Word: flak
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Bull's-Eye. In the South Pacific, a U.S. flyer landed after disregarding orders by flying through his own side's flak to shoot down two Jap bombers. When he explained, "I figured if they couldn't hit the Japs, they couldn't hit me," he was grounded for a month...
Four of them were over Germany, and on the last one his luck almost ran out. He was flying as top-turret gunner over Münster when a flak burst hit the turret dome, shattered his goggles, tore off his oxygen mask. Copilot and radioman pulled him down and revived him with an emergency mask. After that, Ben got his orders for home...
Under Water. As many as ten submarines bunched against the convoy never broke through escorting Canadian corvettes, British frigates and sloops. Focke-Wulf 200s and four-engined Heinkel 1775 flew out from French bases to launch radio-controlled glider bombs (British sailors call them "Chase-Me-Charlies"). Flak from the ships, Allied Fortresses, Liberators, Hudsons, Catalinas, Venturas, Sunderlands, fought off the attackers. One British pilot said that the glider bombs looked like small monoplanes and performed "most unusual acrobatics." But they were ineffective: at the battle's end, only two Allied ships had been damaged, none had been sunk...
...fight a really "hot" aircraft. By midsummer the Marauders tackled the broad assignment of pounding the Luftwaffe's northwestern French airfields. By October Anderson could report that the enemy squadrons had been pushed inland 40 miles. He kept at it, developed new tactics for evading flak, trained his bombardiers to needlepoint precision...
...shell hit our right horizontal stabilizer. Then some more hit the right wing and made a patchwork out of it. ... By this time . . . flak had knocked out our No. 2 engine...