Warbird Information Exchange

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Don't touch my junk!!

That pic is the things that legends are made of.

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Director

That is one of my two favorite pics of the August 43 raid. The other one was from the German flak train dueling with B-24 gunners so low they came back with corn stalks in their bomb bays

I don't know if I ever saw that one.

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Chris Henry
EAA Aviation Museum Director

I see there a great book somewhere cant remeber title called soemthing Ploesti and it shows many more photos of the raid in action and B-24 nearly hovering over fields in the run in and outs of the target area. It one of those raids of WW2 that has and still does capture people imaginations. The first ever low level below radar and air defence raid.

Pity they cant make a movie about it would be nice.
Then again youd need more then 2 B-24 flying to recreate it.

As long as the movie was a documentary. I shudder thinking what Hollywood would produce...

As far as Tidal Wave books are concerned, perhaps you were thinking of Dugan's (see link). It's still my favorite account after all these years.

http://books.google.com/books?id=KV8Ma- ... il#PPP1,M1

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It was a good idea, it just didn't work.

Jack,

Thanks for posting that photo. I have a book written by Frank Way and Robert W. Sternfels titled "Burning Hitler's Black Gold" that refers to this series of pictures. The airplane in the photo is "Sandman" of the 98th B.G. (H) and the photo was taken by a bombay camera set to shoot aft and down. The camera was mounted in "Chug-A-Lug", and just after this picture was taken the Sandman ran into a barrage balloon cable with the #3 propeller hub. It beat the he** out of the airplane, but the crew made a safe return from the mission. The pilot of the Sandman that day was Robert W. Sternfels. When I get to my computer tonight I'll post a different photo from this series.

Scott

bump

As promised:


Sandman coming off the target after just missing the smokestacks to the right of the airplane.


The next frame published.

I was incorrect about when the Sandman hit the barrage balloon cable, the firsthand accounts state that they encountered the cable while in the smoke that was thick over the target. After getting away from the target area, Sternfels and crew formed up with Colonel Kane in Hail Columbia and Lt. Hadley in Hadley's Harem and limped as far as Cyprus. The Sandman made a safe landing in Cyprus after over 14 hours in the air.

An interesting point about the photo Jack originally posted is that it is a reverse image. The folks who published that picture in Stars And Stripes got the negatives backwards when the photo was published. The two from Major Sternfel's book are "right-side-up".

Oh, those smokestacks off the right wing of the Sandman are around 200 feet tall and they lifted the wing to make sure they were clear!