THE PILOT WHO WOULDN'T FLY

Look what happened to Guy Gibson - too many times to the well and
ended up
killing his hapless "navigator" and himself. His "bravery" (or
internal drive
to grapple with the enemy) was the primary reason both of these airmen
died.

Oh? Actually I thought the mainspar failed in the Mosquito after being
previously
overstressed in a very high G pullout elsewhere? Or am I thinking of
someone else?

He took a navigator up who had never been inside a Mosquito before. There was
little to no pre-flight briefing and the switchology on the fuel system on the
Mosquito, frankly, required a systems expert to operate it all in the dark. At
a point coinciding with fuel starvation on the main tanks, the aircraft "ran
out" of fuel and crashed in the dark, next to a village with many witnesses.
Rumors about the crash persist to this day, but the villagers described the
hapless crew struggling to restart engines as it circled lower and lower,
finally impacting the ground. It was a very odd sound for late at night - a
circling aircraft with engines cutting out, then silence for half a minute
followed by a shattering crash.

Expecting men to face death daily over a period of years is not a way
to find
out who is brave and who is not

No, and I wasn't implying anything of the kind. My statement about
courage seems
to have become out of context. IIRC, it was Gibson(?) who said that
there were 2
kinds of courage, the man who simply feels 'it can't/won't happen to
me', perhaps somewhat
unimaginative in that respect, and who is therefore more readily able to
do dangerous things
supposedly without being *really* afraid and the other kind, who *knows*
that it *can* happen to him,
perhaps through seeing just one too many close friends or associates
'get the chop' or just through
being more 'imaginative' BUT still 'carry on' regardless. IIRC, he
considered the second kind the bravest
of the brave. He put himself in the first category. I'm in no position
to argue with him, or indeed anyone
who's 'been there'.

Basil Embry, #1 bad ass of the RAF, agreed and used almost the exact wording.
"Chop rate" gives me the willies - the stoicism displayed by the Bomber Command
boys during the bloody period between 1940 to 1942 far exceeds my own; right up
there with the USN's torpedo bomber crews of 1942...

- its simply a way to expend them like
cartridges, or leave many of them as broken shadows for the rest of
their
lives.

True enough. I could hypothesise that the first kind could suddenly
lose that belief in their immortality
that seems natural in those under about 30 through constant trauma.
Perhaps enough to make them
unable to carry on in the same way. (As did Art's "Captain Johnson" I
think). That he 'lost his bottle'
as the poms put it, was just one man reaching his breaking point.


Agree.

We did have one that fell into neither of these two categories: I served with
a chump who decided (after 4 years of quiet, relatively safe peacetime
training) that it wasn't "safe" for him to fly night landings aboard ship. He
became a pariah in my squadron and he had no reason whatever to justify all the
thousands of dollars he soaked up, just to quit when he actually had to face a
little danger. He didn't ever live it down and when I see him on occasion, I
call him a coward to his face, San Diego Sheriff uniform or not. I can't
believe he took another career where folks will be depending on him, after the
way he reacted the first time. If I had him with me in battle, I'd shove him
out ahead of me and use what was left as a barricade, because I sure as hell
wouldn't want him _beside_ me.

v/r
Gordon
====(A+C====
USN SAR

Donate your memories - write a note on the back and send your old photos to a
reputable museum, don't take them with you when you're gone.