Some Remarkable WWII Airforce Photos

It’s amazing what a plane can go through and still keep flying.

This morning I was looking through some photos on the site and came into a section of photos taken in England of planes that had been damaged on missions, but still returned to base.

Here are a couple of examples:

Then I came across this one:

I did a little research and found a Missing Air Crew Report for this plane (one member of the crew was killed) and then found Footnote Pages, created from the Social Security Death Index, for the pilot, Lawrence DeLancey and the navigator, Ray Ledoux. I added a few web links and some stories about this amazing event to their pages.

Here’s the first image in the section of battle damaged planes in England. You can browse through the collection using the filmstrip at the bottom to look at other images.

You can view all the World War II Airforce images for free.

2 thoughts on “Some Remarkable WWII Airforce Photos”

I read recently that a group of scientists looked carefully at each plane that returned to note what was damaged on each returning plane. Their reccomendationd included hardening systems and assemblies that were undamaged on the returning planes. This may seem counter-intuitive but the logic was that the areas that were undamaged on returning planes may have been damaged on planes that did not return so hardening those areas might lead to more planes returning.

Sidenote: There is a book entitled “In Enemy Hands” by Bryan Philpott 1981, that discusses why planes are shot down as determined by the Germans as they inspected Allied downed planes