Being under impression after talking with Shere, visiting the Nanton Lancaster Museum, I thought about how to continue this little research on the long range bombers - pilots and machines - and post some results of it here.
Naturally, I also tried to find something related in Russian resources, - as far as you know, the Soviet Union, the USA, the United Kingdom were the ‘Big Three’ of Allies during the World Word Two. Among many episodes of the war that I remember from reading the Soviet publications, I could recall the ones accounting on how the US and the Soviet Union Air Forces mutually coordinated operations in which the American Flying Fortresses running ‘bomb shuttles’ would start from the Western Europe aerodromes, go to their targets on the battle fronts, and then continue further East over the Soviet controlled territory for refueling, the crew rest, and replenishing the munition. Once this was done, the bombers would set off for the back journey to their home bases via targets again.
And the Soviet Air Force had their own long range bombers too.
A friend of mine, a great enthusiast of historic photography sent me recently these images showing moments of the Petlyakov-8 long range bombers ground operation and maintenance service.
Aleksei, - that’s his name, - is collecting, systematizing, and posting old photographs on his account on the Yandex photo-hosting - a sort of ‘Flickr’ in the Russian language Internet.
Aleksei saw my brief report from the Lancaster Museum in Nanton, and he promptly found a couple of ‘matching images’ - ‘Pe-8′ above - as for the planes, and this ‘5-ton bomb’ - as for their weapons. The above picture of the Petlyakov-8 was a notice on the back saying that it was taken (ca. 1943) in ‘the Colonel’s Lebedev division’. The one that is below was captioned “The Aerodrome in the vicinity of Moscow. 5-t bomb destined for Berlin”
And these two were taken in Naton during our tour at the Lancaster Museum
Thank you, Aleksei, and hopefully, we”ll keep exchanging by interesting materials in the future.
And I’ll keep posting on the topic.
Cheers,
C.
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