Army Air Force leaders believed the plants to be a key, or “classic,” target for strategic bombing. Located in eastern Bavaria, Schweinfurt produced most of the ball bearings used in many of Germany’s military and support vehicles and equipment, especially tanks and aircraft. 14, 1943, became known as “Black Thursday.” Because of the disastrous losses that day, Oct. Almost all of the other bombers suffered some level of damage. Of the surviving aircraft, 17 were so badly damaged that they were scrapped. German ground-based antiaircraft artillery and 300 fighters shot down 60 of the aircraft, with 600 crewmen killed or taken prisoner, the largest Army Air Force loss of the war to date.
submarine eventually rescued him.Seventy five years ago, 291 B-17F Flying Fortress high-altitude heavy bombers, each with a crew of 10, attacked the ball bearing plants around Schweinfurt, Bavaria. Nonetheless, he managed to swim to a life raft and remain afloat until a U.S. His travails continued once in the waves, as jellyfish stings and swallowing too much seawater rendered him nauseous. Smoke poured into the cockpit, and I could see flames rippling across the crease of the wing, edging toward the fuel tanks.”īush dropped his four 500-pound bombs on the target, a radio facility, and subsequently bailed out over the ocean, though not before bonking his head on the plane’s tail and ripping part of his parachute. “Suddenly there was a jolt,” Bush wrote later, “as if a massive fist had crunched into the belly of the plane. Then, on September 2, 1944, he was again hit by anti-aircraft fire during a bombing run on the Japanese island of Chichi Jima. destroyer rescued them minutes after the crash.) George Bush Bailed After Being Hit by Anti-Aircraft Fire “He was the leader,” Kinney says, “responsible for making the team operate efficiently.”īush and his crew first ran into trouble that June, when anti-aircraft fire forced them to make an emergency water landing. Enlisting in the Navy’s flight training program fresh out of high school, he then flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific, first seeing action in May 1944 at the head of a three-man Avenger torpedo bomber. George Bush was nearly one of these casualties. Overy explains that Axis air casualty rates were especially high toward the end of the conflict, when the Allies dominated the skies.įor all countries in the conflict, Overy says, about 25 percent of pilots would be killed or seriously injured each month in peak combat, and in some battles the loss rate reached as high as 40 percent. Britain’s Royal Air Force Bomber Command, for example, lost almost half its aircrew in World War II, whereas, on the Axis side, hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese airmen were killed. Yet as bad as it was for the United States, it was even worse for other countries. Was Commodus the Worst Emperor in Ancient Roman History? The material costs of maintaining an air force were likewise astronomical, with the United States losing almost 100,000 of its 300,000 planes produced during the conflict. airmen died in World War II, representing nearly one-quarter of total U.S. Airmen Made Up Nearly One-Quarter of U.S. “It’s very taxing on their mental stability.” Being shot at in an airplane could be so nerve-racking, in fact, that one British paratrooper spoke of how on D-Day he couldn’t wait to jump out, behind enemy lines, where “we knew we would be safer.” U.S. “You had to be constantly on guard,” Kinney says. The fighting, of course, also took a harsh toll on airmen, who confronted anti-aircraft fire from below and fire from enemy planes in the sky, with only a razor-thin hull to protect them. Later on, Bush witnessed a fellow pilot panic and smash right into an aircraft carrier’s landing crew, showcasing how pilot stress and fear could turn deadly, even in a non-combat situation. Bush himself crash-landed during a practice bombing run in Virginia, emerging unscathed despite totaling his plane. warplanes never even made it to the front, crashing instead during training or in route to combat. George Bush served in the Navy from June 1942 to September 1945, rising to the rank of lieutenant.
0 kommentar(er)
