How Did They Do It in WWII?

[Jay Honeck]

Mary and I were watching one of the bazillion shows on the History Channel about the air war over Europe. After a lifetime of watching these shows, I thought I knew it all...

...Then Mary innocently dropped this bomb: "How, after twisting and turning in air combat over unfamiliar territory, and getting separated from their mates, did a fighter pilot know where he was, and then find his way back to base in England?"

Given how easy it is to get disoriented doing aerobatics (WITHOUT people shooting at you), I had to confess that I had no idea.

My first thought was that they had a radio beacon of some kind to follow, in those pre-VOR, pre-LORAN, pre-GPS days -- but that would, of course, lead the enemy straight back to your base.

Over Western Europe you could just head West until you hit the coast, and try to figure it out from there, but what about over the vast emptiness of the Eastern Front? Or the Pacific, where you had NO ground reference?

How did they do it?

 

[Jim Logajan]

That, poor/no weather information, and various mechanical failures I suspect had to do with a large number of them.

In Ernest Gann's book he talks about squawking a particular code (or whatever the old term was for their predecessor to the transponder), which changed daily. Unless you had the proper code in, they would shut off the navigation aid, and assume you were the enemy. So they would probably send out people to try to kill you. In one instance he describes, he was given the wrong code, and the airport was so fogged in that at 50 feet off the deck they finally got below the clouds. Or something of that nature. They managed to find the landing strip, somehow.

Oddly, I was just reading of a case where an allied pilot was mistakenly shot down and killed for giving the wrong code.

Anyone reading this ever heard of Amy Johnson? She was a British pilot allegedly on a secret mission in WWII and it was alleged (many decades later) that her airplane was shot down when she responded with the wrong color code of the day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Johnson

She first became famous for being the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia in 1930 in a de Havilland DH.60 Moth biplane. Navigation equipment consisted of only a magnetic compass.

It seems she had only 50 some hours solo flying time when she made the trip.

Oh - and first woman in England to be granted a ground engineer license. Amazing accomplishments considering the sexism she had to overcome.

 

[Jim Logajan]

I suppose thats a good question. My only answer is that all the WWII pilots I know/knew were very good. Maybe thats why they survived and they're not indicative of the norm. Sure they were rushed through training but that doesn't mean they were sending idiots out. I know some washouts too... guys who failed to meet the spec and ended up as ground pounders or had other jobs. I used to fly with a B17 waist gunner who washed out as a pilot because of map reading problems. He got tossed to the back of the plane but got his license after the war and figured out his issues. I learned a lot from him flying around the wide open New Mexico landscape in CAP planes.
More came back then got left over there so in my opinion I'd say they were mostly good pilots.

Frank

According to the taphilo.com link below, there were 13,621 fatalities in the U.S. Army Air Forces during training for the period 1941 to 1945. The Wikipedia article says in its statistical summary that 88,119 USAAF airmen died in service. Assuming that number includes training fatalities, that means about 15% died during training. That is a lot.

(The note at the bottom of the taphilo.com web page indicates training fatalities likely exceeded 15,500.)

http://www.taphilo.com/history/WWII/Loss-Figures-Aircraft-USA-Training.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Air_Forces

 

[Jim Logajan]

Not that I think there was really a better way that the Allies could get into Europe.

The allies were already in Europe - they had been fighting hard in Italy for 8 months prior to the Normandy landings.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Did they even make the alps? Thought the defensive lines held them up pretty well.

Not really - at least not till Germany had all but collapsed. The Wikipedia article has a series of maps showing progress during the Italian Campaign, and this sobering quote:

"No campaign in Western Europe cost more than the Italian campaign in terms of lives lost and wounds suffered by infantry forces."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Campaign_(World_War_II)