Grown Up Or Blown Up

It’s commonly held that 'the kids grow up fast these days'. 

From a relatively temporal position, I would contend that kids are experiencing the world at approximately one second per second, just like the rest of us. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what Beryl at the bowling club means when she looks at a couple of 15-year-old slappers on their way out for a night on the town.

In one of those oddly synchronous moments (that ends up being a flimsy excuse for me to write a blob) three incongruent things got thrown together and made me think about generational differences in maturation speed.

I like watching Talking ’bout Your Generation, mainly to see GenY get slammed. Even when they win on points, they‘ve been so thoroughly patronised and humiliated, it warms my cockles.  So comparing the generations was on my mind.

Immediately after Generation I watch Australia’s Next Top Model which, in the normal course of events, I would be embarrassed about, but I only watch so I can better appreciate Australia’s Next Top Westie Scrag… (actually, I tape the show and watch it on fast forward). 

Thirdly, I’m reading a book called Dambusters. Not Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters. Every self-respecting aeroplane-nut over the age of 30 will have read that one, so no news there. This is by Max Arthur, was published in 2008 and is a collection of interviews with the airmen, ground crews and scientists involved with Squadron 617 and that same dam-busting mission. The accounts are amazing and always told with modest understatement and self-effacement that can only come from genuine heroes. 

They speak in plain terms about proper derring-do. About flying Lancasters so low that, when getting back from training runs, the ground-crews had to clear tree branches out of the radiators. If you know anything about this sort of thing, you will know how un-freakin’-believably dangerous that is. That’s not all folks. The boffins put nearly opaque black Perspex over all their canopies and made the crew wear yellow goggles. This simulated doing it at night. At this point, all normal means of navigating a four-engined, 29 tonne bomber go out the blackened window. Turns out, the best course is (and you really need to see how big a Lancaster is to fully appreciate this) to fly under the freakin’ high-tension power lines. But wait, there’s more. Apparently the trigger-happy Navy would regularly take pot-shots at them, thinking they were the bad-guys. This is all before even going on the mission. I won’t spoil it, in case you want to read it. One pilot’s testimony to all this exemplifies the group‘s attitude: “Well, it was good practise. It made you a bit flak-happy, but you couldn’t play silly-buggers.”

Almost as amazing is the timeframe. Wing Commander Guy Gibson chose his crews in a couple of hours. They built the squadron, fitted it, kitted it, staffed it, did all the research, development and the training… in six weeks. To put this in personal perspective; I am currently part of a team trying to put together a few web pages for the Asia Pacific region. We’re six months in and only half way through phase one. 

The other night, I put down Dambusters to tune in to the HQ of Australia’s Next Top Module, where their challenge was to walk in a straight line, in clothes. This seemed to get the better of most of them, what with all that breathing they had to do at the same time. Earlier, a challenge involved the modules having to think of a line with their brain to say with their mouth, and then say the line with their mouth while getting out of a car using their legs. This onerous task ran tensions so high that sabotage and foul play were called on and the modules were forced to storm off, burst into tears and hit things.

How do these things relate in any way, shape or form? 

Those two groups, the modules and the airmen, are essentially the same age. Late teens to early twenties.  

Wing Commander Guy Gibson was 24 years old when he commanded the 617 and it was staffed by his peers. The crews refer to the few 30-year-olds as “the old men“. 

Four generations ago, Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris expected a bunch of kids to have the maturity, piloting skill, and management smarts to get 21 top-secret, heavily modified bombers ready on the runway, with trained crews who were to fly at tree-height and bounce experimental bombs across the lakes of brutally fortified industrial dams in the heart of enemy territory… in six weeks. As history shows, they did it. 

The contrast is stark when Air-Head Marshaller Sarah Murdoch asks some of the current generation to stop thinking solely of themselves for four seconds and get ready for the runway.

(Look, I know it‘s not an entirely fair comparison. I could have used real people for the second group. But my initial premise is that it‘s widely held that each generation grows up quicker than the last. I think no generation grows up faster than a war generation, and no group has the luxury of growing up slower than a generation that grows up in peace and unbelievable prosperity.)