Box Brownie,
A fine start ! Welcome to you (#9320 and #9326), and to Flt Lt John Dunbar DFC (RIP).
...Not knowing that I had come top of the course I stormed into the Group Captain and said what a disgraceful decision it was, that I was the youngest on the course, that I was totally ill-equipped to be a flying instructor, and wanted to go on operations...
How to win friends and influence people ! More likely to be a case of "A young man with a bright future behind him !" - he was lucky to survive.
His reaction was the same as that of our American Army Air Corps instructors after Pearl Harbor:
"It'll be all over before we get there !". In the end there was plenty of war for everyone - and a bit too much for some. But I don't remember any of ours going and taking it out on their Colonel - they'd be clapped in irons ! (they took it out on us, instead).
At this stage of the war, almost all our flying training was farmed out to the Empire Air Training Schools in Canada, Southern Rhodesia and other places. Britain had too poor weather, the skies were too crowded, there was a blackout at night, and there was a war going on all around in the air in the meanwhile.
The American offer (of training in selected Schools of their own - the "Arnold Scheme") and in providing six "British Flying Training Schools" in the Southern States, was extraordinarily generous. And surprising, too - both Schemes were started in summer (1941), when the US was (officially) still neutral (and not supppose to provide military assistance to either side). Not that Hitler could do much about it !
Their enormous help (about 7,000 pilots for the RAF from their own resources) must have just about balanced the Bomber Command losses during the war.
Keep it coming, BB - slabs of 1,000 words are about right.
Danny42C (ie in Class 42C of the "Arnold Scheme", still treasures the dollar-silver US Army wings he got - but we were not allowed to wear them on uniform, only our RAF ones. A pity).