This is a story of a B17 pilot and a Bombadier two anti-heroes that become best friends and assemble their bombing crew out of a bunch of Misfits that don't fit in anywhere else, and they become determined on doing things their own way so much so that the US government won't even give them a B17 to fly. They then proceed to build their own and become the most heavily decorated air crew in US history.
Today we're talking about Jay Zeamer, Joe Sarnowski and their air crew the Eager Beavers the most decorated air crew in US history, responsible for completing the most decorated mission in US history, all while flying the most heavily armed bomber of World War II Lucy, AKA old 666.
Starting off with our pilot and main character Jay Zeeamer, born in 1918 he grew up in Pennsylvania with a pretty wealthy family, for high school he was sent to a military Boarding School in Culver Indiana. While there as a freshman despite the school's policy on no students having vehicles he managed to acquire a Willie Motor Company whipit the direct predecessor of the Jeep, and he managed to turn this thing into an absolute hot rod, better than it ever ran before until the school finally found out that a student had a car which was against the rules so he had a disciplinary meeting with the dean he goes into this meeting with the dean and he's like, “look I'm in the engineering program, I'm taking all the engineering, classes I want to go to school to be an engineer, I just rebuilt a motor and I'm 14 years old, you guys should treat this as extra credit”. To which the dean being cool is like, “well take me for a test drive and we'll see”. He takes the Dean for a test drive and the Dean has a great time, he ends up giving him extra credit and letting him keep the car the entire time he's at military boarding school. So his grades were a little lackluster as freshman year cause he was busy restoring a car, after that he aced absolutely everything from sophomore, to senior year he goes on to apply to go to MIT to become a civil engineer
He gets rejected by MIT because his grades were lacking his freshman year so he drives his whipit that he rebuilt all the way to MIT and he camps outside the admissions office for days until they agree to meet him he then goes in and proceeds to persuade the head of admissions to let him into MIT, so he gets into MIT goes on to become an engineer, while he’s at College he joins the ROC program which is like the pre-officer training program that they have at most colleges. While he's there he ends up flying a plane and he absolutely loves it. It is now his new goal in life to become a fighter pilot. So naturally he applies to go off to Army Air school to become a pilot at which point he is pretty much immediately informed there's a 0% chance that he will ever get inside of a fighter plane because he's way too big, at this point in time they only let the smaller guys be the fighter pilots and all the bigger guys had to go work in bombers, and Jay was a big dude well over 6ft so it's not exactly what he wanted but it is the next best thing. So no big deal, he goes in, does the paperwork work, does a physical exam, bad news his eyes suck and his vision is not good enough to become a pilot, so the entire notion of being a pilot gets shelved. For now at least he goes back to college continues going through the RC program to be an Army infantry officer and while this is going on he's constantly researching on ways to make his eyes better and he finally comes across this crazy optometrist named Dr Bates and he has the Bates method, basically this method wanted to treat your eyes like there were muscles. Bates believed that glasses enabled your eyes to be lazy so he would crush his patients glasses and then force them to do a bunch of eye straining exercises in hopes of building up better Vision similar, to how you would lift weights to get bigger muscles one of these exercises included staring directly into the sun. Obviously with hindsight being 2020 this didn't work that well and it certainly wasn't recommended but the young Jay Zer wanted to be a pilot, so bad that he was in fact willing to go outside every day and attempt to beat the sun in a staring contest, oh it's a deep burn, so deep essentially trying to give himself a caveman version of Lasik. Obviously this does not improve his eyesight if anything it makes it better, but it does highlight just how bad this guy wanted to be a pilot.
So World War II kicks off, standards get lowered and he gets accepted into the bombing program, and from there he becomes the top of his class. Immediately he is so good at flying bombers that he can actually perform fighter Maneuvers inside of a bomber, which is something most Pilots would never even imagine but not only is he naturally talented at it he also works extremely hard he could tell every single American, German and Japanese plane, and their capabilities just by their silhouette. So Jay Zeamer hands down the best bomber pilot in training right now, and somewhere along the lines during training he becomes friends with the best Bombadier in training by the name of Joe Sarnowski. This guy is basically the Larry Bird at putting Warheads on Forehead. They hit it off, they become best friends and they have a ton in common. After they graduate from school they get separate missions and they get separated.
So, early 1942 Jay Zeamer gets assigned to the Fifth Air Force and he's not happy about it because the fifth air force is also referred to as the Forgotten fifth, the reason they're called that is because they are stationed in Australia. And their job right now is to basically run a containment war against Japan, trying to slow them down and contain them to the Pacific, and at this point in time nobody cares about the Pacific Theater, the entire world is watching the European theater as America and Great Britain fight their way through North Africa into Italy to take back France, and eventually overthrow Germany. That's where the majority of the funding is going, that's where all the attention and glory is, that's the place where young motivated men like Jay Zeamer want to be, but that didn't happen so Jay shows up to Australia he is the FNG. Being the new guy, nobody trusts him, he has zero street cred nobody wants him in their crew, now this is partially due to the fact that he's a new guy and that's just how it goes for new guys sure, but mainly it's because the Japanese are kind of kicking America's a$$ right now, it's mid 1942, America just got involved in this war, a lot of their pilots are inexperienced, a lot of their equipment outdated, and everybody's giving all the funding to the European theater so it's not a great time, and you got to remember since this is 1942, America hasn't come out with the Hellcat or the Corsair yet, meaning that America has no fighter plane capable of going toe-to-toe with the Japanese Mitsubishi zero, so even if the bombers did have a fighter escort they weren't capable of going toe-to-toe with the Japanese zeros anyways. It has never been more dangerous to be inside of a bomber and it has never been more important to have everybody in that Bomber Crew as good as possible to increase everybody's chance of survival. So nobody wants to risk it on giving a new guy a shot, so it becomes apparent to Jay early on that if he ever wants to get up in the air he's going to have to do some gangster stuff. So he goes over to the bulletin board and on that bulletin board are the missions that are deemed so incredibly dangerous that they are volunteer bases only. He starts volunteering for all of them filling in any position where he's needed, the majority of these missions would wind up being reconnaissance missions which is where they're going to take a B17 Flying Fortress instead of filling it with bombs they're going to fill it with extra fuel tanks equip it with cameras and send it way off into enemy held territory all by itself to hopefully get some valuable Intel. Since a single bomber flying alone in enemy-held territory is extremely dangerous and nobody is about to let their pilot or co-pilot be the brand new guy fresh out of school Jay just has to fill in wherever there's a gap. Over time he winds up doing everything, he's a tail Gunner, a ball gunner, a waist Gunner, a navigation guy, a radio guy, he can do everything and eventually he works himself up enough credit that they let him be co-pilot for a little while.
While he's working as a co-pilot he figures out something very very important, you have to remember he's an engineer he loves taking things apart figuring out how they work, why they work, trying to make them better, and while he's sitting in the co-pilot seat he figures out how the Japanese zeros are tackling the B17s. You have to remember this is 1942 the B17s that they are flying are the B17 Bs they are the first generation of mass-produced B17s ever, and they have one fatal flaw and the Japanese figured out how to exploit it, you see the B17s have a ton of machine guns all over them to defend themselves, they have a tail Gunner a ball gunner, a waist Gunner on each side, and a turret on top, the problem is none of those can shoot in front of the plane, the only thing the front of the plane has is two 30 caliber guns which might as well be nothing at all when it comes to shooting down an actual plane. Later generations of the B17 would end up getting more Firepower and turrets on the front to help alleviate this issue. At this point in time they didn't have that so the Japanese zeros would approach from behind well out of range the machine guns, pass the B17 all together and then go and do a U-turn and approach the B17 head on and shoot it down where the B17 had no way to defend itself, and during his time as a co-pilot Jay Zeamer caught on to this and developed a plan. Fast forward Jay Zeamer on his first mission he finally got enough street cred and there was finally a mission dangerous enough that they were going to let him be the pilot, sure enough a Japanese zero shows up does the exact same thing, passes outside the range of the guns, does a big U-turn comes back to confront Jay’s B17 head on, as soon as a zero gets within range, Jay takes his B17 turns it up on a wing tip and Banks exposing the belly of the B17 to the zero, forcing the zero to go the exact opposite direction and down, putting it directly in the firing lines of both the belly Gunner and the tail Gunner shooting down the zero, and that is just one of multiple combat Maneuvers that Jay has engineered inside of his head pushing the B17 airframe to its absolute limit. Fast forward into the mission he lands the plane no problem the entire crew gets out and swears that they are never getting on a plane with Jay Zeamer flying it ever again, and that becomes a new Norm for a couple months. Jay went from the new guy that nobody trusted to fly, to now he's so good he's crazy and we're scared to fly with him. That was until a bunch of new reinforcements showed up on the island and among them was none other than his best friend Joe Sarnowski. So Jay and Joe start volunteering to go on a bunch of dangerous missions together same thing happens, every time they fly on a mission pretty much everybody else on the plane refuses to ever go on a mission with those two ever again because they're absolutely crazy, but every once in a while they find somebody just crazy enough to keep flying with them, and over the course of a couple months they build up an entire air crew that starts volunteering together on every Dangerous Mission available. Earning them the nickname the Eager Beavers making up the team we have Bud, apparently the only man smart enough to be a navigator and crazy enough to fly with these guys and then of course we have Jay Zeamer as the pilot Joe Sarnoski is the Bombadier and from there it just gets completely out of hand because after that we have the radio expert William Bon AKA Willie, he is one of the most experienced bomber crew members in the entire US military, at this point he’s been on countless missions, one of which his B17 landed to refuel when his crew was ambushed by 500 Japanese soldiers. They took the machine guns out of their B17 and proceeded to defend themselves in a firefight for 10 hours until the Australians showed up and during that 10 hours Willie had 14 confirmed kills, four of which were in close quarters combat, two with his Colt 451 1911 and two with his knife. Jay Zeamer said he didn't plan on getting in any knife fights at 30,000 ft but if he did he had Willie.
Next we have camera expert and waste Gunner George Kendrick, typically on a B17 you're supposed to have one waste Gunner on either side of the plane but Kendrick preferred to man both sides completely by himself when, Jay Zeamer asked him if he wanted to find another waist Gunner for the other side Kendrick said and I quote, “these are my guns and I'm going to shoot all of them, I don't need to be bumping butts with another guy while I do it”.
Next we have Johnny, a 19-year-old Farm kid that's so mechanically gifted that he is deemed more valuable as a mechanic on the ground than he is a member of a bombing crew, despite that he wants to be a pilot, so Jay is teaching him how to become a pilot, but in the meantime he's the topside turret Gunner.
Next we have the tail Gunner and he is the biggest, fastest, strongest man in the entire Fifth Air Force, Herbert Pew AKA Pudge. There were a couple other stragglers that came and went on a couple missions here and there, but this was the core group of men that became best friends and went on the most dangerous bombing runs and reconnaissance missions that the war had to offer. Because of this they very quickly built up an incredible reputation and became too valuable to lose at which point leadership doesn't let them go out on the dangerous missions anymore. They send them out on a regular bombing run with like 10 other B17s, and if that wasn't bad enough they're going to make Jay and his men be the first bomb bomber in line, which if you don't know is the safest bomber in the entire run because as soon as their bombs hit the ground that's what alerts the enemy that they're even there, so when they go through there's no enemies manning the anti-aircraft guns so they're done and gone by the time there's any enemies returning fire, it's that second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth plane that faces the real danger, and that's just not okay with Jay and his men so they go out on the mission just like they're ordered to and they are the first ones to drop their bombs, just like they're ordered to, they make a clean getaway and they get out to open ocean at which point Jay tells his men, “get ready for a fight.” cause he does a U-turn, goes back in, flies over the enemy compound at a 1000 ft while his men from the ball turret the waist guns and the tail guns open fire on the enemy's anti-aircraft positions on the ground, literally becoming a ground attack plane like their an antique C130 they were able to knock out all of the enemy spotlights and most of their anti-aircraft positions and every single B17 on that mission made it back home. So Jay, the eager beavers, and all the other B17s on this Mission make it back to base, completely okay at which point Jay is treated like a hero by his commanding officers. No I'm just kidding, the commanding officers can't give themselves a bunch of medals if their men are defying orders but doing the right thing because it makes them look bad, so naturally Jay is somehow the bad guy here so he and the eager beavers are all confined to quarters, pending court Marshal, the only reason that Jay and his entire crew weren't kicked out of the military right then and there was because there was a journalist in Australia with the fifth Air Force that heard the story from one of the other B17 crews and they reported on it writing a story that would end up getting read by a congressman that wanted it investigated and he demanded and ordered that chain of command to give Jay, Joe and all of his men on that air crew a silver star, so at that point Jay and all of his men get a silver star. Leadership just kind of has to drop the issue but also these guys we're not going to give them easy missions anymore, their only going to give them the hardest missions they have, and if they die they die we don't really care anymore because they made us look bad, which is exactly what Jay and his men wanted all along, so it all works out, fast forward.
This big Dangerous Mission officially known as Flight of the gishes naval code breakers have deciphered enough messages to figure out that in the city of Rabou there's a hotel, and the penthouse of that hotel is being used as an exclusive Officers Club, where they are being entertained by a bunch of geishas and getting hammered, and among those officers is rumored to be none other than Admiral Yamamoto the leader of the entire Japanese Navy, their mission is to fly in with a single B17, under the cover of night, bomb that hotel, take out all the high ranking officers, and make a clean getaway, so Jay and the crew get pulled in and get briefed on the mission, no big deal, everybody's going to go off to bed, they got a big day tomorrow, everybody except for Joe Sarnoski, he stays up all night long studying the map of the city of Rabou, nobody knows why, they just think he's over cautious they go to bed and Joe stays up, fast forward the next day, they take off on their mission, Jay flies them all the way there gets them real close to the hotel at which point Jay can actually send the controls of the plane over to Joe Sarnowski in the Bombay, so Joe can control the plane and really line up the shot that he wants with this bomb, so Jay sends the controls over to Joe, Joe opens the bomb doors and veers way off course Miles and Miles off course like 10 miles off course, Joe steers this plane essentially blind driving the plane just from what he can see outside of the bomb bay, and then before anybody even knows what's happening Joe just says bombs away, drops the bombs on a seemingly random location and sends the controls back over to Jay, everyone is completely confused nobody knows what's going on, the bombs make impact and there is a humongous explosion, way bigger than this 500lb bomb could have ever done on its own, Joe had just hit a major Ammunition Depot for the entire Japanese Navy, and his single bomb set off a chain reaction blowing up the entire facility, come to find out Joe Sarnoski didn't feel right about killing innocent geisha girls and he decided that he was going to find a Target that was just as if not more valuable than the officer club and blow that up instead, so they make it back to base tell leadership everything that happened and Leadership is absolutely furious that they decided to do their own thing instead. They interrogate the entire crew but nobody is ratting on Joe Sarnoski, since the defied direct orders, as a punishment they're ordered to do the mission again, and this time do it right, but that is essentially a death sentence because now they know that the Americans are bombing the city and they're going to be on high alert, so they're just going to do it anyways and leadership was actually trying to get him killed, but it's not really going to work out that way, so the crew goes to bed early Joe Sarnoski stays up all night again studying the map of the city of Rabou, and yet again the same exact thing happens, Jay gets them all the way there completely undetected, sends the controls of the plane over to Joe, Joe opens the bombay, veers way off course miles and miles off course, bombs a seemingly random location, and there is an even bigger explosion than the day before, it is an enormous explosion, Jay had just taken out a major Fuel Depot again for the entire Japanese Navy, they make their way back to base, at which point they are effectively grounded, and Leadership will never give them a B17 to fly again because they refuse to follow orders, and they are given absolutely no credit for single-handedly bombing major fuel and ammunition depots in the city of Rabou. So leadership's being a bunch of dicks so they're not going to let Jay and the eager beavers fly any more of the good B17s which sucks because at that point there's really nothing that they can do unless they plan on building their own airplane.
Which is exactly what they do, so Jay and the beavers go out to the boneyard and the boneyard is not just where planes go to die they go there to be cannibalized for any good parts, they may have left to keep all the other planes still running and what they come across is what used to be a B17, it has been stripped of every usable part and is covered in bullet holes and there is no way that this thing is going to fly, the only identifying characteristics of this plane at all was the faded word Lucy, up on the front, and the tail number 2666 which would later bring about its nickname, old 666, so now they have a plan, they just need to fix it a seemingly impossible task, but they have Jay Zeamer, the engineer and Johnny Abel the 19-year-old mechanical prodigy that set forward restoring this plane, while everybody else on the crew goes out and steals all the parts they need to do it, Strategically Transfer Equipment to an Alternate Location. That the eager beavers managed to acquire included four new cyclone engines, radio equipment, camera equipment, and 19 .50 caliber machine guns. Right off the bat we have a problem, because right around the time that the Beavers start finding all of this amazing equipment, a bunch of other air Crews seemingly have lost a bunch of their amazing equipment, so a bunch of them are going to go back and try to steal it off of Old 666 at which point the only logical solution is for the entire crew to start living on Old 666 while they restore it all day and all night, and spread the word that the 50 caliber machine guns are loaded, and if that doesn't work you get to fight Willie about it, at this point leadership has completely lost control of the situation, everybody's calling Jay Zeamer and the eager beavers pirates, renegades, everybody's looking at leadership to stop them at which point leadership is kind of like,”screw it”.
There's not much Firepower at the front of a B17 so they take a 50 caliber machine gun mount it right on the nose cone and they line it up with the rivet line going down the center of the cab and they rig it up so that there's a button inside the cockpit for Jay Zeamer to hit to be able to fire the .50 caliber machine gun. So all he has to do is aim the rivet line at the enemy and fire, he calls it his schnaz gun, then the other two .30 caliber guns on the front of the B17 are replaced with .50 cals, the navigator compartment usually had .13 caliber machine gun now it's going to have dual 50s, then the seat for the radio guy who typically never even had a gun cut a hole in the plane and gave him 2 .50 caliber machine guns as well, then we get to George Kendrick's area, the waste guns typically there's 1 .50 caliber on each side, now we're getting dual .50s on each side and because that's not enough we're also going to cut another hole in the bottom of the plane and give him dual .50s there as well, that way when Jay banks up in front of a zero not only can the ball turret gunner hit the zero, Kendrick is also going to be able to hit the zero as well, then in case any of the guns malfunction they have three extra .50 caliber machine guns strapped down on the inside of the plane. Old 666 now has more than double the firepower of any other B17 in the pacific theater, and after shedding over 2,000 lb it is also the fastest, but all that Firepower isn't going to be worth a whole lot if they don't know how to use it so Jay and Johnny continue working on the plane while everybody else is sent out to go train and become experts on the m2 .50 caliber machine gun, the Beavers get to the point where every single member of the crew can assemble and disassemble the M2 browning under a minute while blindfolded. Joe and Jay also make it a rule that every Gunner inside of their aircraft has to link their own ammunition belts and they're going to change up how they do ammunition. At this point a B17 .50 caliber machine gun had an ammo link that went ap round, ap round, incendiary round, incendiary round, tracer, a tracer is the one that looks like a laser beam coming out from star wars they do that so that you can tell where your fire is going and so that your friends can see where your fire is going they start linking their amunition so it's ap round, tracer round, and they do this for psychological warfare, because when you're shooting every other round is a tracer round out of a machine gun it is going to look like old 666 is something out of star wars, shooting laser beams at the enemy. They finish up the plane and they start volunteering for every single dangerous mission that they can find. They volunteer for so many missions so often that they never actually got an opportunity to finish the nose art on the plane, like you see all the other bombers have in the movies and in the old pictures, and that's why the plane never got a cooler nickname other than its tail number, old 666, now most of these missions just like before are recon, it is Jay the eager beavers and old 666 going up into enemy territory, completely by themselves and every single time they come into enemy zeros they light them up the new machine guns. With the combination of increased speed, increased firepower, Jay's piloting tactics, and the entire crew's new found machine gun proficiency, they were shooting down so many enemies that it became unbelievable, so the crew came back and people started doubting them so they rig up some cameras to turn on every time we start firing the machine guns that way they film them shooting down the enemy fighters. They were literally kicking so much butt that to get people to believe them they had to prematurely invent the GoPro 70 years ahead of time.
The beatings continue for a little while, old 666 the eager beavers and Jay Zeamer build up this enormous reputation and eventually leadership would approach Jay with the most dangerous mission he'd ever heard of, so there's a mission where marines are going to make a 40,000 man amphibious landing in Banville but before they do that they wanted to get aerial footage over the coastline, because they wanted to find out where all the reefs were so the Marine Corps didn't get caught up on the reefs with their amphibious landing vehicles, the problem with that is the only way to get enough high definition in that footage to be able to see reefs that are underwater is to use a tri metrion camera setup which is three cameras where they merge all the footage together. The only way to actually film this and make it work is to fly in a perfectly straight line under perfect weather conditions and they can't move the plane at all, even a single degree of tilt would ruin the entire thing, and in order to film this coastline they're going to have to do that for 22 minutes straight in enemy territory, and that enemy territory may or may not have enemy fighters and anti-aircraft guns on the coast, and if there is anti-aircraft guns on the coast it's pretty much game over, because again they have to fly in a perfectly straight line for 22 minutes straight in broad daylight. The worst gunner on the planet has enough time to get dialed in and shoot them down and that's assuming they even make it to the coastline, because banville is 600 mil into enemy-held territory, because of this the leadership only approached Jay with this Mission because they were just hoping that he would pilot it, they never in their wildest dreams imagined that his entire crew would volunteer to go on this mission because it had such a low chance of survival, despite that after being briefed on the entire thing, Jay rushes over to the barracks where the Beavers are, briefs them on the entire thing, at which point every single one of the eager beavers stands up and they're going with him. Later on when retelling this story one of the Beavers is quoted as saying, “we thought so much of Captain Zeamer and his abilities, that we didn't give a damn where we went just so long as he wanted to go there, anything okay by him, it was okay by us.” Jay then runs back over to the Colonel that had just briefed him, as he is pinning the volunteers slip onto the board to collect volunteers for this mission Jay grabs the paper, crumples it up, and says that him and the eager beavers are going to take the mission, on one condition, he does it how he wants to do it, and they have no further input on how he will get the mission done, at which point the Colonel agrees and it's settled, the only thing to do now is to get prepared for the mission and wait for Army meteorologist to tell them that they're going to have a day clear enough to actually pull this off. It's monsoon season, a couple of weeks go by and then finally they get word from the Army weather guys that the next day it will be clear enough to get this mission done. So they all get prepped and they take off first thing in the morning when it's still dark out. For this dangerous mission they take off, they're making their way over to Banville, they get halfway there, it's still dark out and everything's going great, and Leadership radios over to Jay and asks if they could head to the top island and film Bouka passage for extra credit as well, they don't need tetragon footage just normal footage would work they can do it while it's still kind of dusk out, at which point Jay is like no, no I don't need extra credit during this extremely dangerous mission, that wasn't what they agreed to, I'm not doing that, then they're like well too bad it's an order, to which he just hangs up on the guy, he doesn't really care he's going to do what he wants anyways cause that's been his the entire time.
Fast forward they get all the way to Banville it's still too dark for them to start filming with with this Tri Metron footage, so Jay asks the crew can do a U-turn we fly 15 minutes out over the open ocean do another U-turn come back, that'll be half an hour that should be bright enough by then, or we could fly like 45 minutes north film Bouka passage and then come back and film Banville, and the crew is like we don't care, so they go, they film Bouka passage then they come back, it is now broad daylight so they start filming their Tri Metron footage, they get 5 minutes into the 22-minute run and they come up on a Japanese air strip, and on that air strip is over 20 Japanese zero and he can see men running out to the planes to come get him, now Jay doesn't realize it at this point but these weren't just normal Japanese zeros this was one of the best fighter squadrons that Japan had, that was specifically brought in to go take out Admiral Hy, and in this squadron they had two Aces with a combined over 30 confirmed air-to-air kills, and even if this wasn't a specialized badass fighter squadron, 20 on one is still completely undoable, they'd gone up against against 5, 6, 7, zeros, they'd never gone up against 10, let alone 20 plus. It's at this moment that Jay has to make a decision because he knows that by the time all the Japanese zeroes get up in the sky, get in their formation and actually attack him. He's going to have just enough time to finish this camera run however, then he's going to have to fight his way out which is probably a death sentence. Or he could cut and run right now and he's almost guaranteed to be able to get away with a 20-minute head start, he's taken a second to weigh his options and really think about it, and he's just about ready to cut and run, and looks down at the water and he can just see all these reefs just right below the water, and he just envisions 40,000 Marines and their amphibious landing vehicles hung up on these reefs getting cut down by enemy defenses and machine gun fire. He decides that he's going to risk it to try to save these guys, and for the next 17 minutes the crew gets ready for a fight, as Jay keeps the plane completely straight and level in broad daylight as all the zeros get up in the air to come get them. Seventeen minutes later, two dozen Japanese zeros have caught up to them and they are trailing just behind 666 out of machine gun range. Right as George Kendrick comes over the radio and says give me 30 more seconds, 3 zeros pass along the outside of machine gun fire, do their U-turn to begin their attack run against 666 then George Kendrick radios again that he has a film done, at this point it's too late for Jay to do his normal evasive maneuver where he plays chicken with one of the zero, so he just lines up the nose of the plane and his schnaz gun with the lead zero shooting it down, Joe Sarnoski down below inside the nose cone manning those guns manages to shoot down one of the other zeros, and the third, and final zero was able to riddle the cockpit with 20 mm cannon fire, this fatally wounds both Jay Zeamer and Joe Sarnoski, takes out all the navigation equipment for the plane, as well as the entire oxygen system, Jay Zeamer is now slowly bleeding out inside of this cockpit with no way of knowing where he has this plane headed other than Instinct and a compass that he's holding in his hand. He has about 30 seconds of oxygen left before the entire crew passes out from hypoxia, and the remaining Japanese zeroes all now know that this is not not a normal B17 their typical tactics aren't going to work, and they just begin swarming every direction they can, firing from all angles Jay immediately puts the plane into a nose dive desperately trying to get below 10,000 ft so him and his men can breathe, with the oxygen system down he drops
15,000 ft in just under 30 seconds that is over 3 miles in 30 seconds,(360 mph). This plane drops, before Jay pulls it back up, he estimates that they're at 8,000 ft he doesn't actually know because the altimeter is broken and the only way he can tell the altitude that they're at is because he's such a good pilot he can look at the pressure gauge for the engine manifolds and be able to tell. At this point the entire situation devolves into an all out chaotic dog fight. Jay while still bleeding out is pulling off combat maneuvers inside of a B17 that most pilots would never even attempt, and his crew instinctively knows how he pilots so that they are able to pick off these Japanese zeroes, one by one, your average dog fight at this point in time lasted for less than a minute, and this dog fight would drag out for over 45 minutes, and the entire time Jay Zeamer is losing more and more blood, and more and more control of the plane, because at some point both rudders would become damaged, and he would no longer be able to actually turn the plane using the rudders, but he's such an incredible pilot that he begins individually throttling all four motors throttling one side up and the other side down turning the plane that way. Throughout the course of this firefight the eager beavers shoot down and completely destroy five Japanese zeroes, critically damage and send back a bunch of other ones, and by the end of this firefight there's five or six left, fully functional and coming to get them and they are almost out of ammunition and right as it looks like this is going to be the end, the zeros peel off and do a U-turn, as they have to go back because they've ran out of fuel.
Now at this point Jay Zeamer passes out and the co-pilot is finally allowed to take over the aircraft, something that Jay Zeamer refused to let him do In the heat of the fight, for the entire flight back Jay is coming in and out of consciousness, and the last thing he remembers is them landing and the ground crew rushing in as he hears the medic say, “get the pilot last, he's already already dead.” he would wake up in the hospital days later to find out that he had lost over half of the blood in his entire body, but the Intel that they had gathered was going to be used to launch operation Cartwheel, a highly successful allied offensive, that military planners credited that success to the Intel that Jay Zeamer and the eager beavers had gathered, because of this both, Jay Zeamer and Joe Sarnoski were to receive the Medal of Honor, unfortunately Joe would have to receive his POSthumously, according to the accounts of the rest of the crew, he was struck by a 20mm round during the first engagement, despite that he still managed to man the machine guns at the front of the B17, shooting down an additional two Japanese zeros before succumbing to his wounds, as for the rest of the eager beavers, four of them sustained injuries, but they all survived and all of them were awarded the distinguished service cross for this mission, making this the most decorated air crew in US military history and making this the most decorated mission in US history. According to the official Japanese reports this story is highly exaggerated because according to them they only sent up 7 zeroes to intercept old 666, and none of them were shot down, however when you take into account the verifiable fact that old 666 was hit with 5 20 mm cannon rounds, and sustained over 187 bullet holes, and the crew depleted all of their ammunition literally thousands of pounds of .50 caliber rounds, it kind of sounds like the Japanese official reports are lying so that they don't look bad.
Do you think the Eager Beavers should have had there plane taken away after disobaing direct order.
Do you think that Japan only sent up 7 aircraft, instead of 20
Would you have wanted to be part of this crew.
Replies
Abe,
I have to applaud you for a great effort but this is really just too long for a forum post. It led to people not reading it or commenting on it. The topic is great but for the purpose of this assignment, it needs to be shorter. It is, by far, the longest forum post of all time, so respect for that.
I think that Eager beavers should have there plane tooken away because disobeying direct order is like telling your dad no, and we all know that doesn't go well. I think that Japan set up more than 7 aircraft because it would be better to set up more than to set up a small amount, and no i would not want to be part of that crew ecpsially if there disobeying direct orders.
You dont have to read it, you just have to answer the questions.