Aviators and or history buffs

What is your favorite WW2 war bird? My fav is the P51 Mustang.

you had to have your cahones hung right to fly any of the planes in wwII.

p38 night lightning is one of my favorites, b/a fighter and had radar.



mustangs were awesome for what they could do for the bombers.

P38 was also among my favs. My dad was getting qualified on them during the middle of the war and fortunately or unfortunately washed out on gunnery. He ended up flying transports in the Pacific theater.

Mustang or

Corsair f4u.

Personal favorite or most productive? It depends on the theater (Europe or Pacific) and mission. The British Spitfires really gave the Luftwaffe hell in Europe. The B29 ended the war in the Pacific by dropping the big ones on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I personally like the P51 as well. I'm not a flyer though.

A really great read about WWII strategic bomber aviation in the Pacific theater, and an even more amazing story of perseverance, is "Unbroken: Path to Redemption".

B-17 !

F4U Corsair!!!

It isn't sexy, but one of the best fighters made...

Dad was bombardier on B-17

My FIL flew P51's during WWII. He wanted to stay in aviation after the war but knew with so many pilots coming out of the war job opportunities would be competitive and few. Decided to take a leap and went to work for a small company at that time called Petroleum Bell flying something called a Helicopter. Had to train and qualify of course but was so good at what he did he became a test pilot for Bell. He was always a man with a vision of the future.

SBD Dauntless and the men who flew them.

Dad flew the first tanker. Its a KB-29.

Looks like a T 33 gassing up.

B-17 for me, love those planes.

My uncle was on a carrier...

That's cool, would love to hear a few of those stories

P39 Aircobra. A POS (Russia used to effectively) but a cool plane. I always like the underdog.

P-51

F-4U Corsair

My dad was a waist gunner on B-17s flying from a base in Pembroke, UK. But I think the most elegant war plane ever made was the Spitfire.

F-4U
P-51
P-47

I'm certainly no pilot, but as a hobbyist that loves model aviation, I'm a real fan of both the P38 Lightening as well as the Spitfire. They look good, fly well, and the aesthetic of both sort of capture and personify the era to me.

My office sits right at the edge of Addison Airport where the Cavanaugh Flight Museum is located. I spend quite a few days per year wandering around over there just marveling at all the shiny metal. For those of y'all that have never been, if you're a fan of historic warbirds, it is an absolute must visit destination. It's an incredible collection - one of the best in the country.

https://cavflight.org/

If you click the link there, then click the collections tab at the top, you can see all the aircraft they maintain. It's really something else.

The P-40. It's what my father flew.

i'm partial to several; supermarine spit, jap zero, me-109, the p-40 just to name a few. my favorite, and a bit of a dog, the p-39 airacobra

I drew a World War 11 Luftwaffe pilot named Hans Wohlbier in a club vs. club tournament back in late 70's....have always been interested in World War 11 and this was most interesting two days I've ever spent in a bass boat...it's been over 40 years ago but I'll try to recall as much as I can of those two days and share it with you.....


I lived in greenville,ms. and we were fishing against my brothers club out of houston,texas and we met for a two day tourny on toledo Bend....when my brother saw that i was drawn out with hans ...........he told me to get him talking about his experiences during the war.....hans at the time was an executive with a big steel company in houston....Hans was a real laid back guy,not a real serious fisherman but a very intelligent and educated person..He ended up in this country because he was a German war groom.....married an American war correspondent and emigrated to this country........He was a Stuka (dive bomber)pilot and served the entire war on the russian front.....he was shot down either 13 or 16 times (can't remember which)and captured twice by the Russians and escaped both times......that is amazing and he was a very.very lucky man in that most german pilots and soldiers who were captured by the russians were never heard from again....


It was not uncommon to be shot down a number of times during a long war especially flying a low level attack bomber and you did everything you could to make sure when you had to land or bail out,you did it within your own lines...Hans related that crossing back across your own lines was very dangerous because all soldiers have tendency to shoot at anything that moves in front of their lines and they are hidden so you don't always know exactly where the lines are.....obviously if you start yelling or hollering to be recognized too soon,the russians would shoot you,wait too late and your own men would shoot you......
the first time they got shot down behind russian lines,a squad of russians captured them and were just starting to escort them to a stockade when they were hit with a rocket attack,hans said the russians were just as terrified of those things as they were and they ran in one direction and hans and his gunner ran back toward german lines and managed to cross without getting shot.....


the second time they were shot down behind enemy lines,they were taken to a stockade and were being interrogated by a soldier who spoke fluent german.....Hans said when i gave him my name,rank and home town...he asked me if i knew so and so....Hans said yes,I went to school with him....the Russian commented "that's my cousin" and volunteered that he was German Jewish and his family had emigrated to russia to escape persecution in Germany....he confided to hans that the persecution was just as bad in russia as it was in germany and they regretted emigrating.....as they finished the interview,the russian whispered to hans...."I'm going to leave your cell unlocked tonite....if you get caught-I don't know you and there is nothing further i can do to help you.....Hans said late that night,he and his gunner slipped out of the stockade and were traveling through some woods when they came across a couple of horses.....hans said his gunner was an old farm boy and knew about horses so he picked out the fat one and gave hans the other which was skinny and had a backbone that stuck up a foot....hans said riding that horse with that skinny backbone hurt more than anything else he encountered in the war......he said they rode their horses up to small russian occupied village located right in front of the german lines....they waited until daylight was barely breaking and in his words...galloped their horses through the village just like a cowboy movie,taking the russians by surprize and managed to get back across the lines without getting shot by either side...


in the last few days of the war,his commander told them his orders were to surrender his command to the russians who were advancing and only a few miles away,,,,,,the pilots all knew they did not want to be captured by the russians but the closest american forces were a couple hundred miles away...the commander then made it clear that he was leaving the base for a couple of hours which was his way of indicating to them that this was their opportunity to get in their planes and get to the nearest american held airstrip...hans said he went to his plane and somebody had stolen the stick out of it as a souvenir....he went to another plane and the battery was dead....he ended up cutting a stick out of wood,sharpening the end of it enough to jam it down in the hole and managed to take off....the sky was full of american planes and he had fly at treetop level to keep from getting shot down....on the way,.he had to fly through some mountains and he said he came over this mountain and right on back side of the slope there were some power lines,he jerks the stick to hop over them and the stick breaks off in his hand.....he said to this day,he doesn't know how he cleared the lines but the mountain fell steeply away from him and he was somehow able to get the broken part out of the hole and the stick jammed back in the hole before crashing and made it to the american base without getting shot down...


during the time I fished with hans,there was some question being raised by the media whether the holocaust really happened...I asked Hans what he thought and his explanation was....it probaly did but the average German didn't know about it and didn't really concern themselves with what happened to the Jewish people....he went on to explain there was a lot of anti jewish sentiment in germany stemming from the depression years which were much worse in Germany than america.....the jewish people during the depression controlled much of germany...the banks,media,most of the retail including food stores...in short they had the money and were using it to foreclose on many peoples farms and homes many of which had been family homes for hundreds of years...there were even some instances of refusing food to people who were starving so that fueled the anti jewish sentiment...


Hans told me that the war took a terrible toll of young men in Germany...Out of 87 boys in his school class...two came back...him and one other guy and the other guy was a paraplegic.....


When i asked about Hitler,he told me Hitler was a dynamic speaker,able to captivate people with his speeches...Hans mentioned his father was a great believer in him even though his father was headmaster of the school and a highly educated man.....he reiterated how bad it was in germany during the depression and said hitler led them out of that into a period of great prosperity and made germany a world power...he just did some incredibly stupid and wrong things......


there was more but my memory is fading after all those years....Speaking of memory,,,when you do good,you always remember....that tournament we fished against the houston club,I was fishing out of my 14 ft aluminum bassboat and didn't do much the first day,second day it was rainy and windy so I decided to just to fish in the back of the arm of the lake we launched in (somewhere on western side of T-bend)...I don't think i even cranked my big(35 hp)engine except to idle in but there was some grasslines back there that were loaded with bass that wanted a black spinnerbait and I ended up winning the tourny with my second day catch back there.....

War is hell for all parties involved. Thank you Beartrap for sharing that story. Awesome.

That does sound like a very interesting experience. Time spent in a bass boat is as good as it can get for picking someone's mind on any particular topic. Having that opportunity with a guy in his shoes would be pretty darn unique.