All those “your favourite…” are difficult. So many things to choose from.
But I think this was summer 1995. We managed to bring a real flying Spitfire to an air show in Poland, the first time ever. When F/Lt Stanislaw Bochniak DFC (then about 80) entered the cockpit he was the first (ex-) Polish Air Force pilot to sit in an airworthy Spitfire on free Polish soil.
Exactly 50 years later than all other Allied nations…

I have already posted this on this forum a while ago, but nothing has changed since – still my favourite colour WW2 photograph.

The word says LOPAST’ which means blade, so this is a part of a propeller or rotor.

From the Fighter Collection Flying Legends Participants list website

Quote:
12x Supermarine Spitfire
2x Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress

I’m happy with that.

OK, but how do I make it plural if I don’t know the exact number?
Should I put it as “Many x Fortress”?

I will leave it unless you really want to have it removed.
No disrespect to yourself but if there is one thng that does annoy me slightly (and I have to be very careful on the annoying front…;)) is when threads are deleted or posts removed; in this case the other following posts would have to go too, otherwise they have no point.
Flood.™

Flood,
I agree with you on removing posts in general. I have never removed any of my posts (even if after a while I wished I hadn’t posted them…).
However, I thought there was a good reason to remove this one: if some casual visitors to this thread had a look at that post only, without following the entire discussion, they would leave the site with the impression that the information I posted was correct. I didn’t want that to happen, that’s all.

Flood,
Thanks for your comments.
I have checked and I cannot quote a published source of my info, just a number of conversations. Obviously there must have been some confusion as to the actual person, unless someone has spread rumours aginst P/O Hardy in the past. I apologise for posting the info without checking first.
I have removed that post. I leave it up to you to either leave it in the quote in your post (with your correcting comment), or to remove it, too.

If America did have such an influence over its citizens as you say, i wonder how much of this applied to people like Billy Fiske who were half British. Did that make a difference I wonder.

A lot of difference if they had British passports (see my first entry in the thread).

as I understand it, anyone is free to join a foreign country’s armed forces, being technically a mercenary.

Unless their own country’s law bans it, in which case they become criminals in their home country. I’m not sure of other countries, but a Polish citizen joining foreign military forces (such as the French Legion Etrangere, for example) breaks Polish law and automatically becomes a criminal. I think that was the case with US citizens then.

It was none of United States ‘business’!

Yes, it was. The US had become involved in WWI due to the incident where US citizens were killed on board a British ship. Therefore, I believe, the isolationists had the law passed that said that US citizens were not allowed to join the Allied forces, because it was feared that American deaths in the war might force the country to enter the war. Also, all young men were suposed to serve in the US forces, so by joining foreign forces they avoided that and thus broke the national defence laws.

From what I understand (I was too young to be there) most facets of the U.S. government didn’t care about people breaking the neutrality laws.

I remember reading a book about Eagle Squadrons which outlined this in some detail (I’ll try to find its title/author). Initially those joining the RCAF/RAF were liable to be sentenced to prison or high financial penalties (not sure how may acutally were). During autumn 1940 some sort of informal agreement was reached between HM Government and the US Administration. Basically, the Americans would not mind their young men joining the RAF/RCAF, but only provided these men were first found unsuitable for service in US air forces. This later caused some bitterness among the Eagles when the USA entered the war and they were invited to join their country’s forces. They felt that if they had been rejected by their own air force, it would be unfair to the RAF (who didn’t reject them) if they left it. You might remember that some of them never joined the USAAF (Lance Wade, for example). And some, like Hollis Hills (hope I got his name right, the man who got the first Mustang air-to-air victory for the RAF), preferred to join the US Navy, rather than the USAAF which had rejected him.

As war continued, the generall attitude in the USA gradually changed, so by 1941 US forces actually chased U-boats in Western Atlantic (but still under the label of those constituting a threat to neutral shipping). So, when talking about US neutrality it is important to say which period we are discussing.