Yo, mick -

I wish I could have met your dad - we could have told some real tales and I could have learned a lot from him.  Sounds like he was one of those great guys from his generation.

I'm surprised that RAF worried much about tire wear on Spits and Hurricanes - weren't most RAF stations still basically large, sod fields during the early War years?  And with the relatively light weight of a Spit or Hurricane, I wouldn't have thought that tire wear was a big deal, especially operating off of sod fields.

The experiments I knew of related to bombers.  As they weigh many times what  a small fighter does, tire wear with them is more expensive, as they have more tires and they wear out so much faster with the weight.  When our B-47 came along, tires were wearing out really fast, since it was the first jet bomber to be built in any large numbers, and it landed much faster than anything before it.

Remember how it had the big drag chute that was deployed after landing to slow it down?  Many fighters had them too, including my all time favorite, the F-4 Phantom.  Brake technology wasn't that advanced then, and the drag chute was needed to slow down even using a 10,000 foot runway.

The F-4 emergency procedure for a drag chute failure to deploy was mainly to stand on the brakes, bend over and kiss your posterior good bye, and hope that 47,000 pounds of iron screaming down the runway at 160 mph would come to a stop before you ran out of runway.  If it did stop, the brakes were probably so hot that the landing gear was trashed, and you might even get a gear fire from the overheated hydraulic fluid in the braking system.  The brake discs would get red hot and heat up the fluid to its flash point.  Of course the tires were goners.

The kind of stuff for 25 year olds; not old men.

Mick -

I know that life was much tougher in England during the war than it was here - we never got bombed.  But beyond that, we had only voluntary things like turning in your pots and pans, never compulsory.

We had gas rationing too - some people like doctors, who made house calls then, were exempt, but it affected most people.  We had meat rationing for a part of the war, but it ended before the Japanese surrendered.  There was a big black market in gas and meat rationing stamps.

My mother said the meat rationing was the worst - most people ate lots of meat then, naturally didn't know as much about diet and nutrition as we do now.

Everything about WW II, from the absolute national togetherness about winning the war, to life on the homefront was a time, the likes of which we'll never see again.

Can you imagine Americans ever again being so united toward a common goal?  We had a bit of that feeling for a few weeks after 9/11, but then the conspiracy idiots surfaced, and once again Americans were b!tching about their government's policies and aims.  How did we go so wrong?  During WW II, FDR had his political foes, but when it came to winning the war, everyone was together.

My dad started the war in the Navy, but soon transferred to the Army Air Corps, and finished out the war flying B-17s from England.  He loved to talk about his experiences, unlike a lot of vets, but I think the infantry soldiers are mainly the ones who didn't talk as much as the flyers did.  Flyers saw lots of carnage too - it wasn't all romantic chivalry when a German 30mm cannon shell or a hunk of flak ripped thru a B-17, tearing apart bodies as well as metal.

They truly were the greatest generation.