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Old 9th Dec 2007, 04:26
  #220 (permalink)  
Wiley
 
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Fokkerwokker, I think I could safely say I speak for quite a few others when I say "prattle on - as much as you like", about the making of the movie.

If I may be allowed a bit of thread drift myself, when I was still at school, my next door neighbour was a bloke who, at age 18, had been an ambulance driver at a major northern Australian military airfield during WW2. Sitting listening to the men yarning under the house over a few beers towards the end of a BBQ one night, (and keeping very quiet, hoping I wouldn't be noticed and told to go upstairs to join the women, who, back in those days, would always finish the evening in the kitchen cleaning up while the men stayed downstairs knocking over a few beers, half choking in the smoke from their roll yer own ciggies and the stinking mosquito coils they'd have burning under their chairs), I heard him casually say how they often used to run fire hoses in through the waist gunner's window and down to the tail gunner's cubicle on the USAAF B17s that got back from missions over New Guinea to clean the blood and gore out.

It was the first time I'd ever heard use the phrase "we hosed them out", and possibly the first time I realised that war might involve something more than a clean cut shoulder wound that allowed the hero in my Biggles comics to wear a semi-decorative sling over his uniform.
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