Dubbo

I have a Russian movie about Afghanistan called "The 9th Company" I was looking for it when you were here and have since found it. Not bad. (It had a $10M budget) But the subtitles were a bit inaccurate. I had my Russian friend over giving me a running translation as we watched. Much better. I'll get it to you Waldo

"Bring Back My Stringbag" by Lord Kilbracken Just finished this one and what a good read. It follows John Godley (later to become Lord Kilbracken) as a young Irish lad who thought the wait for RAF looked too long and decided to join the RVNR instead to become a pilot. He had been keen on flying since he was a youngster and had even started building a Flying Flea as a teenager until his mother banned him from finishing it. So after completing flight school with visions of flying fast, powerful & modern combat aircraft he ended up being posted to a Swordfish squadron. And there he stayed growing to love the Swordfish. He spent the majority of the war flying from MAC-ships (converted grain and oil tankers) running between England and Canada and later on an escort carrier to Murmansk. : What was interesting that although his career was extremely perilous, there was very little contact with the enemy. It was also interesting to see the arc of this young bloke who initially lived to fly to end up grounding himself by the war's end and never piloting an aircraft again. Having survived almost 900 hours in Swordfish, he was almost killed because of a design fault in the Fairey Barracuda, after he took over a training squadron ashore. Nice outline of the horrendous flying conditions (not to mention that the Swordfish had no defensive armament) and the mysterious rivalry between the regular navy & volunteers. One memorable tale involves a hurricane (weather), The North Sea and a runaway tractor on the hangar deck. Makes me wish we had Swordfish in the game. Lots of ideas for missions (aside from Taranto and Bismarck) Absorbing and entertaining :thumbright:

You had me going for a bit there mate. Tricky bastard. You have too much spare time.......

Pooka generously sent me a copy of "The Thousand-Mile War" by Brian Garfield. This is a detailed account of the war in the Aleutians and is really well-done. He offers reasons as to why the whole campaign is generally not known even though it had some of the bloodiest fighting during the whole of WW2. Two particular stories stand out. One took place during the invasion of Attu where, in a blinding snow storm 2 companies of US soldiers were being pinned down by 9 Japanese machine gun nests. A Private Fred Barnett remarked to a companion that he was fed up, and taking his rifle and a string of grenades, stood up and walked into the snowstorm. Periodically there came the sound of shooting from the enemy positions punctuated by the heavier explosions of grenades. Eventually there was silence and after a time Barnett emerged from the blinding snow and waved his fellow soldiers forward. He had charged 9 machine gun emplacements and wiped them all out, without a scratch. The second one involves the pilot of a B-24, Captain Lucian Wernick and one particularly dicey landing after a raid. A flak burst had taken out the nose wheel and hydraulic systems leaving Wernick with a pressing problem. Having decided early in the campaign not to carry parachutes on board (as survival time in the water was counted in minutes), he had to somehow put the B-24 down without a nose-wheel nor brakes on the marsden matting runways of their base. Ditching was not an option and nor was a wheels-up landing (According to the book these rarely worked out in B-24s) The problem with no nose wheel meant that as soon as the nose of the bomber hit the steel mesh of the runaway, the sea of sparks would pretty much guarantee an inferno. Wernick approached his base and dropped to sea level, which was slightly lower than the strip. Coming over the shore gear and flaps down he pulled back and washed off enough speed to drop the B-24 onto it's main gear. He had assembled his whole crew just aft of the main gear to keep the centre of gravity slightly to the rear. As they touched down, he had his crew walk towards the rear of the fuselage while he played with the throttles, balancing the bomber on the main wheels as they trundled down the runaway. Eventually the whole crew was jammed up against the tail turret and the end of the runway was fast approaching. The Liberator slipped off the threshold into the mud and then having come to a standstill the nose slowly dropped to the ground. Everyone survived and the B-24 was repaired. The book is full of little stories like these and is a good read. Interesting and informative.

Yes..the pitch. Practice will be needed in my house too

Yeah. But don't they make you look. It's amazing how different a paintjob can make something look

I'd have to upgrade first unfortunately. Looks fantastic.

Nice footage of G-effects. Looks like a fun ride http://www.dumpalink.com/media/11475101 ... ou_with_me

So Arthur will be up this way again on the weekend of 3rd June. Your place or mine mate?

They look really good Beebop. What is the last one based on??

Have a good trip mate. And have fun when you get back

Have fun mate. And a safe trip. Lots of pics (of the museum, not of you at Disneyland)

Still amazed at your water. Fan-bloody-tastic

Thanks. Pretty damn funny

Thanks Waldo. I love this show. Pooka even my wife loves it and she's not really really into cars. These guys have the best jobs ever.

Interesting article Waldo. Thanks

Yeah. I agree with you. It looks like there are more than one 2 seat conversion.

Nice pics. Nice plane. Except for the twin seater. Some things just should never be done. That is one of those things. Unfortunately it's probably the only chance, as slim as it is, that most of us would ever get a flight in one.

:shock: That hurts my eyes.

Women's right? And not the good kind. :wink: You no longer have any because you threw it all at David Hasselhoff, right?

We should rock up to Jetsetsam's place and watch it on his 42inch plasma HDTV. Didn't he say he played this game on his giant TV?

Douglas Reeman Fiction once again. Now I was not all that interested in naval warfare but my boss loaned me a book called "The Last Raider" by this British chap, Douglas Reeman. It was a story about a WW1 German merchant raider and was a good tale, well-told. But I gave the book back to him and never gave it much more thought..... Then he was cleaning up his place some 2 years later and he threw some old books my way. One of them was a novel called "The Destroyers", again by Douglas Reeman. This was a novel about a captain of a WW1-era destroyer being used in WW2 on operations that would border on suicidal. Once again, a great yarn, well written. He had raised my interest in this navy thing. As it turns out the guy has written many, many novels ranging from WW1 through to Korea, mostly about the Royal Navy and the men and traditions that make up that institution. The guy is prolific. He has written over 60 novels (including a bunch under the pseudonym "Alexander Kent") and as a result, you can find a lot of the Reeman novels in 2nd-hand book stores for only a couple of dollars. I just finished one called "H.M.S. Saracen" and it was really, really good. It was about a WW1 monitor ship that supported ANZAC troops at Gallipoli when she was brand new and about a raw officer who got his 1st posting aboard the brand new ship. By WW2 he had made captain and was posted back to the old monitor. Reeman himself is an interesting bloke too. This is the blurb from his website. "Acclaimed as 'the foremost naval writer of this century', Douglas Reeman was born in Thames Ditton, Surrey, England in 1924. With the outbreak of World War Two, and despite belonging to an army family, he joined the Royal Navy without hesitation at the age of sixteen. He saw service in the North Sea and Arctic, and the Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns, beginning as a midshipman in destroyers and transferring later to motor torpedo boats, where he was twice mentioned in dispatches. Following the war, he held a variety of jobs, including delivering yachts, selling marine engines, and walking the beat in London's East End as a uniformed policeman and in the plain-clothes Criminal Investigation Department. He returned to active service during the Korean War, and remained a naval reservist while working as a children's welfare officer for the London County Council, retaining that close contact with the navy which was to prove so invaluable. In 1957, having published two short stories, Douglas wrote the fictionalized version of "his war" on the backs of L.C.C. nit notices, more for his own satisfaction than out of any hope of publication. That novel, A Prayer for the Ship, was published in 1958, and was the beginning of a remarkable career............" More here http://www.bolithomaritimeproductions.com/Douglas%20Reeman%20Novels/default%20-%20DRNovels.html Highly recommended :thumbright:

Sweet Waldo. How big's your telly? (Personal question I know, but relevant)

I paid twice.