At 04:17 AM 2/1/02, Brett wrote: >The troops regarded time out of the line, especially after the day's >training had been done, as being their own. Strange thing was, in general >their officers agreed with them. > >Oh, and they bloody well never saluted. In fact, a doorman or bus driver was >more likely to be given a salute than a British officer. Unless the officer >wore the VC. Even King George was met with a stony silence when reviewing >one Australian Battalion. > >3. Australian privates were paid 6 shillings per day ($0.60)
I don't suppose that had anything to do with the song "I've got sixpence"? >5. There was very little segregation between the ranks. Because of the way >the men got promoted it was common to see a group of privates, NCOs and an >officer or two all walking along together chatting away when on leave. That >just didn't happen in the British Army. If a British noncom ever got >commissioned, he'd be sent to a different unit because it was thought he'd >not be properly respected by his peer or subordinates. In the Australian >army a newly commissioned officer would almost certainly end up in his old >unit, at Battalion level if not Company or platoon. > >Actually, the RAF in WW2 was very similar in that respect to the AIF in WW1. >Bomber crews would spend their leaves together, regardless of rank, in much >the same way. That sounds like the unit I was in when I was in the US Air Force, though the reason there was that the unit was an engineering unit involved in flight test (of such things as cruise missiles and some of the predecessors to UAVs and UCAVs like the "Predator" that we are using in Afghanistan), so out of about 30 people, about 25 were commissioned officers, most with advanced degrees (masters or doctorate) in some area like electrical engineering or the sciences, and of the handful of enlisted personnel, one was a senior master sergeant whose insignia stripes reached from shoulder to elbow, where his service stripes picked up and reached the rest of the way to his cuff, and the rest were the drafting section. -- Ronn! :) God bless America, Land that I love! Stand beside her, and guide her Thru the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans, white with foam� God bless America! My home, sweet home. -- Irving Berlin (1888-1989)
