James was a chaplain with the 381st Bomb Group based at Ridgewell, Essex. He was responsible for the welfare of the airmen, and also corresponded with the relatives of men who died. On 24 May 1944 James had to document and photograph the scene of a crash before arranging the funerals. On the back of one image he wrote: ‘A man who gave all he had…’ On another: ‘One minute alive, one minute dead.’ James would go on to write a history of his bomb group calling it ‘not so much a book as a testament to both the living and the dead, lest we forget.’ He died on Christmas Day 2008, at the age of 107.