WW2 and its heroes

I was reading a couple of nice Time Life books on the Luftwaffe and the RAF during WW2, and that got me on to looking up a whole bunch of things on Wikipedia, thinks like the Victoria Cross (did you know that only one has ever been awarded to a fighter pilot?), and entries on many of the great aviation heroes, such as Johnny Johnson, Pat Pattle, Douglas Bader, Guy Gibson, Leonard Cheshire, Sailor Malan, Hans Ulrich-Rudel (unsurprisingly, he was involved in the design of the A-10 Thunderbolt II), Erich Hartmann, Adolf Galland, Hans-Joachim Marseilles, and many others. They're virtually all dead now, over 63 years later, but it seems strange to know that many were still alive when I was a boy, and nuts about aircraft. My great-uncle Hugh was a Spitfire pilot; I wish I'd got to know him better. I met him for the first time in 1977, when I was on a trip to Windhoek; apparently he was astonished at how much I knew about WW2 aircraft.

I'm amazed at how those men all coped back then; it must have been so hard, getting back into a fighter or bomber each day, knowing that it was not unlikely that they'd not be coming back, and that it was quite probable that some of the comrades wouldn't.