Reading ,watching,listening to him for a long time......The Ultimate "GADFLY"..
- A persistent irritating critic; a nuisance.
- One that acts as a provocative stimulus; a goad.
- Any of various flies, especially of the family Tabanidae, that bite or annoy livestock and other animals.
For many? he was a pain in the ass!..tho he grew on you in time..and there was plenty of time!!
One more of Americas Greatest generation gone...RIP
he wrote....
"On Feb. 23, 1943, I went on a bombing raid on Wilhelmshaven in a B-17. That's something you never forget. It was as close to death as I ever came, and I was 24 years old. Artillery shells exploded in the air around us and we were attacked by German fighter planes, FW 190s and Messerschmitt 109s. I haven't forgotten them, either."
"Several times a week, Air Force public relations alerted reporters that there was going to be a bombing raid. The reporters living in London boarded a train in the morning to be at one of the airfields when the bombers returned -- if they returned.
On one of those raids, I was up front, in the nose of the bomber, sitting behind the pilot and co-pilot and across from the navigator at his little table. I could see the German fighter planes out the window boring down on us, guns blazing. You notice I'm not saying I wasn't scared. I kept asking myself why I volunteered to go on a bombing raid. It had always seemed wrong to me that I wrote about the airmen without ever joining them, so I volunteered to go on a raid."
"When they flew over Germany after crossing the English Channel, some of our bombers were always shot down. The bomb groups were either B-17s or B-24s, and the B-17s always got the dirty jobs because they were harder to destroy than the B-24s. The B-24 was faster, more maneuverable and in many ways a better airplane but it had that one shortcoming: It got shot down more easily."
"The B-26 Mustang was a smaller, two-engine bomber that they should not have wasted time and money making. It didn't carry a heavy load, had limited firepower and was a poor weapon. This sort of thing happens a lot in war, I think, and we never know about inadequate weapons or vehicles until the war is over."
"They made one early mistake with the B-17. As the story goes, they built it so big and wide that they had to remove its wings to tow it onto the airfield because the streets of the town where it was made were too narrow to accommodate it."