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Another Historical Question

Autothrottle

Autothrottle

Charter Member
Hello all,

Not to be too much of a bother, but this always intrigued me, What was used to patch bullet holes on battle hardened aircraft of all types during World War Two? Were airframes still airworthy after applying whatever it was they placed over them, or did the ground crews just replace the entire airframe altogether?

I ask this question because of an Article I read a few years back on Robert S. Johnson (God rest the Dead) On his fateful meeting with Egon Mayer and his Fw190 over France. His thunderbolt reportedly sustained well over 100 bullet holes, after which ground crews stopped counting after 100. I know the USAAF replaced that particular aircraft, however, What were the fates of so many others that got the same or worse punishment?
 
Autothrottle said:
Hello all,

What was used to patch bullet holes on battle hardened aircraft of all types during World War Two?
Click to expand...

AT

That's what a quickly research revealed:

"Most battle damage was repaired with spare parts taken from scrapped planes, a club member was the squadron engineering officer for the 451st bomber squadron for 3years in England he tells of stripping damaged planes to the bone to repair the fixable ones, they lost 111 men from there group.

Part of the reason you see relatively clean looking planes even after seeing heavy combat,a advantage of the assembly line method of construction interchangeable parts including the fuse and wing skins in some cases, patching individual bullet holes is a bit of a romantic notion of the hero in the sky.

The ground crews were way too proud of there planes and there pilots to allow them to fly a substandard machine unless it was a rare situation, there was always junked planes laying around to be scrapped.

A little side note he also told me, a little jokingly my invasion stripes were way to neat and the lines were also too strait on one of my planes, when they did the invasion stripes on there squadron some of the paint was still wet when the planes took off the morning of the 6th of June.

the paint in some cases was applied with a mop,they did there whole squadron in a 36 hour period and far from the nice neat lines we use on some of our models.

Read more: http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_8597445/anchors_8597445/mpage_1/key_/anchor/tm.htm#8597445#ixzz0tePX4k9p"


I've found also some notes talking about newspaper and dope used to repair Hurri fuses in Malta, duct tapes to repairing Corsairs and even fabric.
Cheers

N.
 
here is an example

View attachment 12815
Ther is another fairly famous one that I can't find a picture of right now of a B-17G in natural metal that had the entire fuselage behind the wing and tail replaced with a green and grey painted fuselage from a B-17F

here is a quick article on "flak Bait" a B-26 that took 1,000 hits from flak during it's tour in the ETO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_Bait
 
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