My Dad's brother was one of those "swatted out of the sky". "His" plane was
a B-17G, "Quarterback", but for some reason he was flying "Plain Mister
Yank" IIRC, when he went down.

I was born well after WW II, so I never knew him, but we had some uniforms,
his medals, and a few pictures.

And the pictures used to fascinate me: they had an octagonal "cut-out" of
the nose of the aircraft. This was to prevent our enemies from examining
purloined pictures to get the details of the Norden bombsite, which was one
of the keys to our bombing successes.

Flash forward to around 1975...

I was working as a disk jockey. We frequently received electronics surplus
catalogues at the station, and I was flipping through one while the records
were playing.

One of the hot items being offered was Norden bombsites, for only $29.95.
Interesting, but I really didn't have any use for one.

A couple of hours later I grabbed the copy for a newscast off the teletype,
sat down, and started reading. At the end of the copy there were always a
few very short stories to enable us to properly time our newscasts. I was
running a little short so I started reading these filler stories.

And one of these filler stories turned out to be interesting: it seems that
one of the men who was part of a plot to steal the Norden bombsight during
the War had just been released from prison.

I thought there was a certain irony that this guy had spent more than 30
years in prison for trying to steal something I could now buy for less than
$30!




wrote in message
...
On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 12:56:09 -0700, "gatt"
wrote:

So close I could see the glint off
the plexiglass turret and the black traction tape and red gas caps on her
olive wings. 60 years ago, I'd be thankful I wasn't German. Today I am
simply thankful.

I'm thankful I didn't have to fly one in combat. B-17's are beautiful
airplanes but during WWII, they were big slow targets. The Germans
swatted them out of the sky in huge numbers. Several missions
resulted in 60 airplanes being shot down out of about 300 that made
the mission. During another mission in which more bombers sortied,
over 80 were knocked down.

That era is gone forever. All those guys could count the number of
people lost and calculate their chances for staying alive till their
tour was over, they weren't good. Yet most went anyway. Some didn't,
a lot of men cracked up psychologically and a number of bombers were
flown to neutral countries to be interned rather than complete the
mission or bail out over enemy territory. Can't say I blame them, the
psychological stress of having to sit their and be shot at without the
ability to maneuver to escape the fire must have been enormous.

Overall, some 12,000 heavy bombers from both Britain and the US were
shot down during the war. Mull that number over for a second, it
represents an incredible effort and loss of life.

Corky Scott