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A Physicist with the Air Force

Posted by michael on from the meet-new-and-interesting-people,-and-kill-them dept.

An anonymous submitter - anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today, sigh - sent in this tale about the duties of a physicist during World War II.

3 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Don't ride the bomb... by mikeage · · Score: 4, Funny
    From the article:

    At the pilot's insistence (I will not repeat his heated words), I dislodged the target by jumping on it while hanging from a bomb-bay rack and wearing a parachute, just in case.

    For those who didn't read the article (after all, if you did, this comment is worthless to you), he's talking about a training "dummy aircraft" for gunners to practice shooting at that didn't drop from the bomber that was carrying, and jammed in the bomb bay, preventing the doors from closing (which meant they couldn't land). Quite a hilarious mental picture if you ask me ;)

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  2. Slide Rule Club by Dr.+Dew · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At first I thought he was kidding about the slide rule club - I guess we're this generation's equivalent.

    It's a little sobering to think of these engineering problems in their human context - even ignoring the fact that he's talking about bombers, it's striking to think that they had enough data to calculate 70-to-1 fighter-to-B29 kill ratios on rear attacks and 3-to-1 kill ratios on front attacks.

    The opportunity to make adjustments to decisions as theoretical data are replaced by empirical data is exciting and rewarding. But I'm glad my adjustments don't have an immediate impact with respect to people living and dying.

  3. Payment: Old Granddad! by hyrdra · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is an article which really makes me appriciate what we have today. If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.

    My favorite line of the entire article (in reference to the fabrication of slide rules used in the missions):

    But, to avoid paperwork and delivery delays, I chose to have them made at the Harmon Field sheet-metal shop on Guam. At that time, there wasn't much combat damage to B-29s. So the repair crews readily gave up some of their beach time for a few bottles of Old Granddad.

    Yep, things we're certainly different back then!

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    "I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95