oyuki

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Terrorflieger

I stumbled across this web-site and found it very interesting. How incredible with just a small amount of effort, understanding can be reached. Especially when the subject is WWII bombing of Germany, Dresden under Bomber Harris erupting into a night-time fire-storm that sucked the air out of bomb shelters suffocating civilians to the daylight 1,000 plane raids of the 8th Air Force. The poster is a B-17 pilot who became a German POW while the other person was a little girl who endured those bombings.

3 comments:

Mike's America said...

I don't know what would be more terrifying: A. being under the bombing or B. being locked in a tin can high in the sky with people shooting at you.

I crawled through a restored WW2 bomber last year (I wasn't quite clear whether it was a B-17 or B-24). Those things were tiny and cramped.

It's amazing that we had brave men willing to fly those things over such long distances day after day and night after night in all kinds of conditions.

Anonymous said...

What an incredible accounting of an incident. To see the two sides is really enlightening! Thank you!

Anna said...

Mike, either. As a flyer wrapped in electrically heated flying gear sucking oxygen while wearing flak armor as the bombadier locks the plane into its final bomb run and the German 88mm guns use radar to find the range as Bf-109s, FW-190s, ME-262s, and everything else tries to break through the fighter cover. While the civilian is hunkering down with family in a bomb shelter hoping no bombs really stray during a daylight mission and hit civilian areas and if they do stray the shelter is strong enough to survive. Then once the raid is over, to emerge and see if one's home still exists.

Anna, when I found that story I just had to bring some attention to it.