Bombs away! The Blenheim's back

UK Daily Mail ^ | 06/13/2015 | SARAH OLIVER

[DFG]

Beneath the panes of Perspex in her floor, the daisy-strewn runway falls away as fast as 80 years of history. The Blenheim’s snout lifts skywards, her twin engines casting a heat haze behind the propellers’ silver blur. At 200mph, she throttles towards a patchwork of cumulus and sun, quiet, quick and deft. Inside she is bare of today’s technology. Her khaki flight deck contains pedals as delicate as a piano’s, a joystick, and a small black bank of antique instruments. I am perched in the navigator’s place on a circular seat the size of a dinner plate. Above me and in front, on both sides and beneath my boots, I can see the sky through the windowed cutouts of her cockpit. From here, by the Blenheim’s bomb mount, there is truly a fly’s-eye view of Earth. It’s one that few people have been privileged to see since the end of the Second World War when the RAF’s Blenheim fleet was retired. This old warbird is the only craft of her type still flying.

[the scotsman]

As a Brit, it feels almost sacriligeous top criticise a British WW2 plane. Esp one that served in the darkest days of 1940.

[AnalogReigns]

None-the-less, these saved your country a lot more than that plane:

And nearly 1/3 of the American airmen who manned them, never returned.

A question I always like to ask, especially of those who call the Air Force wimpy: Which US force had the highest casualty rate, by far, in WWII: Army, Army Air-Corps, Navy, or Marines? Most will guess Marines, or some even Navy, but it's not even close. 30% of our bombers over Europe were shot down, and all were Army Air-Corps, predecessor to the Air Force.