I can't find my old Midway thread, so I'll put this here. Even though my dad was an Aviator (Go Black Cats!), I never flew. (I'm very near sighted.) But the things those guys did in the Big One are beyond incredible. Imagine taking off from a carrier in a bomber knowing that you would have to ditch the plane in the drink or China. Now, imagine that your mission is to bomb Tokyo. BTW, thanks to Atlantic Magazine for the pics. http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/ww2.html Dale Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Note the line painted on the carrier deck in the first photo. This was for the nose wheel and the left main. If they didn't keep on those the right wing tip would have hit the carrier superstructure.
Yep, he was going through OCS in Jax on December 7th. He ended up mostly flying around the Solomon Islands picking up crazy-ass Aussie & Kiwi coast watchers. I have one old picture of natives paddling out in dugouts. They had never seen an airplane or white men before. He told me once that the Marine uniform saved his life. You see, he choose Navy because he couldn't stand the blood stripe on their pants. A lot of his buddies who choose to become a jarhead didn't make it because they flew tail draggers. It's kinda hard to land on a jungle airstrip when you can't see where you're going. He also told me that landing in chop was the hardest thing he ever did. Apparently, the transition between being a plane and a boat is where things can get kinda hairy. Damn, all those guys were good. Dale
Doolittle was THE MAN! His autobiography is well worth reading, and 30 Seconds Over Tokyo is a pretty darn good movie of the raid- I watched it with my kids, and they enjoyed it quite a bit.
Dale, thanks for sharing. I can't imagine what those natives thought seeing that plane as their first ever. Sounds like your father had good insight.
I can't resist two more pictures. The first shows survivors of the Doolittle raid. According to the picture caption, the Japanese killed over 250,000 Chinese in retaliation for helping them. The second shows how close to the wire they used to run. I've seen Navy movies of planes spinning all over the deck. It is really hard to imagine what life and death was like back then. Dale Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
After reading the Midway thread and seeing the statement by Sarti that helicopters weren't invented till the 50's I have to comment. Sikorsky got a patent for it in 1931 and flew the first one in 1939. I saw him fly the VS-300 in 1940 and saw the U.S.Army Air Force fly them in 1942.
Quite right. That would have been the Sikorsky R-4, which was used in a search and rescue role in the South Asian theater in WW2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_R-4
And what about all those Bell H-13s as seen in "M*A*S*H" operating in Korea? Or the S-51 in "The Bridges at Toko-Ri"? Helicopters were well established by the early '50s.
Here is a summary of the pre-, during and post-raid events, for those who haven't read the book or seen the movie... http://pendletonairmuseum.org/doolittle.html
I saw Igor Sikorsky demonstrate his first helicopter at Bolling Field in 1940 but I was more interested in the Martin B-10's that were running up nearby.
Dale, Thanks for posting your original link. The B-25 "Yankee Warrior" was at our local airport for a show this weekend. As we were standing in line to tour the C-130, the B-25, T-6 and P-51's were taking off at various times. I was explaining to my 12-year-old the importance of these old planes, how many were built during war time, and how few remain, and the circumstances under which they were flown. Imagine being 18-20 years old, enlisting, and working your way up from a Stearman to something like a T-6, to a B-25 in the course of less than a year, and then being deployed right away. It's one thing to see the old planes on the tarmac, to see the pictures of them taking off from an aircraft carrier on a near-suicide mission really puts in context how much the ones that flew them gave for their country.
Thanks for the Tokyo Raid pics. My dad's college roomate was on one of those planes... he didn't make it. A 'what if'... they had been able to take off closer to the target as planned... they took off much farther away from Tokyo than planned; a Japanese fishing trawler saw them and they were afraid that it had radioed the position in just before the US blew it out of the water. More or all of them might have survived... but remarkably, most of them did return home. (The crew that landed in Russia was 'detained' for a year or so.
Think about those B-29 crews later in the war that used Russia as an emergency landing field. Little did they realize that their "ally" was going to use those airplanes to develop their own copy (the Tu-4) and thus have their own long-range strategic bomber!
Dale, if your Dad flew PBYs, you might enjoy this thread (and some of the links contained in it): http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=292186&highlight=pby
I had an amazing experience when we were searching for two crew members who bailed out of a B-17 over the York River during a violent thunder and lightning storm. We started the search at midnight along the shoreline of the Chesapeake and a PBY was called in from Norfolk to drop flares and search out in the bay near us. That guy flew up and down the river and bay ALL NIGHT dodging thru lightning and a violent wind storm. The most erie thing about it was to see the silhouette of the airplane dancing in the clouds and rain when he was backlit from the lightning or his flares. he didn't leave until noon the next day. he earned the respect of the Air Force that night in 1945.
As I have mentioned, I have never flown. However, I did have a college roommate who ended up flying Jolly Green Giants in Vietnam. He said the hardest thing he ever did was hover as his final exam in training. He had already flunked a couple of times. Last time up, his instructor told him, you're gonna pass this time you mother****ing *****. As I'm sure most of you know, the instructor was in the jump seat. And, as I'm sure that most of you know, the problem with hovering is the pitch. If you lean too much in one direction, your blades hit the ground... As you watch this video, watch how low the guy gets. Plus, you need to keep in mind, he can't see what he is doing. Dale [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmpLUGLi78E&feature=player_embedded[/ame]
After a few scotchs, I finally got my dad to talk. He said his worse experience was when a Marine went into the drink. They could see he was slumped over the controls. But the seas were running about 4 to 5 feet. A Black Cat can't land in those kind of seas, must less take off. They kept doing fly bys. They never saw the Marine respond. He said it was the worse experience of his life to watch that plane sink. Dale
