220429 Sentinel, Brave Men

There were countless brave men in WW-2.
My thinking is the bravest of all were the men of the 8th Army Air Force, and below I will explain why.

While any soldier, airman or sailor was courageous going into dangerous situations. Early in our involvement, when the 8th air force began daylight bombing raids from England over the Germany, they soon found out that daylight bombing over Germany was nearly suicidal. The English who we were allied with in the war stopped daylight bombing and only operated overnight because they knew well the risk after losing a major part of their bombers.
Our Army Air Force decided to go into daylight bombing to get the job done as fast as possible. There were two major problems with that scheme. One was that at the time the German air force was combat trained and at near full strength, they were good and experienced pilots. The second problem was this, US aircrews had never been in combat, they were mostly young men below the legal drinking age of 21 and over Germany those big B-17 aircraft had German anti-aircraft guns shooting at them from below and German fighters firing at them from above. The operation was a recipe for disaster!
Our aircrews soon found out that they could and would expect a 66% loss rate. That meant that 2 out of every 3 men flying over Germany in daylight bombing were going to be killed. Think about that for a moment. Would you be brave enough to go into that and continue, knowing that you only had a 34% chance of surviving? That my friends is why I consider the 8th Army Air Corps the bravest of the brave in WW-2.
I take nothing away from those other soldiers, sailors or airmen in other areas of combat, while their numbers of killed servicemen were higher than the 8th Air Force, there were many more men in the battles, so overall percentage wise their losses were less. There were 200,000 men in the 8th air force, while there were 1,600,000 men and women in the rest of the armed forces. Overall a man had a much better chance of coming home after the war anywhere else but in the 8th.