D-Day, 73 years ago today...

[Steve Helmick]

So many served and died, so that we wouldn't have to learn to speak German...or Japanese.    Steve

[Terrence Durrill]

So many served and died, so that we wouldn't have to learn to speak German...or Japanese.    Steve

                         Or Italian.        

[Larry Fernandez]

So many served and died, so that we wouldn't have to learn to speak German...or Japanese.    Steve

Our greatest generation

Larry, Buttafucco Stunt Team

[M Spencer]

Seems approprite I should have the Typoon finished ( or flyable , anyway ) for this weekend .
Almost cancelled by the beaurocrates . Problems were Elevator couterbalane snapping & non centrifugally cast sleeves .Early On.



Probly the most effective ground attack fighter of the war . Certainly the best western tank destroyer . See the Falaise Gap carnage .
Troops could call them from a standing ( airbourne ) ' Taxi Rank ' loaded and armed , if they had ' difficulties ' .
Also used against the V1 & V2 attacks .

The French Resistance virtually put the railways to a standstill , thwarting reinforcements .

617 Sqn. ( the Dam Busters ) carried out a rader faux par to convince the germans that the actual landings were elsewhere .
Along with many other S.O.E. & intelligance russes to fool German Intelligance .

This Bloke recons He was the First to Land on a Allied Airfield in France , at the invasion . Quite a halarious book , in a quite way .


Its in someparts about the Mk 9 Spit they ' paintstripped ' to avoid identification , having ' aquired it ' abandoned . Initiative . 

[RogerGreene]

Amazon has "The Silver Spitfire" new hardback for $152.79. Or in used paperback for $0.98..

[Steve Helmick]

Dad was piloting the first Allied aircraft to land in Rome after the Germans vacated. Runways hadn't been checked for mines yet.  I sez "Why?" He said "No gas, no choice."   Steve 

[Chad Hill]

Thirty-four American POWs who had survived the Bataan Death March died in Camp O'Donnell, Philippines on June 6, 1942. This brought the total number of O'Donnell US dead to 1270 since April 11th, when the camp was first occupied. Disease, starvation and Japanese brutality caused the prisoners to perish. This is an episode of history largely forgotten, and seldom taught in academic institutions today.

[Dan McEntee]

    Let us not forget the Battle of Midway, which has an an anniversary this month also. Lost of stuff happened on June 6th, it seems. Can you imagine how differently the rest of the war with Japan might have gone if our Navy had been defeated in that great sea and air battle? How much longer it might have gone on? I have no doubt that the US would have still been victorious, but the price paid on both sides may have been a lot higher.
   Type at you later,
    Dan McEntee

[pat king]

American fighting men have been putting their lives on the line since the Revolutionary War so that their families and neighbors could live free. We all owe a debt to our military that can never be repaid. Say a prayer of thanks for all those who have served and serve now.

Pat

[Brett Buck]

    Let us not forget the Battle of Midway, which has an an anniversary this month also. Lost of stuff happened on June 6th, it seems. Can you imagine how differently the rest of the war with Japan might have gone if our Navy had been defeated in that great sea and air battle? How much longer it might have gone on? I have no doubt that the US would have still been victorious, but the price paid on both sides may have been a lot higher.

   Midway was pretty much the end for Japan. More-or-less as soon as all the "peacetime leaders" had been removed, and you got people willing to fight effectively and aggressively, it became a mismatch with the Japanese, who fundamentally misunderstood the implications of their own successful tactics. They still imagined that they could induce one decisive battle, after which we were going to give up. That was a ludicrous underestimation of their foe, and while some of them probably realized that, the IJN in general didn't.

Additionally, the same people probably also realized that is one decisive battle was the only chance they had, because they were never going to win a war of attrition. Their motivation for starting the whole thing in the first place was to ensure imports required to keep them going, once that was cut off, it was over.

  They also had no way to replace pilots and had dismal results trying to develop and field new aircraft. The Zero was superior in some ways to the US equivalents (mostly, high maneuverability at low speeds, and extreme range) in 1941 but was fragile, impossible to maneuver well at high speeds and as soon as a few people figured it out, even the Wildcat had a decent record against it. And it never got a lot better - but the Hellcat certainly was. We turned out massive numbers of better airplane and better pilots, they quickly found they couldn't replace the pilots and they had very inferior equipment, so by Leyte Gulf, they sent out the carriers as decoys with very few airplanes because they couldn't man them.

    They were *never, ever* going to win as long as we kept trying.

     Brett

[Chad Hill]

A very interesting read is "The Unknown Battle of Midway", by Alvin Kernan. When the book came out in 2005 it was a blockbuster of sorts, revealing much previously undisclosed info about the CO of Torpedo Squadron 8, John Waldron, and especially the serious failures of the Hornet Air Group commander, Stanhope Ring. Waldron's VT-8 was the only Hornet squadron to find the Japanese fleet, but all of their planes were shot down without scoring a hit.

This new information complimented tremendous research done by Bowen Weisheit, a WW2 Marine Corps navigator, in his 1993 book, "The Last Flight of Ensign C. Markland Kelly, Jr., USNR". Ensign Kelly of Fighting Squadron 8 had died when the ten F4F Wildcats from the USS Hornet ditched their fuel starved aircraft together during the Midway battle. Eight pilots from VF-8 were rescued, but Weisheit discovered that their actual location when they were picked up differed by 150 miles from the Hornet's official battle report.

To make a long story short, due to the efforts of authors Kernan, Weisheit and others, many present day historians have come to believe that the Midway battle records of the Hornet Air Group were sanitized to deflect attention away from the gross errors made by Hornet skipper Mark Mitscher and especially Air Group commander Ring. Required after-action reports from the squadron COs were deliberately omitted and navigation information was distorted. When Admiral Spruance forwarded his report to CINCPAC he suspiciously noted that "Where discrepancies exist between Enterprise and Hornet reports, the Enterprise report should be taken as the more accurate".  

A final interesting note: author Kernan was an 18 year old aviation ordnanceman for VT-6 on the Enterprise during the Battle of Midway. When Medal of Honor recipient Butch O'Hare was lost the following year during a night intercept of a Japanese Betty bomber in November 1943, Kernan was a turret gunner aboard a TBF Avenger exchanging gunfire with the Betty. O'Hare's Hellcat became caught in the crossfire between the planes and went down. It is therefore possible that he was a friendly fire victim, though recent authors have tended to believe the Japanese gunner shot him down.

[M Spencer]

The spitfire Guy was Liason Officer the the USAF fighter squadrons , and ' misslaid ' for a few years , too .  British School Upbringing & ' Press on Regardless ' .