Word: flak
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With cold courage LeMay held the course seven minutes, although planes around him were going down and his own plane was hit by flak. Upon landing he posted a new order, ruthless but necessary: no more evasive action over the targets. ("Having paid the price of admission to get over the target, we've got to get the benefits.") His men saw the casualty list go up, tagged the skipper "Old Ironpants." But LeMay got bombing results. He led many a flight himself, including the famed raid on the Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg in August...
...LeMay believed that the Japs would be susceptible to surprise, and he calculated shrewdly. Jap antiaircraft could shoot down an occasional plane at 30,000 feet, but their flak was weak and ineffective at one-fifth the height. Besides, they were no longer putting many fighters in the air-a vital factor in his later calculations...
Judging by the few who were brought down and captured, most of them knew just enough about flying to keep their crates straight and level, and had never before experienced flak. But it was with irreducible pride that they wore the red sash which dedicated each to death as a certainty and to the utmost destruction he might achieve by diving his explosive-packed plane into U.S. battlecraft...
...almost unbelievable. There is little antiaircraft fire in the target area and if any enemy night fighters are in the air, none has made aggressive sweeps toward our aircraft. In the time we have been near the target we have seen only a few phosphorus shells from land-based flak batteries and a few tracers from small warships in the harbor but none came close. . . . They could not save this northern Honshu shipping center [Aomorí] even though they knew 24 hours in advance [see above] that we were going to burn it to the ground...
...Flak was spotty. Fighter opposition-on some raids at least-was weak. But weather was playing the enemy's game. On one raid the cloud cover was so thick that B-29 men could hardly see beyond their wingtips as they nervously watched ice thickening on the leading edges. Soupy fog kept navigators and bombardiers on instruments. After one raid more than 70 Superforts had to make emergency landings on Iwo.*But the planes drilled through, and reported the clouds over one city glowing "like a hot plate" from the flames below...