Lucky 666

Lucky 666

I got to thinking about WW2 in the Pacific the other day. My Dad flew as a tail gunner in a B-24 during the war, but he never told me much about it, so I'm thinking there ought to be some books about it, and there are. This one is pretty great.

Port Moresby, Rabaul and Bougainville Island

Lucky 666 is the story of Jay Zeamer, troublemaker, misfit and pilot enamored of the B-17 bomber. The story concentrates on Port Moresby on New Guinea, Rabaul on New Britain and Bougainville Island. The distance from Port Moresby to Rabaul is 600 miles, the same as the distance from London to Berlin.

The climax occurs when Lucky 666 is attacked by a mess of Japanese Zeros while they are attempting to photograph the west coast Bougainville. The Zeros preferred method was to attack head on as the front of the B-17 has the fewest number of guns available to shoot back and is the most vulnerable with the glass nose. The book tells us that after they have made an attack run, it takes the Zeros ten minutes to circle around and come back for another pass. I'm guesstimating a zero can make a U-turn in about 6 seconds, but that will only put them about 1,000 feet to the side of the B-17's flight path. They will also now be a third of a mile behind the B-17, so they will still be in range of its guns. Zeros fly over 300 MPH and a B-17 taking photos is only flying at 200 MPH, so the Zero will be able to catch up to the bomber. The Zeros don't want to just catch the bomber, they want go way past it so they can turn around and head back towards it so they are heading right towards each other. That tight turning radius means they will only be 1,000 feet away from the bomber as they go by which is well within range of the top, tail, waist and belly guns, so they might want to be a little farther away which means a larger turning radius and more time taken. Now the Zero has to catch up to the B-17, then it needs to get several miles ahead so it has time to make another U-turn and time to line up its sights and fire a mess of bullets at the nose of the B-17. So, yeah, I can see that it could take ten minutes.

Metrogon Camera

Trimetrogon camera installed in B-17

Aerial reconnaissance was done using Trimetrogon cameras which were a lash up of three Metrogon cameras arranged so they covered a wide swath of ground. This swath of ground was perpendicular to the line of flight. By taking a set of three photos every few seconds a great deal of land could be covered with one pass.

Relationship of cameras to ground for trimetrogon photography (three cameras)

Metrogon cameras used nine inch wide film. If we assume a resolution of 600 pixels per inch, that's like 30 million pixels. Modern 35mm film might have a resolution equivalent to 3,000 pixels per inch. Funny, I could not find an article that gave a good account of the film versus digital images. They all seem to be tangle of mumbo-jumbo. Seems to me you should be able to make straight forward comparison.

Fairchild K-17 Camera

The Fairchild K-17 camera also used nine inch film. I suspect the camera body is the same as the one used with the Metrogon. Near as I can tell, the Metrogon name comes from the fancy, wide-angle lenses they used.