The Nuking of Japan

[jonb]

And it is worth noting that in a dogfight, in biplanes no less, shooting down enemy bombers capable of moving faster than you? Yeahhh, that actually is some crazy levels of skill, because you basically had to line up the target head-on and take it down, because if you didn't, by the time you turned and started opening fire the bomber was already getting out of effective range of your guns. And hitting a head-on target couldn't be very easy to do in those days.

Spot on with your tactical knowledge, but I think it is also worth a mention that there were often up to twenty enemy fighters with the bombers as well.

A bit of gossip here a loose relation of mine was an engineer with them, and he told a story that the tail of one Gloucester Gladiators was so shot up that they had to build a whole back section from scratch. As they did not have the parts they had to utilise a good deal of scrap iron just to hold it together.