Brian 48nav (your #8237),
For a couple of days I have been mulling over your mild "rant", particularly your:
...my age was displayed. Then under 'ATC Issues' another poster disagreed with my opinion and called me a coffin-dodger...
You were fully entitled to your "rant" ! For this was unfair, unpleasant, uncalled for, and leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.
It shows that some of our members have no conception of the nature of military service. In war, I've often said that: "
we each had to fight the war we were given" - there was no choice. So it is, and always be, in military service, even in peace. It may be that you serve your entire time and never hear a shot fired in anger, while someone five or ten years younger (or older) has heard all too much ! But that is "the luck of the draw", nothing more.
In my own case, on leaving OTU in '42, I might have stayed in the UK, gone into Fighter Command and spent my time on "sweeps" over France and the Low Counties, basically looking for trouble - and usually finding it. Or (more likely), I might have been twin-converted and been switched across into Bomber Command, in which case my survival (with nearly three years of operations ahead) would have been more than doubtful.
Instead I was sent out to India. At the time (mid-'42) the colonial empires in SE Asia were falling like ninepins to the all-conquering Japanese; there was no confidence that lightly defended India would fare any better. We were generally thought to be on a one-way trip, just to be a delaying force, buying time to allow as many of the white civil population to get away as possible. Our fate was to be death or imprisonment in the hands of the Japanese (which in many cases amounted to the same thing).
As we know
now, it didn't happen. The line was held (but it was a "
damn'd close-run thing"). Then for two years we had the nearest thing to risk-free operations imaginable in the VVs. Why the Japanese Army Commanders in Burma didn't use their "Oscars" to wipe us out (which they could easily have done) we'll never know. Perhaps their book said that they were supplied "for Army Co-operation duties" - and the Generals never raised their eyes to the skies.
"Luck of the draw !"
Danny.