[hughlomas]

A World War 2 training video for evading flak cannon fire is one of the best examples of graphical information presentation that I've seen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP_-WUMi-nw

It features smoothly animated and highly functional designs as well as overlaying graphics on real footage to achieve a fashion of "augmented reality". The production quality is astounding and it is amazing to think that it was produced in the 40s. The entire video is an inspiring example of conveying information.

[joshontheweb]

That was really interesting. I never knew there was this kind of strategy behind flak evasion. Man, must have taken some stones to do a bomber mission. I knew an old timer that flew bombers in WW2 and he said towards the end of the war the germans were running out of metal and all sorts of things were used as flak. He said nuts and bolts were pretty common. He'd find them embedded inside the cabin after close flak fire. Pretty scary to think that your end might come from a washer.

[DanBC]

RAF Bomber Command had appalling rates of attrition through WWII.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command

The wiki article gives good explanation of how bombing developed during WWII - starting as a weapon to terrible to be used (based on poor quality data); with general agreements not to kill civilians; realising that bombers were hopelessly inaccurate; changing tactics to allow bombing of civillian populations, including the (to my mind) war crimes of fire bombing.

> Bomber Command crews also suffered an extremely high casualty rate: 55,573 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew (a 44.4% death rate), a further 8,403 were wounded in action and 9,838 became prisoners of war.

That's pretty much "toss a coin".

[jonesdc]

Thank you for posting this.