PetaPixel reprints a post (from the LensRentals blog) about a WWII story I’ve never heard before.
Jay Zeamer was a pilot. But he wasn’t a great one. He had problems passing his check tests, especially when it came to the “landing” part. He managed to get into B-17s and started flying as a “fill-in” pilot and on photoreconnaissance runs.
But nobody wanted to fly with him. So he created his own crew by gathering up every…
… misfit and ne’er-do-well in the 43rd Air Group. As another pilot, Walt Krell, recalled, “He recruited a crew of renegades and screwoffs. They were the worst — men nobody else wanted. But they gravitated toward one another and made a hell of a team.”
But they didn’t have a plane. So they grabbed onto a dilapidated B-17 that had been flown in for spare parts and somehow rebuilt it into flying condition. The base commander thought this was a pretty good thing, and intended to assign the plane to another crew.
Not surprisingly, Zeamer and his crew took exception to this idea, and according Walt Krell the crew slept in their airplane, having loudly announced that the 50 caliber machine guns were kept loaded in case anyone came around to ‘borrow’ it. There was a severe shortage of planes, so the base commander ignored the mutiny and let the crew fly – but generally expected them to take on missions that no one else wanted.
Zeamer and crew called the plane “Old 666”. And yes, they took on the missions no one else wanted.
Even among the men of a combat air station, the Eager Beavers became known as gun nuts. They replaced all of the light 30 caliber machine guns in the plane with heavier 50 caliber weapons. Then the 50 caliber machine guns were replaced with double 50 caliber guns. Zeamer had another pair of machine guns mounted to the front of the plane so he could remotely fire them like a fighter pilot. And the crew kept extra machine guns stored in the plane, just in case one of their other guns jammed or malfunctioned.
My kind of guys.
Having a plane with an apparently nutty crew who volunteered for every awful mission not surprisingly made the commanding officers look the other way.
This would make for one heck of a movie. Especially in light of what eventually happened to “Old 666” and her crew. But for that you should go read the rest of the story at PetaPixel or LensRentals.
Meanwhile, by way of Insta (who draws a different conclusion than I do): W. Joseph Campbell, author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism
, writes about Orson Welles, “War of the Worlds”, and the question of whether there really was a mass panic.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 30th, 2013 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Clippings, History, Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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