That’s about 36,000ft. Sounds like a fairly typical B-17 raid to me, with a bit of hyperbole about accuracy thrown in. If the target was correctly identified from the air (not common, particularly at long range - bombers were known frequently to hit the wrong country during WW2) then the B-17s could usually hit it, sort of.
Or even wrong continent. Watch an interested special on this. Now these guys were in a B-24. Anyhow read this if you never have
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_be_Good_(aircraft)
The plane crashed in 43 but wasnt discovered until 58 by British oil surveyors.
The program I watched stated they found one guy only 30 miles short of a town. After having walked over 120 miles I think. :shock:
Just goes to show that long distance navagation was almost as effective as throwing grass into the air. Sorry dont want to go to far off topic just thought this was interesting.
Wiki link is broken, but I think I know the case anyway. What happened is that they got lost and radioed in to a single direction finding station to get their bearing. If I understand correctly, with the technology of the time a DF station could only give a line through the station that the target was on. Fine if you get a cross-bearing from another source - the two lines will cross at a single point - but they only got a single bearing. Someone made the assumption that they were on one side of the station, when in fact they were very lost indeed already and were on the other side. Hence their flying the wrong way until their fuel ran out.
Can’t be bothered to look the details up now (I’ve got the book which references it lying around, but would have to read quite a while to find the details), but there are recorded cases of SAS troopers in the Western Desert during WW2 walking 200+ miles and surviving. These are exceptional cases, but all the same…!