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Originally Posted by jimbotosome What's up with the 50 misssions. I thought you could get a cake walk job after 25, 30, and finally 35?
50% losses? How in the world did you guys maintain your morale?
The Tuskeegee airmen (for those that didn't know) were the fighting 99th who where all black pilots and flew (later) P-51Ds with bright red tails. Shamefully our military was segregated in WWII, but it was the culture of the times you know. The 99th pilots primarily were assigned bomber escort. They are reputed to have never lost a bomber to an enemy fighter. Their tactics were somewhat different in that they stayed tight in with the bombers and would not chase the Germans. The bomber pilots would specifically request the 99th for escort but most of them never even knew they were black.
This fighting technique developed by the 99th's commander was controversial in that the bomber crews loved them for obvious reasons, but then again they did not diminish the Luftwaffe fighting ability as they didn't engage the German fighters away from the bombers. |
Jimbo There is a film titled "The Tuskeegee Airmen" It tells of their start to to their flying P51s, a very good film.
During my tour crews in the UK flew 25 missions, we in N.Africa flew 50. overall the missions were tougher in the UK, but we had to contend with a lack of planes and crews. our ground crews were fantastic keeping the planes in the air, we would go on maximum efforts of maybe 50 planes, so the fighters gave us a rough time. IN mid '44 the UK crews missions were raised to 35 and the 15thAF still had to fly 50, but there was a system of twofers (2 missions) a twofer was when a mission was beyond a certain point, so the missions averaged about 35+/-. Once the 15th flew from Italy the toughness of the targets was equalized. From Italy the loss ratio exceeded the 8th AF losses. My group went to Ploesti 10 times, aIso to Berlin. I had 2 missions to Weiner Neustadt, a very tough target which later was a twofer, my 1st one was from N.Africa, I was airbourne for 14 hours.
After the 1st Ploesti low level mission with the large loss the rest of the missions were from normal high altitude. An interesting fact----there were 5 medals of honor awarded on the first raid.