Re: Back to Aircraft!

Forty years ago I was talking with one of my customers, whom I knew had flown B-25's in the South Pacific, and was showing him a photo book on the 5th Air Force that had just come out. One photo showed a B-25 with a parafrag bomb snagged on the right wing. When I showed it to him, he said "wait a minute" and left. He was back in about 10 minutes with a stack of photos and said "here is the rest of the sequence." It turns out he was a side gunner/photographer and had taken the photo. The others showed the whole unfortunate sequence which culminated in the aircraft crashing. Marty said that they were bombing an airstrip from below tree top level, and the angle of the photos clearly showed this. This was to minimize the time that the Japanese anti aircraft guns could track them. He said the Japanese began stringing cables between the tops of the palm trees to force them to fly higher and make them more exposed to anti aircraft fire. The book is out of print and I've been unable to find the photo on the internet, but there are certainly plenty of other photos showing the extremely low altitude that these bombs were released at. Must have been truly scary flying one of those raids. You really have to credit the WW II bomber crews that flew in both theaters of the war.

Michael Allen