Regle and pistols and mayhem
Hi Regle,
Thanks very much for your personal experiences on that one. I think you might be right about the possibility of problems if they were always to hand. There is a famous case of a jealous soldier seeing his girlfriend with another man in a pub, so he returned to his unit and came back to the pub with - a BREN gun. He did kill them (short bursts at well-defined targets, of course) and in due course swung for it.
An infantry officer who served in Cairo told me that when they went onto town for a booze-up they always took their pistols. And come the time to return to camp they either to leave the bar to get back to camp in time; or they could stay in the bar if there happened to be a 'disturbance' in town. Naturally, just before they were due to go back to camp one of them would go into a side alley and fire a few shots in the air. Good for another hour at least...
Yes, I guess it must have been warm at 50 feet AGL in a Mossie - especially over enemy airfields! Looking at the seating arrangements it looks as though you might have had your right elbow in the nav's lap a lot of the time. I did read once that for some Mossie pilots it was difficult to get their legs in the right position for the rudder pedals, and that as a result one 'cheek' took most of their weight for the trip. Did you ever have such a 'numbing' experience?
I believe you could also tell the approximate length of service by the airman's Irvin jacket. At the outbreak of war, the jacket panels were made up of nice big, regular pieces of sheepskin, but by the end they were allegedly coming off the line as a formation of off-cuts.
Cheers,
Dave