70-year old Breaking News
Prague Veterans Air crew arrives 1946
…amazing film clip
First, watch this amazing film footage. (You can PAUSE it along the way to study faces or make it go “full screen.” Or just sit back and enjoy!) Afterwards, I’ll explain some things.
SORRY, NO POPCORN TODAY.
It does need a “voice over,” I agree. Someday I would like to add one.
But for today, it is awesome to watch our Veterans Air crew greeted by UNRRA officials and, I believe, a few U.S. Servicemen stationed in Prague. Crate after crate after crate carefully transferred onto that waiting lorry. The hatchery. The fuzzy baby chicks that may very well have been passengers inside the egg shells of the previous Veterans Air delivery in April!
Flight Engineer Thomas Cowart, is that you up on the ladder and straddling the DC-4’s cowl-open engines, making sure she can fly back home? [On the YouTube counter from 3:15 to 3:24]
Identify the Veterans crew?
Hopefully those three different camera angles of the crew disembarking through our DC-4 cargo door may help you to help me to identify who is who. That’s why I suggested the PAUSE mode. (And it’s how I got this photo!)
Here’s the manifest for the May 1946 delivery. (There had been a previous flight in April and would be a third one in June.)
Who do you recognize in the film from this manifest?
2-Prague-crew“Thanks to the Academy…”
Many, many thanks to a special friend who found this footage. And huge thanks to the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for providing it to us. And heaps of thanks to my web consultant, Paul Burton, at Aditerum in London for patiently guiding me through the conversion process to YouTube. Today, I am enriched and grateful for the entire journey.