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From: Joe <rigdonj_at_cfl.rr.com>
Date: Sun Jan 5 09:24:25 2003

At 11:51 AM 1/4/03 +0200, you wrote:
>
>Matthew Sell said:
>
>>
>> Anybody here have a lead on a Boeing B-29 Superfortress for sale or rescue
>> ?
>>
>
>I remember seeing a documentary about a bunch of guys trying to rescue a
>B-17 (I think, WW II, silver colour etc.) from either greenland or
>from some similar cold place (it's -30 celsius outside at the moment
>so I *can* relate :-) It was a truly sad documentary. One member of the
>team got pneumonia and passed away, they had a million obstacles in their
>way.
>
>I don't remember the name of the documentary but I'd love to see it again.
>





>(spoiler warning...)
>
>
>
>
>After the said obstacles they were able to repair the plane, created
>a makeshift runway on the glacier, taxiid the plane to the end of
>the runway (excitement building up here...) and the plane caught fire
>and burned down.
>
>It was a *very* sad moment.


   Theree are two differnt but similar documentaries that I know of. One shows where they tried to rescue a B-29 from (I think) Northern Canada. That's the one that caught on fire and burned up :-(.

   The other is about the rescue of a P-38 that crash landed on a glacier in Greenland. A group recently went there and bored through over two hunderd feet of ice, found and dismantled the P-38 and brought it to the surface a piece at a time. Since then it has been completely restored and is flying again. They're named it "Glacier Girl". The relevent part of this story is that there are six(?) more P-38s and two B-17s on (in!) the same glacier! It seems that the nazies were operating a fake radio station in the North Atlantic and caused the planes to go off course and use up all of their fuel and all of the planes in that flight had to crash land in Greenland.

  Now for a sad story. One of my former teachers was stationed at a B-29 base (Tinian?) in the Pacific when WW-II ended. He said B-29s from all over that part of the pacific were gathered there and that they were in such a hurry to dispose of everything and get home that as soon as the B-29s landed the crew was taken off and the planes were pushed into a huge ravine at the end of the runway. He said they destroyed hundreds of B-29s that way! He also said that NOTHINHG was taken off of them before they were dumped, no maps, no guns, no ammo, not even the fuel. He did say that he snuck into one of them later and removed a tool kit but that it was a court-marshall offense.

   Joe
Received on Sun Jan 05 2003 - 09:24:25 GMT