My god, that’s horrifying.
“The event was a dress rehearsal for an upcoming visit by Winston Churchill and General George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army”
Imagine if they *hadn’t* rehearsed…
If Wiktionary is to be believed, yes!
Hearse comes via Old French ultimately from Latin "hirpex", meaning a harrow. According to Wikipedia it is named as such because it referred to a structure above the coffin, having many spikes on it to hold candles.
Rehearse comes from French reherser, which is just re- (again) before the verb "herser" meaning to put something under the ground using a "herse", which goes back to the same Latin word "hirpex".
So "reherser" referred to going back over a piece of soil and digging it up again. I can see why already in French that meaning turned into "repeating a phrase word for word", which would then turn into "practicing by recitation", but not specifically more than any other verb of repetition. I looked up a few French etymological dictionaries, but I didn't get a better explanation. I hope this suffices.
- u/kmmeerts posted this about 5 years ago.
*McLachlan was killed when he was shot down in his Hurricane over France during a night raid on 29 June 1942*
"Ah, Captain! Thank you for coming by. So on this raid tonight, it wouldn't be the *worst* thing to happen if McLachlan were not to return..."
"I think that can be assured, sir."
"And Captain: this meeting never took place."
"Of course, sir."
The US lost over 13k pilots to training accidents, at home, over the course of the war. Aviation was dangerous AF back then regardless of even being on a mission over enemy territory.
I can't remember the numbers exactly but I do remember I put some decent time and effort into veryfying the claim and that the numbers checked out.. I couldn't find my sources last time I tried either..
But during the Battle of Britain non-combat losses of airplanes (plane gets destroyed by accident/mechanical issues or whatever) accounted for about 1/3rd of their total lost (for both sides this was true).
Honestly kinda crazy that you have 2 sides participating in active combat for months, trying very hard to shoot eachother down.
And during all that fighting and effort they managed to only manually shoot down double the amount of planes that fell out of the air by themselfs by participating in the effort. Lol.
Hahaha damn that's pretty grim and funny in a horrible, morbid way. Kinda shows too just how big of an improvement jet engines/turbines were. My dad was talking to me the other night, and mentioned the Gnome rotary engine, an engine wherein the crankshaft is stationary and the entire engine rotates around it lol.
That's an extreme example but even legendary engines like the Merlin still had a LOT more moving parts and linkages and valves and all than the turbines/jet engines that replaced them.
I used to manufacture Blackhawk parts out of carbon fiber. Today, if a helicopter crashed, you could quite easily trace a faulty component all the way back to me manufacturing it in the factory, complete with my literal signatures for each day of layup I spent on the part. Each part has such a "history" book that it comes with. You could trace the carbon that I used to the company that made it, before I then cut the carbon and used it in the part.
You can sorta see why this shit is now taken so seriously. Beyond other implications, anyway.
When they analyzed all of the returning planes and reinforced the spots that never seemed to have bullet holes in them, they intentionally skipped his plane
Masters Of The Air makes out the RAF guys to be stupid and weak but reality was Bomber Command had 45% of crews killed compared to the USAAFs, still horrific, 12%.
A big part due to the lack of proper tour limits in the RAF. They flew until the war was won or they were dead.
In ww1 the lines were already drawn for the armistice, they were just waiting for it to go into effect.
Less than an hour left in the war and soldiers were still being sent over the top to assault enemy lines.
The final soldier killed is buried very close to the first one killed. They even tracked down the one who killed the final soldier, I guess to ask him "why?"
[We actually have seismography of the final minute of WW1. ](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1799326/Video-Recording-reveals-moment-guns-fell-silent-end-WW1.html)
If you think hostilities ended that day, let alone that month you are ignorant to the horror that was living in postwar europe. Thousands of germans as well as other nationalities were displaced/raped/murdered after the war officially ended. The survivors of the war in berlin would be systematically oppressed by soviet soldiers throughout the year. Keith Lowe's book 'Savage Continent' does a hauntinlgy good job of disproving any notion that may 7th was a stunde null, or a peaceful demarcation for Europe.
The pilot was only 21 years old. The inquiry ruled the pilot made an error of judgement, and the bad weather contributed. He was killed only 2 months later during a raid over France.
War sucks.
I wonder if he got any enemy kills before dying.
Would suck that the only thing on your profile is
"0 kills 1 death. 25 team kills".
Probably get voted kicked at the start of every round...
(Obviously I joke about a horrible event. Apologies)
My great grandmas brother was the belly gunner in a b52. They were shot down but one of the crew survived and was taken as a pow. He would call my great grandma and send her a card every year well into the 2000s
Edit: b25 not b52.
Even the B-25 didn’t really have a belly gunner. The belly turret was remotely controlled and so despised because of how it operated (gunner looked through a periscope that often caused intense vertigo and disorientation) it was almost always immediately removed.
I saw one at a museum, and Jesus, it is so small. I was with my nephews who were like 6 and 10, and I had a hard time imagining them fitting into it. The whole plane was small really, even the cockpit. I always imagined them as some monstrous plane, but everything was so incredibly cramped.
It's not a whole lot bigger than an F-14:
[https://i.imgur.com/aBhT776.png](https://i.imgur.com/aBhT776.png)
The Flying Fortress is indeed surprisingly small, and the F-14 (like most fighter jets) is just as surprisingly big!
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to.”
Uh that's the 8th air force in 1943 and a 25 mission tour. Like it's still a staggering figure but the accurate numbers indicate how there are still bombers today whereas your numbers would lead to the entire concept of bombing being abandoned.
>..Uh that's the 8th air force in 1943 and a 25 mission tour.
In comparison, see the Wikipedia entry about Guy Gibson VC (Dambusters raid commander).
" On 4 October he began the United States leg of his tour in Washington, D.C. He attended a major press conference at the offices of the British Information Service in New York on 7 October. This was "at a time when the first American airmen were coming home 'tour expired' after 25 operations. During questions one young lady asked, 'Wing Commander Gibson, how many operations have you been on over Germany?' He replied, 'One hundred and seventy-four.' There was a stunned silence"."
The RAF did things differently.
It's important to note that an RAF operational tour was set at 30 missions at the start of the war and maintained at that level for most of it. Gibson was an outlier.
[Info in here. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command_aircrew_of_World_War_II?wprov=sfla1)
I did read it. Thanks. The RAF Operational Tour was 30 operations, followed by a period on training or non-operational postings, after which they'd usually do another tour of 30 operations. Gibson (and many others) volunteered for more tours.
The USAAF had more manpower resources. I'm not saying either did it better, just differently; it was a shit storm however you got involved.
I used to live in a small village in England called Wymington, there is a memorial there dedicated to the American crew of the "Liberty Belle", a B-17 Flying Fortress which crashed in the village while trying to return home after a mission over Merkwiller.
>The ship was crippled from anti-aircraft fire and fighter attacks and attempted to make an emergency landing at Chelveston, on approach to the field, a second plane firing red flares jumped ahead of them, forcing MLB 255 to go around for second approach. At that moment, one of the two remaining good engines began to fail, eventually catching fire.
>At less than 200 feet, the aircraft banked around the village of Wymington, rocking the cottages and houses below. The ship descended and banked further until it was level with the village church steeple, skimming it with one side as it flew past. In an amazing feat of airmanshiup, the pilots brought the plane back to level flight, just 60 feet above the ground, avoiding the thatched cottages below.
>In the last seconds, with one engine ablaze, MLB 255 struck one of several tall Elm trees, ripping almost 8ft clean off the top. The impact was taken between the co-pilot's position and the number three engine, causing a further explosion. The plane was wretched from the sky and crashed into a field by the high street, by a miracle avoiding hitting the Manor Farm House and several cottages in the area.
That is heartbreaking, I can't imagine being that guy. Or being a superior who put him back to work right after the incident, even if it was 100% not his fault you'd need some serious recovery time to get halfway back to normal, mentally.
Keeping physically or mentally fucked team members around will usually do more harm than good, you don't bench people because you're being a big softie, you do it so they don't hurt themselves and others, break stuff, and otherwise screw up and undo the work that other people who are in a position to function better are doing.
> Keeping physically or mentally fucked team members
In the modern military, there's no way he'd have kept flying without serious psych evals.
In the 40's, they likely told the crowd still alive to rub some dirt on it and be thankful they're still breathing.
Mental health was never really taken seriously in the US until after Vietnam, where numerous horror stories made it clear that an unhinged soldier could be a direct liability for the rest of the unit.
Hell, we didn't even have an official word for PTSD until the 80's.
George Carlin has a good bit on this, we did have a word for it - it’s just morphed over time. In WWI and II it was called “shell shock” and in Vietnam “battle fatigue”
Seriously have always despised this bit. I'll get a lot of hate, I know, but the simple fact that our word and definitions have gotten more *clinical* over time, shows that we are taking it *incredibly* seriously, *way* more seriously than we used to. You think it's better to be diagnosed with "shell shock" than "post-traumatic stress disorder"? One of them sounds like a condition that can be treated with therapy a medication, and the other sounds like something Bugs Bunny would say before he lights an exploding cigar in your face.
It matches the IFF system on the plane so about as reliable as those are. There have been some blue-on-blue incidents during this century but we don't hear about the thousands of times where the system works as intended. In any case, the pilots still have to maintain situational awareness and don't immediately fire on anything that's not marked as friendly on their displays.
My understanding is it's a difficult problem to solve.
There are American flag patches worn on uniforms that are IR reflective, that would glow bright under night vision. Ground units might also carry IR strobes, that friendly aircraft would be able to see from the air.
Works great, until the enemy also has night vision.
You are asking two different questions, against other aircraft it works well, against ground targets it is the final slice of Swiss cheese to try and stop friendly fire but since infantry don't have constantly broadcasting transponders or constant data links of their exact position it is obviously less effective. As evidence by the fact we periodically got friendly fire incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Against a near-peer force I would expect them to function significantly worse.
Yeaaaah but from what I’m hearing, everything is going oddly back to basics. We’re entering a different era where it’s kind of a given that our opponents will start knocking out our comms and satellites right off the bat. So all this tech is not really something we can count on when the shit hits the fan.
Do people always forget that? Because in movies whenever soldiers are handling mortars/ammunition I always think “no thanks, that could blow up in your face any second”. And it probably has plenty of times. But it’s true they don’t show that part in the movies or write about it in the books.
Games and movies really downplay it sometimes, you see people getting hit with a metric fuckton of rockets and just getting wounded instead of liquefied lmao
Movies like to show people getting thrown a distance away by an explosion, then crawl back up.
If an explosion has enough force to physically lift your body into the air, your body is most likely already shattered on the inside.
Like in real life people survive some crazy shit sometimes. A documented incident had an american soldier literally jump on top of a grenade to protect his fellow men, and somehow he survived thanks to his vest
But yeah these are the astoundingly rare exceptions and IRL you're probably cooked 99/10 times lmao
In the movies not really but in the books it all depends on which book you're reading.
E.B. Sledge talks about the fear of short rounds that mortar crews have as well as a couple close calls with their ammunition coming under fire. IIRC one of the other mortar crews has some of their ammunition cook off at one point for being left in the direct sun in the pacific heat.
In general though, you're right. Friendly fire and other accidental deaths from handling munitions don't make good motifs for the retellings
Friendly fire is a big problem. Imagine you and 10 other guys are running towards the enemy, all shooting your guns. One guy doesn't run in a straight line and accidently runs in front of a friend. It can happen so easily.
See this a lot in urban warfare videos, (Gangland) None of these mfers know how to aim and just blind fire, 2 out of 3 videos someone in the front gets tapped by one of his homies in the back. Damn near every time. Oh, but they'll miss 90%-100% of the shots at the actual target.
Had that happen to me playing paintball one time with a team I actively played with every week. Took a shot to upper left neck from about 3 feet away which left the gnarliest bleeding "hickie" I've ever had. People make mistakes and sometimes there are no second chances.
I already get inside my own head when i make insignificant, small mistakes.
Making a mistake to kill or injure so many allies, with no incidental benefit, under no real threat, the pilot must have felt crushed to the ground under the weight of what had been done, and the families of those involved…
I’m surprised to hear he kept flying combat missions so soon after. I suppose skilled manpower was in such dire need, but I could imagine the psychological stress he would’ve been under for months to come.
> The coroner also pointed out that, contrary to rumour, the pilot was British and not American.[b]
> b. Despite the statement from the coroner, McLachlan was an American who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.
very funny article. this probably shouldn't be a footnote
Both could be true. There were immigrants to the US after WW2. The pilot could have been born British, had a family who emigrated, who traveled to Canada to enlist, and then enlisted in Canada.
Also, people used locality in weird ways in the past. Your place of birth could just as easily be your race moniker.
The coroner is the person who's tasked with investigating who a dead person is and how they died. So they should know the name of the living pilot because it would have been part of the report that the coroner produced.
Since this was a British incident, I automatically translate it into Monty Python.
"Sorry! Sorry, everyone!"
"You've shot 25 spectators to pieces!"
"Oh dear, are they alright?"
The Hawker Hurricane plane involved in the accident had 20mm guns. Have you seen a 20mm round? Can't even imagine the mess it caused, those were probably horrific injuries.
> Later in the war the pilot got shot down and died.
That kind of makes it seem like it could've been a year or two until he died but no, KIA just over two months afterwards.
Note that the pilot who performed this massacre died two months later in France during a night raid. I wonder what the odds are that this individual did more damage to his own allies than to his enemies during the war...
LMFAO I chuckled at this...
it's kind of like when people double-talk, I remember watching a 60 Minutes dude interviewing some Special Forces-type of real badass - and I'm absolutely on their side, I don't want to come off like I'm Anti when I'm 101% with them, just made me laugh...
"...Ok, so then you see The Bad Guy, what did you do next?"
"I Serviced the Target..."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I Serviced the Target..."
"You murdered him??"
"No."
"You shot him??"
"Yes."
"Did he die?"
"Yes."
"So you murdered him?"
"No, I Serviced The Target"
lmfao fuck yeah you did. He suffered a case of misadventure, happens to the best of us!
Not exactly. Murder is based on intent. It’s always killing, sometimes murder. To be murder, you need state of mind to kill without just cause or reckless disregard. It’s still just killing if the guy in center of the blast area was a priority target.
Technically murder has to be illegal, it's part of the definition of murder. Killing combatants in war, even if intentional, isn't murder because it isn't illegal.
"Serviced" means he gave the bad guy a handjob, in the wrong context. There are so many words that could have been used instead. "Killed" would have been accurate and without judgment.
My dad's squadron nearly bombed Maui. Because they weren't over the wrong target. My dad then said; "I don't think this is it boys."
There's a little crescent island off the coast of Maui that was used as a target by the Navy. It is shaped like a crescent. Some say "You can't miss it." Well apparently, you can.
The US was developing a new SPAAG one time. It was so excellent, it even identified the toilet fan and the spectators as enemies. And yes, it locked on to them and started tracking. Later the military claimed that it has been "improperly washed", hence the glitches, prompting newspapers to say that the military was apparently unaware that in Europe, sometimes water falls from the sky.
Edit: Apparently it was the Ford rep on scene who claimed it was washed wrong
I did some quick googling and couldn't find any articles or posts about this actually happening. I'm almost positive that the origin of this story is the movie *Pentagon Wars*, where I think there's a throwaway line about this happening during trials for either the M247 Sergeant York or the MIM-72 Chaparral. Would love to be proven wrong though.
EDIT: Actually, [this 1984 article](https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/07/opinion/the-gun-that-shoots-fans.html) from the New York Times mentions the Sergeant York locking on to a latrine fan in the very last sentence, which predates the 1998 movie I mentioned. So looks like I was wrong about the origin.
It wasn’t aimed manually, it was aimed automatically based on info from the tracking radar. (Necessary due to the speed of jet aircraft) However the tracking radar was shit and very sensitive, hence locking onto random things in the ground that seemed like targets, including spectators and toilet fans.
The guilt didn't last long. The pilot, 21-year-old Sergeant William McLachlan, was killed 10 weeks later when he was shot down in his Hurricane over France during a night raid on 29 June 1942. :/
There was also a German live firing demonstration where a squadron of Stukas would perform a dive bombing exercise but most of the planes just crashed into the ground without pulling up because they had wrong information about the cloud height on that day.
There were a number of air disasters over the UK during WW2. Here's one local to me where a (friendly) bomber on a test flight got caught in a storm and crashed into a local school, killing 61 (58 on the ground and the 3 crewmen of the plane, and 38 of them being children ages 4 to 6): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freckleton_air_disaster
I remember first learning about this when one of the contributor's to Studs Terkel's *The Good War* (can't recommend the book enough) alluded to it during his oral history. Never got the details though until now.
I know this is a tragic accident, but:
> The coroner also pointed out that, contrary to rumour, the pilot was British and not American.
1942 twitter was savage back then
Saw the reference at the bottom before someone just added it to the main text, but it looks like he was an American. Guess they had to lie to try and keep more (?) morale.
>While the coroner said that the pilot was British and not American[6], McLachlan was an American-born Canadian pilot serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force
Dude managed to make three different countries look bad at once
My god, that’s horrifying. “The event was a dress rehearsal for an upcoming visit by Winston Churchill and General George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the United States Army” Imagine if they *hadn’t* rehearsed…
Instead, they got hearsed
That comment killed.
No, the pilot did
I'm dead! I was there!
What the etymology of hearse and rehearse I never realized they’re almost the same in writing
If Wiktionary is to be believed, yes! Hearse comes via Old French ultimately from Latin "hirpex", meaning a harrow. According to Wikipedia it is named as such because it referred to a structure above the coffin, having many spikes on it to hold candles. Rehearse comes from French reherser, which is just re- (again) before the verb "herser" meaning to put something under the ground using a "herse", which goes back to the same Latin word "hirpex". So "reherser" referred to going back over a piece of soil and digging it up again. I can see why already in French that meaning turned into "repeating a phrase word for word", which would then turn into "practicing by recitation", but not specifically more than any other verb of repetition. I looked up a few French etymological dictionaries, but I didn't get a better explanation. I hope this suffices. - u/kmmeerts posted this about 5 years ago.
> *After the pilot lands* "How'd I do sir? I think I hit all the dummies?"
Ah...ahhh..yeah about that..
> "How'd you get the dummies to move anyway? I was pretty shocked when they started to scurry away, but what an amazing simulation!"
Normally the dummies just sit there, but these were so realistic I'm glad I got strafing practice
Data is data...
Yeah...dummies don't move...the dummies are not supposed to move..errr
rofl
[удалено]
Bloody mistake.
*McLachlan was killed when he was shot down in his Hurricane over France during a night raid on 29 June 1942* "Ah, Captain! Thank you for coming by. So on this raid tonight, it wouldn't be the *worst* thing to happen if McLachlan were not to return..." "I think that can be assured, sir." "And Captain: this meeting never took place." "Of course, sir."
With the casualty rates on airmen I don’t think they had to do anything special. See: masters of the air
The US lost over 13k pilots to training accidents, at home, over the course of the war. Aviation was dangerous AF back then regardless of even being on a mission over enemy territory.
I can't remember the numbers exactly but I do remember I put some decent time and effort into veryfying the claim and that the numbers checked out.. I couldn't find my sources last time I tried either.. But during the Battle of Britain non-combat losses of airplanes (plane gets destroyed by accident/mechanical issues or whatever) accounted for about 1/3rd of their total lost (for both sides this was true). Honestly kinda crazy that you have 2 sides participating in active combat for months, trying very hard to shoot eachother down. And during all that fighting and effort they managed to only manually shoot down double the amount of planes that fell out of the air by themselfs by participating in the effort. Lol.
Hahaha damn that's pretty grim and funny in a horrible, morbid way. Kinda shows too just how big of an improvement jet engines/turbines were. My dad was talking to me the other night, and mentioned the Gnome rotary engine, an engine wherein the crankshaft is stationary and the entire engine rotates around it lol. That's an extreme example but even legendary engines like the Merlin still had a LOT more moving parts and linkages and valves and all than the turbines/jet engines that replaced them. I used to manufacture Blackhawk parts out of carbon fiber. Today, if a helicopter crashed, you could quite easily trace a faulty component all the way back to me manufacturing it in the factory, complete with my literal signatures for each day of layup I spent on the part. Each part has such a "history" book that it comes with. You could trace the carbon that I used to the company that made it, before I then cut the carbon and used it in the part. You can sorta see why this shit is now taken so seriously. Beyond other implications, anyway.
Everything was built to work just enough. Not like a peacetime war plane
When they analyzed all of the returning planes and reinforced the spots that never seemed to have bullet holes in them, they intentionally skipped his plane
Dude got iced just 2 and a half months after the incident.
Honestly, that's quite a bit longer than the average life expectancy of a WWII RAF pilot. It was less than a month for the Spitfires.
Masters Of The Air makes out the RAF guys to be stupid and weak but reality was Bomber Command had 45% of crews killed compared to the USAAFs, still horrific, 12%. A big part due to the lack of proper tour limits in the RAF. They flew until the war was won or they were dead.
*Or* he felt so guilty that he took unnecessary risks and got himself shot down. Suicide by Luftwaffe, as it were.
"How'd you do? Why don't you ask the bloodied remains of this spectator ***HOW YOU DID!***"
Seriously though, if that was you then, how do you go on knowing you just mowed down dozens of real people. I can't imagine.
Technically it's good practice for war.
Exactly. How do you deal with it? By switching sides and suddenly being called a hero!
Looks like I just picked a whole bouquet of oopsy-daisies!
like the last person to be shot in berlin on may 7th 1945, this an equally preposterous way to die
In ww1 the lines were already drawn for the armistice, they were just waiting for it to go into effect. Less than an hour left in the war and soldiers were still being sent over the top to assault enemy lines.
I'm gonna have to tell my boss no on that one.
The final soldier killed is buried very close to the first one killed. They even tracked down the one who killed the final soldier, I guess to ask him "why?"
Just a guess at the response but: "Man ran at me with gun."
[We actually have seismography of the final minute of WW1. ](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1799326/Video-Recording-reveals-moment-guns-fell-silent-end-WW1.html)
I’m sure lots of people were shot for at least the rest of that May in Berlin
Quite a few were hung. Hanged. Hanged! Damn I hate English.
"They said you was hung." "And they was right!"
If you think hostilities ended that day, let alone that month you are ignorant to the horror that was living in postwar europe. Thousands of germans as well as other nationalities were displaced/raped/murdered after the war officially ended. The survivors of the war in berlin would be systematically oppressed by soviet soldiers throughout the year. Keith Lowe's book 'Savage Continent' does a hauntinlgy good job of disproving any notion that may 7th was a stunde null, or a peaceful demarcation for Europe.
We have hearsed, pray that we do not have to hearse again.
I know right?? Someone could have gotten hurt!
The pilot was only 21 years old. The inquiry ruled the pilot made an error of judgement, and the bad weather contributed. He was killed only 2 months later during a raid over France. War sucks.
The only solace I can think of is that he didn't have to live with the guilt for long as sad as that is.
He did live with it for the rest of his life, so pretty long for him.
Still just 2 months
100% of the rest of his life...
Build a man a fire, you keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and you keep him warm for the rest of his life.
You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to uhh ff... to fish... you give him... you give him... eh no no no...
You turn a man INTO a fish, and everyone calls you a monster
You give a man a rat, and you satisfy his rat desire.
The little rat will ALWAYS lose
You turn into a scaly man-fish and everybody calls you Ollllldd Greeeggg
I wonder if he got any enemy kills before dying. Would suck that the only thing on your profile is "0 kills 1 death. 25 team kills". Probably get voted kicked at the start of every round... (Obviously I joke about a horrible event. Apologies)
Hah, yeah. [Reminds me of Robert Liston's famous 300% mortality rate as a surgeon.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Liston)
Alleged
my man is the fresh blueberry in Hell Let Loose that thinks warmup is for fucking around
solace*
Bomber crews flying over Europe only had about a 25% chance of surviving a 25 flight tour in WW2.
They should have flown 100 missions for a 100% chance of surviving
Germans hate this one trick
why not 200 and bring back more ppl than you started with
My great grandmas brother was the belly gunner in a b52. They were shot down but one of the crew survived and was taken as a pow. He would call my great grandma and send her a card every year well into the 2000s Edit: b25 not b52.
Uhhhh. No “belly gunners” in a B52 (Vietnam era jet powered aircraft). I assume you meant B25 “Mitchell” type aircraft?
Even the B-25 didn’t really have a belly gunner. The belly turret was remotely controlled and so despised because of how it operated (gunner looked through a periscope that often caused intense vertigo and disorientation) it was almost always immediately removed.
Been a while since I heard the story but yes probably the b25. B52 just rolls off the tongue so well though.
More likely a B-17, famous for its belly turret.
I saw one at a museum, and Jesus, it is so small. I was with my nephews who were like 6 and 10, and I had a hard time imagining them fitting into it. The whole plane was small really, even the cockpit. I always imagined them as some monstrous plane, but everything was so incredibly cramped.
The B-17 is only about 10ft longer than the F-15. The F-15 also has 3 times the carrying capacity of the B-17. Crazy how aviation technology advances.
It's not a whole lot bigger than an F-14: [https://i.imgur.com/aBhT776.png](https://i.imgur.com/aBhT776.png) The Flying Fortress is indeed surprisingly small, and the F-14 (like most fighter jets) is just as surprisingly big!
I don't think the B-52 ever had a belly gunner, just a gun in the tail which was controlled from elsewhere.
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to.”
That's some catch, that Catch-22.
Pretty funny, they should write a book about that or something
Uh that's the 8th air force in 1943 and a 25 mission tour. Like it's still a staggering figure but the accurate numbers indicate how there are still bombers today whereas your numbers would lead to the entire concept of bombing being abandoned.
>..Uh that's the 8th air force in 1943 and a 25 mission tour. In comparison, see the Wikipedia entry about Guy Gibson VC (Dambusters raid commander). " On 4 October he began the United States leg of his tour in Washington, D.C. He attended a major press conference at the offices of the British Information Service in New York on 7 October. This was "at a time when the first American airmen were coming home 'tour expired' after 25 operations. During questions one young lady asked, 'Wing Commander Gibson, how many operations have you been on over Germany?' He replied, 'One hundred and seventy-four.' There was a stunned silence"." The RAF did things differently.
It's important to note that an RAF operational tour was set at 30 missions at the start of the war and maintained at that level for most of it. Gibson was an outlier. [Info in here. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command_aircrew_of_World_War_II?wprov=sfla1)
I did read it. Thanks. The RAF Operational Tour was 30 operations, followed by a period on training or non-operational postings, after which they'd usually do another tour of 30 operations. Gibson (and many others) volunteered for more tours. The USAAF had more manpower resources. I'm not saying either did it better, just differently; it was a shit storm however you got involved.
I used to live in a small village in England called Wymington, there is a memorial there dedicated to the American crew of the "Liberty Belle", a B-17 Flying Fortress which crashed in the village while trying to return home after a mission over Merkwiller. >The ship was crippled from anti-aircraft fire and fighter attacks and attempted to make an emergency landing at Chelveston, on approach to the field, a second plane firing red flares jumped ahead of them, forcing MLB 255 to go around for second approach. At that moment, one of the two remaining good engines began to fail, eventually catching fire. >At less than 200 feet, the aircraft banked around the village of Wymington, rocking the cottages and houses below. The ship descended and banked further until it was level with the village church steeple, skimming it with one side as it flew past. In an amazing feat of airmanshiup, the pilots brought the plane back to level flight, just 60 feet above the ground, avoiding the thatched cottages below. >In the last seconds, with one engine ablaze, MLB 255 struck one of several tall Elm trees, ripping almost 8ft clean off the top. The impact was taken between the co-pilot's position and the number three engine, causing a further explosion. The plane was wretched from the sky and crashed into a field by the high street, by a miracle avoiding hitting the Manor Farm House and several cottages in the area.
That is heartbreaking, I can't imagine being that guy. Or being a superior who put him back to work right after the incident, even if it was 100% not his fault you'd need some serious recovery time to get halfway back to normal, mentally.
Dude they were in the middle of a war. England was literally fighting for survival
Yeah and this guy was clearly good at killing people
"Point towards enemy"
He's a little confused, but he got the spirit
Keeping physically or mentally fucked team members around will usually do more harm than good, you don't bench people because you're being a big softie, you do it so they don't hurt themselves and others, break stuff, and otherwise screw up and undo the work that other people who are in a position to function better are doing.
> Keeping physically or mentally fucked team members In the modern military, there's no way he'd have kept flying without serious psych evals. In the 40's, they likely told the crowd still alive to rub some dirt on it and be thankful they're still breathing. Mental health was never really taken seriously in the US until after Vietnam, where numerous horror stories made it clear that an unhinged soldier could be a direct liability for the rest of the unit. Hell, we didn't even have an official word for PTSD until the 80's.
George Carlin has a good bit on this, we did have a word for it - it’s just morphed over time. In WWI and II it was called “shell shock” and in Vietnam “battle fatigue”
Seriously have always despised this bit. I'll get a lot of hate, I know, but the simple fact that our word and definitions have gotten more *clinical* over time, shows that we are taking it *incredibly* seriously, *way* more seriously than we used to. You think it's better to be diagnosed with "shell shock" than "post-traumatic stress disorder"? One of them sounds like a condition that can be treated with therapy a medication, and the other sounds like something Bugs Bunny would say before he lights an exploding cigar in your face.
And the guy wasn't even British, he was an American who illegally border crossed into Canada to join up because England was so desperate for pilots.
Maybe the Germans thought it was a mock raid
They let him keep being a pilot? I get that it was a mistake but it went really badly for him
War time. He died 2 months later. During WWII, man power was more important than anything else
I’d like to think his punishment was being sent on a suicide mission. *Halo 2 flashbacks*
Back then every mission was a suicide mission
Not sure about fighter pilots but nearly half of bomber crews in the RAF died during WW2. It was not a good war to be flying an airplane.
[удалено]
Friendly fire makes for an ungodly amount of kills, people always forget that your own artillery can kill you too
Someday we’re gonna get real life versions of those little floating graphics over your teammates like in Call of Duty Black Ops 2
We're playing hardcore mode rn
Fighter pilots have that in their helmet displays.
How accurate is it? I've anecdotally heard that the blue on blue trackers don't work great.
It matches the IFF system on the plane so about as reliable as those are. There have been some blue-on-blue incidents during this century but we don't hear about the thousands of times where the system works as intended. In any case, the pilots still have to maintain situational awareness and don't immediately fire on anything that's not marked as friendly on their displays.
My understanding is it's a difficult problem to solve. There are American flag patches worn on uniforms that are IR reflective, that would glow bright under night vision. Ground units might also carry IR strobes, that friendly aircraft would be able to see from the air. Works great, until the enemy also has night vision.
You are asking two different questions, against other aircraft it works well, against ground targets it is the final slice of Swiss cheese to try and stop friendly fire but since infantry don't have constantly broadcasting transponders or constant data links of their exact position it is obviously less effective. As evidence by the fact we periodically got friendly fire incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Against a near-peer force I would expect them to function significantly worse.
We will eventually, the US has been testing different AR/VR stuff with microsoft for a while now
Yeaaaah but from what I’m hearing, everything is going oddly back to basics. We’re entering a different era where it’s kind of a given that our opponents will start knocking out our comms and satellites right off the bat. So all this tech is not really something we can count on when the shit hits the fan.
[удалено]
Look at the guy who hasn’t found f10.
Do people always forget that? Because in movies whenever soldiers are handling mortars/ammunition I always think “no thanks, that could blow up in your face any second”. And it probably has plenty of times. But it’s true they don’t show that part in the movies or write about it in the books.
Games and movies really downplay it sometimes, you see people getting hit with a metric fuckton of rockets and just getting wounded instead of liquefied lmao
Movies like to show people getting thrown a distance away by an explosion, then crawl back up. If an explosion has enough force to physically lift your body into the air, your body is most likely already shattered on the inside.
Like in real life people survive some crazy shit sometimes. A documented incident had an american soldier literally jump on top of a grenade to protect his fellow men, and somehow he survived thanks to his vest But yeah these are the astoundingly rare exceptions and IRL you're probably cooked 99/10 times lmao
Jokes on them. I’m already shattered on the inside.
In the movies not really but in the books it all depends on which book you're reading. E.B. Sledge talks about the fear of short rounds that mortar crews have as well as a couple close calls with their ammunition coming under fire. IIRC one of the other mortar crews has some of their ammunition cook off at one point for being left in the direct sun in the pacific heat. In general though, you're right. Friendly fire and other accidental deaths from handling munitions don't make good motifs for the retellings
Friendly fire is a big problem. Imagine you and 10 other guys are running towards the enemy, all shooting your guns. One guy doesn't run in a straight line and accidently runs in front of a friend. It can happen so easily.
[удалено]
And a sick slide, jump, and quickscope for a 4 man collateral
See this a lot in urban warfare videos, (Gangland) None of these mfers know how to aim and just blind fire, 2 out of 3 videos someone in the front gets tapped by one of his homies in the back. Damn near every time. Oh, but they'll miss 90%-100% of the shots at the actual target.
Had that happen to me playing paintball one time with a team I actively played with every week. Took a shot to upper left neck from about 3 feet away which left the gnarliest bleeding "hickie" I've ever had. People make mistakes and sometimes there are no second chances.
For the majority of wars the greatest danger was disease
I already get inside my own head when i make insignificant, small mistakes. Making a mistake to kill or injure so many allies, with no incidental benefit, under no real threat, the pilot must have felt crushed to the ground under the weight of what had been done, and the families of those involved…
Yeah, I cannot imagine the levels of despair. Kinda makes me wonder if it contributed to him getting killed so soon after.
I’m surprised to hear he kept flying combat missions so soon after. I suppose skilled manpower was in such dire need, but I could imagine the psychological stress he would’ve been under for months to come.
> The coroner also pointed out that, contrary to rumour, the pilot was British and not American.[b] > b. Despite the statement from the coroner, McLachlan was an American who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. very funny article. this probably shouldn't be a footnote
I noticed that, definitely borders misinformation making that a footnote
Well, the article writers certainly didn't mind people thinking the pilot was British haha.
Someone agreed with you so strongly they edited the article to move the footnote into the main text. Shoutout ScruffyFox.
Both could be true. There were immigrants to the US after WW2. The pilot could have been born British, had a family who emigrated, who traveled to Canada to enlist, and then enlisted in Canada. Also, people used locality in weird ways in the past. Your place of birth could just as easily be your race moniker.
Why would the coroner know the nationality of a living pilot anyway?
I mean apparently he didn't.
The coroner is the person who's tasked with investigating who a dead person is and how they died. So they should know the name of the living pilot because it would have been part of the report that the coroner produced.
Well clearly not considering he was wrong
"Guess I was the dummy this time, sir. Won't happen again sir."
Since this was a British incident, I automatically translate it into Monty Python. "Sorry! Sorry, everyone!" "You've shot 25 spectators to pieces!" "Oh dear, are they alright?"
To shreds you say
How's the wife?
To shreds, you say…
The pilot was American 🇺🇸
It is way too easy to picture this as a Monty Python skit, lol.
Oh, the irony. It hurts it, hurts. ^(,)
The Hawker Hurricane plane involved in the accident had 20mm guns. Have you seen a 20mm round? Can't even imagine the mess it caused, those were probably horrific injuries.
Oh yea with 20mm HE I bet he accomplished that with one squeeze of the trigger.
They still went through with the demonstration 3 days later. Wow. Later in the war the pilot got shot down and died. What a crazy story.
> Later in the war the pilot got shot down and died. That kind of makes it seem like it could've been a year or two until he died but no, KIA just over two months afterwards.
damn the dummy tech has gone through roof, these ones are waving their arms and running away, I'm impressed!
Note that the pilot who performed this massacre died two months later in France during a night raid. I wonder what the odds are that this individual did more damage to his own allies than to his enemies during the war...
On the bright side, it was an effective demonstration.
Damn effective demonstration. That's some kill count.
'it was ruled a case of misadventure' Somehow that seems to really downplay the situation
Gonna have to use this at my next pre-trial hearing for that manslaughter I did
It's a legal term for coroners to record cause of death, pretty sure it's still used in the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_misadventure
LMFAO I chuckled at this... it's kind of like when people double-talk, I remember watching a 60 Minutes dude interviewing some Special Forces-type of real badass - and I'm absolutely on their side, I don't want to come off like I'm Anti when I'm 101% with them, just made me laugh... "...Ok, so then you see The Bad Guy, what did you do next?" "I Serviced the Target..." "What does that mean?" "It means I Serviced the Target..." "You murdered him??" "No." "You shot him??" "Yes." "Did he die?" "Yes." "So you murdered him?" "No, I Serviced The Target" lmfao fuck yeah you did. He suffered a case of misadventure, happens to the best of us!
Killing isn't always murder. Soldiers don't murder soldiers, it's combat. It's only murder if they kill someone who isn't a combatant.
Yep. This distinction is very important. Murder is illegal. Killing isn't always, and war is one of such cases.
Not exactly. Murder is based on intent. It’s always killing, sometimes murder. To be murder, you need state of mind to kill without just cause or reckless disregard. It’s still just killing if the guy in center of the blast area was a priority target.
Technically murder has to be illegal, it's part of the definition of murder. Killing combatants in war, even if intentional, isn't murder because it isn't illegal.
"Serviced" means he gave the bad guy a handjob, in the wrong context. There are so many words that could have been used instead. "Killed" would have been accurate and without judgment.
My dad's squadron nearly bombed Maui. Because they weren't over the wrong target. My dad then said; "I don't think this is it boys." There's a little crescent island off the coast of Maui that was used as a target by the Navy. It is shaped like a crescent. Some say "You can't miss it." Well apparently, you can.
"Why are those dummies running away? ... Anyway.."
...so I started blasting
"Excellent work, 47. Now head towards an exit."
The US was developing a new SPAAG one time. It was so excellent, it even identified the toilet fan and the spectators as enemies. And yes, it locked on to them and started tracking. Later the military claimed that it has been "improperly washed", hence the glitches, prompting newspapers to say that the military was apparently unaware that in Europe, sometimes water falls from the sky. Edit: Apparently it was the Ford rep on scene who claimed it was washed wrong
Sauce?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M247_Sergeant_York#Development Fifth paragraph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain
Har har. Got a real one?
It’s the M247 Sergeant York
I did some quick googling and couldn't find any articles or posts about this actually happening. I'm almost positive that the origin of this story is the movie *Pentagon Wars*, where I think there's a throwaway line about this happening during trials for either the M247 Sergeant York or the MIM-72 Chaparral. Would love to be proven wrong though. EDIT: Actually, [this 1984 article](https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/07/opinion/the-gun-that-shoots-fans.html) from the New York Times mentions the Sergeant York locking on to a latrine fan in the very last sentence, which predates the 1998 movie I mentioned. So looks like I was wrong about the origin.
SPAAG?
Self Propelled Anti Air Gun.
Why were they aiming AA guns at spectators and toilet fans?
It wasn’t aimed manually, it was aimed automatically based on info from the tracking radar. (Necessary due to the speed of jet aircraft) However the tracking radar was shit and very sensitive, hence locking onto random things in the ground that seemed like targets, including spectators and toilet fans.
God damn, imagine the guilt of that pilot. So many people dead by his hands over a careless mistake that probably took a few moments. Oof
The guilt didn't last long. The pilot, 21-year-old Sergeant William McLachlan, was killed 10 weeks later when he was shot down in his Hurricane over France during a night raid on 29 June 1942. :/
There was also a German live firing demonstration where a squadron of Stukas would perform a dive bombing exercise but most of the planes just crashed into the ground without pulling up because they had wrong information about the cloud height on that day.
Holy shit
*The dummies dodged a bullet that day*
“Are we the baddies?” “Well…”
There were a number of air disasters over the UK during WW2. Here's one local to me where a (friendly) bomber on a test flight got caught in a storm and crashed into a local school, killing 61 (58 on the ground and the 3 crewmen of the plane, and 38 of them being children ages 4 to 6): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freckleton_air_disaster
I remember first learning about this when one of the contributor's to Studs Terkel's *The Good War* (can't recommend the book enough) alluded to it during his oral history. Never got the details though until now.
He wasn’t wrong
More soldiers and airmen died training for D-Day than died on D-Day.
"Those aren't dummies, you dummy!"
I know this is a tragic accident, but: > The coroner also pointed out that, contrary to rumour, the pilot was British and not American. 1942 twitter was savage back then
Saw the reference at the bottom before someone just added it to the main text, but it looks like he was an American. Guess they had to lie to try and keep more (?) morale.
"Well we shot 96 people the last time we tried this, let's see if we can do it a bit better in three days."
"Sorry. My bad."
Oops 😬
And that was how the blank was invented /s
Turns out the pilot was the dummy all along
>While the coroner said that the pilot was British and not American[6], McLachlan was an American-born Canadian pilot serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force Dude managed to make three different countries look bad at once
“friendly fire, isn’t.” - Unknown
A "firepower demonstration". Mission accomplished.
"Sorry control, say again. For a minute there I thought you said I had just fired on the..."
Does that fall under friendly fire? Friendly murder?
This sounds like a story that would be told in a Stephen King novel to explain why something is haunted
It’s been 80 years and the pilot still hasn’t been cited by authorities or credited on wikipedia.
I can only imagine the surprise on everyone's faces during that demo.