I wouldn't pay much attention to Foofie's remarks, guys, if i were you--he is prone to just making **** up, apparently for no other reason than to have something to argue about.
In the early days of World War II, one of our first heroes was
Colin P. Kelly. Now, it happens that for what he actually did, Kelly deserved to be described as a hero. However, as is pointed out in the Wikipedia article i have linked:
Quote:Early reports misidentified the Ashigara [my note: the Imperial Navy cruiser which he had actually attacked] as the battleship Haruna, and also mistakenly reported that he had crashed his plane into the smokestack of the Haruna, becoming the first Suicide pilot of the war.
When i was in high school in the early 1960s, this version of events was still being taught as factual history. What makes it even more ironic is that the use of suicide pilots by the Japanese was held up as evidence that they were "less human" and less humane than Americans, and that they placed little value on human life. But cognitive dissonance is nothing new in human history, or in historiography.
In the Great War, Eddie Rickenbacker of the United States Army Air Service ended the war with 26 kills. American standards of confirmation were more rigorous than that of other nations, so his 26 kills is "impressive" in consideration of how long he flew in combat. From that time forward, Rickenbacker was the standard by which fighter pilots were judged--American "aces" measured their achievement against the 26-skill standard. So for example, when people disputed that Greg "Pappy" Boyington of the United States Marines got his 26th kill over Rabaul on the day he was shot down, those disputing the claim were savagely attacked, and although the eyewitness accounts of his "kill" disagree, they are almost never disputed--getting that 26th kill and matching Rickenbacker was a crucial milestone in a fighter pilots career.
I suggest that Foofie watch a series on the History Channel called Dogfight. I don't usually watch the History Channel because most of their "history" bears that relationship to history that Christian Science does to science. But i like this series, if only for the CGA with which they recreated the aerial combat--in fact, that's the only reason i watch it. They interview the pilots involved if they are still living, and most are American, although they have interviewed Israelis, Russians, Japanese and Vietnamese, too. One thing that stands out is the excitement, and the smiles, which these men display, when they talk about their dogfights, and their kills. To attempt to suggest that Richthofen was somehow extraordinary, some kind of monster, is bullshit.
