"Kevin Brooks" wrote in message
news

"ArtKramr" wrote in message
...
Subject: Rumsfeld and flying
From: Buzzer
Date: 3/6/04 8:31 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

On 07 Mar 2004 03:25:15 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:

I find it interesting that Rumsfeld
was an instructor who had never been to combat.

It's hard for me to believe that you cannot conceptualize that not
everyone
during times of combat operations sees action. I've got several good
friends
who, through no fault of their own, have exactly *zero* combat hours.
These
guys would have jumped on a jet for England or Diego Garcia in a heart
beat,
but it wasn't thier job. What was there job? They were teaching brand
new
navigators and co-pilots how to operate the B-52, a critical job
considering
the drastic under manning we had (and have) in the B-52. You need to
get
it
out
of your thick head that what you were doing on a daily basis was the
most
important job in the history of the world and anyone who wasn't doing
it
was
a
slackard.

I know I'm wasting my time here....why do I bother?

Your good friends were a bunch of slackers. Everyone knows all you
have to do is volunteer for combat and off you go. An even worse
situation is if an instructor doesn't have combat time all the
trainees will not respect them.
The more I think about it I wonder if the combat veterans in WWII
pulled a reverse Vietnam war situation. When they returned home they
spit on the civilians that stayed stateside doing useless things like
building Arts aircraft, building bombs and ammo, ect..?


You are not far wrong. Most of those who built our planes and ammo were
woman
and old men and high school kids.

No, they were not. That may be *your* twisted perception of reality, but
it
is no more correct than your recent ludicrous pronouncements about the
National Guard during WWII.

"In 1944 there were 104,450,000 people over 14. Of that total 65,140,000
were in the labor force either as workers or in the military and
38,590,000
were not in the labor force (down less than 4 million from 1940). There
were
46,520,000 males in the labor force including the military, of whom
35,460,000 were in the civilian workforce and 19,170,000 women in the
civilian workforce."

www.ndu.edu/inss/McNair/mcnair50/m50c13n.html

The male civilian workforce vastly outnumbered the women workforce (about
two to one), and the fact of the matter is that the majority of those
males
would have had to have fallen into the age group which would have been
eligable for military service (if not the draft).

Damn few who could go to war stayed behind,

In actuality, since the US armed forces only totalled about 11 plus
million
strong at its peak, your statement is again wrong, since there were some
35
million men serving in the civilian workforce, and even if you were very
generous and said only one-third of those fell within the military's
age-eligibility range, you'd still have one military age male serving in
the
civilian workforce for every man in the military force.

And when we all came back and found that someone our age got a
deferment
for
any reason other than physical we did nott ake kindly to them But those
were
different times with obviously different standards.

Guess you might have taken more kindly to them if you had been smart
enough
to realize that it would have been sort of hard for you to drop bombs that
were never manufactured because there were no younger, skilled, strong men
back in the States to help manufacture them; the women and old men
couldn't
do it all. In the end the contribution of a mobilized US industrial base
to
the war effort was every bit as valuable as that of the military forces,
and
in fact neither would have existed without the other. One has to wonder
how
willing a young, cocky Loo-tenant bombadier-by-golly like yourself, fresh
back from winning the war all by your lonesome, was to go up to a big
brawny
crew of male shipbuilders/railroad workers/etc., and tell them how you did
not take kindly to their contribution to the war effort. Since you still
apparently have the use of your typing fingers, the obvious answer to that
is, "Not very."

Brooks



Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer




Well said!!!!