We took off heading for a manufacturing complex, a major facility involved in producing Focke-Wulfe(I do apologise for butchering the spelling) fighters. Clearly, this is a very,
very important target for the war effort. As we head in, our navigator ends up about a 100 miles off-course and gets lost, but I manually correct it. Although it seems that the enemy had very early warning of our approach(actually not as much as I thought due to ending up so off-course), and the first squadron of interceptors met us at the edge of their patrol range.
However, for once our escorts were actually present, and managed to engage them before they got to us. As they tried to both manuever into attack position, and dodge fire from two different directions, two of them crashed into each other. The rest were dropped by our little friends, plus one by our formations guns. The other squadron of escorts we had were apparently fighting off the rest of the enemy intercepts as well. The only thing we had to worry about was the flak.
...And the flak was nothing much to worry about. At least at first. The stuff coming at us on the bomb run was terrible. Even so, the bombs landed perfectly, at least 80% of the whole complex was rubble, and the rest was either on fire or just completely FUBARed. We apparently lost a bomber on the way back, but I don't know when that happened.
Sitting in my mail-in tray was a letter of congradulations for our stellar performance.
B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty 8th.
The mission immediately after this. The first wave of interceptors, their lead craft crashed right into the cockpit of our bomber. Two of our guy apparently died immediately, the rest bailed but were listed as KIA. Everyone got posthumous Purple Hearts.
B-17 Flying Fortress. I can only wonder if the Nazis trained their pilots to kamikaze like that, the war might have gone much differently.
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Topic: How did you last die? (Read 2411886 times)