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Re: Boeing B-52H Stratofortress 

By: Beldin in GRITZ | Recommend this post (2)
Sun, 16 Mar 25 7:50 PM | 10 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Grits Breakfast of Champeens! 		Msg. 05556 of 05574
(This msg. is a reply to 05552 by De_Composed)
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My father-in-law didn't like to talk too much about his bombing missions ... he had two co-pilots killed in-flight who were obviously sitting right next to him.

Most of his crew were kids - 19 to 20 years old. They called him "Pops" because he was 26 to 27 years old. He was an "old man" to them.

Dad said he would have rather been a fighter pilot ... because he wanted to be able to "dish it out, rather than just sit there and take it" ... but, he was somewhere between 6'1" and 6'2" and the fighter cockpits were pretty limited as to space. Most fighter pilots were smaller guys. Although, a friend of my father's was a P-38 squadron commander in the Pacific and he was 6'5"! He wasn't supposed to be a fighter pilot, but the P-38 was bigger than most fighters and he took out his seat and sat on the floor board of the plane. He had back problems for the rest of his life because of it. 




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The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence


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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: Boeing B-52H Stratofortress
By: De_Composed in GRITZ
Sun, 16 Mar 25 7:27 PM 		Msg. 05552 of 05574

When my dad signed up for the Army/Air Corps, they gave him some sort of a test on which he scored very well. They decided to make a pilot of him and sent him to school. While in training, he touch a wing in a landing. There was little damage but that was that. He washed out. They sent him to navigator school instead.

I asked him once if he had regrets. "No, no regrets," he said. "Nobody who survived had any regrets." For the rest of his life he insisted, however, that the accident would never have happened if he'd known ahead of time how to drive a car. "I had no experience with a steering wheel, depth, or travelling at high speed," he said.

Once missions began, everybody was very superstitious about their own crew, believing it to be special, or lucky. Nobody wanted to fill in for anybody else. Once the mission requirement was met, crews were sent home... supposedly for good though no one believed it. Two guys my dad was friends with were in that position except that they'd missed one or two flights due to illness and had to make them up. They were assigned to a new plane which was promptly shot down. No survivors. That, of course, weighed heavily on everybody else and their inclination to ever admit that they were too sick to fly.

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