@ABWorsham:
Great post Black Fox.
Reading about the air war in the Pacific, if an aircraft was off a few degrees could lead to a watery grave hundreds of miles out in the vast Ocean.
Thanks
Thinking of the Pacific. I knew a guy who was a B-25 waist gunner in the Pacific during WWII. He told me a story where his squadron was sharing the air field with Richard I Bong when he was flying the P-38. At the time their version had the eight .50 cal in the nose. He said those guns we just vicious. However, the high humidity was causing problems with the electrical circuits that controlled the guns. When it got bad enough the moisture would connect the firing circuits and the guns would sometimes start firing by themselves. One day they were getting ready for a mission. Just as they were walking out to the planes, one of the P-38s guns went off. The airplane starting bouncing and spreading lead all over the field. It hit a few other planes and their guns went off too. At this point they now had 5 fully load P-38 with guns just blazing away and planes just started exploding all over the place. He said by the time it was all over, they had 45 planes destroyed on the ground! I’m sure this is just one of many such incidents that added to those mind blowing statistics.