FAA Role in the Pacific.?

[R Leonard]

Anecdotally, and having nothing whatsoever to do with FAA performance critcism, my father who was, at the time, Jimmy Thach's assistant in the TF-38 ops shop had the opportunity to speak with an FAA F4U driver who had landed aboard Shangri-La in the late summer of 1945. The conversation was inconsequential, but my father, at the ripe old age of 29, was amazed by the apparent youth of the RN pilot, obviously in his very late teens . . . it struck home to him then that the British had really been at war for a long, long time for their pilots to be so young.
He later flew over to and landed on one of the British carriers and was somewhat relieved to find that most of the pilots were not quite so young, though there was an identifiable population of youngsters.

For what's worth.

Rich