Thread drift alert!! Nothing at all to do with the thread topic, but perhaps some will forgive the thread drift as I follow on from teresa green's misty-eyed post recalling some of the wonderful blokes we we so privileged to fly with, the ones who earned their wings during WW2.
Keeping with the 'no names' rule (for the pilots at least)... I was flying with one of the WW2 veterans one day when TV chef Len Evans came up onto the 727 flight deck. He mentioned that one of the most memorable days of his life was when, as a 10 year old schoolboy, he was let out of class one day in September 1944 to watch the huge number of aircraft and gliders fly overhead on their way to Arnhem. ("There were so many of them, they were like a huge dark cloud passing overhead.")
Old skipper softly buys into the conversation with: "I was flying one of those aircraft. I was skipper of a Stirling towing two gliders on the first drop."
Three jaws drop - Len Evan's, mine and the FE's. Until that comment, although we'd both known him well, neither the FE nor I had known anything about what the guy has done in the war.
After completing his 30 missions with Bomber Command, the same bloke went on to comlete a tour with 100 Group, the ones who carried the spooks who (usually) parachuted to support the French Resistance. I later pumped him for as much as he'd share with me and he told me how he'd LANDED a Stirling in an farmer's field behind German lines during the short-lived Resistance takeover of the Massif in southern France in the months immediately after D Day.
I often wondered how, after what they'd seen and done as very young men, these blokes weren't bored to snores tooling an airliner between Sydney and Melbourne four or five days a week. However, when I was looking at what seemed to be a very bleak future in late 1989 and early 1990, one of the factors that stopped me even considering stepping over into what I saw then as the enemy trenchs was the way I thought men like the one I have mentioned here would regard me if I did.