Posted on 10/03/2012 7:21:16 AM PDT by trailhkr1
There was a British miniseries “Piece of Cake” from 1988, about a Spitfire squadron based in France before the Fall. The Brits didn’t really base any Spits in France then but there was a lot of good flying.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbeA504VzR8
Now I’ll need to go through my old photos. I’ve got pictures from the ‘88 tour that I believe have the exact info on the plane.
Salisbury steak, plain with a little spitfire? Sounds good to me.
The Heinkel 111 bombers in that movie were actually Spanish built CASA-111’s, same airframe, but with British Merlin engines.
Most of the B-29s that exist today survived in a similar manner. Sometime in the 1950s China Lake Naval Weapons Range requested a quantity of surplus B-29s to be used as ground targets...due to a typo of some sort, the base received WAAAAAY more planes than they requested! Desperate to clear the airfield, the base personnel were shoving B-29s in every nook and cranny they could find...and one group of about a dozen was forgotten in a distant corner of the range, until they were discovered sometime in the 1970s or early 80s.
They've got their share of reality programs too, but fortunately I've been able to watch quite a few of their dramas, mysteries, etc. through torrent sites. I don't think anyone does mysteries or historical documentaries like the Brits. Thank God for the internet.
The Patton Museum at Fort Knox had a German assault gun that had been recovered from a bog in Latvia and it still had all of the mud and gunk on it. I haven't been to the Museum since they started moving most of their inventory down to Fort Benning, so I don't know if it moved or not.
One of my grandfather's M-4's is still out at Fort Knox. They were conducting training maneuvers for the invasion of the Japanese home islands when one of the tanks in his platoon hit a sinkhole and flipped over. The crew bailed out through the belly hatch just before the ground gave way and the tank dropped about fifty feet. Since there was no way to recover a tank from a hole that deep, it was written off and left down there.
Cool story about grandad's M4. My dad was a vehicle recovery team leader in the Army. His unit pulled dozens of tanks and APCs out of soggy logging roads in the Black Forest during Reforger '84. Some of them were buried right up to the deck and they had to dig down to attach the cables.
They moved most of the historical tanks down to Fort Benning to the new US Army Museum of Armor and Cavalry. All that will remain here at Knox is the Patton Museum, which is dedicated to Patton and Fort Knox.
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