I’m not sure that is true there were several Americans in the camp who were ‘involved’ in the escape and possibly one or two went through the tunnel.

Here’s a list of the escapees…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Allied_airmen_from_the_Great_Escape

Of course, and only McQueen played an American USAAF pilot, but using American actors is real history being manipulated and distorted for public home consumption. A bit like Errol Flynn (Tasmanian) winning the the battle of Burma single handed, Humphrey Bogart defeating the Nazis in North Africa in a comic little tank, or the US Navy capturing the Enigma machines in ‘U-571’.
Americans did take part in planning and digging the tunnels, but were all moved to another camp weeks before the night of the escape…

You might want to get in touch with WW2 ace Colonel James A (Goody) Goodson, who now lives in the US. According to his book “Tumult in the Clouds”, he was taught by Stanford-Tuck in the RAF, and then joined the American ‘Eagle’ squadron…

It’s a shame Hollywood made the original movie instead of one of the classic British companies. The movie was preoccupied with McQueen, Garner, Bronson and Coburn, when in fact no Americans took part in the actual escape…

Cripes – I’ve watched that episode a hundred times, ad didn’t realise there was so much to it!

The high wind speeds found in jet streams aren’t turbulent in themselves – the flow can be quite laminar in the vertical and horizontal. The turbulence is caused by the shearing effect in the steep wind speed gradients found where the jet interfaces with the surrounding slow-moving air.
It’s a bit like a fast-flowing river – apart from disturbances caused by any underlying rocks in the flow, the eddies, whirlpools and turbulence are mainly at the sides, where the fast flow meets the river banks…

As a conservationist, I would be the first to agree that sometimes predators have to be culled, but you don’t have to make a bloody ceremony out of it.
Dressing up in red tunics, riding roughshod over the countryside (class distinctions rigorously upheld), fox torn apart by hounds, then snacks and champagne afterwards.
Killing living creatures for fun, pleasure, and debatable social status simply can’t be justified under any circumstances.

Plenty of women left in the world, not enough Orcas.

I totally agree. Wildlife always come off worst in the long run when humans are involved – just look at how few tigers and white sharks there are left these days.
Humans are one species we don’t have to worry about… there are always plenty more no matter how many personal and mass tragedies befall us. There are more people alive in India at this very moment, than the entire population of the Earth in the year 1700.
More and more well-known scientists, natural historians, and the so-called ‘elite’ classes are beginning to voice the (once taboo) opinion that the world’s population is spiralling out of control, and will eventually need to be culled, if our food resources are to remain viable.
The common concensus is that 90% will have to be culled, to ensure the future of the rest. Just how they would go about it, they don’t say, but we would also have to do it all again in another 300 years.
Personally, I think that either Eastern or Western genetic scientists will come up with a disease that affects every other human except those of their own genetic makeup, and then they will migrate into the void that’s left…
How’s that for straying off the thread?;)