Originally Posted By PigBat:


Looks like #11 are 4 half-swastikas. The things we are forced to do for political correctness 

Originally Posted By Clockwork138:

@Dog1

The Bf110 1:48 Revell kit I bought ~15-years-ago had an option for that plane. I might have the decals in my left-overs box if you're interested.

Originally Posted By Dog1:
Those decals have some nice instructions
https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/9749/20200520_122401-1424949.jpg

Behind the camera: Leni Riefenstahl and her film crew gather into place to film Hitler speaking at a Nazi rally for the film 'Triumph of the Will' in 1934

Originally Posted By 13starsinax:


Very nice, did they have 1/48?

Originally Posted By 22caliberKIDD:
MK 103 cannon on a Henschel Hs 129
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MK_103_cannon

https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/321106/1638CDE8-388D-4622-A383-DEDD2B897B40_jpe-1424068.JPG

https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/321106/098B3387-6769-4FB5-A066-96349FE3E26D_jpe-1424071.JPG

Originally Posted By 13starsinax:


I can not imagine the feeling of knowing here they come.


Very short video, does anyone know of other flight videos?
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8eT48ypWLw

Originally Posted By Dog1:



I've seen that video before but I want to say that I've seen another video but I can't remember where

Originally Posted By AlmightyTallest:
Since there were Ju-87 posted above with the 37mm cannon, found guncam footage of the attack runs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccOXrfBZoLE

Russian shipping? Landing ships?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIcsIuPOBpk

Originally Posted By Mal_means_bad:
The St. Nazaire raid was designed to destroy the only French drydock that could handle Tirpitz so that she'd be forced to run the gauntlet back to Germany the next time she required repair.  HMS Campbeltown (ex-USS Buchanan, an elderly lend lease destroyer), up armored and disguised as a German destroyer, rammed the locks and delivered commandos who spread out to destroy machinery, while accompanying torpedo boats also delivered commando teams.  The sailors joined the commandos, and once ammunition was expended most of the survivors were captured by the Germans.  While the captain of Campbeltown was being interrogated ashore and a contingent of German officers were investigating the ship 4.1 tons of explosives on a time delay detonator exploded in her bow, wrecking the locks and killing about 250 Germans and French civilians.  The dock wasn't repaired until 1947.

Germans investigate Campbeltown shortly before she explodes:
https://i.imgur.com/hA703.jpg
https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/8527924_f1024.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Bundesarchiv_Bild_101II-MW-3722-19%2C_St._Nazaire%2C_Zerst%C3%B6rer_%22HMS_Campbeltown%22.jpg
https://davidsberry.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/campelwreck.png

Wreckage afterwards:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/pix1/0513122.jpg

Originally Posted By Mal_means_bad:
WPA posters asking for civilians to lend their binoculars to the US Navy:
https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/Visibility-zero-unless-you-lend-your-binoculars-to-the-Navy.webp
https://clickamericana.com/wp-content/uploads/ww2-your-binoculars-could-prevent-poster.webp
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51WxstVhjXL._AC_.jpg

Repeat of a WWI program in which 51,217 pairs were received and 31,000 were accepted for naval use:
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collections/art/exhibits/conflicts-and-operations/wwi/wwi-posters/miscellaneous/will-you-supply-eyes-for-the-navy-/_jcr_content/mediaitem/image.img.jpg/1477683351399.jpg
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/library/manuscripts/b/binoculars-rental-by-the-us-navy-during-world-war-i/_jcr_content/body/media_asset/image.img.jpg/1400004591788.jpg
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/library/manuscripts/b/binoculars-rental-by-the-us-navy-during-world-war-i/_jcr_content/body/media_asset_0/image.img.jpg/1400004595907.jpg
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collections/artifacts/ephemera/letters/return-letter-for-binoculars-world-war-i/_jcr_content/body/media_asset/image.img.jpg/1585317349302.jpg
https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/our-collections/artifacts/ephemera/certificates/certificate-eyes-of-the-navy-theodore-roosevelt/_jcr_content/body/media_asset/image.img.jpg/1585316660292.jpg

Originally Posted By cyclone:


1:48 scale Totenhand BF 110 G decals

https://www.ebay.com/p/673708049

Originally Posted By birdbarian:


Pretty bad ass that the Navy asked. People responded, the Navy paid and returned property where possible.

I'm including Doris Miller, because he was a badass. He risked everything despite being treated as a 3rd class citizen. Doing the right thing because it is the right thing despite risk or consequences is pretty much hard to beat.

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/histories/biographies-list/bios-m/miller-doris/jcr%3Acontent/body/media_asset/image.img.jpg/1412868947456.jpg

The 480th had been flying from Port Lyautey in Morocco against German U-boats for several months....  The Liberators had their share of run-ins with German airplanes. From March through October 1943, they shot down nine German aircraft, including five Condors, three Dornier flying boats, and one Junkers Ju 88 multi-role combat airplane; the 480th’s two squadrons lost three Liberators. The Liberator pilot, Hugh Maxwell Jr., now 98 and living in Altamonte Springs, Florida, had been with the 480th since early March, and had fought another Condor about a month before the August dogfight. Flying parallel courses, the two bombers fired at each other, and Maxwell’s gunners scored hits. The Condor was last seen diving into the clouds with one engine out.

On August 17, the Liberator’s base at Port Lyautey had broken radio silence to warn of the Condors’ approach. Maxwell’s radar operator reported a pair of contacts 15 miles away, and his navigator calculated they would arrive over the convoy at about the same time as the Liberator. That left Maxwell no choice but to engage.

The battle was spectacular. He had never flown fighters—his experience had been in B-18 and B-25 bombers—and he had never been in a dogfight, so the combat that day was the ultimate on-the-job training. He initiated the fight by diving his 28-ton bomber out of the clouds at 1,000 feet on the tail of the lead Condor. He told his gunners to hold fire until they got within range. But the Condor “fired a sighting burst and started hitting me,” he says. “I shoved the throttles and prop pitch forward and closed as fast as I could, and I opened fire. They never came out of their diving turn, and went in on fire. But boy, they had done us damage.”

The second Condor, meanwhile, was firing at Maxwell from behind, and Maxwell’s gunners were returning fire. But the Liberator had lost its number-three and -four engines, and the right wing was full of holes and in flames. The bomber was especially vulnerable to attack because modifications for anti-submarine work (enabling the aircraft to carry more fuel and a maximum load of depth charges) had required removing all the armor plating that protected the crew. So when the Condor’s bullets struck, “all of us got hit by shrapnel and our hydraulic system was knocked out, our intercom radio system was knocked out, the whole instrument panel was knocked out,” Maxwell recalls. Fortunately, one of the crewmen was able to jettison the depth charges.

“As I realized that our right wing would no longer fly and I couldn’t raise it, and was trying to hold left rudder and aileron, my left foot kept slipping off the rudder pedal,” says Maxwell. “I looked down and said, ‘Oh my God.’ My whole left leg and foot were covered with blood, and there was a pool of blood and it was all over that rudder pedal. And I knew I’d been hit in the left side with shrapnel. But then I realized: It ain’t blood, it’s hydraulic fluid.

“At no time did I feel heroic or any of that kind of stuff,” he says. “Hell, I was scared. I didn’t want to die, but I had to do whatever I needed to do. The thing that sticks out in my mind the most was when I realized we were going to be crashing into the Atlantic Ocean, and I thought we were goners. But in a last-minute desperate effort to avoid catastrophe, I kicked in full right rudder and threw the plane into a skid, and sure enough, instead of our cartwheeling and breaking up and exploding, the water put the fire out, and the airplane broke in three pieces, but it didn’t explode or burn.” Seven of the 10 crew members survived.

The second Condor was seen mushing over the waves at low altitude with its number-three engine out. The pilot was able to stay in the air; he made it back to Bordeaux, but his airplane crashed and burned on landing, according to one source. All crew members reportedly survived.

Maxwell’s crew was quickly picked up by one of the convoy’s escorts, the British destroyer Highlander. It also picked up “four survivors from that lead Focke-Wulf 200, two of whom died that night because they were so badly burned,” Maxwell says. The events of the day amounted to “probably my worst experience.”

Originally Posted By birdbarian:I'm including Doris Miller, because he was a badass. He risked everything despite being treated as a 3rd class citizen. Doing the right thing because it is the right thing despite risk or consequences is pretty much hard to beat.

https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/research/histories/biographies-list/bios-m/miller-doris/jcr%3Acontent/body/media_asset/image.img.jpg/1412868947456.jpg

Originally Posted By Mal_means_bad:
The St. Nazaire raid was designed to destroy the only French drydock that could handle Tirpitz so that she'd be forced to run the gauntlet back to Germany the next time she required repair.  HMS Campbeltown (ex-USS Buchanan, an elderly lend lease destroyer), up armored and disguised as a German destroyer, rammed the locks and delivered commandos who spread out to destroy machinery, while accompanying torpedo boats also delivered commando teams.  The sailors joined the commandos, and once ammunition was expended most of the survivors were captured by the Germans.  While the captain of Campbeltown was being interrogated ashore and a contingent of German officers were investigating the ship 4.1 tons of explosives on a time delay detonator exploded in her bow, wrecking the locks and killing about 250 Germans and French civilians.  The dock wasn't repaired until 1947.

Germans investigate Campbeltown shortly before she explodes:
https://i.imgur.com/hA703.jpg
https://usercontent1.hubstatic.com/8527924_f1024.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Bundesarchiv_Bild_101II-MW-3722-19%2C_St._Nazaire%2C_Zerst%C3%B6rer_%22HMS_Campbeltown%22.jpg
https://davidsberry.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/campelwreck.png

Wreckage afterwards:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/pix1/0513122.jpg

Originally Posted By MMcfpd:

My father's first wife; he was in the Army and she was a WASP. Killed in 1944 when the plane she was flying suffered  a structural failure.

Originally Posted By Not_so_Clever:


What was her name?

Originally Posted By 22caliberKIDD:


Tough seat to sit in...some of the Luftwaffe videos of them just pumping cannon fire into the rear gunner position always give me a sick feeling

https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/321106/F41B056B-AA5E-49C7-B29A-E4F0F8786E77_jpe-1431635.JPG

https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/321106/909F4A7C-AC18-4337-9502-2A7A0EDFF3AD_jpe-1431636.JPG

McGlashan Air Machine Gun Corporation made full auto BB gun used for training gunners
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGlashan_Air_Machine_Gun
https://www.AR15.Com/media/mediaFiles/321106/0BB75D34-42CC-4737-A477-9238F1EF7D38_jpe-1431639.JPG

Originally Posted By piccolo:
I remember them along with the BB Tommy guns

They'd put up a little star and if you obliterate the entire thing you'd win a kewpie doll or some such shit.

Originally Posted By piccolo:


These were popular at carnivals and penny arcades in the 60s. I remember them along with the BB Tommy guns

They'd put up a little star and if you obliterate the entire thing you'd win a kewpie doll or some such shit.

Originally Posted By bodybagger:

I would have looked hard at the French Hispano-Suiza 20mm guns or captured German guns and tooled up production of both fixed and flexible mounted 20mm aircraft guns for both aircraft and ground vehicles. I wouldn't have to have seen too many chopped up allied planes to decide the Germans had a better gun.
I imagine twin 20mm guns on the gun mounts of our bombers would have made a Luftwaffe pilot even more short lived of an occupation.
The M2 has it's place, but if we'd had 20mm cannons in WW2 our guys would have been field mounting 4 or 6 in the noses of planes instead of .50s.
I find it remarkable that with all the innovation we did in aircraft in WW2 our innovation in their basic arnamen revolved around mounting more .50's, we didn't do much in the way of developing a bigger, heavier hitting gun. I'd wager my grandpa wasn't the only gunner then that wished he'd had a big gun like the Germans.

It was probably some stodgy stubborn ass in the war department that said "Bruh!! Do you even M2???" Anytime the subject of a bigger gun came up.