187: June 2010

Day 2 WW II Weekend

Russ Gackenbach was the navigator on the photo plane for the Hiroshima

raid. He is 83 years old. It was a thrill for me to talk to Russ because the attorney that Anne and I used when we first moved to North Carolina was the radio operator in the crew. I never heard Warren Coble say anything about the raids and Russ said that no one on the crew knew anything about Warren because he was such a loner. Russ said that Warren never ever responded to requests and the Editor of "The 509th Remembered" said Warren never responded to his requests to write any memoire for the book. I got an autographed picture of the

Hiroshima blast that Russ took with his personal camera while on the photo run just after the Enola Gay dropped the bomb. The photo plane was the "Necessary Evil". The Ladies of Liberty are Andrew Sister impersonators and the are all trained singers that do a remarkable job. The Fairchild PT-26 "Cornell is a trainer. The last picture is a flame thrower in action during a mock battle. There are only a few that have survived from the war.

AVRO LANCASTER

This plane is the only one in North America and one of a few still flying. It is the size of a B-17 but it could carry close to the bomb load of a B-29. It is the only WW II plane other than the B-29 that was cleared to carry the atomic bomb. It is also the plane that carried the huge skipping bombs that are shown in the movie "The Dam Busters". Anne is talking to a crew member. They are standing under the bomb bay.

The man in the wheel chair is talking to the crew who were sitting under wing to get out of the sun. He was a Lancaster pilot. The crew paid attention to his stories of first flying the Manchester which had a habit of breaking up in mid air because of inferior design. He said the Lancaster was a very good plane to fly and that he held the altitude record of 25000 feet in the Lancaster.The last picture is of the Lancaster in a a bank just before a low pass over the crowd