Young crew!
 

The age of these pilots in WWII amazes me!
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/...24_964x425.jpg

I didn't think colour had been invented back then :).

Living in my college town, I'll sometimes take a walk through campus at lunch and am amazed at:

1. How young the students look
2. How old I've become.

Age
 

I have read (can't cite the sources), but believe in WWII, the average pilot was between 20-21 years old. Most fighter pilots showed up with about 200-250 hours total; some had as little as 15-20 hours in type before their first combat sorties.

Robin Olds was a Major, and the squadron commander, at 23.

"Pappy" Boyington was so-named because at 28, he was considered "old."

(I may be off a little in these numbers, but they are close).

N9373M: You got me curious, so I looked it up: color photography has existed since at least 1877, but was not readily available (to those with the money) until near the 1900 time-frame. Mass-marketed color film was not really until the mid to late 1960s (I remember that part).

This thread is making me wish I was born in 1920.

Nobody mentioned how many died... from training accidents.

Not me. Willy Driscoll (the one from Duke Cunningham's F-4 who's not in prison) gave my NFWS class a talk about stress in combat. He showed us pictures of a 20ish WWI pilot and a 40ish WWI pilot who happened to be the same guy a few months later. In WWII some squadron's would kill so many guys in pre cruise carrier quals they'd be down to an 0-3 skipper. One of my roomates on the boat had an uncle who flew bombers for the AF in WWII. His training was so minimal he felt he was basically thrown into combat unprepared and never flew after the war. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants, but I wouldn't want to trade places with them.

Respect, and Respects
 

Exactly.

There is an excellent series that shows on PBS from time to time: "A Fighter Pilot's Story." The protagonist was a P-47 pilot, and he chronicles his enthusiasm in joining, his training, and finally combat, both as Jug pilot, but also as a FAC during the Bulge.

He states, and I have read other accounts, that more people died in training than in combat....almost 2 to 1. Think about that.

He showed up in England about a week or two before D-Day. Nine months later, 75% of his squadron was dead. Robin Olds, in his book, gave similar percentages.

We owe them more than we can repay, and I respect them for what they did. It was incredibly dangerous. Single-battles in WWII killed more than we have lost in Iraq & Afghanistan since 1991.

My grandfather was flying P-47 missions in the Pacific at 21 yrs old. He finished up as O-6 with over 10,000 military flight hours. He passed a way at age 86 a few years ago, but was able to play golf with me and my Dad just 3 weeks earlier. Every time I think I'm cool for being a fighter pilot, I think about my old man's pop and what he was doing at my respective age. He's outpaced me every step of the way.

If you read some books like "Top Guns of the Luftwaffe" or "Luftwaffe Fighter Aces", many of them were extremely young as well, especially the NCO pilots. Towards the end of the war it was in the teens. And a little drift, the average age of a Type VII U-boat commander was 23 years old. A type IX commander was mid to late 20's in age.

I remember watching that show when it first debuted years ago and thought it was really good. There's that one piece of gun camera footage that I'm not sure if it's from his plane or not, but the wingman in the strafing run doesn't look his prop has more than a foot of clearance under him.

What? it looks just like any given flightline in OEF minus the reflective belts, blowing sand, the fact that they have ground support there and, oh that little Angus Young character rummaging throughout the cockpit.