Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] magazine article

[Coalbunny <coalbunny@onewest.net>]

One of my past landlords was some kind of a technician for the USAF in
the late '60s to the mid '70s.  He was stationed in AK for a number of
years, working on the radar stations.  He showed me some pics of the
remains of a Bear that went down east of Nome.  Went down, went boom, no
survivors.  And radar didn't pick it up.  Eskimos first found it.  No
bombs, full crew, even had drop tanks.  Where it went down there wern't
any trees, just tundra.  I wish I could recall the distance from Nome. 
He said they were baffled how the bomber could have gotten opast their
radar, but it did.  I think it had been down long enough that they
couldn't approximate the time of impact.  I'm thinking it had been down
a few weeks before the Eskimos found it.
Carl


Lew Clayman wrote:
> 
> --- Coalbunny <coalbunny@onewest.net> wrote:
> > I recall the Japs did a ballon-bomb thing out of desperation.  Some went
> > way past the states and some actually worked as planned.  Then there's
> > the Russian Bear that went down east of Nome back in the early '70s.
> > Carl
> 
> Yes, in WWII they launched balloon incendiaries against the Pacific coast.  Not
> real effective, but mighty creative.  Gotta give 'em credit for going outside
> the box.  Cleverest part might be that we (US) couldn't steal the idea and use
> it easily back against them, since it works best west-to-east, with the
> prevailing winds.  In order to have used it against the main Japanese islands,
> the allies would first have had to capture China or else achieve naval
> superiority in the seas west of Japan - either would have been close to total
> victory, so the balloon weapon would have been, on the part of the allies, at
> most a tactical detail in the final invasion battles.  Whereas, had it
> functioned at all well, Japan could have used it effectively throughout the
> war.  Not to mention that Japan is a far smaller target for an unguided
> balloon, and a miss by the allies might well have drifted all the way to our
> own shores - whereas if the Japanese balloons missed the United States, they'd
> most likely hit Canada, almost as useful to them.  Clever!  Good thing for us
> that the balloons flat-out sucked as weapons, in actual practice.
> 
> What was the "Russian Bear" you mention?
> 
> -Lew
> 
> =====
> "I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter."
>              - Pascal, Provincial Letters XVI
> =====
> 
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-- 
"The plain meaning of the right of the people to keep arms is that it is
an individual, rather than a collective, right and is not limited to
keeping arms while engaged in active military service or as a member of
a select militia such as the National Guard." - U.S. vs. Emerson, 5th
Circuit Federal Court- published October 16, 2001