Can I safely assume I'm not the only one to get an aviation hard on (laced with absolute envy) when I look at the pic of those (very) young men in front of the Mosquito? That is a seriously horny aeroplane.
(Tin hats on, everyone. War-ie to follow.)
When I first joined the RAAF (yep, the double-A one), we had an old Flight Sergeant fireman - (he probably wasn’t even 40, but to us then, older than God) - who told us a story of when he first joined the Service in the early 50s. He and a dozen other teenage Airmen were issued axes and sent off to chop through the main spars of twenty or thirty Mosquitoes before they were to be sold for scrap. (Believe it or not, some farmers used the plywood fuselages as hay stores!)
He said an officer had to be present to witness and sign off that each aircraft had been rendered unairworthy (an axe through the wooden main spar tends to do that!) and the officer in question was a Flight Lieutenant pilot with four rows of WW2 medals, who, they discovered, had flown Mosquitoes on operations. He and all his teenage mates were agog to see this officer with tears streaming down his face as he watched them swing their axes. Reading Cliff and Harry’s stories, I think just about all of us today would have some inkling of how he felt.
(harrym, check your private messages - top right of the page, where you sign in.)