Hi all,
I was very moved to read the story of Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner and decided I'd like to build a diorama showing Hudner trying to help Brown out of his downed F4U-4.
The account that I read, from a book called "Such Men As These", describes the crashed F4U as "bent about 20 degrees to the right, just in front of the cockpit" (from memory-I was looking at it last night) and describes a mass of wiring spilling out of the break.
But have a look at the F4U..."just in front of the cockpit" is at the centerpoint of where the fuselage meets the wings. It doesn't seem possible for the nose to "bend to the right" at that point and I looked at hundreds of photos of crashed Corsairs without seeing similar damage. If the plane's body broke, it seemed to break at the tail or the engine fell off its mount. In all pictures of crashed corsairs that I saw, the fuselage-wing joint was always intact. I'm having a very difficult time envisioning how a Corsair could bend to the right about 20 degrees just in front of the cockpit.
Now, Brown's leg was trapped in the cockpit by the bent fuselage, so it happened somehow. Does anyone have any ideas (or photos) of how a Corsair would break that way?