A Beautiful Mess of a Plane

It was designed for but arrived a year too late to make it into WWII, so it was re-forged into the bridge between the Prop Era B-29s and the Jet Age B-52s.  Somewhat forgotten today, the B-36 Peacemaker was in service for less than fifteen years before it was phased out.  Seventy six years ago yesterday, one fell out of the sky over Canada; you can read about the incident here at This Day in Aviation.

Anyway, it's a beautiful plane in its own ungainly way.  Glad we never had to use them for their main purpose.

Beast of a plane, but I'd love to have gone up in one.  Once.

With the retractable gun turrets, it has a certain sci-fi vibe.

A New-ish D-Day Documentary

I say new-ish, because it's 11 years old.  Explains Bayou Renaissance Man at his blog (where he directs to a newly posted youtube video of the documentary in its entirety):

Back in 2014, the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of France, Jean-Christophe Rosé produced this 90-minute documentary for France Télévisions.  It uses archival footage that was remastered and colorized, and is probably one of the best sources to understand what the run-up to D-Day involved (with training and other preparations) and the reality of combat on that day.

You can see my Dad very near the start at 1:50 in, and the footage is used again at the 15 minute mark.  He was a combat engineer who landed on Omaha Beach, Easy Red, somewhere in the third wave.  Anyway, here's the link to the documentary.  Total run length is an hour forty.

I didn't have a tag to fit this post, but it calls for a new one: history.  I'll be using this going forward, and will be adding it to a few older posts as I come across them.