Staff Sgt. Jacob DeShazer, a member of the famed Doolittle Raiders, was the bombardier of Crew No.16 flying the "Bat Out of Hell, the last of the 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers to launch from the USS Hornet April 18, 1942, on the famous bombing run over Tokyo. Sergeant DeShazer, 95, died March 15. (U.S. Air Force photo)
Another of the Old Ones joins the eternal patrol.
Another of our Greatest slips into the presence of God, and we are left with an unmistakable void. May he rest in peace.
I wonder what he thought about such a tactic being called "mercy" in the case of Terri Schiavo...and being carried out on television here in America.
One more inverted goblet at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/
Click the Pic
You did well Sarg!!!!
The Doolittle Raid was one of the great stories of WWII. It inspired the country tremendously even though the actual damage to Japan was minor.
That RAT POS Ken Burns in his supposedly great documentary on WWII didn’t even mention it. Although he found time to mention the 442 Combat Team about 200 times (although I take nothing away from the 442). I just thought that it was outrageous that the Doolittle Raid was not mentioned.
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Amazing story. Amazing man!
RIP. An inspiration for us all.
From a Sailor...I wish I had been there to carry your plane, and...I wish you eternal fair winds and following seas.
Go to your reward. You earned it...how dearly you have all earned it.
Thank you and God rest your soul. You are home safe now.
America has lost a true hero. Before the era of “The Audacity of Hope,” this man displayed the audacity of courage! RIP, Mr. Deshazer, my family thanks you.
I don’t know if that was “The Greatest Generation” but it surely has to rank right up there.
Thank you, Sir.
One of the great “stories behind the story” of the Doolittle raid was of the fate of the shot up bomber that had to land in the Soviet Union instead of China.
Stalin was ecstatic at the opportunity to steal the technology of the most advanced bomber in the world. He made it one of the top priorities of the Soviet scientific community to mass produce that aircraft within six months.
And he ordered that within three months they were to produce an “exact duplicate” prototype of the American aircraft. It was such an important operation, that he placed his chief of secret police to be in charge of the effort, with deadly ruthlessness.
Two to three hundred of their top aeronautical scientists were assembled. They quickly learned that the US aircraft was built to English, not metric standards. Both the commercial and scientific Soviet Union had long been exclusively metric.
So the chief of secret police ordered the entire scientific community to re-tool to English measurement standards, even though the rest of their society was metric. Their scientists did not convert back to metric until Brezhnev.
The scientists announced that they had built the prototype within three months. Showing up for an inspection, the chief of secret police noted that they had mistakenly created a *perfect* version of the aircraft, not the “exact duplicate” that Stalin had demanded.
So he ordered all of the scientists killed.
A completely new group were brought in, who then drilled holes at the same angles as the original bullet holes, broke glass, and ruptured rubber tires and hydraulic lines.
Stalin himself showed up for the test flight, taken by two of the top Soviet pilots. The plane crashed immediately on take off, killing both of them. Its total flight distance was just short of that of the Wright brothers ‘Kitty Hawk’.
It was nicknamed “The Brick”, and never went into production.
After considerable delay, the American air crew were returned to the United States.
