B-17 flyover during 1943 World Series

Not sure about all the downvotes unless it is for a FB link. The story is interesting, and thanks for posting.

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ust 21 years old, we take for granted how young these men were.

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It really is and then read accounts of 21 and 22 year olds with a year or so of flight experience bringing back heavy bombers shot all to hell and executing landings and then a few days later flying another mission.

Just two decades later the planes were so complex that you couldn't take a kid off the street and have him flying six months later. It was a career, and the pilots were in their late twenties to late forties. Many of the combat pilots in Vietnam were the same 21 year old who had flown in WWII.

Flying these bombers was a pretty physical task. This is a letter a B-24 pilot wrote to his mother describing his training . It's from the 15th Air Force FB page.

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My father, Lieutenant Bill Hanchett, transitioned to B-24s in September 1944 after serving as an instructor-pilot teaching cadets to fly the BT-13A Valiant at Bainbridge Field, Georgia. Before learning to fly the B-24D at Maxwell Field, Bill went through a five-week engineering course, “studying everything about the B-24,” logging many hours in a Liberator, as an engineer. He wrote: “The whole idea is to get us familiar with the mechanics of the plane and its flight characteristics before they put us in the left-hand seat.” My father’s correspondence chronicling his experiences as a pilot are in my new book, Disgracefully Easy: A B-24 Pilot’s Letters Home, by William Hanchett with Thomas F. Hanchett, (Acorn 2025).
Here is an excerpt from a letter written to his mother in October 1944: “...It seems the pilot of a B-24 has to be more than a pilot; he has to be an aeronautical engineer...The Liberator certainly does not fly like an airplane. It is a big, heavy unwieldly TRUCK. The difference between it and an airplane is the difference between a convertible Ford coupe and a moving van...I have a lot of respect for the B-24 and the damage it can do...”
A B-29 Superfortress school had recently been established at Maxwell and Bill thought that he might eventually transition to B-29s. In early October 1944 he toured a B-29 at Maxwell and was very impressed by its size. Many years later he would describe to me crawling through the 40-foot-long tunnel that connected the forward crew spaces (cockpit area) with the rear of the plane. He never transitioned to B-29s though instructors he knew at Bainbridge made the move.
After about a month at Maxwell Field, Bill transferred to the intense B-24 pilot training school at Courtland Field in northern Alabama. He wrote: “...Shot 13 landings in the B-24 this morning. You’d be surprised at the amount of physical work involved. You feel as though you are holding all 36,000 lbs. of the plane in your left hand.” Also, “...As I told you, the pilot’s cockpit is very bewildering until you know something about it. The instruments extend the full width of the plane, three radios are on the ceiling, and a column containing throttles, superchargers, mixture controls, light, prop, cowl flap, and many other toggle switches is between the pilot and co-pilot...” and “...A bomber is not like a single-engine ship, where the pilot can do all the work. It takes two men to start these engines, and while it would be possible for one man to fly the plane, it would not be safe and is never done, except in emergencies...”
In December he was able to say, “...By the way, [I] have been officially checked out in the B-24! T’was almost as big a thrill as my first solo...”

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Now we’d have 18, 19, 20 year olds lying to avoid serving.

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I don’t know about these days but when we had the draft and Vietnam going on I sure as hell didn’t want to go for that senseless shite. Luckily the war ended right before I graduated high school and I didn’t have to make that choice. I didn’t know there was a problem now.

Crazy think how we sacrificed all this just to suck off facists in 2025

How a B-17 nearly clipped Cardinals in World Series

That is pretty cool.

There is no draft dumbass. Most of the military is made up of those under 25 with majority under 21. It's always been this way.