And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thursday, January 6, 2022
B-17 of 324th Bomb Squadron, 91st Bomb Group at Rackheath with battle damage from a mission over Hamburg, 6 November 1944.
That’ll buff out. Battle damage repair (BDR) school was one of the most interesting and enjoyable schools I attended while a USAF aircraft mechanic. Take an axe, knock a big hole in the side of an old jet and then fix it. Actually blasted one with a 12 gauge slug during the advanced class.
That plane is set up for radar assisted bombing, with the replacement of the ball turret By an AN/APS-15 ground scanning radar.
ReplyDeleteWhich is great, because it would have taken three weeks with a grinder to get the poop stains out of the ball turret afterwards on an ordinary model.
DeleteFrom a time that Boeing still knew how to build things.
ReplyDeleteTwice as many airmen died over Europe (@50m) as marines in the Pacific (@25m)
ReplyDeleteLet's not forget any of them
That’ll buff out. Battle damage repair (BDR) school was one of the most interesting and enjoyable schools I attended while a USAF aircraft mechanic. Take an axe, knock a big hole in the side of an old jet and then fix it. Actually blasted one with a 12 gauge slug during the advanced class.
ReplyDeleteHow'd you like to be in the Airframes shop when that one came back?
Delete"Ops Boss wants to know if it will be ready for the first go in the morning."
(Or, more likely, it would have been pushed aside and robbed for parts after being stricken from the records.)
88mm Flak?
ReplyDelete