This is not the original Witchcraft. That one was scrapped long ago. This one has its own history. Since it was restored it has been dressed up to play a couple of different characters. From the Collings Foundation:
The history of “Witchcraft” is a story that legends are made from. The original “Witchcraft” was produced as a B-24H, built by Ford at the famous Willow Run, MI plant in 1944. It was delivered to the 467th in Wendover, Utah and initially assigned to Second Lieutenant George W. Reed and his crew who flew the aircraft to England. “Witchcraft” safely arrived with her crew at Station 145 in Rackheath, England on March 19th, 1944, after a 20-day flight over the Atlantic. The aircraft and crew began their combat service on April 10th, 1944, flying the first combat mission of the 467th Bomb Group. Over the next year “Witchcraft” flew an incredible 130 combat missions with various crews. “Witchcraft” was never once turned back while on a mission, and never had any crewmen injured or killed. Her last mission was flown on April 25th, 1945 which also was the last mission flown by the 467th Bomb Group. “…Witchcraft” was there at the beginning and at the end.” After the war, she was returned to the United States and like many other B-24’s, was scrapped on October 3rd, 1945 at the surplus depot in Altus, Oklahoma.
Yes, it looks like a clown car, and no, it isn't some kind of wacky camouflage. During WW2 in Europe, they gave some aircraft high visibility paint schemes. These airplanes were called assembly ships and were used to guide other aircraft into formation for their mission. Once the contingent of combat aircraft were assembled and on their way, these high visibility marker aircraft returned to base.
Only posted this because I saw another B-24 on daily timewaster and I wondered what in the heck it was. And because it was a B-24.
Country Joe & The Fish "Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine"
The story about Eddie Rickenbacker ditching in the Pacific Ocean during WW2 got me to thinking: just how did those guys navigate back then? My dad was a gunner on a B-24 bomber during WW2 in the Pacific. Raids in the Pacific were very different than the ones in Europe. The ranges were much farther and navigation was much more critical. In Europe you head vaguely southeast from England for a hundred miles and you were over enemy territory. Drop your bombs and turn around, head northwest and in short order you will be over England which was littered with airfields. In the Pacific, if you screw up one number 3 places to the right of decimal point when plotting your return flight and you could easily miss your destination completely and end up like Eddie, floating around in the Pacific hoping someone comes looking for you.
History of the LORAN System
Excerpted from a 1947 Coast Guard film
They started with the same tools mariners had used for the last couple hundred years: a sextant, a compass and a chronometer. In Europe they soon got LORAN which was another one of those super-top secret projects, like the Norden bombsight, the proximity fuse, the atomic bomb and the code breakers at Bletchley Park. The original LORAN was only good for about 750 miles. It was superseded by LORAN-C and now by eLORAN. From the map shown at the end of the video, I surmise that they didn't get LORAN in the Pacific until very late in the war, and even then it didn't cover much of the area.
LORAN is kind of weird. You need at least three base stations in order to get a good fix. The base stations all send out a periodic pulse, and they all do it simultaneously. You measure the difference in time between when you receive the pulse from two different stations, and that will place you on a line. Do that for a different pair of stations and you get a different line. Plot the two lines on a chart and their intersection is your location. Since radio waves travel at the speed of light, your timing needs to be critical. Light travels about one foot in one nanosecond (one billionth of second), so in a microsecond, it travels about one thousand feet. So if you can measure the arrival time of the pulses to the nearest microsecond, you can determine your location within a thousand feet, which for navigating across the ocean is fine.
MathLapse: Constructions by pin-and-string: conics | Construções de fio esticado: cónicas
Hyperbola starts at 1:45
LORAN is often called a "hyperbolic navigation system", but all that means is that the lines you plot on the charts are hyperbolas.
You can see about 200 miles from a B-24 flying at 25,000 feet.
P.S. Thinking about LORAN must have triggered my memory of Sweet Loraine. There is another version of the song sung by several people, but the one by Country Joe is the one I remember. I don't know where they got Martha from.
The whole thing is grainy WW2 footage and it's mostly done in black and white. I suspect the narrator has a lot to do with whether I can watch a documentary or not. Or maybe it's the music. This isn't a great video, but it's tolerable.
The video points out that the P-47 was the most produced American fighter aircraft ever, but what they don't tell you is that the P-51 was a close second. (See my spreadsheet for the glory details).
John TruluckMILITARY | CAPTAIN | FIGHTER PILOT | 56TH FIGHTER GROUP
71 missions from May 1943 to April 1944. P-47 plane name was 'Lady Jane', for his future wife. DSC/ DFC w/ 3 Oak Leaf Cluster/ AM w/ 3 Oak Leaf Cluster 5
So regular old romance, no hi-faulutin' literary reference.
Loading Ammunition into P-47 wing magazines
I can sort of understand how an all-metal airplane can fly: the aluminum is thin enough that the whole airplane doesn't weigh much compared to the amount of surface area it presents. But it becomes a little more difficult to understand when the wings are full of lead and brass and not just empty space.
My father flew on B-24's in the South Pacific during WW2, so I was more interested in that portion than the stuff about Europe. I'd heard of the Mariana Islands before, but I didn't realize it was THE major turning point of the war in the Pacific. But then I recalled hearing about The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.
Reading about the airliner incident brought a couple of questions to mind. The first one was why was a giant airliner carrying only a hundred people? Every plane I've been on recently has been packed to the gills. And then I plot the trajectories on a map, and I wonder why are they diverted to Cold Bay. Cold Bay is way south of the Great Circle route from Shanghai to Chicago. I smell a conspiracy! The CIA is probably up no good, and this engine malfunction story is just part of the coverup.
Then I do a little more checking. Seems airlines sometimes need to stage a plane to be ready to pick up a full load of passengers, but there just aren't enough people where the aircraft is, who want to go where the airplane is going, but the plane has a schedule to keep so it goes anyway, which means that sometimes they are darn near empty. Wish I could find one of those flights when I need one.
Looking at the Great Circle route again I notice that it goes over North Korea and we don't want to be flying over North Korea. They might not be able to hit the broadside of a barn with a bowling ball, but let's not tempt fate, eh? The route also goes over the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is part of Russia. These days I am pretty sure airlines are allowed to fly over Russia, but maybe they need permission, and you know, maybe we ought not go there either. Plug those allowances into the route and Cold Bay looks like a more likely solution.
My Dad was a tail gunner in a B-24 during the last part of WWII in the Pacific. He was in the Army from before the war started. He got shuffled around to several different places before he ended up in the Pacific with Kelly's Cobras. One of the places they were stationed was Palau. Not too long ago I discovered I had a shirt with a tag that said "Made in Palau".
The B-24 normally had a turret in the aft position, but when my Dad was there they pulled the turrets out and just mounted the guns. They only made a few raids, maybe a half dozen or so. But the enemy planes he was shooting at were Japanese Zeros. As a History channel program informed me, they were made by Mitsubishi, the same company that made my wife's SUV.
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