I’ve seen and toured both the Collings’ B-17 and B-24. A bunch of us saw them up at Martin State Airport near Baltimore years ago, in the company of a guy who flew 24 missions as a bombardier in B-24Js with the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. On his 24th mission, a bomb hung up in his plane’s bomb bay; he ended up 10,000 feet over the Adriatic, standing on a 6” girder over the open bomb bay doors, with no parachute on (no room for it), using a fire axe to hack at the shackles holding the stuck live 500-pound GP bomb in place. He couldn’t knock it loose. When the plane arrived back in Italy, it ran off the end of the runway due to battle damage, and only then did the bomb fall off the shackle and explode. Miraculously, he survived, but his war was over.
You should’ve seen his daughter’s face as we toured the planes and he explained everything about them to her. You could see that he’d never really talked much about his service, but a friend and I who were big WW II aviation buffs got him to open up. I thought his daughter was going to cry, she was so stunned and amazed at the heroism and duty that he just took for granted.
If you’ve never seen one of these old warbirds before, you have to. You just have to. You’ll gain an even greater appreciation for the Greatest Generation.
}:-)4
My uncle flew B-24s out of New Guinea in WWII, the Jolly Rodgers, he does talk about it, the heat, the malaria, the abject terror at the beginning of every mission. Look up the casualty statistics for the B-17 runs on Germany, you stood more a chance of being in cemetery at the end of your tour than you did coming home to your sweetie. The guys in uniform today have the same stuff but the populace does not have the stomach for that kind of sacrifice.