The National WWII Museum implies that your WWII anecdote is the inverse of what actually happened. That is, that returning planes were shot in the fuselage, and

The National WWII Museum implies that your WWII anecdote is the inverse of what actually happened. That is, that returning planes were shot in the fuselage, and a WWII statistician recognized survivorship bias in proposed reinforcement and concluded that the areas not hit on survivors should be reinforced. See: http://www.nww2m.com/2012/11/scitech-tuesday-abraham-wald-seeing-the-unseen/ http://www.nww2m.com/2012/11/scitech-tuesday-abraham-wald-se... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald