It never gets this cold in Cuero, southeast of Austin, but these boys are headed to altitude in open cockpits. Taken at the former Cuero Army Air Field in 1942 when this was basic pilot training. I do not subscribe to the "greatest generation" baloney, which I think mainly scorns Korea and Vietnam veterans, but it’s for sure these guys had to deal with some fairly primitive technology. They were just lucky to have the almost complete backing of the whole country during their war.
Comments Off on PT-19 trainees
Posted in Library, Texana, Troops
Tagged basic pilot training, Cuero Army Airfield, Fairchild PT-19, greatest generation, open cockpit, PT-19, World War II
Was reading a new genealogy narrative pulled together by a cousin of Mrs. Charm’s and came across the phrase of the headline. The description of this old technology wasn’t clear, so I searched it and came up with this which is. It also has some diagrams and a photo to reinforce it. Pretty ingenious.
Comments Off on One-legged jack bed
Posted in Genealogy, Library, Mrs. Charm, Texana
Tagged Alabama bed, jack bed, one-legged jack bed
Pilot Gordon Bennett Robertson Jr.’s first fire-bomb run over Tokyo in March, 1945 took him through boiling thermals produced by the burning city about 5,000 feet below. They bounced his B-29 up and down and then flipped the sixty-ton bomber onto its back. He was able to recover only through a Split-S maneuver he’d practiced flying fighters in training.
And so it goes through thirty-five missions over the Japanese Empire in Robertson’s always tense, sometimes thrilling 270-page memoir which kept me up late finishing it over several nights. I’ve long had a special interest in the B-29, but never before felt that I was on the flight deck with the pilots in their helmets and flak suits threading their way through blinding search-light beams and a hail of shrapnel from anti-aircraft bursts.
Robertson, president of the 29th Bomb Group’s reunion association, helped put it to rest last year after twenty-two years because the surviving membership is getting too old to cope with it any more. Their memorabilia is on display where most of them first met the big bomber, in a museum at their old training field in Pratt, Kansas. But this book surely will live on, a testament to the young men who flew the big silver birds that finally helped bring Imperial Japan to its knees.
Comments Off on Bringing The Thunder
Posted in Library
Tagged B-29, Bringing The Thunder, Gordon Bennett Robertson, Jr.
This is the DVD of the 2006 ABC-Disney Docudrama which, despite widespread claims that it is not available thanks to censorship by the Clintons, in fact can be bought here. At least I’ve ordered a copy, though it hasn’t arrived yet. Did get and watch Blocking The Path To 9/11 and it’s a good ‘un.
Comments Off on The Path To 9/11 DVD
Posted in Library
Tagged Blocking The Path to 9/11, The Clintons, The Path to 9/11, The Path to 9/11 DVD
I’m only about half through it, but this is a wonderful book. Full of good humor and understanding of people and politics, from the small town where everyone knows your business to the national arena where they think they do. The criticism is measured and often funny. There’s none of the whining and get-even, that I can see, that’s been reported so often in the legacy media.
If Sarah wrote all of it, she’s a helluva writer. If she had help, she apparently didn’t need much. The "voice" is consistent and assured throughout.
It is a political book, of course, and as self-serving as Barry’s Dreams From My Father. Although his book is more about race and grievance and her’s rarely touches on either subject and then only in connection with her husband’s Eskimo heritage. So there’s evident calculation in these pages, but that’s not surprising. Whether she ever runs for president or anything else, she wants us to like her. And I think any reader without an ax to grind will like the person Sarah reveals. Unless you’re already convinced that you hate her, you should get a copy. It’s worth the read.
Comments Off on Going Rogue: An American Life
Posted in Library
I enjoyed this 1992 scifi novel of physicist Charles Sheffield’s, though it seemed unnecessarily complicated in the beginning. A little more action before establishing the seven main characters would have prevented me from putting it down so often. Sheffield died of brain cancer in 2002, which resonates because a good friend of Mrs. Charm’s is struggling with it. Seems to have it licked for the moment, though the odds of that lasting are very low.
I bring up Sheffield to point out how easy it is to fall into these stories of ordinary life in the solar system, as if we had gotten off the engineering dime and were actually living in/on Luna, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt. A lot of Cold As Ice occurs on (actually, under the surface of) Ganymede, which recalls Heinlein’s impossible young adult novel, Farmer In The Sky, which Mr. B. and I started as a bedtime story but never finished.
We had the space probe pictures and details of Jupiter’s radiation to consult, as Heinlein did not. Also life on (under, actually) Europa, which seems plausible, despite Sheffield’s scientific realism of the dangers of Jovian radiation. I hope all this verisimilitude means humanity really will do these things and not just wallow forever in political corruption and the threat of war. But a posed result of the latter is limned chillingly in Cold As Ice as one of the spurs for continued colonization.
Comments Off on Cold As Ice
Posted in Library, Mr. Boy, Mrs. Charm, Obamalot, Rancho Roly Poly, Science/Engineering, Space
Tagged Asteroid Belt, brain cancer, Charles Sheffield, Cold As Ice, Europa, Farmer In The Sky, Ganymede, intense radiation, Jupiter, Luna, Mars, Robert Heinlein
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 