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Enjoy.
Nickodell
Donation Time
You have to admit, though, that he placed that tree trunk nicely just to the left of his shoulder. A couple of feet to the right and he'd have been singing soprano. Or playing a harp.
skywords
Donation Time
I'm not so sure he or she isn't playing the harp. That looks like one hell of a abrupt loss of forward motion. I hope the shoulder harnesses were in use. My dear ol Dad always said "the difference between shoulder harnesses being worn and no shoulder harnesses was a open or closed casket funeral" I hope this one would prove him wrong.
Rick
Rick
Nickodell
Donation Time
There was a plaque on the wall of our crew room that read I WOULDN'T BE SEEN DEAD WITHOUT MY HARNESS ON. After that, it's all just a matter of luck, isn't it? I think I posted a year or two ago about a crew in a Victor from another station (I think it was Marham, Norfolk) who had to bale out after an in-flight fire and total hydraulic loss. They all exited successfully, but the second pilot was hit and killed while descending in his 'chute by the first pilot's ejector seat after it automatically separated. Just think of the chances of floating down and being hit by the only other piece of hardware in the sky.
Nickodell
Donation Time
How true. Fate indeed. WHen your number is on it ....
I was going to include this bit under the Spitfire thread last year, but I thought it was getting a bit long and didn't want to string it out (pun) too long:
Robert ("Bob") Stanford Tuck was one of the most celebrated Spitfire aces in WWII. Tall and handsome, with a scar on one cheek that resembled a Prussian duelling scar, he was an outstanding marksman at a time when the average RAF pilot was a "spray and pray" type and 20% of the pilots made 80% of the kills. Tuck himself had 29 certainties and several more probables. He was forced to bail out several times, either from battle damage, engine troubles or, in one case, a midair collision, but always escaped unscathed, these scrapes earning the soubriquet "Tuck's Luck." One time he bailed out over the English Channel and was drifiting in the cold water when an English fishing boat turned up. "Oy! Are you English or a Jerry," yelled a crewman (nobody knows if they'd have left a "Jerry" there). "Get me out of this bloody water you f**king idiots" yelled Tuck. "OK mate, keep yer 'air on," was the reply.
Anyhow, one night a German bomber on a solo mission passed over the airfield where Tuck was stationed. This was at a time before airborne radar was viable, so night-fighters like the Beaufighter and Mosquito were still a year away. The average Spit or Hurricane pilot had little or no experience flying them at night, and would have had great difficulty even flying such high-performance aircraft in the dark, far less locating an enemy intruder and attacking it. Tuck decided to try his hand, took off and was lucky enough to be vectored by ground control into visual contact with the Ju88, which jettisoned its bombs in vain and was promptly shot down.
When Tuck landed he received a phone call from his sister to say that her husband had been killed in a bombing raid. The next day Tuck discovered that only one German intruder had flown over southern England. With growing dread he asked for details of the raid, to discover that is was in fact the plane that he had shot down, and the only bombs dropped had been when it jettisoned them while under attack.
And his sister's husband was the only civilian fatality that night. There was no doubt; Tuck had in effect killed his brother in law. Tuck's Luck in reverse. He was tortured by this for the rest of his life: "If only I'd pressed the tit a second earlier. Or later" etc.
Tuck was not shot down by another fighter, but by antiaircraft fire when he strayed over an industrial area during a "sweep" over occupied France. A shell stopped the Spitfire's engine and Tuck, too low to bail out, faced certain death as he was coming down deadstick into a vast industrial complex with no clear space. Then, just as he was down to 100 feet or so he spotted a small green park area just big enough, banked and was lined up to make a wheels-up crash landing when he found himself engaged by a flak battery at the far end of the park. Mad as hell he lined up the Spit's sights and loosed off a burst from the four 20mm cannons. The firing stopped.
After slithering to a stop he found himself dragged out of the plane by a bunch of yelling, gesticulating German flak personnel, pounding him and dragging him over to the gun site, convinced that he was going to be lynched. After a moment he began to understand what they were yelling: "Good shot Tommy! Good shot!, and that the pounding on his back was actually in congratulation. And there was the remains of the gun and its crew lying dead all over the wreckage. What the survivors were yelling about, and pointing to, was the barrel of the gun, split like a banana peel. One of his shells had gone into the barrel and exploded, splitting it apart. Tuck's Luck - without that million to one shot he probably would have been lynched (someone explain the German psychology to me one day).
Tuck's Spitfire (third from the camera) in a German scrapyard after his crash-landing. Note the 29 swastikas on the engine cowling.
In 1945 Tuck was forced to march east from his POW camp because of the allied advance from France. He finally ended up fighting for the final weeks of the war as a foot soldier in a Soviet unit, but that, as they say, is another story.
I was going to include this bit under the Spitfire thread last year, but I thought it was getting a bit long and didn't want to string it out (pun) too long:
Robert ("Bob") Stanford Tuck was one of the most celebrated Spitfire aces in WWII. Tall and handsome, with a scar on one cheek that resembled a Prussian duelling scar, he was an outstanding marksman at a time when the average RAF pilot was a "spray and pray" type and 20% of the pilots made 80% of the kills. Tuck himself had 29 certainties and several more probables. He was forced to bail out several times, either from battle damage, engine troubles or, in one case, a midair collision, but always escaped unscathed, these scrapes earning the soubriquet "Tuck's Luck." One time he bailed out over the English Channel and was drifiting in the cold water when an English fishing boat turned up. "Oy! Are you English or a Jerry," yelled a crewman (nobody knows if they'd have left a "Jerry" there). "Get me out of this bloody water you f**king idiots" yelled Tuck. "OK mate, keep yer 'air on," was the reply.
Anyhow, one night a German bomber on a solo mission passed over the airfield where Tuck was stationed. This was at a time before airborne radar was viable, so night-fighters like the Beaufighter and Mosquito were still a year away. The average Spit or Hurricane pilot had little or no experience flying them at night, and would have had great difficulty even flying such high-performance aircraft in the dark, far less locating an enemy intruder and attacking it. Tuck decided to try his hand, took off and was lucky enough to be vectored by ground control into visual contact with the Ju88, which jettisoned its bombs in vain and was promptly shot down.
When Tuck landed he received a phone call from his sister to say that her husband had been killed in a bombing raid. The next day Tuck discovered that only one German intruder had flown over southern England. With growing dread he asked for details of the raid, to discover that is was in fact the plane that he had shot down, and the only bombs dropped had been when it jettisoned them while under attack.
And his sister's husband was the only civilian fatality that night. There was no doubt; Tuck had in effect killed his brother in law. Tuck's Luck in reverse. He was tortured by this for the rest of his life: "If only I'd pressed the tit a second earlier. Or later" etc.
Tuck was not shot down by another fighter, but by antiaircraft fire when he strayed over an industrial area during a "sweep" over occupied France. A shell stopped the Spitfire's engine and Tuck, too low to bail out, faced certain death as he was coming down deadstick into a vast industrial complex with no clear space. Then, just as he was down to 100 feet or so he spotted a small green park area just big enough, banked and was lined up to make a wheels-up crash landing when he found himself engaged by a flak battery at the far end of the park. Mad as hell he lined up the Spit's sights and loosed off a burst from the four 20mm cannons. The firing stopped.
After slithering to a stop he found himself dragged out of the plane by a bunch of yelling, gesticulating German flak personnel, pounding him and dragging him over to the gun site, convinced that he was going to be lynched. After a moment he began to understand what they were yelling: "Good shot Tommy! Good shot!, and that the pounding on his back was actually in congratulation. And there was the remains of the gun and its crew lying dead all over the wreckage. What the survivors were yelling about, and pointing to, was the barrel of the gun, split like a banana peel. One of his shells had gone into the barrel and exploded, splitting it apart. Tuck's Luck - without that million to one shot he probably would have been lynched (someone explain the German psychology to me one day).
Tuck's Spitfire (third from the camera) in a German scrapyard after his crash-landing. Note the 29 swastikas on the engine cowling.
In 1945 Tuck was forced to march east from his POW camp because of the allied advance from France. He finally ended up fighting for the final weeks of the war as a foot soldier in a Soviet unit, but that, as they say, is another story.
Nickodell
Donation Time
Sure is. Fly For Your Life, by Tuck and Larry Forester.
Funny thing about Tuck and (legless ace) Douglas Bader - in WWII they couldn't stand the sight of each other, and the few times they met usually ended in mutual acrimony. One time they were the fighter pilot members of an RAF panel deciding whether to convert from the 8 Colt/Browning .303 machine guns that both the early models of Hurricane and Spitfire carried to 20mm cannon.
Tuck was all in favor of the cannon, since he had recently experienced firing at German bombers sometimes until his ammo ran out, only to see them proceed on their way. It was obvious that after the Battle of Britain they were protecting crew and engines with armor plate. "The last one I attacked only went down because I more or less wore it away." Bader, however, had had unfortunate experience with the first Mk II Spit which was experimentally armed with two Hispano 20mm cannon in place of the inboard 4 machine guns. Unfortunately, the Hispano was designed for use on the ground or on ships, and in aerial combat the "G" forces caused the shell feed from the magazines to hang up, usually on one side which caused the plane to skid and the target to escape.
Bader said "stay with the Brownings. They've been good to us and they're reliable. The bloody cannon stop firing when you need them!" Tuck argued that the misfeed problems could be fixed, and while several thousand machine gun bullets might bring down the enemy, one explosive shell in the right place from the cannon could do the job. Actually, both were right from different aspects. The average RAF pilot in 1940 had only skimpy training, with many joining squadrons after only 10 or 12 hours on Spits. or Hurricanes, which is like putting a teenager with a two-day-old license at the wheel of a Ferrari. On an icy road. They were fully occupied just flying and trying to keep in formation, and had virtually no practice or understanding of leading a moving target in three dimensions, so the "cone of fire" of the 8 Brownings was most suitable. Tuck was right from the viewpoint of the rare expert marksman like himself. Eventually, the Mk V had 2 cannon and 4 m/gs, and the Mk IX and all later marks had four 20mm cannon, combining devastating destructive firepower and a smaller cone, and after the frantic days of 1940 ther was time for marksmanship practice at towed targets.
While on the subject of armament, it has long puzzled air combat historians why the USAAF/USAF subbornly persisted in the .50 machine gun long after all other belligerent air foces had converted to 20mm and 30mm cannon. Unbelievably, this lasted into the Korean War, placing the F80/F86 at a marked disadvantage to the Migs. When German armor, with the best tanks in the world (except the Soviet T34) threatened to reverse the D-Day landing, USAF fighter-bomber guns were useless, the bullets bouncing off the tanks. Some P47 Thunderbolts were successful with rockets, but the bulk of the tanks were destroyed by RAF Typhoons, using 20mm armor-piercing shot and rockets. And a bit you didn't see in the movie Patton, after the disaster at Kasserine Pass, the only thing that stopped the German armor rolling over and massacring the remains of the US force were RAF Hurricane "Tank Busters," equipped with two 40mm Vickers guns. Patton is a great movie in many ways, but definitely anti-British, with many sarcastic snipes at the RAF, Gen. Montgomery etc.
Anyhow, about Tuck and Bader. It didn't help that the first time Tuck encountered Bader he didn't know who he was, and when Bader shambled over in his characteristic rolling gait due to the two artificial legs and greeted Tuck with "what's the score old boy? [i.e. what's going on?] Tuck thought he was drunk and told him to go to hell.
The two old adversaries made up after the war and became firm friends. I have a videotape from a BBC broadcast made in the 1980s, commemorating the 50th first flight of the Spitfire, where they meet and discuss tactics and war experiences. (The program is done by Raymond Baxter, himself a WWII SPit pilot, and later a famous sports commentator, who only recently died).
After WWII, believe it or not, Bob Stanford Tuck, who could have gone on to high rank in the postwar RAF, settled down to being a mushroom farmer.
Adolf Galland, one of the Luftwaffe's top aces (and one of the few who fought from the Spanish Civil War all the way through to flying the Me 262 jet fighter in 1945 [reading: The First and the Last], and later became top General in the post WWII Luftwaffe), met Tuck and Bader after they were shot down. He presented Tuck with a bottle of 12-year-old whiskey.
Galland, who had fought against the RAF's best, including Bob Stanford-Tuck, Douglas Bader, Sailor Malan and Johnnie Johnson, repected his adversaries, and after the war established friendships with them. Vacations on Tuck's mushroom farm were reciprocated with boar-hunting forays in Germany; generally, with Tuck it was "one shot, one kill." The old enemies Tuck, Bader and Galland lectured together in America.
Funny thing about Tuck and (legless ace) Douglas Bader - in WWII they couldn't stand the sight of each other, and the few times they met usually ended in mutual acrimony. One time they were the fighter pilot members of an RAF panel deciding whether to convert from the 8 Colt/Browning .303 machine guns that both the early models of Hurricane and Spitfire carried to 20mm cannon.
Tuck was all in favor of the cannon, since he had recently experienced firing at German bombers sometimes until his ammo ran out, only to see them proceed on their way. It was obvious that after the Battle of Britain they were protecting crew and engines with armor plate. "The last one I attacked only went down because I more or less wore it away." Bader, however, had had unfortunate experience with the first Mk II Spit which was experimentally armed with two Hispano 20mm cannon in place of the inboard 4 machine guns. Unfortunately, the Hispano was designed for use on the ground or on ships, and in aerial combat the "G" forces caused the shell feed from the magazines to hang up, usually on one side which caused the plane to skid and the target to escape.
Bader said "stay with the Brownings. They've been good to us and they're reliable. The bloody cannon stop firing when you need them!" Tuck argued that the misfeed problems could be fixed, and while several thousand machine gun bullets might bring down the enemy, one explosive shell in the right place from the cannon could do the job. Actually, both were right from different aspects. The average RAF pilot in 1940 had only skimpy training, with many joining squadrons after only 10 or 12 hours on Spits. or Hurricanes, which is like putting a teenager with a two-day-old license at the wheel of a Ferrari. On an icy road. They were fully occupied just flying and trying to keep in formation, and had virtually no practice or understanding of leading a moving target in three dimensions, so the "cone of fire" of the 8 Brownings was most suitable. Tuck was right from the viewpoint of the rare expert marksman like himself. Eventually, the Mk V had 2 cannon and 4 m/gs, and the Mk IX and all later marks had four 20mm cannon, combining devastating destructive firepower and a smaller cone, and after the frantic days of 1940 ther was time for marksmanship practice at towed targets.
While on the subject of armament, it has long puzzled air combat historians why the USAAF/USAF subbornly persisted in the .50 machine gun long after all other belligerent air foces had converted to 20mm and 30mm cannon. Unbelievably, this lasted into the Korean War, placing the F80/F86 at a marked disadvantage to the Migs. When German armor, with the best tanks in the world (except the Soviet T34) threatened to reverse the D-Day landing, USAF fighter-bomber guns were useless, the bullets bouncing off the tanks. Some P47 Thunderbolts were successful with rockets, but the bulk of the tanks were destroyed by RAF Typhoons, using 20mm armor-piercing shot and rockets. And a bit you didn't see in the movie Patton, after the disaster at Kasserine Pass, the only thing that stopped the German armor rolling over and massacring the remains of the US force were RAF Hurricane "Tank Busters," equipped with two 40mm Vickers guns. Patton is a great movie in many ways, but definitely anti-British, with many sarcastic snipes at the RAF, Gen. Montgomery etc.
Anyhow, about Tuck and Bader. It didn't help that the first time Tuck encountered Bader he didn't know who he was, and when Bader shambled over in his characteristic rolling gait due to the two artificial legs and greeted Tuck with "what's the score old boy? [i.e. what's going on?] Tuck thought he was drunk and told him to go to hell.
The two old adversaries made up after the war and became firm friends. I have a videotape from a BBC broadcast made in the 1980s, commemorating the 50th first flight of the Spitfire, where they meet and discuss tactics and war experiences. (The program is done by Raymond Baxter, himself a WWII SPit pilot, and later a famous sports commentator, who only recently died).
After WWII, believe it or not, Bob Stanford Tuck, who could have gone on to high rank in the postwar RAF, settled down to being a mushroom farmer.
Adolf Galland, one of the Luftwaffe's top aces (and one of the few who fought from the Spanish Civil War all the way through to flying the Me 262 jet fighter in 1945 [reading: The First and the Last], and later became top General in the post WWII Luftwaffe), met Tuck and Bader after they were shot down. He presented Tuck with a bottle of 12-year-old whiskey.
Galland, who had fought against the RAF's best, including Bob Stanford-Tuck, Douglas Bader, Sailor Malan and Johnnie Johnson, repected his adversaries, and after the war established friendships with them. Vacations on Tuck's mushroom farm were reciprocated with boar-hunting forays in Germany; generally, with Tuck it was "one shot, one kill." The old enemies Tuck, Bader and Galland lectured together in America.
skywords
Donation Time
I remember your post about Raymond Baxter's death. I take it he was England's Walter Cronkite. I will look for the book written by Tuck and Forrester. Thanks for the great follow up on their story. You have a knack for writing that not many people have and we all enjoy the reading. You should publish a book about your own experiences in the air and on the ground. I would read it.
Rick
Rick
Nickodell
Donation Time
Hey, Rick; for a $25,000 advance I'll go to work at once!
Anyhow, thanks for the compliment. As a matter of fact writing has been my avocation since my teens and I occupy my "retirement" writing Commentary pieces for the local papers (for which I get paid), and others (for which I don't). I've had odd pieces published in US News, USA Today, Newsweek and Car & Driver to name a few.
Edited Friday 1/26.
By a strange coincidence, tonight on the History Channel they featured RAF Typhoons destroying German armor in the battle of the Falaise Gap in 1944. Superb film of the "Tiffies" firing rockets and cannon, and the aftermath.
Anyhow, thanks for the compliment. As a matter of fact writing has been my avocation since my teens and I occupy my "retirement" writing Commentary pieces for the local papers (for which I get paid), and others (for which I don't). I've had odd pieces published in US News, USA Today, Newsweek and Car & Driver to name a few.
Edited Friday 1/26.
By a strange coincidence, tonight on the History Channel they featured RAF Typhoons destroying German armor in the battle of the Falaise Gap in 1944. Superb film of the "Tiffies" firing rockets and cannon, and the aftermath.