The most valuable lessons in life are timeless. Their import is a constant across the decades—or longer — serving as models that guide and shape our thinking and perceptions. The key is to recognize when we are being presented with such a lesson, since their presence is often not obvious and their instructive significance frequently escapes our notice.
The de Havilland Mosquito, a British World War II aircraft, is a perfect example of one such lesson. The exigencies of national crisis place demands on a country that can almost never be seen in advance or planned for. From one day to the next, conditions change, circumstances shift and previously reliable relationships are thrown into uncertainty. It’s easy from the safety of time and distance to claim that such life-altering events should have been foreseen, but at the time of their occurrence, most radical incidents come as a complete surprise.
Great Britain’s entry into World War II in September 1939 found the country unprepared for a large-scale life-or-death struggle against the aggression of Nazi Germany. By the spring of 1940, Germany had vanquished all of Western Europe with its newfound blitzkrieg tactics of fast-paced attacks of coordinated ground armor and tactical air forces. France, a longtime historical continental rival to Germany, had fallen in a particularly humiliating and feeble manner, surrendering after barely a month of fighting without ever having mounted a serious defense of its homeland. It was perhaps the most feckless, anemic fight for national survival in the annals of military history.
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