Good Day,
I was just wondering, when a P-51 drops their extra fuel tanks in combat over germany, where do they land and how many people actually get injured/have been injured by these balloons of aluminum?
Cheers
Milan
They have a tendency to land on the ground for some reason, god only knows how many folks got konked on the head by one.
You’d think a lot… I bet a lot of people had an “unexpected guest” land on their dinner table!!
Just as a note of interest, they also used 108 gallon tanks made of a paper/resin composite. Not saying it wouldn’t hurt if one of those puppies landed on you though.
Have people been killed by them…there is alot of humor in it as we all know, but this seems like a pretty serious thing to happen to someone…
Consider the alternative. Would you rather have empty aluminum fuel tanks raining down on you or 500 pound bombs? And if some of the enemy were killed by these empty tanks, so what? That is what the aircraft were doing there, that is looking for enemy to kill, right? War is the most uncivilized of endevours. Maybe some day we (humans) will all come to our sences and solve our differences in a humane way. We can always hope. Cheers!
While at a fire base in Viet Nam we had two Skyraiders provided air support while we were taking fire. On one of their runs they started firing overhead. It rained 20MM shell casings and one bounced off of one GI’s steel pot (helmet). He wasn’t hurt but it stunned him. Stuff happens!
I got hit in the head with a 1/2" long screw once, well hit in the hard hat, but it rung my bell, and it was from about 3 stories up! I can’t imagine what the shell casing would feel like, and probably burning hot to!!! OUCH! I’m curious if they ever accidently dropped them over a town when they were perhaps getting shot at? That would be pretty bad, but like RangerJ said, thats better than bombs!
During the Viet Nam war, when we were bombing Hanoi and other areas of the north, they accused us of dropping bombs on schools, hospitals and other “off limits” places. The air defense groups fired hundreds of the SA-2 Guideline surface to air missiles at our aircraft. Each one had a solid propellant booster section that dropped off after a few seconds of flight. Even empty, that thing weighed several hundred pounds and was about a thousand feet up when it separated from the sustainer section. Once the warhead, (near the nose), exploded, there would be a lot of pieces of the back 2/3 of the missile that would drop back to the ground from many thousands of feet up. Every AAA, anti-aircraft artillery shell that was fired created tens of thousands of little pieces of shrapnel that had to fall back down somewhere. They did almost as much damage to themselves from falling debris as we did by intentionally dropping bombs on them. Those conical, straw hats they liked to wear probably didn’t provide a whole lot of help when Chicken Little said, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!”
Darwin, O.F. [alien]
Couple of interesting points…
A few years back there was a National Geo article on Siberia, there was a photo of a Russian Dacha (i.e. summer cabin) The water tank was a “spent” external fuel tank…pretty neat use for it. No report about anyone getting brained though.
In relation to what Darwin wrote…There are two books that the author or interviewees specifically comment about spent AAA being a bigger danger to ground personel then the actual falling ordinance. Geoffry Morley Mower on the campaign in the Western Desert and an author (name escapes me right now) on the South Pacific campaign.
Both mention the dame=age and casualties caused by spent casings…pretty nasty little buggers…
Besides any collateral damage, it is my understanding that the Germans did extensive recycling of downed aircraft and anything else for the metal.
Probably most unpleasant to get one of those droptanks on your roof, but still not as bad as what happened here in Belgium about 15 years or so ago.
This guy was minding his own business, watching television in the afternoon, when the next moment his house was a ruin (not to mention that he was dead too).
What happened was this ; a couple of hours earlier, some Russian pilot had problems with his Mig and decided to eject, knowing, the plane was minutes away from crashing. Bad call, the plane didn’t crash and kept on flying to the west till it ran out of fuel, funny thing is, the area where it crashed on the house, is a rural area, with just here and there a villa or farm.
…of all the stupid luck [:o)]
Think it should be mentioned that they were not always empty when dropped. If fighter needed to engage enemy planes, they would jettison the tanks empty or not.
My [2c]:
Also, they didn’t always drop them when empty.
If they saw no need, and they had the later model improved tanks (the paper ones tended to “wreck havoc” with the fighters’ fuel pressure system) they simply went back with them on so as to ensure the extra fuel reserve.
In fact, sometimes a pilot would forget to jettison the tank when action hit, with sometimes bad results. A famous P-38 pilot (I forget who) was lost in the Pacific when he got hot to engage the enemy but forgot to drop the tanks (they came factory equipped for that model).
For a while the Luftwaffe was ordered not to until too many German fighters were sent down as a ball of flames when a B-17 gunner hit his drop tank.
Tom T[C):-)]
In WWI, when a Zepplin was downed by a British pilot, a crew member fell from the wreckage without a parachute, falling through a dormitory roof, literally landing in an empty bed! [:D]
In the WWII ETO, in addition to any drop tanks, they had pieces of both Allied and German fighters, bombers, crews (both intact and dismembered), off-target bombs, spent casings, various “spare” equipment jettisons, etc.
I recommend the recent “Memphis Belle” movie to illustrate this fairly well.
So I don’t think this was the greatest of their concerns.
Tom T [C):-)]
i agree, if i was flying and encountered an emeny, id drop my tanks as well. But I am just wondering when it isnt an enemy in the case of Germany or Vietnam when allied planes were maybe over france or holland, then these drop tanks must cause quite a bit of havoc…i dont see a way around this but as well I dont think innocents should die from dropped fueltanks. Was there some procedure to avoid this?
Cheers
Milan
I think the spent fuel tanks were among the least of the worries for people on the ground, considering all the other things that could be raining down from the sky. Living our lives in relative freedom from warfare (the threat of terrorism is the closest thing North America has ever had), it’s hard to imagine how cheap life gets during wartime.
A few anecdotes and such…
A friend of mine’s father was a P-51 pilot in the Pacific. Late in the war, junior pilots had to do stints with the infantry as target spotters for their group. He had to do this duty at Iwo Jima. He would lay out flags that the fighters would use to hit the target. He said the most terrifying thing from the whole experience was not the Japanese, but having to contend with the .50 shell casings raining down on friendly positions as the fighters opened up on their target well over friendly lines.
Tom T mentioned a famous fighter pilot in the Pacific killed when he didn’t eject his tanks. That was Tommy McGuire. His section was jumped by the Japanese soon after take off and they had full tanks. He tried to maneuver at low altitude with the drop tanks on and stalled out.
The US started using paper tanks in an attempt to deny the Germans the high grade of aluminum from all the drop tanks raining down on them every day.
Shrpnel from AA can be deadly. During the “Air Raid on LA” in February 1942, trigger happy AA gunners around Los Angeles started firing at ghosts in the sky over a panic about a Japanese air attack. There were 5 or 6 people killed or injured from falling shrapnel.
People who fire their guns in the air on January 1 have also killed people. I came close to being a statistic once. I was outside at midnight on Jan 1 and I heard somebody shooting a gun a couple of blocks away. A few seconds later I both heard and felt something embed itself in the lawn within a couple of feet where I was standing. I got indoors very quickly.
My father (who was in the Pacific with the USAAF in WW II) said that when he was at Tac Loban right after Leyte, the showers at the air base were made from a P-38 drop tank. They painted it black to absorb sunlight and make a natural water heater. They then attached a shower nozzle to one end and a valve. He said it made a pretty decent shower.
The drop tank on the F6F was so distinctive that Hellcat pilots reported that friendly flak fire from their own ships was a lot higher when they returned to the carrier without the tank than when they had it.
Finally, I Googled the story of the Russian MiG crash in Belgium: http://mm.iit.uni-miskolc.hu/Data/Winx/stories/accid23.html
Bill
Drop tanks wasn’t the only thing falling from the sky over Vietnam. The also got their fair share of MER’s, TER’s and pylons as well. Anything that produced drag in a yanking, banking, turning, burning dog fight was reason to get rid of them.
Actually our F-4 aircraft very seldom got rid of the 370 gallon wing tanks. If they were not in a maneuvering situation, there was no need to get rid of them. A lot of kills were made at a distance of two or three miles and the missile had to do the maneuvering, not the shooter.
Shortly after WWII, a few California guys figured that drop tanks might make good race cars. They were made of aluminum, so they were light, and wouldn’t rust, they could be had from a salvage yard for anywhere from $5.00 to less than a couple of hundred, and they were aerodynamic. The big tanks slung under a P-38 were big enough to fit an engine and driver inside. You can find out all you can handle in a Google search of “belly tank, racers, salt flats.”
