The Age
[Melbourne]
13 March
2019
Column 8
[David
Swain of Glenhaven writes:] “Some years back I was assisting a government
department in New Zealand. The officer I was assisting was a woman, who
reported to her divisional manager, a woman, who reported to the CEO, a woman,
who reported to the Minister, a woman, who reported to the Prime Minister, a
woman, who reported to the Governor General, a woman, who reported to the
Queen, who presumably reported to God, and there seems some doubt about Her
too. When I commented on this, I was told that if I didn't like it I could
complain to the Chief Justice, yes, a woman.”
=====
South
China Morning Post
12 March
2019
Passengers ground Chinese flight by throwing ‘lucky’
coins at plane – yet again
Two young
Chinese women have been detained on suspicion of tossing coins at a plane they
were boarding for good luck, making this the fourth confirmed case in two
years. […] The plane, which was travelling to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan
province, eventually took off soon after 10pm when the coins were found
underneath the boarding steps. […]
=====
The
American Warrior
20 April
2015
Beer Bombing in B-17’s
John R.
Bruning
Over the
years, I’ve come across interesting things American air crews have thrown out
of their planes during bombing missions. One of the more famous was a donkey
that was a B-17 group’s mascot. They’d picked the donkey up in North Africa and
brought it back to England, where the local kids were given rides on it. The
donkey kicked the bucket one day, so the guys in the bomb group somehow put it
in an NCO’s uniform, gave it a set of dogtags and dropped it over Germany
during their next mission. You know that somewhere, in some archive, is a
report of finding a flattened, uniformed donkey in some poor German farmer’s
field. […]
[The
foundation of this story is likely the life of Lady Moe, a Tunisian donkey
adopted as a mascot by the USAAF 96th Bomb Group, based in Snetterton Heath,
England, during WWII. The donkey was killed by a train in October 1945 after
wandering onto a railway track near the base, and she was buried there. A short
documentary about her, Lady Moe: Queen of
the Heath (Alex Fryer, 2012) is currently available on YouTube.]
=====
S. P.
MacKenzie, Flying Against Fate:
Superstition and Allied Aircrews in World War II (Lawrence, KS: University
Press of Kansas, 2017), 57, 164n27.
In the
Eighth Air Force, heavy losses suffered by one […] bombardment group led it to
be famously dubbed “The Bloody 100th". […] The legend – entirely
fictitious – was that a B-17 from the group under attack one day from fighters
had lowered its landing gear, a sign of surrender, but then had gone on to
shoot down the escorting German planes, causing the enemy subsequently to seek
out bombers with the group’s tail markings for special attention. […] The exact
same legend was spread concerning one Liberator with the 450th Bomb Group in
Italy and another with the 492nd Bomb Group in England.
