Fake B-26 photo?

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If the photo is doctored, why would anyone bother to do it.

I'm sure it would really be worth it to frighten the Germans into thinking the B-26 could drop a lot of little bitty bombs.
 
It's a real photo, real bombs and all - it was taken during wartime so the personnel and noseart were censored.

The aircraft's noseart was "Shoot'in" and it's production block numer is B-26B-50-MA.

Here's the actual photo (censored, of course) that was released by the AAF.
 
It's a wartime photo...lol

They expected the Germans to see it.

So the actual load isn't going to be shown, but the 26 will keep 'em guessing!

Also, it looks like several of the bottom bombs (perhaps about 16 of them) were "added"...
 
I remember the A-26 at NKP in 1966 had adapters for the internal bomb bay to haul smaller bombs on the racks, several parafrags where one bomb normally hung. They may have been using something similar on 100 lb bombs on this B-26.
Parafrags were very high drag if carried on a external rack.
 
The forward bomb bay on the B-26 had 20 stations. The rear bay had 10. It could carry twenty 100 pounders, or ten 300 pounders, six 500 pounders (later eight), four 1000 pounders or two 1600 or 2000 pounders in the front bay. The rear bay could hold ten 100 pounders, six 300 pounders or two 500 pounders. Alternatively, one or more 250 gallon bomb bay tanks could be carried at the expense of half the bay's capacity each. The rear bay was rarely used and is certainly not open in this picture. The front bay doors folded up along the sides of the fuselage, but the rear bay opened downward.
This info comes straight out of the TO, so no room to speculate.
 
Greg, you have to read the entire thread before commenting...........

Milosh said:
30 100lb bombs could be carried.
http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/Aircraft/B-26_BombChart.pdf
Click to expand...


 
I remember when I was a crew chief for a OH-6 the tech orders were in a ringed binder so that when specs were rescinded or revised you could take out the old pages and replace them with the up to date requirements. The tech manual, or Tech. orders for a OH-6 in 1968 wouldn't have much resemblance to the 1971 T.O.s

It was a full time job probably for the guy that took care of the manuals at battalion level , every now and then a LT. would come up from BN. and jump on our butts for not being up to date on the T.O.s. Some of us wanted to shoot the little sob, we were already working 20 hour days half the time.

Undoubtable the same in WW2, if you don't have the last version, or all the revisions of the TO's on a aircraft you don't have it all.

You notice in that photo you can only see the gun in the rear upper turret, not a sign of the turret Plexiglas at all. I think that's just because of the angle of the sun, not because it was retouched for propaganda purposes. I think that's the same explanation for the blanked out side windows too.

And then there could have been experiments in the field tried and rejected that never made it to the TO's. It ain't a perfect world out there .
 
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The angle of the sun is above and slightly behind the ship, so the sunlight would be illuminating the cockpit and pilot. While the image quality does have a high amount of contrast, the pilot should be visable, even under these conditions, since the sunlight isn't reflecting directly off the cockpit sideglass.

And if you look closely at the nose of the B-26 in the photo, the nose-mounted MG is completely edited out, too...
 
The crew, and other details, have been 'spotted out' by the application of potasium fericyanide to the relevant areas of the print - notice the 'white' areas of the cockpit glazing. This is the white of the photo print paper, where the silver halide image of the original area has been removed by the chemical mentioned, applied with a fine brush and then washed off. The sort of thing done today on a computer with the eraser tool, but the standard method of deleting areas from monochrome prints up to the early 1990's.
At a guess, I'd say the bottom two sections of the sticks of bombs have been added, using an image of bombs just released from the bay from a separate photo - note the 'clumps' of bombs together, which haven't yet started to separate in the disrupted air flow.
 
Hi again;
The pic of the plane is 352 mm long on my monitor and the bomb is 19.6 and when you divide those two numbers and the length of the plane, the bombs are about 3.6' long and thus are 100 pounders. The picture only shows 27 bombs and thus there are still three inside. But if you really want to raise a stink, look at the picture of a formation of B-17s dropping, IIRC 34 each 440 pound bombs in the time life pictorial history of WW-II. (The epic of flight-America in the air war, page 115!)
That's over 15,000 pounds of bombs out of a B-17 which according to some old threads, supposedly could not lift over 8,000/9,600, or whatever load of bombs when the Air Force stated it had a bomb load of "over 17,600 pounds"?
Just goes to show you things were done in the war and now some people doubt it.
 
The bombs are actually dropped in a "Salvo" by an intervalometer (sp?) I have seen a chart that states smaller bombs, like 100 pounders, 30 could be loaded. Measure the plane and bombs in the picture and you can tell they are 100 Lbs each. The spacing could be as little as 0.05 seconds between bombs if it is the same as my uncles B-17. Some of my friends claim the interval could be as short as 0.035 seconds. It was also adjustable depending on the target. Things like ships caused them to use the shortest intervals, while air fields would require a longer interval for maximum effect.
At 225 MPH, the bombs would land about 5 Meters apart at the short interval.
 
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