One of the observable patterns of history is the way in which some women simply will not stop trying to interfere with men's decisions and actions, even when they clearly have no idea what is involved. And, just as clearly, they don't give even the smallest damn about the men concerned.
The combat experiences were different for airmen from the ground troops, but there was a similarity in reaction. After three months, most infantrymen suffered from some form of battle fatigue. For the airmen, that happened after twenty-five to thirty missions. Still their commanders kept them in trouble.
Flight Surgeon McKittrick treated men who had reached, and sometimes passed the breaking point.... McKittrick saw to it that crews got liquor rations after a mission during debriefing. "It was done very methodically," he said, "and it did a great deal to settle them down and it gave them a little more appetite. it helped to relax them slightly from the horrors of a particularly terrifying mission that, all too often, surpassed fiction. And I'll be damned if the Women's Christian Temperance Union didn't try their best to put a stop to that."
- Citizen Soldiers, Stephen Ambrose, p. 103
I suppose we should be grateful that they didn't try to prevent morphine from being given to the wounded. Assuming they didn't. I find this amazing, especially when one recalls that liquor rations have been a formally specified soldier's right since the days of the Roman legions.
~ archived since 2018 ~
