A flight into history

A friend of mine alerted me to this video of B-17s in action during the Second World War. It’s set to Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”.

B-17s were the workhorse of the US air war in Europe, and they were perhaps the earliest of my technology interests.

They didn’t have the payload capacity or the range of other bombers, but once their armor was beefed up, the Eighth Air Force followed a strategy of formation flying and they developed long-range escort fighters, the B-17 just kept pounding targets all over Europe.

It was called the “Flying Fortress” because you could shoot half of the fuselage, most of the tail and other sundry parts away, and it would still make it back to base. (You can see this in the video.)

I’ve actually been in one—a guy I was going out with was designing Mattel’s “B-17 Bomber” Intellivision game, and we went to an air show specifically to see it. (The game kind of tanked; wonder how it would do with today’s graphic action capabilities?) 

(And if you want to see the interior, here are some pix from the Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine.)

The interesting thing to me was the old guy they had showing us around. He’d flown in the craft and had lots of stories to tell.

The one thing I remember, 30 years on, is that he said that, even with its stolid homing capabilities, about half of the Forts were lost during the war. (And since each plane held a crew of ten, that means a loss of more than 50,000 men.) According to this guy, a high proportion of those losses occurred on a crew’s 25^th (and final) mission. The pilot would try some damn-fool stunt, like buzzing the control tower, and that was all she wrote.

Well, maybe, maybe not. I can’t find that documented anywhere, but it makes a good story.

Both Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite were working journalists during WWII, and they’ve written about “ride-alongs” they took on B-17s. I recommend their accounts to you. Before their sortie, they’d absorbed the ground-pounders’ usual complaint about how war for the flyers was all glamour and no risk. They had a different perspective afterward.