Good Series

I looked at bits and pieces of it on YouTube.

I’ll watch this series when I can. I’ve seen snippets on utoob and it looks excellent.

I recently upgraded my phone, so I snagged my three month trial of AppleTV.

I did a B-17 walk-through a few years ago at an air show. I built a scale model of one when I was 10 or 12 years old and was left with the impression that it was a huge aircraft, a notion that was largely dispelled by the walk-through.

What struck me was how cramped the accommodations were for everybody except the navigator/radioman. All priority was given to bombs, defensive armament (+ammo for same) and fuel. Creature comforts were an afterthought, if they were given any thought at all.

Those bombing missions had to be utterly terrifying, especially before long-range fighters were available to escort the bombers all the way to the target and back. Before the escorts came ion line, I think that the average life expectancy of bomber crews was only 5 or 6 missions.

And pity the poor belly ball turret gunners...Lord: they could get trapped in there if the right parts of the plane got too shot up, in which case they were SOL if the crew had to bail out or the plane had to belly land.

In addition to 7.92 machine guns, the ME-109 and FW-190 attackers were armed with 20mm or 30mm cannon firing HE ammo. According to what I've read, far more of the bombers were downed by fighters than by FLAK.

I thought the same Taildragger until at an Air Show in Dallas after Desert Storm. One was parked next to an F-111 and it was just about as long but mostly engine.

I took a ride on a B-17 for my 60th birthday. Thirty minutes, and got to walk around inside the plane during the flight.

She was the Nine-O-Nine, built late in the war. She's gone now, crashed a few years ago, killing all eight souls on board.

They look large while on the ground, as Taildragger mentioned, but there is not much space on board. And it's an aluminum frame with an aluminum skin, a tin can with four engines attached.

The men that went up in those planes during the war had testicles the size of grapefruits. And it was, IMO, the weapon that won the war for the Allies.

There are less than a dozen still now flying.

The crew numbered 10.

13,000 B-17s were produced from 1936 to 1945. 8,000 of them were lost in combat.

I read somewhere (maybe the book, "Unbroken") that, due to the high wing root placement, B-24s sank very quickly when ditched, which gave the crew (especially any who were injured) little time to escape.