I recall Dad being elated at finding a picture from a man half way across the country, that showed the plane Dad was aboard when the picture was taken. Although it was a blurry shot, they were able to work it out from a knowledge of where they were flying within the formation that day.

It’s tough for an airman or sailor to get a picture of his craft while he is aboard it…you can’t take it yourself. That leaves the task to some complicated forethought and planning, which is not something that comes naturally to twenty-something kids.

The very best photographs taken during WWII were those taken by the Army photographers…they knew what they were doing with their cameras. You can identify them as being the shots having a line of white identification writing along the lower border. Unfortunately, it seems that most of those pictures were either discarded or reside somewhere in a musty NARA file.

Through the AAF forum, I made a contact with a historian who had a trove of these pictures taken by the photographers assigned to his Group…a different one than my father’s. However, he suggested that since the two groups were geographically close, they often flew together on missions, and asked if I knew the plane numbers my father flew. Happens that Dad kept a detailed log of all the planes he flew and of the missions, dates, etc.

The gentleman looked through his trove and found two pictures, both of them very sharp and of a single B-17 alongside the photo ship, both of them carrying my father on that particular day–this we knew from the data printed along the bottom of the print which gave the date and target information, while the picture clearly showed the plane number on the tail. Dad would have been delighted to have seen these, but he never did. The technology we now use wasn’t available when he was active….a shame.

These kinds of things are possible now. For a great picture file showing a wide variety of well photographed WWII vintage flight and ground subjects, see the 457th Bomb Group site and look for the Zemper Collection on that site. Several of the pictures show Col. Smith very clearly…he was the unfortunate pilot who later flew into the Empire State Building.

Also, make a Google search for WWII Air Force. Switch to the images search, and key in the search term followed by: source:Life

This will take you to the images that have been scanned from the old Life Magazine files…another wonderful source of high quality images on a number of subjects.