iscover
Avro Lancaster, a veritable death trap due to bureaucracy's inability to modify the aircraft to confound the Luftwaffe's ability to destroy it with ease
Short Finals
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Just because they’re at the top doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing!
And that unfortunately is truer than ever when applied to military matters. You don’t have to be a military historian to remember the ridiculous and totally ill-founded manoeuvres that for the most part was called World War I. Fifty thousand good, young and brave Australians alone are buried beneath French soil as a grim testimony to the follies of war and a hierarchy that for most of the time didn’t know or couldn’t care enough to get it right. A surviving German soldier of 1945 might even feel more betrayed – he would certainly have a right to!
In WWI airmen lived for barely a fortnight at the front before meeting what was then considered an inevitable end. Parachutes could have saved scores of these brave young fliers but no they weren’t to be issued under the explicit orders of the British High Command. Why? Because it was considered by those on high (who had never even flown in an aeroplane, let alone in combat over France) that “it would be bad for morale and possibly cause pilots to disengage the enemy prematurely”. Fact unfortunately is stranger than fiction.
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