Originally Posted by
t43562
While you are enjoying your righteous anger about Chuck Yeager, which may well be justified, I remember my mother quoting a popular saying that the Americans were "oversexed, overpaid and over here." That doesn't sound too friendly.
It was music-hall banter which was almost invariably parried immediately with the risposte "while you are underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower".
Yeager was a farm-boy from Smalltown, Nowheresville whith the limited education that went with that background in the 1930s, so it's not really that surprising that wartime UK was a bit of a culture shock to him. His inferiority complex in regard to the more educated and intellectual pilots of later generations is a matter of record. I guess it has continued to rankle and eat away at him like a cancer. I've often felt he may be one of those people whose professional capabilities one can admire while almost despising them as a person - like John Wayne and Michael Schumacher. The exact opposite of (for example) Tony Benn, whose political stance I disposed on almost every topic but when I met him I found to be a charming and engaging man who I would have valued as a friend.
PDR