chatarra
All posts tagged "war"
Esto tenéis que leerlo.
1945 Letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his family from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival
(via yimmyayo)
Otto Dix es, bueno, Dios.
(via obsidianobelisk)
Ojalá alguno de los profesores de esas asignaturas que amargaron mis años de estudiante las hubiera impartido con la décima parte de mano izquierda y encanto que tiene Xplanes contando historias de aviación. Esta sobre escuadrones femeninos de bombarderos rusos tampoco tiene precio. Hasta existe un cómic de Garth Ennis!
Night Witches
On June 22 1941, Germany commenced Operation Barbarossa - the invasion of the Soviet Union. The resulting conflict is known by many names - The Eastern Front, the Russo-German War, the Axis-Soviet War to name a few - but scholars/historians tend to agree that it was the largest, bloodiest and most ferocious theatre of war in human history.
Marina Raskova, a famous aviatrix before the war, used her personal influence with Joseph Stalin to secure permission to form three all-female combat units. The most famous was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. They flew obsolete Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes (believed to be the second most produced aircraft in history), and flew night-time harassment bombing missions against enemy encampments. The Po-2 aircraft could only carry a couple of bombs each, so missions were mainly psychological in impact - the aircraft would cut their engines and glide over the targets, release their bombs, and hopefully vanish into the night (there are stories of enemy troops hearing singing as the silent aircraft passed overhead)
The German forces called them “Nachthexen” - Night Witches
The missions were endless and highly dangerous. The Witches would regularly fly in groups - each aircraft taking it in turn to act as a decoy against searchlights and flak. Losses to enemy nightfighters also took their toll. Many refused to wear parachutes, opting for a revolver instead..
By the end of the war, the Soviet women bomber pilots had earned 23 Hero of the Soviet Union medals and dozens of Orders of the Red Banner, flew more than 24,000 sorties and dropped 23,000 tons of bombs. Most surviving pilots had racked up nearly 1,000 missions each.
(art above from the excellent but brutal “BATTLEFIELDS: Night Witches”, a 3-part comic mini-series by Garth Ennis and Russ Braun, released last year)
¿Por qué lee CiRC un blog sobre aviación? Pues por estas cosas, hombre. Por estas cosas.
The “Ye Olde Pub”
On December 20th 1943, 2nd Lieutenant Charles “Charlie” Brown, of the 379th Bomb group, flew the B-17 Flying Fortress “Ye Olde Pub” on a bombing run against the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant at Bremen, Germany.
The squadron encountered heavy flak on approach to the target. Brown had to feather two of his engines, and his aircraft began to trail behind the rest of the bomber formation. He watched his flight leader plummet to the ground ahead of him.
Suddenly, eight fighters attacked from the front, joined by another seven from the rear. The crippled B-17 managed to down one (possibly two aircraft) before starting to spiral to the ground. Brown recalls:
”I either spiraled or spun and came out of the spin just above the ground. My only conscience memory was of dodging trees but I had nightmares for years and years about dodging buildings and then trees. I think the Germans thought that we had spun in and crashed”The B-17 recovered, but Brown and four of his crew were injured, and one of his gunners was dead. They had no compass and no oxygen. Then they were engaged by a lone Messerschmitt Bf-109, piloted by Franz Stigler. Stigler approached the bomber from the rear, then noticed that the tail gunner was incapacitated, bleeding profusely.
“I saw his gunner lying in the back profusely bleeding….. so, I couldn’t shoot.”
As he flew by the cockpit, he gestured for Brown to land the aircraft - he refused. He tried to get Brown to turn to Sweden - only 30 minutes away - he also refused.
He continued to escort the B-17 towards England, eventually saluting Brown and heading back to base. He told his superiors that the plane had gone down over the sea.
“I tried to get him to land in Germany and he didn’t react at all. So, I figured, well, turn him to Sweden, because his airplane was so shot up; I never saw anything flying so shot up…the most badly damaged aircraft I ever saw, still flying.”
“I didn’t have the heart to finish off those brave men,” Stigler later said. “I flew beside them for a long time. They were trying desperately to get home and I was going to let them do it. I could not have shot at them. It would have been the same as shooting at a man in a parachute.”
Stigler and Brown eventually found each other in 1989, and became firm friends. They both passed away last year.
Este aparato de belleza futurista es el giróscopo láser de un misil balístico Peacekeeper. La mayoría de los misiles nucleares avanzados de las últimas dos décadas o así llevan un juego redundante de bolitas como esta, cuya increíble precisión (funcionan en el vacío espacial y debajo del agua) tiene como objetivo guiar el petardazo al lugar correcto.
La foto forma parte de esta ominosa galería de retratos de armas de destrucción masiva, cuya visita recomiendo encarecidamente. Me fascina la luz mortecina y aséptica de instalación gubernamental que ilumina a los sujetos. Parecen casi apesadumbrados, como diciendo “yo sólo trabajo aquí” desde un punto impreciso entre el retrato de cine negro y un catálogo de diseño industrial.
El fotógrafo, Martin Miller, tiene unas cuantas galerías espectaculares que merece la pena ver (si te estimulan esta clase de cosas). También podéis leer más detalles sobre el funcionamiento del giróscopo láser, que conceptualmente no es tan complejo como parece, pero cuyo proceso de fabricación sigue siendo “highly classified”.
“Around 1:30 p.m. Eastern time today, a World War II-era P-38 Lightning fighter plane is set to take off from Teterboro Airport in northeastern New Jersey, bound for Duxford, England — where it is almost 65 years overdue.
The plane was one of six P-38s and two B-17 bombers on their way to help shore up the defenses of the British Isles in July 1942, seven months after Pearl Harbor, when bad weather blocked them first from reaching a refueling base in Iceland and then from making it back to their previous stop in western Greenland. The pilots wound up having to make emergency landings on Greenland’s ice cap, where they were spotted by air and rescued by dogsled teams three days later.
Glaciergirl Greenland’s harsh climate soon buried the planes in snow and ice – almost 270 feet of it, eventually — so though the rough whereabouts of what came to be called the Lost Squadron were known, the planes were not precisely located until 1983. Nine years later - when they had been icebound for 50 years - an expedition succeeded in burrowing down to one of the P-38s.”
(via Telstar Logics)
Wow.
(via yimmyayo)
“A Russian World War II veteran wearing a Navy uniform (no name given) toasts his fellow veterans during the annual Victory Day celebration in downtown Moscow on Saturday, May 9, 2009.”
Día de la Victoria en la Plaza Roja, de The Big Picture.
Gracias, Jenny.
