On a foggy, rainy airfield in Scotland in 1942, the B-17 sat with it’s engines off, waiting for the orders to fire all four and take off for the French coast. Today’s raid, with no fighter escort and in daylight, would be against the train-marshalling yards in the western sector.

The B17 crews would be a perfect target for the Luftwaffe.

The bomber crews in WWII were part of the all out effort to stop the Axis-powers. These were men just “doing their job”, but their job was to save the free-world.

They would go out on mission after mission, hoping to live to rack up enough mission points to be rotated home. The catch was the number of points required to go home kept being raised, so it was an agonizing race to get enough survivable-missions.

The losses were appalling, but the men continued on the duties for which they’d signed up, hoping for more “Milk-runs” that would be easy and have fewer losses.
Air support was vital to the war effort and many a famous person were on the aircrews of the bombers, not the least of which were Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and George McGovern.

This picture was taken at the Planes of Fame museum in Chino, Ca on a foggy, rainy morning. It was taken with a Nikon D200, Nikon 18-200 VR zoom lens, and a Nikon SB-800 Speedlight.

Dedicated to our military troops.