Flak Alley!

0900, 27AUG2023. 65 hearty souls attempted the first of three missions for the day. As the title suggests, the “theme” for this year was about how “effective” the flak was over Europe. As in previous missions, actual missions that the 8th Air Force did are used. This year the missions were:

MISSION 1 – St. Nazaire, France 1MAY43. The target was the sub pens in the bay. What made this mission unique was that after the pens were bombed. The bomb group missed there turning point to get back to England. So instead of going through the channel, they went up the peninsula towards Brest where they encountered heavy flax before reaching back to base.

MISSION 2 – Bremen, Germany 26NOV43. Heavy clouds and smoke obscured the target and also made it hard for the bombers to keep in formation as they went through the target. This enabled the Luftwaffe to shoot down over 29 bombers.

MISSION 3 – Berlin, Germany 29APRIL44. Weather conditions and a lack of pathfinders forced the 8th Air Force to take a direct route to Berlin. This caused the bomber stream over target to take over 30 minutes before all of the bombers. Because of this over 65 bombers were lost in this raid.

B-17 is unique in that it’s a solitaire game where people are put into six plane squads where their opposite rolls the dice anytime the German’s attack their plane. With David Terry’s point system, points are awarded for completing certain objectives during the mission. Points are accrued from one mission to the next if they have a crew member survive able to fly the next mission.

With this system, the points ranged from a low of 22 to a high of 196. The 1st place wood went to Joshua Githens with the high score. 2nd went to Jacob Hebner with a score of 174. 3rd to Eric Stanger with a score of 170.4 (Bomb scores are divided by 10 to help with tiebreakers). 4th to John Conlon with a score of 170. 5th, Pierre Massar with a score of 167. And the coveted 6th place wood went to Tim Packwood with a score of 165.5.