Armed and Extremely Sensitive

The Flying Weathermen of the Second World War were their own pilots, gunners and observers. Their planes retained the fighting armor, but three of the five guns were removed to make room for extra equipment. Still, the two remaining guns were workable, and the pilots frequently used them. Often flying by instruments alone, in the teeth of wind, ice and cloud, the reconnaissance men found holes for t h e bombers, or eli-e radioed back information that kept the big planes grounded. Sometimes, when one target could not be reached, an alternate target was arranged. The P-38s, usually sent out in pairs for their own protection, ranged two hundred miles or more ahead of the bombers. Sometimes a second pair was sent out to relay radio messages from the leaders to the controls at bomber bases. This procedure generally reduced the number of false starts and futile missions, and also cut down the hazards to be met by the bombers.

Enemy interceptors and attack fire were bad enough, without having to buck the weather, too. Weather plays pranks and does unpredictable things sometimes, but its behavior usually falls into a fairly consistent pattern. The high and low pressure areas and the storm fronts move in a general west to east procession in the northern hemisphere. This fact was an advantage to the Allies in Europe because the British Isles knew what the weather was to be before Fortress Europa did. It was an Allied disadvantage in the Pacific, for there Japan got the weather first. To make even fuller use of t h e west-to-east weather movement, both sides tried to establish weather stations in Greenland. Such stations were bombed and bombarded until finally the Americans took firm control, as protectors, in both Greenland and Iceland. Weathermen in the far northern latitudes battled cold, hardship and homesickness on assignments that cut them off from the rest of t h e world for months at a time.

They fell into glacial crevasses and were lost. They were frozen to death, were drowned in icy waters, and one was engulfed by a river of molten lava that burst from Mt. Washington on Chuginidak Island in the Aleutians. At far northern weather stations the instruments were mounted on stilts to keep them from being buried in the snow. Camps actually were covered with snowdrifts, and the men got in and out by means of escape hatches built in the roofs. To fill out other gaps on the worldwide weather map, small "Met" detachments carried their own supplies and equipment into the remote regions of China, India and Burma. Additional supplies reached some of these posts only by parachute