Posted on 12/07/2012 1:22:52 PM PST by DogByte6RER
Thanks for the ping. Those jackets were for parties, where the art work could be appreciated. They wouldn’t keep the wearer warm at 20,000 feet.
The Schweinfurt raid (I’d have to look up the date, don’t remember...) was supposedly the worst for losses, during which we lost 60 B-17s and 600 flyers.
Black Thursday..14 October, 1943
Wow. The sacrifice.
Not correct. That figure is just for the 8th Air Force that flew out of England during the war. There were many others.
The United States Army Air Forces incurred 12% of the Army's 936,000 battle casualties in World War II. 88,119 airmen died in service. 52,173 were battle casualty deaths: 45,520 killed in action, 1,140 died of wounds, 3,603 were missing in action and declared dead, and 1,910 were nonhostile battle deaths. Of the United States military and naval services, only the Army Ground Forces suffered more battle deaths.By comparison, the US Navy and Marine Corps combined had less than 60,000 KIA for the entire war.
35,946 non-battle deaths included 25,844 in aircraft accidents, more than half of which occurred within the Continental United States.[72] 63,209 members of the USAAF were other battle casualties. 18,364 were wounded in action and required medical evacuation, and 41,057 became prisoners-of-war.[72]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Air_Forces
Being in the USAAF during WWII was a damn dangerous place to be. Just getting into those aircraft back then was dangerous even if no one was shooting at you. But it did have its perks like really cool jackets. ;~))
The Army losses fighting in the Pacific, were almost exactly equal to the combined Marine and Navy total.
Because of the media and Hollywood, almost no one knows that.
In my career as a design engineer (1967 to 2002) I have been employed by several corporations with manufacturing facilities built for the federal government before or during WWII. In most cases they were still using the original machine tools and inspection equipment well into the 70's.
At the end of the war, Europe and Japan were reduced to rubble. We stepped in with the "Marshal Plan" and provided massive aid to our former enemies, a rather unlikely "urban renewal" operation which provided them with brand spanking new infrastructure. Meanwhile we were still making steel in 50-75-100 year old plants. The result? You'd be hard pressed to find a large, functioning steel mill as we used during WWII. Today we buy steel from Japan, titanium from Russia, vanadium, chromium, manganese, cobalt, nickel are all imported and necessary ingredients in high performance steels. For better or worse, we are "globalized" today and if we were ever to put in a situation of fighting a WWII again, we'd be screwed.
Regards,
GtG
Not that we have any appreciable economically viable titanium ore that I know of . . .if we were ever to put in a situation of fighting a WWII again, we'd be screwed.It was frustrating to read in Forge about the shipment of American trucks and other materiel to the USSR. We needed the Russians in the war, and they needed that stuff to hang in with the Wehrmact, true - but it would have been to the good if we’d had an actual American administration in Washington to negotiate some quid pro quo. We should’ve at least gotten some titanium from Stalin in return . . .
Maybe someone would have made an axial flow gas turbine with it, to make a competitor to the Me-262 with. The Germans had the right idea that axial flow was the wave of the future but - as British inventor Whittle saw - materials limitation was a worse constraint on the turbine inlet temperature, and thus on the efficiency and power, of an axial flow turbine than of the centrifugal design. The Germans had trouble getting specialty metal, and the consequence was that an axial flow Me-262 engine was only good for 30 hours of operation. The British Gloster Meteor, with centrifugal flow, was so much better in that regard that there is even a workable WWII Meteor still extant.
True. But WWII was one of a kind. The US was peculiar in its adaptability to mass production. And that is no longer true. What was ironic about it was that America had the production technology, but it was the Germans who were continually experimenting, and the Americans basically fixed on a few models and went hog-wild on production on them. There was no thought of phasing out production of Sherman tanks with a model change, even when the Army had every reason to know that they were obsolescent, and were only effective if you could overwhelm the opposition with numbers.
Cool stuff!
I’ve had a lot of leather jackets. One of my favorites is a reproduction of a German WWII “Messerschmitt” jacket. Not very warm, but very cool.
No, it doesn’t. It is more like a per/month figure.
Regardless, the number is huge. It is nearly double the entire Marine Corps deaths during WWII (24,500+).
Wow. Excellent article - thank you. My late dad was one of those young men, joining the Bloody 100th at ~24. He was the old man of the squadron. 32 missions, got him home safely...
On the 17th of August, a large force of 376 bombers raided Schweinfurt and Regensburg. Sixty bombers, with six hundred aircrew, didn’t come back. 16 percent losses. At that rate, the Eighth Air Force could not continue. When B-17G’s began to arrive in August and September, the forward machine guns in their chin turrets helped a little. The appalling wastage continued:
September 6 - Over 400 bombers attacked the Stuttgart ball-bearing plant; 45 were lost.
October 14 - Schweinfurt again. 291 B-17’s went out; 60 went down.
January 11, 1944 - German aircraft industry targets. 600 Flying Fortresses were sent out. Because of bad weather, only 238 reached Germany; 60 were shot down.
http://acepilots.com/planes/b17.html
I’d say the guy was exaggerating, but the reality was quite harsh enough. It is also possible he was including ALL bomber losses - American & British, both theaters and including training losses.
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