Word: raiding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hour. But one heavy bomb plumbed into a crowded dance hall and milk-bar. When the dust of the blast had settled, the district all around looked to eyewitnesses "like a battlefield," recalled the horrors of the blitz and jarred Londoners out of their recent tendency to ignore air-raid alarms...
...time had come for a change of daylight tactics. The old way was terribly expensive. The Regensburg-Schweinfurt raid had cost 59 planes; the second Schweinfurt raid had cost 60. Percentage of casualties had gone up to over 10%. No matter how precious the targets, the flyers and the fleets could not stand such losses. The Germans had come up with new rocket-bearing fighters which could lurk outside the range of U.S. .50-caliber machine guns. Flak was getting thicker...
Being attacked by the enemy under these conditions had become a nightmare of exploding planes and disappearing friends. Lieut. Colonel Beirne Lay Jr. described the sensations and sights of the Regensburg raid in last week's Saturday Evening Post: "A shining silver rectangle of metal sailed past over our right wing. I recognized it as a main-exit door. Seconds later, a black lump came hurtling through the formation, barely missing several propellers. It was a man, clasping his knees to his head, revolving like a diver in a triple somersault, shooting by us so close that...
...that terrible day only 26 bombers and five fighters were lost. In the heavy Wilhelmshaven raid only five of 550 bombers did not return. Two days later another coordinated series of punches, climaxed by another massive Fortress-Liberator raid on the synthetic oil center of Gelsenkirchen, cost the Allies only ten heavies, two Marauders and five fighters. Again two days later a somewhat smaller raid on Düren, coordinated with diversionary attacks, was accomplished without the loss of a single bomber...
...factory had been flattened. Not a building except one shed was standing when the Americans went away. Everybody was thunderstruck by the whole thing. Every one of the bombs fell exactly inside the target area. It was perfection bombing." That was his account of a U.S. Eighth Air Force raid on an unspecified German airplane factory...