Mitch Peeke has kindly sent the following report from the unveiling of the memorial he organised, for the crew of USAAF B-17 Serial 44-6133, lost in collision overhead Allhallows, Kent on June 19th, 1944. If you haven’t yet read Still with us, you may like to start there. A Wing and A Prayer by Mitch Peeke So, the day finally arrived. Saturday June 22nd 2019 … Continue reading And with us still
History in the making Late one English midsummer afternoon, eighteen young men fell out of the sky over Allhallows, Kent, in England. The date was June 19th, 1944 and they were the victims of German flak. Not from the ground below, obviously, but from a target area half an hour and 83 miles behind them. Closer to their Kimbolton base than the combat zone, they … Continue reading Still with us
The Battle of Winslow Sobanski Any war is made up of a series of battles – for each particular country, region, city, hamlet, hill or strongpoint… and World War 2 was no exception. But alongside the thousands of strategic and tactical fights which made it into the history books, there were millions of private battles that didn’t. On land, sea, and in the air, every … Continue reading Private War
The way to fly I’ve been reading aerodynamics books over the last month. I know. So cool, right? I don’t apologise. I find the subject fascinating and the more I learn, the more it makes me want to find out. I have it so bad that I find the engineers at NASA JPL and Langley genuinely cool. Sigh! I guess there are far lesser people … Continue reading Go with the flow
Almost any time you watch, read or listen to interviews with WW2 fighter pilots, they give a huge amount of credit to their ground crews. And yet the media never seems to take the cue. Stories focused solely on those ground crews are rare beyond words.* However, I found the following piece in an old Air Forces Magazine (January 1944). Apart from being incredibly well … Continue reading Lonely From The Off
Dominic Salvatore Gentile (1920 – 1951) “…But it was not until I was 17 that I finally got into an airplane. At that time I felt I had come to the place where I belonged in the world. The air to me was what being on the ground was to other people. When I felt nervous it pulled me together. Things could get … Continue reading “…where I belonged…
As so often happens, I was prepping a post on one topic when I spotted something completely different. In this case, a short but poignant article from the October 18th, 1945 issue of Flight magazine… Missing Airmen One of the biggest jobs now facing the Royal Air Force is the effort to trace missing airmen. Since the beginning of the war in Europe there have … Continue reading Without a trace
He was born on a Pembina, North Dakota farm on May, 17th 1923. He died today, Christmas Day, in 1944. Donald J Emerson enlisted as a US Army Air Forces armourer as soon as he’d finished high school. Early the next year, 1943, he learned that entry requirements for pilot training had been lowered and he jumped at the opportunity. By January 1944 he … Continue reading On Christmas
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