Posted on 05/04/2017 8:42:22 PM PDT by TigerClaws
My only caveat would be if the driver felt he was going to die or be seriously hurt if he didn't drive away... thugs with baseball bats hitting on his car windows etc.
Indeed. My dad was an Eighth Air Force WWII vet, and delighted himself with teasing me with some of the ways he might not have been around to have seen me born into this world, or even to cause it to come to pass. Bombers then ran ten or twelve-man crews, more-or-less, and of course transports could be carrying even more aboard. Nowadays, the B-1 is crewed with about the same number of crew spaces as a tank, but ELINT birds and transports can still keep the numbers at a high risky level.
And of course there's another way an entire crew of too-many can go together quite easily. It happened to these guys, and a member of our family was aboard; still remembered into the fifth generation.
You’re fortunate to even exist.
It was far safer to be a Marine in the Pacific than to be an aircrewman in the 8th AF.
It was no great bundle of joy for the Infantrymen in the ETO either. People overlook that we lost more Army Infantrymen in Sicily and Italy than in all the Marine Pacific beach landings combined.
And, of course, the General Officer Chief of Staff of the Second Air Force went down with the crew of an Eighth Air Force B-17 during a bombing raid on the Nazi U-boat pens at Kiel, Germany in 1943. At Eighth USAAF reunions, his name is read off as one of their own.
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