Posted on 01/27/2004 7:53:44 PM PST by arjay
Thanks to another Freeper, I read the book Thunderbolt! by Robert S. Johnson. I was deeply impressed by the following description he gave of our men flying the big bombers during WWII.
We must never forget the courage and sacrifice of our military heroes of yesteryears as well as today.
"From each savage collision metal dropped, and metal fluttered, ludicrous, and almost featherlike. Wings or tail surfaces, flip-flopping almost gently as the spume of jagged steel and flame rushed by in the endless plummet to earth. Within the cubic mile of space, within the heart of the more than six hundred American pilots and gunners, the bombardiers and radiomen, streams of cannon shells and bullets and rockets sought and found their quarry. Sometimes the flames appeared as a tiny lance, a creature struggling outward from a rupturing fuel tank, seeking air through a gash in a wing; and then, maddened by its freedom, leaping explosively across the wing, into cockpits, surrounding the crewmen. A Big Friend does not often die quietly, nor does the giant craft yield its throbbing life without pain and terror and, in those who watch, a helpless, sickening feeling of futility.
Few of the Big Friends succumbed without a fierce struggle. Crippled bombers, engines pouring thick smoke, dropped away from the greater safety of the cubic mile, the formation box in the sky. Some gasped as power died in one or two or three engines. Others staggered, many feet of wing or stabilizer or rudder shot away. Pilots covered with their own blood, with steel in their bodies and limbs broken, clung grimly to their controls, coughing blood and fighting to maintain their giant craft on an even keel, to survive in the teeth of the muderous gantlet they must run. They fell out of formation with gaping holes and tears in wings and fuselage, mushing through the sky with gunners hanging lifelessly over their heated weapons, with oxygen systems ablaze, with bombs hung on racks as fire licked at the eggs within the bays. Bombers falling, bombers dying slowly, crewmen refusing to abandon their stricken craft because a buddy was wounded and would die unless a friend remained to administer aid. Pilots dies in crippled giants because their men could not bail out, because parachutes were torn by jagged pieces of flak, because men were unconscious from lack of oxygen. They could not, they would not, jump--not while a man lay helpless behind them. And so they all died, meeting their end as fire reached finally to fuel cells or to bombs, or died instantly as the pilot sought to belly in his crippled hulk of a bomber in rough fields or through trees." (pp. 258-259)
In the last few years, I've seen lots of WWII footage on places like the "Wings" channel.
But there is one film I'll never forget. Around 1978, I was an airman on alert at Hahn AFB Germany, taking care of F-4E's with nukes hanging on them, waiting on the Russians to send up the balloon. We would regularly check out military films to watch during the long hours of waiting for the Klaxon to go off, and one of our favorite 16mm films was produced during WWII as a testament to how "our fighting men" were doing in the sky over Europe in 1944.
I was just an F-4 crew chief, but one of the pilots saw something I missed in the film. It was gun-camera film showing an attack on a cargo boat on an inland canal, probably in the Netherlands.
A P-47 was giving the whole 8x50cals to the barge, when it exploded in a huge fireball. The film narrator didn't say a thing, but the pilot I watched this with noticed that there was another P-47 in the footage, who had obviously led the attack on the barge. As the barge blew up, the '47 was caught in the blast, and obviously a wing departed the airframe. Much to low for the pilot to bail out.
An American pilot died, right on film. But the narrator was just interested in one thing. Another barge couldn't bring ammunition to Nazi troops. That's it. An American died, but the important part was, the job got done.
Don't ask the current crop of Democrats to understand that kind of sentiment.
They can't see the utility of fighting evil because they tend to like evil.
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