Tom's plane (and bomb) pix

From the family's visit to the Museum of the Air Force, Dayton OH:

B-18A nose. The great precursor to WWII workhorse B-17.

Mitsubishi Zero

B-25 with Jimmy Doolittle represented on the right.

Clearly, Alec Baldwin was a bit too tall to play him accurately.

The famous Doolittle silver goblets (all 80 of them) are missing from their display case. The annual reunion happened just last week in San Antonio.

Gotta wonder how many of the original crews are still alive.

Neat story: Disney Studios made 1,200 plane and unit insignias--free--during WWII, continuing a wartime cartooning tradition started by WWI ambulance driver Walt himself.

B-24 Liberator, with its famous plexiglass nose.

Fat Man replica

Little Boy

Comments

[Mark in Texas]

I'm glad you've got a picture of a B-24 in there. My dad was a navigator in one of those planes. That little bubble thing on top, right behind the plexiglass nose is where he would take sightings with his octant. Although he was ordinarily one of the calmest people you would ever meet, one thing that would always set him off would be somebody praising the B-17 (the "pretty" airplane with its light bomb load and short range while some people were spending twice as many hours in the air flying twice as far on each mission to drop more bombs deeper into eastern Germany, Poland, Austria or Hungary and then flying home to sleep in a tent in Italy instead of drinking beer in an English pub... There is more, but that is the essence.)

[Tom Sowell]

Mark-I know what you mean. My dad was a pilot of a B-24 in the Pacific.When the show 12 O'Clock High came on, dad would smirk and say there were a lot more B-24s than there were B-17s. Dad's was a photo reconnaisance plane.