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.
I know it's a dive bomber, but it made me remember the summer of 1979 when I was working as an engineering apprentice in the (now closed) Great Northern Nekoosa paper mill in Millinocket, Maine. This was the summer before I graduated with my degree in Chemical Engineering and I was renting a room from a nice widow named Catherine Feeney, a couple of blocks from one of the 2 employee entrance gates at the mill. My wake up alarm every morning was the sound of Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers taking off from the local air strip, which was a few hundred feet in elevation above the house and flight line on takeoff took the planes pretty much directly over the house I was staying in. The house was on either Knox or Lincoln Street but so much time has passed, I'm not 100% sure anymore. If anyone watches Tucker Carlson, he has interviewed his neighbor at least once - a down to earth Maineiac with last name Feeney. I wondered if he was a relation of the kind lady that rented me the room.
And one more edit - neglected to say the torpedo planes were not going off to sink the Japanese Navy, they had been converted to spray pesticide to treat the invasive insects that were killing off the Douglass Fir trees. As I recall there as many as 6 of those beasts in the pesticide air fleet.
Balls of steel or more likely young, dumb, and full of some… no thought of mortality ever entering his mind.
ReplyDeleteSilly question. Isn't the tailgunner's field of fire restricted by seating him so deep in the fuselage and close to the tail?
ReplyDeleteAl_in_Ottawa
Here is a good article. Scroll down for a photo of rear gunner with "turtleback" retracted--
Deletehttps://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/curtiss-sb2c-helldiver-big-tailed-beast
SB2C--aka S.O.B. 2nd class.
Coming home to the HANCOCK!
ReplyDeleteBig ocean-small boat-huge aircraft
ReplyDeleteI know it's a dive bomber, but it made me remember the summer of 1979 when I was working as an engineering apprentice in the (now closed) Great Northern Nekoosa paper mill in Millinocket, Maine. This was the summer before I graduated with my degree in Chemical Engineering and I was renting a room from a nice widow named Catherine Feeney, a couple of blocks from one of the 2 employee entrance gates at the mill. My wake up alarm every morning was the sound of Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers taking off from the local air strip, which was a few hundred feet in elevation above the house and flight line on takeoff took the planes pretty much directly over the house I was staying in. The house was on either Knox or Lincoln Street but so much time has passed, I'm not 100% sure anymore. If anyone watches Tucker Carlson, he has interviewed his neighbor at least once - a down to earth Maineiac with last name Feeney. I wondered if he was a relation of the kind lady that rented me the room.
ReplyDeleteSteve the Engineer. Forgot to put my moniker on the comment.
DeleteAnd one more edit - neglected to say the torpedo planes were not going off to sink the Japanese Navy, they had been converted to spray pesticide to treat the invasive insects that were killing off the Douglass Fir trees. As I recall there as many as 6 of those beasts in the pesticide air fleet.
Delete