I am also unable to cavil at it.

… his cited trip of September 6/7. 1941 …

Further to this, although that night saw an operation to Huls, the very next night 7/8 Sep ’41 saw an operation to Berlin on which 10 Stirlings (plus other aircraft) operated (that’s possibly a single squadron) and two were lost. This from Middlebrook/Everitt’s BCWD mentioned in my post above. Someone with access to Chorley will be able to confirm to you if Pape was one of those shot down that night.

Click on NewForest’s link and it shows you Oriented North.

Yep, thanks … also Wikipedia has the answer to much of my question, see here (text) and here (pic)

I didn’t know that – learn something very day. And they changed it back again? A-10 Warthog and various others?

in 1945 an A26 was an A26

Sorry, can you explain “dissed” please?

… not a B26. That was my point. I was being pedantic. Bit of a pet hate re the change of ID for the B26. Come war’s end the IMHO excellent B26 (Marauder) was summarily melted down and the A26 became the B26 … for no good reason! And therefore yes dissed = disrespected.

The US highball trials were conducted with an A26 Invader – not a B26 Invader.

Closely eyeballing those videos I’d say the highball bomb itself cut right through the fueslage.

cheers Don

Conversion rip off!

And on the pounds shillings and pence thing. I remember as a wee lad feeling might ripped off when we went decimal here in NZ (’67).

Jaffas and things like that were 5 a penny. 5 x 12 = 60 so you got 60 for a shilling. Along came decimal currency and the shilling became 10 cents. But did we get 6 jaffas a cent? Oh no, they were 5 a cent.

Base 5 in real life

Will it ever be used in real life?

You know, I realised a couple of hours back that I use base 5 every now and then … when I’m counting things in (or as they pass me, or I collect them etc.).

You know that technique with a pencil, or a knife and a tree trunk, of counting things in blocks of 5? Four vertical strokes and then one that crosses through it. I can’t do it here, there’s no strikethrough format tool.

You end up with blocks of 5 and a few leftovers. Of course we’re very quick at converting the 5’s into base 10. Say we’ve counted 23 things (kids, sheep, spitfires, whatever). Oh, there’s four blocks of 5, that’s twenty … plus three, means there’s twenty three. etc.

In base 5 it is ever so quicker, four of them plus three is instantly recognisable as 43.

cheers