B17 -The Ripening Harvest
by Pat Speirs
Title
B17 -The Ripening Harvest
Artist
Pat Speirs
Medium
Digital Art - Digital Art Print
Description
The Ripening Harvest
The seeds were sown when Harris, chief of Bomber Command, commenting on the 1941 ‘blitz’ by the Luftwaffe, said - ‘they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind’. By 1942 the RAF and RCAF were building up the heavy bomber night force of Lancaster, Halifax and Stirling aircraft and the USAF had started their first operations with B17s. By the autumn of 1943 the above combined forces were mounting round the clock operations from over 300 bases crammed into an area, 150 miles by 50 miles, from Cambridge to York and indeed the ‘harvest‘ was being reaped.
The image depicts a commonplace event as a B17 Group lifts off from a Lincolnshire base - slowly climbing away and struggling to form the complex defensive formations necessary for daylight penetration into Europe. It would be more than two hours after take-off before all the aircraft, often up to 800, were assembled over East Anglia and ready to head east.
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August 20th, 2013
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