Show your Americana / Non-Sports Memorabilia

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Other than early baseball, my big collecting passion is historically interesting diaries. I started with Civil War diaries and then moved into many other areas including; WWI and WWII soldiers, naval men and aviator diaries (including those from other countries), Oregon Trail diaries and other historically interesting ones including a hippie from 1967 who hitch hiked to San Fransisco and hung out at Haight/Ashbury during the "Summer of Love".

Seeing some of the great military items, in particular the B-29 material, got me looking through my diaries. Below is an entry from a B-29 radio operator writing about the great/terrible low altitude incendiary bombing raid of Tokyo. He even claims (and several others from this raid said the same thing) that they "could smell Jap flesh burning at 7,000 feet". Because of the tremendous fires and the low level at which they were bombing, the turbulence threw them all over the place when they released their bombs. Parts of the planes came off and the men were thrown all over the plane.

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