Fokkers

When I was at school, we had one of those days when old people from the town come into the school and tell you all about the dim distant past. One of the guys who came in was a proper old air force type. He wore his best suit with his medals proudly pinned to his chest. He had a huge bushy moustache that nearly joined up with his pure white mutton chops.

He started telling us about WWII, which he spent flying lancaster bombers over to germany to flatten factories. As you may know, when the lancasters went over the channel they took fighter escorts with them, but the little spitfires and hurricanes didn’t have the range needed to protect them the whole way, so the lancasters had to rely on their own defences for the last stage of the journey. This, he told us, was the frightening bit.

“We were flying over Dresden one night,” he said, “when out of no-where a whole squadron of these german fokkers appear and start ripping us to sheds. Before I know it, three of our boys are going down. So I shouted to my gunman ‘Geordie! Shoot those fokkers!’ and he started firing at anything he could get his sights on.”

“These fokkers were everywhere. Fokkers above me, fokkers below me, behind me and in front of me. If I take evading action then I risk hitting one of the other guys in the formation or one of these german fokkers. So I have to hold fast and just hope our gunners can hit the fokkers faster than they can hit us.”

“It was a long fight, but finally the last fokker ran for the open skies and left us there licking our wounds. Half our guys were down. Those fokkers were fast. Maybe even faster than our spits and hurricanes.”

Most of us were spell bound, but there were a few who were giggling at his language.

The teacher steps forward and explains to the class that fokker was a very famous and well respected aircraft manufacturer who designed and built a lot of the planes used by the germans during the war.

“Yes. Yes of course,” agreed the old flyboy. “But these fokkers… these fokkers were all Messerschmitts.”

Tags: bad joke