Posted on 05/17/2022 6:20:03 PM PDT by lgjhn23
My dad was 22 when he went to England.
My dad would never talk about his time in the air. Every time I’d ask, his stock answer was we had a job to do. We went out, did it and came home.
I once knew an A&P mechanic, Fred L., who had learned his trade working on B-17s in the Eight Air Force in WW II. After the war, he was shipped stateside and kept in service for a year working on B-17s, some for service or long-term storage, but most for sale to scrappers.
The military, being the military, was determined to demilitarize and sell off no longer needed B-17s on schedule. That required that the guns and bombsights be removed and the old birds made airworthy and flown to the sales sites. The bombers that had wrecked Nazi Germany were then sold for the value of the AV gas they had in their fuel tanks. Cannily, the Air Force sales agents had the tanks filled so that buyers could be assured of making a reliable profit on their bids.
Fred recognized one old friend in its last days, a B-17 with a plain metal patch on the leading edge of its wing. Late in the war, Fred had helped remove an unexploded German flak rocket from the wing and put a patch on so that it could continue to fly missions. And there it was with its sisters on an airbase in Alabama, waiting to be sold off for the value of the fuel in its tanks and oil in its engines and to be ground up to make appliances and aluminum foil for America's kitchens.
Japan was never going to invade Hawaii. It’s at the outside range of their logistics. They did not have enough shipping to support an invasion. There was no way the Imperial Japanese Army would have provided troops for such an operation. They only provided 10 division for the entire invasion of the Southern Resource Area.
For whatever reason, the Miami Space Transit Planetarium used to have on display a cut-in-half Pratt & Whitney R2800 Double Wasp radial engine. The thing was fascinating, you could stare at it for half an hour just trying to trace how all the parts moved.
The Wings of Freedom tour visited our local suburban airport a few years ago, and we took the grandkids to see the planes.
#98 I had no idea that there was STILL that much unexploded ordinance in the ground over there.
Yeah, you do not want to be a ditch digger swinging a pick axe over there!
After the war, the US provided Germany with untold amounts of camera footage that the American bombers had taken. Because the Americans were primarily doing daylight raids, the bomb hits in the photos are remarkably clear.
The Germans have it down to a science in that they can see exactly where a bomb fell but failed to explode; it's that obvious.
(There seems to have been an awful lot of bombs that failed to detonate and which raises obvious questions about the QC in our munitions plants, but I think that's a subject for another day.)
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