The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress entered service in 1938 with the USAAC, it was a four-engined heavy bomber which evolved rapidly during WW2.
The early versions of the Fortress were not very successful, but rapid development of the ‘E’ ‘F’ and ‘G’ models made a huge difference to the survivability and and effectiveness of the aircraft and it became renowned for it’s ability to take heavy battle damage.
The Fortress was armed with up 13 x 12.7mm machine guns (B-17G) and carried a 8,000 lb bomb load as standard for short range missions.
B-17G (Fortress III) of 214 Squadron RAF 1944.
This is a RCM (Radio Countermeasures) aircraft.
I had a restored Yankee Lady B-17G fly over my property a few times on June 2013, I’m in the local airport flight path. The sound of those engines above is both fascinating and scary.
The local paper reported that during one of flights a local WW2 B17 Bomber vet was aboard.
I was wrong, there were actually four local WW2 Vets who were able to take a ride on the Yankee Lady.
Wilbert L. “Curly” Seibold, Robert L. Randol, Dean A. Gressley and Don E. Baer were treated to the flight on Friday, June 21, through the efforts of Mayor Brooks Fetters, the Huntington County Veterans Service Office, Huntington County Veterans Council and two private donors. Seibold and Randol are both former prisoners of war.
Yes I started becoming interested in WW2 bombers recently and have been avidly watching documentaries quite regularly. The beauty is juxtaposed with such horror and heroism–very hard to grasp in real terms being merely an armchair hobbyist as I have become. The call to duty and living that out as the crew is traveling over land and sea to the targets cannot be put into words. And then the intensity of air battle thereafter… it must have been unreal.
It’s also somewhat tragic furthermore that most of these magnificent machines were nearly 90% scrapped and rendered extinct forevermore, with only a scant few flying and on display in museums. Out of tens of thousands made only a few score are extant. That seems wrong. These are among some of the finest and most beautiful planes ever created and they were nearly all earnestly destroyed just minutes after the war ended.
They are beautiful, but then beauty is in the eye of the beholder and wasn’t the point which was to drop bombs. Even with the formidable defensive armor of the B-17, it generally was not enough to withstand the determined assault of the Luftwaffe which shot these planes down in huge numbers. Bombing accuracy was not good either. The famed Norden bombsight failed to deliver. I forget the statistics, but the Strategic American Bombing Survey conducted following the war determined that a very small percentage of bombs released actually hit their targets. The English already knew this and resorted to area bombing at night which was akin to using a hand grenade to kill an ant. The Mustang eventually saved the day for the B-17 by providing cover all the way to Germany and back. Goering, seeing the Mustangs over Berlin, concluded with, “I knew then that the war was lost.”
From my cursory knowledge of the bombing campaigns of the Allies over Europe, the accuracy and survival rate improved as the war went into its later stages. The Americans were the daytime/tactical bombing element and the British were the night shift/area bombing aspect–which amounted to a 24 hour daily regimen of bombing Germany.
After a time, the Americans, too, began area bombing and targeting civilians directly as the war matured (Dresden is the example that sticks out). From my understanding, the sheer numbers of planes available and replaced by the Allied forces overwhelmed the Luftwaffe despite Germany’s myriad technical advantages in aerial combat. Germany’s technical edge began to diminish in relevance as their Luftwaffe wasn’t replaced at the pace of the Allied planes.
Evidently the United States adopted the Henry Ford mass assembly line ethos of bomber and fighter production, outpacing and outnumbering in units all of the Allied country’s rate of plane production combined. Also the Luftwaffe failed to coordinate their radar tracking systems which, despite their superior radar, left them without the intelligence gathering of the Allies whose radar systems were inferior but much more coordinated and made into a “system.”
And then there are the various individual models of bombers and fighters that each brought strengths and weaknesses to the battlespace. For example, the B-17 is perhaps the most famous and good looking of the bombers, with the B-25 as a strong competitor in that regard, whilst the B-26 is the “black sheep” of the bombers which was plagued with technical issues in its development cycle even though once worked out was more “capable” than the 17 or 25.
This is all very endlessly fascinating I’m avidly learning more and more about it every day. And I thank forums like this one for the great content. :lol:
“A flight simulator movie based on a short story written by Colonel Merle Fister, USAF, retired. It’s about a mission that he flew on June 6th, 1944. The movie is narrated by Col. Fister.”
Actually, my favorite bomber in the looks department is the Lancaster. There was only one bomber that was mass-produced on the Detroit model and that was the B-24 line at Ford’s Willow Run plant in Dearborn, MI, although when viewed in the light of every other country’s airframe production, they all looked like mass production. It might not be so hard to outpace other countries’ production when yours is immune from air attack, has access to huge manpower and natural resources and where one’s transportation systems are pristine. The Mosquito is another favorite because it was very fast, had a long range and was clad in plywood(!) because steel or aluminum were in short supply.
I like that one, too. The Landcaster is brutishly elegantly ugly-beautiful. It’s awesome to behold. And my favorite is the B-24 actually. I have a soft spot for that one. I’d launch a search and recover mission to find another restorable B-24.
Agree and I will add that I consider they were all mass-produced, assembly line style particularly after Dec 7, 1941, regardless of where they were made. The number of units made outpaced all allied countries’ output combined. I don’t think they had to be made literally by an automotive manufacturer the be deemed assembly line mass-produced.
Regardless, I think that drastically (if not solely) nailed the coffin shut on the axis powers as the German infrastructure’s ability to keep pace and recover failed miserably. I think Hitler underestimated, out of pure ego and ideology, the capacity of the United States’ manufacturing capability and national resolve. He was out of his depth.
Hence, Hitler’s hubris. No doubt the German’s were a formidable adversary. They brought a lot to the table to overcome on the battlefield, be it sky, land, or sea. But their momentum was unsustainable in hindsight. Once one loses momentum their tempo drops and it’s incredibly hard to get initiative back. Any chess player will attest to this brutal reality.
Yes I think that was a British plane. I learned about that plane last week. It’s a great looking plane and I did a double take to make sure I heard it correctly: that is indeed made of wood.
Another thing that was surprising to learn (but made sense after I pondered it) was the Wellington bomber with its canvas coated fuselage made of geodesics. It made for an incredibly airworthy airframe under flak conditions.
There is a great documentary about the one they found and raised and restored from Loch Ness–you probably have long since seen it.
Not at all. You can get big production in a factory by throwing skilled craftsmen at it (to some extent the system the British used), but that isn’t mass production. To understand the difference I’d suggest starting by reading up on W Edwards Deming.
It’s probably better to think of it as an early composite aircraft. Wood is very broadly cellulose fibres in a lignin matrix, while fibreglass is glass fibres in a resin matrix. The high strength comes by aligning the fibres with the load, which De Havilland did by using thin plywood and good design.
On a strength for weight basis, wood can actually outperform aluminium in some circumstances - the reason it was dropped was the difficulty in mass-producing wooden aircraft. De Havilland partially solved this problem by moulding the plywood into concrete moulds, removing some of the skill from the process, but mass production was only really possible because wartime had created a surplus of skilled woodworkers. it is notable that their last wooden design (the Hornet) was also their last wartime one…
It’s still mind-boggling and counter-intuitive to realize that there were wooden warplanes sent into battle in WW2. But considering the aforementioned it has sound logic.
Actually, it took Ford quite while to establish their mass-production line because they had to rationalize and reduce the parts needed to where they could be assembled in a continuous, logical production process. The B-24 prototype on which the line was based was not produced in this way, of course. However, once it started production it was formidable as to quantity and quality. The planes literally emerged from the production line and were flown off on a runway at the end of it. I believe the Willow Run plant employed mostly women.
