Historical Links
- In the novel, the character of Moggy Cattermole is pursuing a mortally damaged German bomber and he notices that one of the Luftwaffe crewmen has become hopelessly stuck in the escape hatch beneath the aircraft, his legs dangling in mid-air. Knowing the horrific fate that will befall the man when the bomber hits the water, Cattermole decides to put him out of his misery and shoots him dead. A similar real-life incident occurred in December 1941 when Wing-Commander Robert Stanford Tuck, then leading the Biggin Hill Fighter Wing, with the aid of another pilot, shot down a Junkers Ju-88 over the Channel. A solitary survivor was sighted floating in the water, without a dinghy and many miles from the Dutch coast and with no ships in sight to rescue him. Tuck, wishing to spare the German airman a slow, painful death from exposure, strafed the water and killed him. Tuck later wrote If that were me, down there.....this is what I would want to happen. It was the right thing, the only thing to do. But I will tell no one, for some may not understand.
- When the character of 'Flip' Moran is shot down, he dies horribly, trapped in a flaming cockpit. When his relatives arrive to collect the coffin with his remains, they request to see the body. Adjutant Kellaway has to uncomfortably explain that it would be in-appropriate due to the circumstances of his death. The incident was mirrored in the actual experiences of Wing-Commander H R Dizzy Allen who flew Spitfires with No 66 Squadron during the Battle of Britain. In September 1940, one of his comrades was killed when his fighter crashed in a full-speed, vertical dive. Precious little of the body was recovered and the coffin's interior was lined with sandbags to give it some weight. He wrote...his parents arrived, having received the fatality signal, and requested that they be allowed to a last look at their son. Fortunately, the officer in charge of the funeral tactfully pointed out that...it would be a rather unpleasant experience for them to see it in that condition. All they would have seen, in fact, was a jampot surrounded by sandbags.
Read more about this topic: Piece Of Cake (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or links:
“Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody’s mom in that she knows what’s best for us. But if you look at the historical record—Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages—you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)