The great big, wide, deep bowels of the internet are trul an amazing place. I read earlier today there are now over 50 million blogs . . . 50 million, and something like 35 million of them are in China.
50 million with a reading audience of 1.5 billion. Staggering numbers indeed.
What this is all means is I find it remarkable when I am lead to something so humbling, so eloquent, and so beautiful —– 1 in 50 million.
About someone who never wanted a spotlight shone upon them. Now there is hope, my hope-that millions hear his story.
My father was a ball gunner on a B-24J Liberator bomber in the Pacific during WW2. He rarely spoke about that.
I had never heard of a blog called the Sippican Cottage until about an hour ago, and now I would like all of you to know about this blog and particularly this story about the author’s father.
The Greatest Generation.
As far as how practicable it was to keep safe hanging below a plane filled with four hundred pound bombs with nothing but the ocean beneath you to bore you and Japanese Zeros shooting at you . . .
Please take a look and read, and grab a hankie.
The Whispering Crane Institute 
Rick:
Truly impressive.
At Brooklyn at Floyd Bennet Field (historic 1st airport in NYC, that never got to grow up but is a part of the NPS Gateway National Park system) there is a WW2 group called HARP (Historic Aircraft Restoration Project) made up of folks, many of them WW2 veterans that restore planes historic to the era and the airport… the NPS personnel there have to frequently run out and quietly pull wires and such ’cause the old guys keep trying to fly… and it being in the flight path out of JFK it is not such a good idea for them to do that. I was down there one day on one of the last flights of the Concorde out of JFK and it took off straight over us… that aircraft always impressed me to see it close up in flight.
Thnx, Ken
http://www.geocities.com/harpfb/index.html
You had me laughing at “quietly run out and pull wires” .. . . . good stuff.
I was never able to see the Concord, in flight, or in person. Nor was I able to “afford” a ticket to fly on one. That’s a good memory.