From the Magazine Archives - Page 11 of 17

Pearl Harbor images of the Aftermath – December 8 and Onward

The images of the attack on Pearl Harbor will be forever etched in the mind’s eye of Americans everywhere. As with the images of the airliners hitting the World Trade Center towers, the fire and smoke of December 7, 1941, can’t be erased from our memories. We seldom see, however, photos that portray the aftermath […]

Pearl Harbor – A Greenhorn relates his experience

Back in the mid-1930s, when I was a teenager in California, I used to spend a lot of time fishing off the municipal pier at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. I was standing on the pier one day when a flight of 16 to 20 Boeing P-26s came roaring by fast and low in tight formation. I will never forget the look of the pilots, with their heads sticking out of the cockpit and their white silk scarves billowing behind them, all looking like Eddie Rickenbacker.

Bellanca CH-300 Pacemaker: 1929’s Heavy Hauler

We only have roads into town three months of the year, while all the lakes and rivers are frozen. Otherwise the only way into Norman Wells and many of the other communities around us is by airplane. Usually float planes. That’s why I had the Bellanca CH-300 restored. In the 1930s it was one of […]

Maxim Machine Gun – WW I’s revolutionary advance in weaponry

If you do an Internet search for “chattering Spandaus,” you only get 89 hits, but that stock phrase has become synonymous with World War I aviation. Generations of moviegoers have seen the image: the leering Teutonic ace, hard eyes gleaming behind squared-off goggles above the blazing muzzles. The fact is that there is no such […]

Sen-toku: Japan’s Underwater Aircraft Carriers

Sneaking Up On America … Again Pearl Harbor was the first. The American West Coast was to be next for a sneak bacteriological attack. Then, bomb New York City and obliterate the Panama Canal. According to the Japanese High Command, that was all to be accomplished early in the conflict—and they were deadly serious about […]

WW II Military and Aviation History Cartoonist: Milton Caniff

Milton Caniff never served in the military, but, his spirit was on virtually every battlefield of WW II. His artwork on the nose of fighters and bombers and in thousands of military papers touched those in combat in ways nothing else could. Born in 1907, Caniff moved from Ohio to New York in […]

Habbaniya Surprise – Battle of Britain, Iraqi Style

At 2:00 on the morning of 30 April 1941, employees of the British Embassy in Baghdad were awakened by large military convoys rumbling from al-Rashid barracks, across bridges and out into the desert in the direction of the town of Habbaniya, Iraq, where the Royal Air Force (RAF) maintained its largest flight school in the […]

On a Flying Wing and a Prayer

Spring, 1944. My head wound had healed but my back was still killing me when I jumped off the train in occupied France. I had recently escaped from neutral Switzerland after being blown out of my B-24 Liberator while making my 20th bomb run into Germany. Although I landed on the German side of the […]

Today in Aviation History: Corky Meyer Test-Flies the F9F Panther

Sixty-seven years ago today, Flight Journal’s old friend and former Grumman test pilot Corwin H. (“Corky”) Meyer took off from the company’s 5,000 foot runaway at Bethpage, Long Island, New York, in the first prototype XF9F-2 Panther, Bu. No. 122475. In this article, he takes the reader along on some wild rides. Corky was world renown as […]

No Tailhook? No Way!

Out-of-fuel Spitfire and a Carrier: No options As the Supermarine Spitfire Mk Vc approached the stern of the aircraft carrier USS Wasp (CV-7), Pilot Officer Jerry Smith, RCAF, knew he was quickly running out of options. His first approach had been high and much too fast, and the 21-year-old fighter pilot knew that unless he […]