Two Beautiful Gals............

[Louis of PA]

There were days when we put up one to two-thousand bombers. Approaching some target areas our bomber stream could be ten-miles wide and a hundred miles in length. Must have made the blockheads below wonder about Adolf’s “Thousand-Year Reich”.

“Within ninety seconds of the attack, I looked around and found that there was no one left in our squadron except our wing man… all the other B-17s had disappeared”.

From on line: “Incredibly fifty-five percent of these 32,263 aircraft were lost in action while 29,916 enemy aircraft were destroyed. On the human side, there were 94,565 American air combat casualties with 30,099 killed in action. 51,106 American airmen were either missing in action, POWs, evaders, or internees.

Parachuting into German territory was risky business; civilians were known to lynch American flyers, and Jewish flyers sometimes ended up in the death camps.


Note that this B-17 got home with much of the fuselage floor gone, along with the ball turret.

[PhillipM]

Oddly the best bomber to survive in battle was the one with the worst reputation for accidents, the Martin B-26. I've read that it would do 400 mph in a shallow dive, must have been nice to get out of trouble faster than you flew into it.