OT - P-47 Thunderbolt Video

[Anthropoid]

ORIGINAL: wdolson

Bill Dunn, who was the first American ace (Eagle Squadron) was pulled into the USAAF and flew P-47s with the 9th AF.  When he reached the end of his tour, he expected to be sent back home, but instead they offered him a choice between being a FAC in France, or China.  He chose China because at least he could get some leave stateside.  As it was, the war was almost over by the time he got to China.  Unfortunately, the civil war started brewing up and they wouldn't let him go home.  He remained as a military advisor to Chaing Kai Chek's forces for another year.  By the time he finally got home, his wife was ready to divorce him.

Bill

That sucks. You'd think a guy who had distinguished himself as an exceptional soldier would get at least normal treatment, let alone maybe even a bit of a break!?

I know a lot of skilled soldiers choose field combat additional enlistments, but has it been that common in the last 50 years that they be re-committed to longer stints against their will?

[rjopel]

The term of service for WW2 was duration +6months (unless extended by proper authority).  A current US Military enlistment is for 8 years.  A person may only be signing for 4 years active duty but the commentment is for 8 years of service.  The duration plus 6 months clause is also still in the enlistment contract.  It's paragraph 10 of the enlistment contract and is 10 U.S.C. 12103(c).

[wdolson]

In reality, the military came up with a point system.  There were points for having been overseas, the time overseas, the amount of combat seen, etc.  My father volunteered in early 42 for a deferred enlistment so he could finish his second year of college.  In late 43 or early 44 he was sent out to the Pacific as a combat photographer and ended up spending the rest of the war in the field with only a short time back home.  When he came back in early 1945, the other half of his unit was being deployed to the Aleutians and an officer came down with a pendecitis just before they were going to ship out.  There were only two guys from the section that had just came back that weren't sick with tropical diseases and my father was the one who was single, so he got picked for a second tour back to back with the first.  They did promote him from corporal to 2nd Lieutenant though.

My father came back to the States in early September 45 and he had way over the points needed to be in the first group discharged.  However, he had three months leave accumulated, so he took three months leave to get his life back on track and then returned for one day in December and was mustered out.

My SO found a bunch of letters her father wrote to her mother after the war.  He didn't have enough points to get out right away, so he had to sit around a base in Fresno cooling his heels waiting for his number to come up.  To kill time, he started taking college courses and just before finals, they accellerated the point schedule and discharged everyone on the base who was killing time.  They gave him a bus ticket and he had to leave before finals.  He was rather unhappy about that.

My father said he also had enough points on the GI bill to get a PhD if he wanted one.  He was happy enough to use it to pay for his last two years and settled for a BA degree.

Bill

[Rainerle]

ORIGINAL: Jaroen

@Madman - I wasn't aware of any specifics on the 362nd Fighter Group, thanks. You're right about that free roaming role I think but this doesn't explain the shooting of that bulding in the video to me. I find it very hard to believe any pilot to fire on just any house just for the chance Germans might be present. Would you say from the video that house was anywhere close to some target? Maybe but it doesn't show. So it's my thinking there's more to that specific action than what meets the eye. I think it was known to be an ammo dump. Because fighter/bombers were more accurate in destroying small targets it isn't like they were never tasked with precision attacks which included precise planning. That planning usually included all intel from all possible sources and a known ammo dump would definately be on the target list.

And isn't it so that ground troops had some airforce liaison personnel present to direct air support? That might be an explanation. It's very hard for a pilot to find such targets without proper direction or intel. Radio messages are probably not very descriptive (time constraints etc) but it was used. Were there any other devices used in designating targets??? Smoke signals?

And since when do houses explode so violently? It's not some Hollywood movie, right? [;)]

The reason for shooting that house is simple. They shot at everything.

[Anthropoid]

ORIGINAL: rjopel

The term of service for WW2 was duration +6months (unless extended by proper authority).  A current US Military enlistment is for 8 years.  A person may only be signing for 4 years active duty but the commentment is for 8 years of service.  The duration plus 6 months clause is also still in the enlistment contract.  It's paragraph 10 of the enlistment contract and is 10 U.S.C. 12103(c).

Wow. Eight years. That is quite a spicy meatball. I'm not a vet, but my father and grandfather were, and I spent a lot of my childhood hanging around vets in VFW and Elk's lodges. I was about that close to going into the Navy to be a cryptographer at age 19, but my Mom convinced me to go to collage. Next thing I know, I got a 'terminal degree!' Anyway, I'm in the Ivory Tower, but I'm very pro-Vet and actually want to become more involved in veterans affairs and veterans welfare. My research deals with PTSD and other sorts of psychosomatics, so there is a real link besides just my interest in wargames and youthful socializing with lodge members.

Eight years. From a developmental/life history sort of perspective, that is a really significant chunk of time for someone in their reproductive prime to commit, and yet tens of thousands of young men and women are doing it every year, in the U.S. alone . . . it is really quite awe-inspiring and humbling. It is hard to imagine a more substantial self-sacrifice and form of giving to the rest of us.

What is unique about us humans, is our unsual capacity for compassion, self-sacrifice, and effectively social altruism. Defining a human in that way, I am of the opinion that a soldier (including police and firefighters) is in most instances, the exemplar of a human being, much more so than a politician, or a journalist, or even a physician, a scientist or a lawyer.

Peaceniks like to imagine a world in which we 'have no soldiers,' but I think that is highly unrealistic, and indeed narcisstic. Instead, I think real and sustainable peace lies in cherishing our soldiers, and appreciating their commitment to one another and to us. If we can as societies truly appreciate just how beautiful are these humans who protect us that we may sleep peaceably at night, maybe over time the need to put them in harms way will slowly become obsolete?

Sorry for the waxing poetic . . . [>:] and let me know if I'm acting like a know-it-all bulshitter [:-]

[rjopel]

[font=consolas]A Simple Truth....... [/font]
[font=consolas]A veteran - whether active duty, retired, national guard or reserve – is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to "The United States of America," for an amount of “Up to and including my life.” [/font]
[font=consolas] [/font]
[font=consolas]That is honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.[/font]

[Charbroiled]

My High School German language teacher was a pre-teenage boy living in Germany during WWII. He had this story about getting up one morning and finding a P-47 that had made a wheels up landing in their field. Nobody was around the plane, so, boys being boys, him and his brothers started "investigating" the aircraft. He had crawled in to cockpit and was checking things out when he accidently pulled the trigger of the .50 cal MGs. He shreaded the family's only milkcow. He said that he had never been in as much trouble as he was in that day.

[Jaroen]

@Rainerle - Well, I think that's a bit stretching the truth but not untrue. It depended on the operational area and the assigned task. Does anyone know if some "rules of engagement" were in use? I'm asking because you'd expect the allies to spare civilians especially in the occupied countries (France, Holland and Belgium). As an aside, I know about ground attacks in Holland where my family lived where pilots were shooting on all vehicles including farmers transporting hay. Though those were exceptions!

More on close air support:
http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/AAF-H-DDay/
http://www.lonesentry.com/gi_stories_bo ... index.html
http://paul.rutgers.edu/~mcgrew/wwii/usaf/html

I was also looking for an example of the meticulous planning involved with just (?) another airfield attack. Those were  usually well planned missions involving more squadrons and plane types each with different tasks like Flak suppression, plane strafing, hangar bombing, etc. But I didn't find a good source on the web as an example. Does anyone know of a good description of such attacks??? Of course in the last few months of the war many sorties were of the free ranging type resulting in less target planning.

[Anthropoid]

At the risk of taking us off topic, but related to the topic of Air Power, some of you guys might find this interesting. Compilation of video from AC-130, and Apache strikes on Insurgents in Iraq & Afghanistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKAxmyRau4E

[MadmanRick]

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

At the risk of taking us off topic, but related to the topic of Air Power, some of you guys might find this interesting. Compilation of video from AC-130, and Apache strikes on Insurgents in Iraq & Afghanistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKAxmyRau4E

I have to say the Spooky is an AWEsome machine, they can lay down an incredible amount of fire and with almost pinpoint accuracy. With but one caveat, you sure don't want to be in one of those suckers in an area where there are any anti-air defenses, particularly SAM's. That's how the USAF lost one in Iraq (I believe it was to a hand-held SAM - possibly an SA-7/variant). However, I can tell you that from the ground, these things are literally scary!

[Anthropoid]

ORIGINAL: MadmanRick

ORIGINAL: Anthropoid

At the risk of taking us off topic, but related to the topic of Air Power, some of you guys might find this interesting. Compilation of video from AC-130, and Apache strikes on Insurgents in Iraq & Afghanistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKAxmyRau4E

I have to say the Spooky is an AWEsome machine, they can lay down an incredible amount of fire and with almost pinpoint accuracy. With but one caveat, you sure don't want to be in one of those suckers in an area where there are any anti-air defenses, particularly SAM's. That's how the USAF lost one in Iraq (I believe it was to a hand-held SAM - possibly an SA-7/variant). However, I can tell you that from the ground, these things are literally scary!

Yeah, talk about psychological warfare!

http://www.theaviationzone.com/factsheets/ac47.asp

From 1964 to 1969, the AC-47s successfully defended 3,926 hamlets, outposts and forts. They fired over 97 million rounds and killed over 5,300 enemy soldiers. No outpost or village under gunship protection was ever lost to the enemy. . . . During a night defense of a hamlet in the Mekong River Delta, a reporter from the Stars and Stripes watched an AC-47 attack from inside the fortifications. Upon witnessing the wrath that the AC-47 brought down on the VC attackers that night, he reported that visual effect of the tracers, one in every five rounds (20 per second), gave the appearance of Dragon's breath. He also tied the roar of the guns into the description. (Captured VC documents later told of orders not to attack the Dragon, as weapons are useless and it will only infuriate the monster.)