Picture of the day

Long may she run.

Many didn't make it. Kingman, AZ, 1946:

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In happier times, many miles away.

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I for one always find pics from the mass scrapings done post war to be heart breaking.
 
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82nd Airborne Division being dynamic as #### during Operation Urgent Fury, 1983.

That is a pretty cool pic.


I thought the Memphis Belle was already restored and in flying condition? *EDIT* I was wrong. the B17 I saw in Seattle that I thought was the Memphis Belle turns out was a replica for the movie.

Wow, she sold for $350 back in 1945!
 
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People may or may not know this, but most of those aircraft wound up as '50's era aluminum cooking utensils (so I've been told). A great recycling program

Especially considering all the civilian metal that was recycled to be put into the war effort only a few years before
 
Feckin' sad end to things that helped end a war.

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Kingman in 1947:

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Thirty six thousand gunners trained at the Kingman Army Air Field during World War II. With peace in the world and the war ending in 1945, there was no further need for a gunnery school or for the aircraft that carried the guns. In 1946 the training base became Storage Depot 41, and over two years seven thousand aircraft were melted down to 70,000,000 pounds of aluminum and shipped out of Kingman. In July 1948, the Military released the base for civilian use.

Do a google maps search for "Kingman, AZ boneyard". They're still storing airplanes there. Commercial stuff, mostly, but that place is still doing what it did 70 years ago.
 
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The USS Santa Fe lies alongside the heavily listing USS Franklin to provide assistance after the aircraft carrier had been hit and set afire by a single Japanese dive bomber, during the Okinawa invasion, on March 19, 1945, off the coast of Honshu, Japan. More than 800 aboard were killed, with survivors frantically fighting fires and making enough repairs to save the ship.
 
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Not sure if this is correct, I think that this is a battleship line.
The battleship USS Pennsylvania, followed by three cruisers, moves in line into Lingayen Gulf preceding the landing on Luzon, in the Philippines, in January of 1945.
 
The U.S. Navy battleship USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) leads USS Colorado (BB-45), USS Louisville (CA-28), USS Portland (CA-33), and USS Columbia (CL-56) into Lingayen Gulf before the landing on Luzon, Philippines, in January 1945.
 
Feckin' sad end to things that helped end a war.

Kingman in 1947:

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Do a google maps search for "Kingman, AZ boneyard". They're still storing airplanes there. Commercial stuff, mostly, but that place is still doing what it did 70 years ago.

I watched a program last week on Willow Run Aircraft plant. They rolled a B-24 Liberator out the door every 55 minutes. Kind of mind boggling really, considering there are over 1 million individual pieces in a "Lib".
 
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