Yeah, you wouldn't get me into one of those things without also giving me a way to cut my way back OUT if need be.
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Yeah, you wouldn't get me into one of those things without also giving me a way to cut my way back OUT if need be.
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>YOU IDIOTS! I WROTE 1984 AS A WARNING, NOT A HOW-TO MANUAL!--Orwell's ghost
Psalms 109:8, 43:1
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Oh my, I just realized that I know of Taigh! He was piloting a B-25 that they had to put down in a field recently on the way back home after it was on a carrier to Pearl Harbor for the anniversary. He is one of the most experienced warbird pilots in the world.
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That and other similar incidents are graphically detailed in Donald Miller's "Masters of the Air". Those crews were some hard guys.Originally Posted by SteyrAUG
Reads a lot, posts little.
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B29 didn’t have a ball turret? Weren’t all the guns remote controlled from a pressurized cabin?
that was the plot of a Disney movie where the ball guy was actually saved on the landing by cartoon wheels.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0511124/
The Second Amendment ACKNOWLEDGES our right to own and bear arms that are in common use that can be used for lawful purposes. The arms can be restricted ONLY if subject to historical analogue from the founding era or is dangerous (unsafe) AND unusual.
It's that simple.
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Sorry. It's just the one that always comes to mind when I hear ball turret gunner. My grandfather was top turret in a B-24 and while he wasn't exactly safe or anything, he always commented that he was glad he was too big for the tail gunner or bottom gun position.
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
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Craziest one I ever read was where two B-24s collided vertically (one was going up and the other was coming down) and they wedged together. The pilots of one of them was able to keep everything flying long enough for most of both crews to bail out, and again I think it was the ball turret gunner of the top plane who could not escape and that last thing most heard before jumping was him reciting the lords prayer because he knew he wasn't going anywhere.
Not long after the entire thing came down and the pilots of the top B-24 were shocked to find out they were still alive. I'm trying to think of something that might possibly be more terrifying than that but it's not coming to me. Regular guys did extraordinary things nobody could ever imagine and most people never even heard of it.
My own grandfather did shit you could probably make a movie about, but if you asked him and his crew they'd have said they didn't do anything that everybody else wasn't also doing and that they didn't have it as hard as some of the guys. I was able to meet the tail gunner from his crew and invited him to my wedding, never said anything to him but it was always funny to note he was pretty short and pretty thin. They obviously didn't draw straws for gun positions.
Of course waist gunner was no picnic either, I didn't notice it until I was able to get my grandfather on a walk though of a B-24 and a B-17 but those waist gunners didn't have windows, just a big open space and my grandfather commented that it was so cold if you accidentally touched those guns without gloves it would peel the skin off your hands.
He would still shudder at the mention of Me-109s or Fw-190s and his favorite plane in the world was the P-38. Coming back from a bomb run they ran into a bunch of 190s which managed to separate several planes from the main group and they were basically having their way with them taking passes and chewing them up a little more each time.
A group of P-38s escorting a different bomber group to target heard their distress calls and decided they could "spare two planes for the time they were close enough to each other" and a lone pair of P-38s jumped what my grandfather said was more than a dozen 190s (and they didn't have much else to do beside keep counting them).
Something along the lines of they dumped 4 from the sky on approach and then knocked off another two before the remaining half dozen or so skated. Seems the P-38 was really the only thing the average Luftwaffe pilot was really scared of. They knew the P-51 was their match, but for some reason P-38s really gave them extra concern. The two P-38s then got them back in with a larger group before rejoining their original group.
So probably one of those pilots became an ace that day but couldn't take credit for any of the kills because they'd have gotten their asses ripped for leaving their group. But my grandfather was convinced that if not for those two guys, none of them would have made it home alive.
He had the distinction of having bailed out twice, once over Romania as part of the Ploesti raid and once over Germany after hitting the Schweinfurt ball bearing plant. Both times he successfully evaded capture, being an Iowa farm boy who could speak German meant a sympathetic Romanian family allowed him to come on as a hired hand (no questions asked) and he worked that farm for an entire summer, while the gestapo was grabbing airmen left and right out of barns and ditches.
He was never captured and in both instances managed to make it back to allied territory. The real kick in the pants was when he finally got from Romania all the way back to his base in Turin, Italy...the next bombing mission was Schweinfurt and they knew it was gonna be a bad one and he really didn't feel confident about his chances when they bailed out over Germany. To add insult to injury, the pilot ordered the crew to bail after losing a third engine, my grandfather remembering how difficult it was to exit a bomber filled with smoke in a flat spin was extra prepared this time and when he jumped and opened his chute he looked up to count how many other guys got out and in his words "those assholes spun the third fan, got it working and flew home without me." He was the only one from his bomber to bail out and after that his nickname was "first one out of the plane."
He didn't think it was very funny. But didn't get caught, never spent a day as a POW. Of course the summer he was officially MIA really put his family through a LOT, the army wasn't telling them everything is fine, we're sure he's probably ok.
Those were the events that stuck with him through most of his life. In 1984 my father took the family to Germany and they had an air museum and while my grandfather found things like the Me262 to be interesting, he really had no great desire to go stand next to the Fw190s. He told me they are less interesting when they are flying at you. He was especially not fond of the 20mm canons some had as armament and he used to say that you saw them after something blew a "big goddamn hole in the side of the plane" and then everyone had to look around and find the damn thing.
It's hard to be a ACLU hating, philosophically Libertarian, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, scientifically grounded, agnostic, porn admiring gun owner who believes in self determination.
Chuck, we miss ya man.
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Oops B-24
Gettin' down innagrass.
Let's Go Brandon!
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