Dangers of Bombing Operations
Heroes Remember
Dangers of Bombing Operations
But just to put it in figures, we lost 157 airplanes in about
three and a half years of operation. And that was 900 and some
odd air crew. Now some of them were taken POW, some of them
were, died or crashed or, you know with the airplane, but that's,
that's just one squadron. We had 157 airplanes over, lets say
four years, that's forty airplanes a year. You know, it started
adding up, almost three or four a month. On a given, any given
raid you never knew what was going to happen, we would see
the airplanes take off naturally. We knew what the target,
we didn't know what the target was when they left always,
but we had a good sense by the fuel that was prescribed and
the bomb load, the heavier the bomb load and the less fuel,
the shorter the flight. So we knew it was probably a coastal
command, Hamburg or some place like that. If it was a heavy fuel
load, we knew that there was going to be Berlin, or well down
into the Ruhr Valley, or someplace. So we had a good feel as to
where it would be, and depending upon the target, it had quite
an effect on our losses, like the people that went to Berlin.
Berlin was a rough ride, you went three, six hours there and back
and you were, the pilots or the crew were in difficulty,
or were in danger, from about the first forty five minutes out.
All because they had night fighters, they had flak, they had all
this stuff to, to contend with, and those long flights. They used
different procedures, too. We sent diversionary forces
out in flight. They'd take off and there'd be one squadron or two
squadrons or whatever assigned to go to one target, and then
the both of them going to another one, and the Germans
immediately would say, "Oh, they're going after Cologne tonight."
And scramble their fighters to Cologne, and hopefully they'd
forget about the rest that went on to, to bomb the other target.
But again it was a continual battle between wits in that sense,
that the Germans were always trying to figure out what we were
doing and our guys were, people had ways of trying
to disrupt whatever they were doing.
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