B-24 versus B-17

Rich,

While Jules is collecting his thoughts for a reply to your questions, I will jump in with the following. My longest mission (B-17) was 11 hours 30 minutes to Bayreuth, Germany on April 5, 1945. Thirty seven aircraft of the 303rdBG dropped 206 500-lb. G.P., 6 500-lb. S.A.P., 144 500-lb. M17 incendiary bombs and 10 units if leaflets on the target. We were each given a sandwich and a candy bar to eat on the return flight. The sandwiches were placed in a frostbite muff that was electrically heated. The bread would dry out but it wouldn't freeze. They sure tasted good and who can say anything bad about a frozen candy bar!

Regarding frequency of missions, at this late date in the war, we( our squadron) generally flew three days in a row and had one day off.  However, often part of the the day off was spent in training. The exception to this pattern was when a maximum effort was ordered.

By the way we exhausted our supply of oxygen on the way back and flew the last 300 miles over enemy territory at near tree top level to avoid radar. A number of the group aircraft had to land and refule in France but we made it back o.k.

ORIGINAL: Rich Wright

Mr, Horowitz,

On the mission Tunis to Weiner Neustadt "13+ hours, 1900 miles"...

WOW, never knew you guys had to endure such a mission!  Several things come to my mind and I hope you don't feel me prying in areas that I should not go...  1) Did you guys bring any chow?  2) Do you remember if you had to 'lighten' your bomb load for this mission?  If so, by how much, if you can remember.  3) Were you able to get any sleep or cat-naps along the way?

A group of us, here in St.Louis Mo, are trying our best to simulate bombing runs during the early part of WWII in the Pacific during the Coral Sea Campaign.  We have heard about the 'bomb bay' tanks of the B17s and some info on 'reduced' loads when going to distant targets, but have no references for such.  Example, if the mission was for 500 miles - full load ~6k lbs of bombs, 750 miles - 4k load, 1000 miles - 2k load, etc.  This is why I am asking the questions...also to just better appreciate all that our fliers accomplished in those days.

From your experience, was it possible or probable that you flew a mission EVERY day if the weather was good?  Sure seems like a lot of wear and tear on that young body and mind.

Thanks in advance for reading this...anything you reply with would be appreciated.

Rich
636-332-8933

The mission was flown 11/2/43
1. we had K ration as on all missions, but they were frozen so they were useless.
2.we carried our nomal load of 6   1000lb
3.no, I never slept while in enemy territory, although I shared stick time with the copilot.

We landed in Gela, Sicily, for overnight as briefed, the next day we would get enough fuel to return to home base. I slept under the bomb bay about 15 feet from #2 and #3 engine, in the A.M. when the 4 engines were preflighted I didn't hear a sound, I was out cold.

As Bill flew later then me, he had luxuries that we did,t have, such as heated muffs? etc. I never saw a heated flying suit. 
 
My sqdn flew 6 to 10 planes on missions. USUALLY  the sqdn had more pilots then mission requirements, once a crew got into the sequence they flew pretty often, in no set order. During the critical Salerno, Italy invasion I flew 16 missions in 15 days bombing from 10 to 12,000 feet, troops,road and railroad junctions.
I had 460 combat hours for my tour.
 

Rich,
 More info on that mssion----
Our 4 groups of B17s, about 150 planes and about 50 -60 B 24s. Our altitude was 24,500 ft, target was an ME109 factory. We were attacked by over 80 fjghters, Goerings best, we had P38 escort, 12 B24 and 4 B17s were lost, I don't know how many P38s were lost.  My gunners got credit for 2 enemy planes shot down.
 
 

From the books I have read the aircraft flying over the Pacific in that first year 1942 and even after that had some issues not found in the European Theater. Parts, planes, dry food, decent living conditions and supplies were in terrible short supply.

There were many times nothing was left to be found or to identify any one or any aircraft. They were gone never to be seen again dead or alive in the great open ocean distances.

Do we have many B-17 Bomber or B-24 pilots who come here from the early campaigns in the Pacific flying over the large distances of ocean? 
 
In the book "Grey Geese Calling" that first year  from July 1942 to November 1942 in the Pacific was as near as one can get to a hell on earth. 

Gregg,   I agree.  I've not found or read too much on those early years in the Pacific by those who were there as opposed to the latter part of the Pacific Campaign.  When you talk about "hell,"  there was another Theatre of Operation that I found after doing some reading last year, the CBI.  Flying the "Hump" and the conditions under which they lived also seemed intolerable, let alone the conditions of wartime.  Daniel Ford's book, Flying Tigers, is pretty good reading.  Hopefully some early Vets  post.  Best Regards!  Steven

I agree with you completely with your statement "Flying the "Hump" and the conditions under which they lived also seemed intolerable, let alone the conditions of wartime"
 
After living through the worse of World Depressions, and the struggles that brought into a families life, fighting a truly Global and TERRIBLE World War, we all have to really wake up in this country and appreciate the great sacrifices our parents made for our country and all our freedoms.
 
I am not sure we will see such a generation again in our life time, or anyones.

I just read this in a review of a 1/72 B-24D Hasegawa model Kit on the B-24 Best Web.

http://b24bw.proboards33.com/index.cgi?board=ScaleModel&action=display&thread=1207326242

Hasegawa
1/72 B-24D Liberator
Kit Number: 558
Reviewed by Jim Pearsall, IPMS# 2209

The author, Jim Pearsall's contention is that it wasn't so much the range as the time between overhauls that made the difference in the Pacific.

"Why weren't B-17s the big deal in the Pacific that they were in the 8th Air Force? Engines. The B-17's Wright R-1690s had a 250 hour TBO (time between overhaul). The B-24's Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasps had a 500 hour TBO. Considering the primitive conditions of the SWPA, and the distance to the nearest overhaul facility, the B-24 was the aircraft of choice."

Interesting theory. If true, it would explain a lot. Of course that leads to the thread of some time ago of which was the better engine...

Ken

Ken...I think this person's opinion, if it is that...is somewhat in question.....I tihink the TBO on the R-1820-97 was 1200 hours...if it lasted that long....many engines were changed due to bad cylinders, as it was faster to change the engine than it was to replace a cylinder.
 
I speak as an FAA licensed Aircraft and Engine Mechanic as well as a qualifed flight engineer.
 
If the above statement is true that the overhaul time was the determining factor, then the rigors of combat should apply equally to both aircraft.
 
In fact the B-17s carried the brunt in the early days of the Pacific as the B-24s were just appearing in the year 1939 and on.
 
All three of the Bomb Groups..the 7th, 11th, and 43rd  were all equipped with the B-17s and later were equipped with the B-24s, after the B-17s were either lost to the Japanese overrunning the airfields until the Battle of Midway.
 
These early B-17s did not have the later tokio tanks, and an interim additional tankage was fabricated in Australia with a tank installed in the nose and another in the radio room.
 
I think it is erroneous to make the point that the TBO had anytbing to do with early days...the conditions were so primitive that both the B-17 and B-24s would have suffered the same problems..
 
For an excellent book on the Pacific, I suggest reading Gene Salecker's book Fortress Against The Sun.
 
In addition, the early B-24s had a very weak nose gear that was very prone to failure, and had to have a modifiction accomplished in Australia.
 
As another thought, the supply situation in the Pacific was such that any spare parts including engines would have strained the supply....the Pacific is huge and vast....and the Pacific was not given the priority that the ETO and MTO were given.
 
I would therefore respectfully disagree with the original statement.
 
Jim :-)
 

Jim,

I am only the son of a Tech Sgt. Armorer in the 42 Squadron the 11 BG H 7 TH Air Corps. My father said very little against the way the war was run. However if he said it once he said a thousand times. The Pacific Theater was lucky to get a hot meal and dry bed let alone badly needed parts and armament for their planes of war.

The crews did not fly home to a hot meal and a dry bed and a cup of tea. Their pilots flew home to some insect infested, fever ridden sandy salty piece of coral if they made home at all. How many Pacific pilots that were shot down were even buried in dirt? In the European Theater you were often buried even if it was in some European Country.

How come so few pilots or crews are on this site from the Pacific Theater, when they went down it was into a ocean with plenty of hungry sharks.     

The 42 ND Squadron received the Presidential Unit Citation for fighting overwhelming forces of Japanese, but also for fighting against the odds of success with having so few parts and so few supplies sent to their war, it was all sent elsewhere first. My fathers early letters mentions the rats eating the shoe laces out of their boots in the beginning of their visit to the Pacific Paradise of Midway. 

Nearly every Pacific airmen was down with fever. It was so bad the hospital tent was over filled and they had to stay in their own beds and puke in their helmets. That was the first fever, in the Pacific they had all kinds of fevers to content with and then the foot rot etc. Look how few POWs survived Japanese camps compared to German Camps. A Japanese Camp Commander executed for eating the livers of Australian airmen.

Everyone who comes here trying to find family from the Pacific Theater has a better chance finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

P.S.

Did anyone notice the date on the photo of Lt Cox's Crew that Patrica Cox has been trying to find someone who knew her Uncle. It was 12/10/1941. Three days after Hickam was bombed to heck Lt. Cox and his crew were flying the oceans around Hawaii trying to find enemy to bomb and to protect Hawaii. This was only 3 days after the base was bombed and many good men and women died the 42 Squadron 11 BG H was already in the air doing their job with whatever they could put together. 


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PA. Dutchman:

Thank you for posting your message.  You are absoluletly correct....there are roughly 80,000 MIA from all of the US wars, and there are 60,000 MIA from WW II.

One observation was made that there are more aircraft in the Pacific ocean than sunken ships.

I think that for some,thier fate will NEVER be known, as they just vanished at sea.

I have flown to Japan for the Korean Conflict on a B-29. and again on a C-124, to the island of Guam for a TDY.

Unless one has flown over the Pacific, it is difficult to understand how large the Pacific ocean is.

This is one reason I have been harsh on the persons from the 8th AF.....from what I have read and experienced myself....the personnel in the 8th AF, and the 15th, had it a lot better than those in the Pacific. I am speaking of the conditions at the ground bases...Any aircrew that was in combat, took the same chances in the air, in any theater, as far as survival is concerned.

The ground conditions were where the differences lay, as your father noted.

Jim :-)

Jim,

I only was given my fathers papers and kept sakes a few months ago from my mother when she moved into a Senior Apartment.
 
My father was in the 11 Field Artillery at Schofield from 1937 to 1940. On the same day he re enlisted in the 11 BG H 42 Squadron at Hickam and served until September of 1945.

My father has been gone for some years, but we have a interview he gave his grandson for a history project.

I was able to purchase a copy of "Grey Geese Calling" since coming here. I opened the book and on Page Nine I could not believe my eyes. It was a photo my father had in his box of papers all these years. His photo has all their names on the back. He is "Bud" he was a JR. and he was a "Bud" until the day he died.

He is in the front row in the middle with the helmet at his feet.  A few pages later he is standing on a ladder talking to someone in the co pilots seat of the Tokyo Taxi in Grey Geese Calling.
 
I was in third grade when I found out he was at Hickam on 12/7/1941. Our teacher gave us the story of Pearl Harbor on 12/7/1957 and then she announced that one of our classmates fathers was there. We were all surprised and excited and then she read my fathers name. That night at supper I asked him if he had been at the Attack. He was surprised that I would ask this, and he quietly said yes and not much more for a while. In time he would open more and more. Within seconds of exiting the barracks his best friend was shot down. Pop went right and the friend went left and he was dead. We got a Christmas card from the boys parents until they joined their son in Glory.  


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I must be quiet after this. From coming here I found a Lt. Krey living in Flordia who recommended my father for Warrant Officer and my father still had the letter he wrote.

Lt. Krey is 92 and he remembered my father and how disappointed he was that my father left the Air Corp because he could have been a Warrant Officer.    

The letter is too large a file to post, but I can forward to anyone who would care to see it and the other four letters officers wrote for Pop.
 
Here is something I just learned to do as well Jim. It is pretty much the entire book Hickam 1942 published soon after the Attack.
 
http://usera.imagecave.com/kegsh01/USAAC/


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Dear Jim,
 
One of the things I first observed here and shared with many of my WW II Veterans friends is when the children write to that they have adopted a Veterans grave in Europe.  It might be in Belgium or France, but the child writes in to find if there are any family members still living. The children want to give the family some peace of mind that in the family's absence this child will care take their Veterans last resting place.
 
I believe that is as touching and wonderful an act of compassion and appreciation as ever I saw.
 
This again however is Never got happen to some 11 TH BG H crew that went down in the Pacific. Again most times nothing was found and only once in a while someone witnessed the plane go down.
 
Jim did the B-17s and 24s even carry rafts at this point?   

PA.Dutchman....yes they did...the 8th AF had the English Channel and the North Sea to cross and the  15th had the Adriatic Sea....there were many ditchings by both the B-17 and B-24s.
Neither were as big as the Pacific Ocean.
 
Jim :-)

I guessed they would have had to but I don't see a lot of chatter on here about rafts on the site.

The escape hatches or routes come up a lot and where the parachutes were kept, but I haves not seen anything about rafts.

Thank you so very much. I greatly appreciated your comment that the ground comforts might have differed, but in the air it was all the same, no matter what theater one might have fought in.  

Whoever flew in any theater of the war in the defense of our freedoms and liberties is a hero in my book. My family thanks and salutes them all for what they have given our country and its citizens. 

You can count on me to keep reminding folks. My son did a history project for 9 TH Grade. He was given permission to interview his grandfather, my father, about his war experiences. They put it all into words and cassette tape that I put on CD now. Matthew got an A+

(Jim you might like this part. I was listing to the tape and I heard my father telling Matthew they went into town on Saturday nights to see the girls. Pop was in the service in Hawaii from 1937 and then the Pacific Theater to 1945. My mother was in the kitchen doing dishes and you can hear her telling my father "HE DOESN'T NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE GIRLS IN TOWN ON SATURDAY NIGHTS!. I found a photo of my father with two girls, it was long before my parents began to court. I will post it here for you, Mom is 85 now and I have never told her I found this photo)   

I know both my sons grew up seeing their grandfather as a hero. He never told them he was one, it was a quality about him. Like there is found in so many of our heroes.  It is a quiet modest quality found in the heroes of all our wars.


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Thought I'd tack this onto my origial post.  In a Thread on "Combat Box Formations," the question came up again about the difference between the two, and it was probably due to an earlier post of mine.
 
"Robert,  I am sure that I am one of these posters, as from my research, even though I am a passionate Lib-lover, especially the FO WR Lib, I believe that the Fort probably did outweigh the Lib.  I do, however, remember in a post that Ken Alexander spoke about formation flying and the "tips" that his father used and shared to keep his A/C tight in the formation.  Like anything else, practice makes perfect, and you are correct about that." 
 
Best Regards!   Steven
 
 

Steven, et all,
If the following has been posted before, forgive me, a lot of pages to this topic. I came across the following.

                               Flying The B-24
Everyone had something to say about the Liberator, and it's Pilots said it everywhere. Few, however, found better words for the Consolidated bomber, which ultimately became the backbone of the Fifteenth Air Force, than pilot 1st Lt Bud Markel who after the Ploesti bombing flew with the 827th BS/484th BG out of Torretto;
" The B-24 bomber was a cantankerous, lumbering, draughty, unforgiving S-O-B, heavy on the controls, overgrossed and difficult to fly in formation, with it's ancient boiler guage-style fuel quantity system that was almost useless. The heaters never worked when you needed them, and were removed by many combat groups as being too dangerous to operate because of the fuel lines on the flight deck necessary to feed them. Headway was maintained by throttles and brakes. The famously weak nosegear had a mind of it's own, often collapsing of it's own volition, so the flight engineer would have to sit astride the mechanism, waiting with a heavy foot to kick the stubborn thing down.
Even today, the B-24 versus the B-17 controversy continues because every throttle jock and gunner knows that sooner or later you learn to accept and eventually to love the equiptment assigned to you. It's not romance but survival that triggers the match. Familiarity breeds self confidence, at least in this case. You soon learned not to take off with the cowl flaps open as this caused too much drag. You learned to keep the generators parallel and to plot cruise control charts to calculate fuel cosumption, or how to transfer fuel without starving the engines or pumping it overboard. Many would call this becoming professional, but we called it accommodation-a deal struck with the aeroplane, like a stand-off between two boxers who respect each other's strengths. With this out of the way the war could be attended to".

Janos,
Bud Merkel sums up the argument of the B17 vs B24., B17 wins hands down. The B17 had it's ideosyncracies, but nothing like the B24. I flew most of my missions in the F model which lacked the improvements that came with the G model.
I will agree with Merkel that when  a person was assigned to either a 17 or a 24 they eventually fell in love with their plane , and prayed that it would carry them through their tour.

I felt the same way about my 1978 Ford Pinto. A lot of folks kidded me but she got the job done and that was all that mattered! 

Hello folks I have been watching this tread and would like to add the following info
During WW II the b-24 dropped 452,508 tons of bombs on european targets
the b-17 dropped 640,036 tons
all othe aircraft dropped 463,5444 tons
the b-17 flew a total of 291,508 sorties
b24- I cannot locate the info right now
 
Statistically
for every 1000 b-17s sent up against europe 23 were lost to enemy action
for every 1000 b24s sent up against europe 11 were lost to enemy action
escorting fighters at 11 as well for every 1000
medium bombers were 3 lost for every 1000.
 
My father was a tail gunner on a B-17 based at Lavenham in 1945 and I once asked him which was a better plane he smiled and said the b-29. also this summer a b-17 will be in Michigan and I am trying to get there for a ride.
The above information comes from a great book written by Martin Caidin published 1968 and title
Flying Forts the b-17 in world war II. It is an excellent book about boeing and the R and D of the b-17.
I highly recomend it
Brian Angeloni