World War II Airplanes

These photos were taken about a year ago...There
was a big storm along the Texas coast and the
Confederate Air Force sent some of their planes
inland to escape the weather. Three jewels spent
a few days at Grayson County Airport (the former
Perrin Air Force Base) until the storm blew past.
One plane is a B-17 Flying Fortress...a veteran of
the European air war. This is the type plane that my
father-in-law bailed out of before being captured by
the Germans. He spent the last six months of the war
in a POW camp.
The second plane is a B-25 Mitchell Bomber. This very
plane is one of the Raiders that bombed Tokyo in early
1942 as a payback for Pearl Harbor. Sixteen B-25's took
off from the carrier Hornet and bombed the Japanese
capitol to show the enemy they were not immune from
America's wrath.
The third plane is a P-47 Thunderbolt. This was a far
better plane than history has recorded. At the beginning
of World War II America's top fighter was the P-40 Tomahawk
and was almost laughed at by the Japanese and the
Germans. The Thunderbolt came along and took the smiles
off their faces. While it could not turn with the Zeroes and
Messerschmidt's, it packed a wallop and provided it's pilots
with a lot more protection than their adversaries.
These planes and a lot more can be seen at the Confederate
Air Force Museum in Corpus Christi, Texas.