Stardate 20020203.1612

(On Screen): The History Channel ran "The Tuskegee Airmen" last night on their Saturday Night Movie. I've seen it before. It's an excellent movie. It is, perhaps, a bit over-dramatized, but the essentials of the story it tells are not far off the truth.

It was originally made by HBO on a pretty small budget, and so it's not surprising that they end up using P-51 Mustangs for the whole film, even though the 99th actually started out with the P-39 AiraCobra, a total piece of shit which was moderately decent for ground attack but was completely outclassed in air combat. Then they were given P-47 Thunderbolts, a huge fighter as big as some light bombers, but very good nonetheless. Ultimately, they switched to the Mustang, which was the prestige fighter of the European theater; beautiful, fast, deadly and long ranged: it was the best fighter the Allies had in Europe, and for bomber escort they needed every bit of it, especially after the Germans began to fly the Me-262.

One of the most impressive moments in the film is where two of them strafe a German destroyer and destroy it. This really happened, and the gun-camera film you see is genuine. The actual pilot responsible was Lt. Gynne Pierson of the 302nd (who was actually flying a P-47 at the time). As "Train" says, it was a lucky shot. A machine gun bullet must clearly have hit something vulnerable and set it off.

I've been assuming that it was an Italian destroyer that the Germans had reflagged after the Italians changed sides. The real event happened in the Gulf of Venice, so when the American pilots spotted it there was little doubt it was an enemy. No friendly warship would have been operating alone that far north.

Ever since I first saw that film, I've been trying to figure out just what the lucky shot was. What did they hit to blow up so spectacularly? My first idea was that someone had a hatch open on a gun turret and that the fighter pilot had managed to shoot through it. Then I realized that was stupid: the turrets didn't have hatches. You entered the turret from below.

The rounds are hitting the ship in the middle just before the blast, so it wouldn't have been depth charges, which were kept at the stern. I don't believe that the Germans had anything like the hedgehog, and in any case that would have been mounted in the bow.

This has sort of gnawed at me for months. (Unanswered problems do that sometimes.) After long thought, I've come to the conclusion that the fighter pilot set off a torpedo. All destroyers of that era kept a bank of torpedoes mounted more or less amidships and set to launch to the side. If a machine gun round had hit one of them just right, it could conceivably have set off the warhead, and that would have set off all the others. There's no question that the resulting blast would have been sufficient to sink the ship; it would have been blown in half.