A mission by mission account of flying and surviving as the navigator on a B-17 in WWII is being circulated on-line at a range of sites.
Joel Punches’ account is a shock at a number of levels, including his observations of daily life in the UK at war, which starts with a delivery flight across the Greenland ice cap by a kid from Nebraska who was worried his beard wasn’t growing, had apparently not seen a big city until they buzz a friend’s home in Chicago en route, and who completed his training at ground school in between bombing raids.
On this raid 60 other B-17s were lost
It ends with his being shot down in early 1944 and evading capture until the war is over.
This diary was originally posted on Scribd.com and linked to with additional details by Steeljaw Scribe at his own blog, under a free single use copyright. It is compelling reading.
5 Comments
Just curious but re mission #5 had kick off at 10-30. Left England at 13-30 implies three hours to fly out of England.
Seems excessive unless kick off has some other meaning
Noticed that too. In fact most of the missions seem to take a long time to ‘get going’. Maybe it involves the time taken to assemble into formation, or a deliberate use of round about approaches. Or ‘kick off’ meant something else. Any information on this would be welcome.
“Kick off” is muster time to the aircraft, followed by pre-flight checks, resolving any last minute issues, forming up for sequential take-off, loitering over base as the group forms up then merges with other groups on the slow climb-out over the coast. Things just took longer with marginal performance at less than 200 mph in the climb.
Ben and LTO, you’re right. Bombers on any one raid often were in large numbers and from squadrons dispersed across Britain. It was never a simple matter of just taking-off and heading to the target. Massive planning was needed for every raid and part of that planning was stringing out take-off times in order to ensure that streams of bombers arrived over the target at their allotted times. Obviously, with a very big raid, sometimes involving up to a thousand aircraft, the bombers couldn’t arrive over the target at the same time.
‘Kick off’ time was usually when the crews assembled at their bases for briefing. Briefings themselves may last for an hour or more. Then there was all the pre-flight checks to be done; taxying to line up in a queue for take-off; then circling over an assembly point while the other aircraft arrived, and finally heading off to the target.
Interesting stuff Ben.
The best movie made about the US Army airforce over Europe was one called ‘Twelve o’ clock high’
Very little Yankee B/S and extremely well acted by Gregory Peck and others. This film highlights the problem , of a lack of long-range escort fighters for day-light operations ( long abandoned by the RAF because of horrific losses)..But later in the war this was solved by the Rolls-Royce Merlin powered North American Mustang ( A rare example of US.—— British cooperation ) which was able to fly escort to Berlin and back.