My next-door neighbor in Lubbock had been a B-17 bombardier. He said his crew did all 25 missions with the only casualties being due to frostbite.
He also brought home an English war bride. She told stories of standing watch with a helmet and a bucket of sand during the Battle of Britain.
Precisely.
HBO redid a superb WWII documentary called, “The Cold Blue” and released it in limited places in theaters in '19.
I gladly went and watched it at the theater. It was incredibly moving and harrowing to view and reminded me that too many Americans nowadays don’t have the foggiest notion of the term sacrifice.
Thanks, I didn’t know about this.
I highly, highly recommend watching it. It was well done.
Did you have multiple ex-fiances or did an ex-fiance have multiple fathers or was it some combination thereof?
Black Thursday by Martin Caidin is a hell of a great read. It’s the story of the 1943 raid on Schweinfort, the center of Nazi Germany’s ball bearing production. I have no idea how those men did what they did.
The survival rate for B17 crewmen over 25 missions was 1 in 3. Just mind boggling bravery.
Speaking of ball bearing…
I would venture to guess so many of those individuals who came back knew everything from there on out was gravy…
Helluva read, indeed, bud.
The navigators had the highest death rate in WWII, which kinda makes sense since they were sitting up in that nose cone. My dad went in in '42 as an airplane mechanic–his dad owned a service station in Texarkana–and then went through navigator training because, I suspect, the army was grabbing and training navigators as quick as they could. Weirdly, he never made it overseas, even though he was in the army for pretty much the whole war. He was scheduled to go a number of times, and then something always happened. It was like a reverse Catch 22.
Frankly, given their death rate, I’m just as glad he never made it.
ETA: He did manage to get stationed in most every Army air base in the States. I figure he didn’t get sent over because they could never quite remember where they last stashed him.
That’s so interesting about your Dad, Neil. Really enjoy reading your posts about him.
Before the advent of the B-17G, the E-F models didn’t have a chin turret and the nose was one of the most vulnerable parts of the Flying Fort. The Luftwaffe knew this and would base of some of their attack tactics on that, hence so many Forts being shot to hell in the nose area. The G model was a game changer with the chin turret.
It was the former. I thought that was an understood running joke around here. HH has multiple ex-fiancés and no one has figured out what chuck does for a living.
This is a really cool thread and I am grateful for it. My only possible contribution is that my mother’s father spent WWII as a flight instructor for the Army Air Corps in…I can’t remember where. San Antonio? Galveston? Corpus Christi?
Anyway, as I understand it, a young would-be flyboy by the name of George Herbert Walker Bush came through there en route to glory. I did not ever ask Papa if he was responsible for teaching the future president how to safely eject…maybe because I’d rather not contend with an answer in the negative. But I do vaguely recall that he (a stoic-as-hell Presbyterian, geologist, oil- and U. of H.-man) boasted of a connection there.
My maternal grandmother did wiring for planes in Mobile during the war.
I could tell you came from noble stock.
Randolph Air Force Base was known as the West Point of the Sky during WWII. More pilots were trained there than anywhere else, if I recall correctly.
So, my vote would be your grandfather being stationed in San Antonio.
ETA: Bush the senior was commissioned at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Cristi. So…
My uncle Marvin flew P-51s in Europe based in England from 1944 to the end. He never talked about his experiences. Near the end of his life, I was visiting and found a history of his unit on his bookshelf. I paged through it and started asking questions about things in the book. I got a couple of hours of his true experiences in the War. I wish I had taped it.
The aforementioned ex-fiancé’s father talked often about his war/POW experience. He was active in former members organizations and regularly attended reunions and such. My uncle was also a 101st Airborne vet, jumped on D-Day, and was wounded during Operation Market Garden. He rarely talked about his service, and threw out his medals, including Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts. He would occasionally talk to my dad about it (even though he was my maternal uncle), but he was about the only one. He would simply say “I did what I had to do, and that’s all I have to say”. I wish I’d have talked more with him about it. I guess every man had his own feelings about it.