Jim, the WW2 B24 bombardier hated General Jimmy Doolittle. When I mentioned him one day Jim recounted how the 30 seconds over Tokyo hero (played by Alec Baldwin in the movie Pearl Harbor) took over as General of the 8th Army Air Corp. in Europe, He boasted to the papers about how the 8th was going over such and such a city and bomb the hell out of them. The Nazis gathered anti-aircraft guns from all around, and they were waiting for us... he looked off, his eyes in pain, I lost a lot of my friends that day... Flying out of England, the Brits he felt treated him poorly. The Brits turned a cold shoulder to he and his friends who he thought were there to protect their island. Reaching out to them as a nice christian farm boy, he was never invited into their lives, and desired for a home cooked family meal time. All he got was powdered eggs and powdered milk, when he could see rich farm land and happy families. Here I am risking my life for these people and they wouldnt even talk to us. On his last mission they were hit by flak. The impact took out two engines on one side. The four engine bomber instantly torqued up-side-down. Jim had nothing but praise for his pilot, a man who looked like Clark Gable (I saw his picture). Muscling the cable operated plane, (no power steering) the pilot finally got her right-side-up. They fell out of formation, and started losing altitude. They would not make it back to England. If youve seen the 1990 movie Memphis Belle its what Jim described to me, alone, open to the fury of the German Luftwaffe, their only hope for survival was to head to Neutral Sweden, across the long, lonely, cold North sea, all the time dropping, dropping, closer and closer to the deadly sea
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 05:10:00 +0000
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