Ww2 bomb messages9/14/2023 ![]() ![]() Their orders for Pilsen were for visual bombing only, which meant the bombardiers had to see the target clearly. Hesley spread out his maps and charts and busied himself with calculations for what would be the Eighth Air Forces’ last bombing mission of World War II. Fisher slid into a miles-long formation of 296 B-17s and crossed the English Channel. The bomb-laden plane lifted off the runway and the English countryside faded beneath them. Lewis Fisher, gunned the four massive engines. This mission happened to fall on his third wedding anniversary with a little luck, he’d soon be home in Paris, Texas, where Maribelle waited with their 2-year-old boy, John. Indeed, Hesley, who had turned 24 three days earlier, hadn’t been scheduled to fly this day, but had volunteered to take the place of a sick navigator. He had never flown with this crew before. He settled into the navigator’s station at a tiny desk beneath the cockpit and just behind the bombardier’s position in the plane’s plexiglass nose. On the flightline, Hesley hoisted himself into a B-17 named Checkerboard Fort. John notes: "She looks like a woman whose husband has died." Right, William Hesley circa 1941. Left, John and his mother shortly after his father disappeared. ![]() This article is a selection from the January/February 2020 issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy ![]() Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 In the spring of 1945, the Americans and Brits had another motive for destroying the factory: Once the war was over, they didn’t want the Russians to dismantle the factory for industrial production at home, which made the mission one of the earliest chess moves of the Cold War. Allied bombers had tried several times to destroy it, without success. Ever since the Nazis had taken over Czechoslovakia in 1939, more than 40,000 Czech civilian workers there had built tanks and cannons, machine guns and ammunition for the Germans. Once over the city of Pilsen, the B-17 Flying Fortress crews would drop their 6,000-pound payloads onto Skoda Works, a massive 400-acre factory complex that had armed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I. Hesley had joined the war late, just four months earlier, but 24 times already he had choked down an early-morning breakfast at Podington Air Base, north of London, and crowded into the briefing room, waiting for his fate to be revealed.Īn intelligence officer slid the curtain aside, from left to right across the map, farther and farther, all the way beyond Germany to their target in western Czechoslovakia. William Hesley and told him to get ready to fly. on April 25, 1945, an orderly woke Second Lt. But still the Germans fought on.Īt 2 a.m. Bombers had already destroyed much of military value to the Germans and flattened wide swaths of several cities. No more missions, no more dice rolls, no more terror in the sky.Ī map in the Officer’s Club showed the advancing front lines, with Germany nearly pinched in half as the Americans and British pushed in from the west and the Russians squeezed from the east. Any day now a cheer would sweep across the airfield. ![]()
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