It is astonishing how many people have the impression that Jane Doolittle died in 1942. Mind you, the Ufa Raid was an insanely ambitious plan - no one who had actually done the math thought for a second that B-25-equipped witches could even take off from a submarine, much less penetrate that far into the Orussian interior and still be combat-effective when they arrived over their target, much less make it all the way to Suomus afterward. So maybe it's not so surprising that a lot of people don't expect any of the participants to have survived.

Survive most of them did, though, and destroying the Ufa Hive secured the Orussian evacuation's western flank, enabling most of the evacuees to make it to Yekaterinburg in relative safety. Which was not a bad first play for the Liberion forces, and quieted a lot of the continental Allies' grumbling about how the USL took its sweet time bothering to get involved in the war.

--G.
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In fact, what the heck, here.

Jane Harriet "Jenny" Doolittle
Lieutenant General, United States of Liberion Army Air Forces
"Wrecker"

Nationality: Liberion
Date of birth: December 14, 1926
Familiar: Bull terrier
Striker model: North Liberion P-51K Mustang
Weapon of choice: M1919 .30-caliber Browning machine gun (x2)

One of Liberion's great aviation pioneers, Jane Doolittle began her aerial career in the spring of 1936, when she was nine - a tender age even for a flying witch. By the end of that summer, she had hedgehopped her way around a complete circuit of the continental United States, the first aviator ever to accomplish the feat, using a First Neuroi War-vintage Curtiss JN-4 biplane Striker nicknamed "Jenny". So many reporters covering the flight assumed that the aircraft's name was her own that she eventually gave up trying to correct them, and has been Jenny Doolittle in the public's mind ever since.

After joining what was then called the Army Air Corps in 1937, Doolittle invented the technique of "perception flying" - using magical means to correct for the natural errors in situational awareness caused by impaired visibility - and greatly improved the safety margin of night and bad-weather flight for witches. (This ability is often confused by laypeople with magic radar, but the two disciplines are entirely separate. Magic radar is a specialist technique very few witches can employ, while all flying witches can be, and as a general rule are, taught at least the basics of perception flying.) By 1938, Captain Doolittle was one of the loudest voices calling for the Liberion forces to develop Miyafuji Engine-equipped Strikers, and in 1939 Major Doolittle became one of the first Army officers to make a public call for her country to enter the war against the Neuroi.

All this agitation nearly got her cashiered, and in fact it was three years before the USL finally got into the war - at which point Lt. Col. Doolittle astounded and annoyed the brass again by propounding an absurdly ambitious first operation for the Army Air Force to undertake: nothing less than the destruction of the Neuroi Hive at Ufa in west-central Orussia, which threatened the evacuation of that country's major population centers to planned fallback positions east of the Urals. This was insanely far from any Liberion base or supply point, and the Army brass deemed Doolittle's plan, which involved a submarine launch from the Black Sea and a one-way ferry flight to Suomus with a bombing raid on a major Neuroi Hive in between, a suicide mission.

There were those who wouldn't have minded seeing Jane Doolittle get herself killed on a damnfool idealistic crusade, though, and either way it would be good press to offset the grumbling about Liberion's late entry into the war; so the plan was approved, with the proviso that all its participants must be volunteers. Some assumed Doolittle would never be able to talk a dozen other witches into undertaking the mission. Some were wrong. The destruction of the Ufa Hive opened the way for the evacuation of some 80 percent of Orussia's population and cemented the reputation of the witch the papers were now calling "Jenny the Wrecker" all over the world.

Now the Liberion Army's youngest-ever lieutenant general, Doolittle is the highest-ranking witch in that country's armed forces and head of all Liberion aviation assets in the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. In that capacity she is constantly butting heads with older, maler colleagues, who have their own (usually wrong, according to Doolittle) ideas of how "her girls" should best be employed. It's a hassle, but Jenny the Wrecker doesn't mind - it's just another hedge to be hopped.

As popular with the rank and file as she is unpopular with most other generals, Doolittle makes it a point to participate personally in at least one sortie a month, somewhere in the AEF's theater of operations. President Truman really, really wishes she wouldn't do that, but he can't stop her. No one can stop her. That, if you ask her, is kind of the point.

Jenny's archetype is General James "Jimmy" Doolittle, who people remember nowadays mostly for the 1942 Tokyo Raid, but who was, in fact, one of America's foremost aviators long before he did that - among other achievements, he pioneered instrument flying, won more or less every aviation trophy going in the '20s, and was the first person to perform an outside loop and not get killed doing it.

--G.
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"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Ah, the GBR-1. The most powerful pre-Miyafuji Striker ever built... and the most dangerous. (To its operator, I mean. It would've been useless in combat.)

--G.
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Not entirely useless- it could be very handy for a diversionary operation, a.k.a. "slap a Neuroi on the head and run away, get them to chase me into an ambush/out of the path of the main force". This is probably a suicidally stupid idea, but then again, so's putting on a GBR-1 in the first place.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

It might work. Or you might end up making the most hilarious entrance to the afterlife since General John Sedgwick.*

By the '40s there are probably faster Strikers available; the old hit-and-run is a specialty of certain marks of Mosquito, for instance. And while those are flammable, they are at least relatively stable. :)

Ohhhhh -
Don't give me a P-39
With an engine that's mounted behind**
It will tumble and roll
And dig a great hooooooole -
Don't give me a P-39

--G.
* Who arrived still in the process of completing the sentence, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance."
** Behind what is a fair question when considering the Striker Unit version. Maybe it was an attempt at combining the power of the Miyafuji Engine with the old-fashioned backpack-mounted magic engines of earlier models, because more is always more, right?
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I'm just waiting to see who's the first lunatic to try adding RATO packs (technically it would probably be a RA^2 pack- "Rocket Assisted Running Away/At", but still) to their gear. Or strapping on Gryphon's jetpack while he's laid up and running both sets of engines at the same time, because why not?

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

They have them! They show up in episode 6 of season 2.

--G.
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Huh. I should probably get around to watching Season 2 then.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Is that the scene that has a YouTube clip (that I can't find now) where what looks like most of the squadron assembles into a multi-witch staged launch vehicle to get a couple of them up to what's probably a mind-boggling altitude?

I think I saw the Season 1 DVD in the shops here last week. I'm seriously considering it.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

That's one of them, yes. The rocket boosters make a few appearances in that episode (they're used at multiple stages, no pun intended, of the mission that's the beginning of). A slide shown during the mission briefing indicates that they are - no big surprise - made in Karlsland.

--G.
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I just stumbled across fun anecdote about HRH's driving talents, which were put to good use "entertaining" another monarch recently in the news, Saudi Arabia's King Abudullah. Article is here, but the gist of it is, Abdullah visited the UK in 2003 and Elizabeth II took him to visit Balmoral Castle in Scotland, and she insisted on doing the driving herself, at what were apparently terror-inducing speeds.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

One of the pictures I found while hunting for what I used as her file pic, and which I couldn't use only because it was too low-rez to crop properly to the standard size I'm using, shows her standing in uniform in front of a deuce-and-a-half truck. That is an image that will stay with me. :)

--G.
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Would that be the one in this section of her Wiki page? The full-size pic still isn't all that big, but it looks like it could take a bit of zooming in.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

"We're gunna die. We're gunna die. We're gunna die."

"I'll tell you when we're dead, now shut up and hang on. Tricky spot coming up."

The punch line, of course, being that women aren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. A tidbit of which one is sure Her Majesty was well aware when she arranged that little expedition.

So that was Liz putting the boot in, in more ways than one. God save the Queen.

--G.
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This is very true, though it beats signing in as "Prince Louis of Battenberg" everywhere. ;)

(Been reading a lot of WWI history lately.)

> So
>maybe "Windsor" is in fact her coinage in that universe, chosen
>off the cuff as her joinin'-the-RAF alias. (Joking about it with
>friends later, she notes that she had her pick of the various royal
>residences, and could just as easily have punted and become Elizabeth
>Hamptoncourt. :)

By such things is history made. :)

--
Mr. Fnord
"I might have chosen Marlborough, but decided against it. The Prime Minister would have been utterly insufferable had I done so."

>. (He probably also rather wishes that not quite so many of her
>future subjects had seen her underwear, but that isn't the sort of thing a
>gentleman discusses.)

That reminds me, is there actually an in-universe explanation for the lack of pants?

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Not really, at least not one that's consistently followed. I mean, as Gryphon noted in New Tricks, the configuration of the Striker Unit would make it difficult to wear pants in an operational capacity, but they don't wear them off-duty either, and in practice the phenomenon extends beyond Striker-using witches. For instance, Yoshika's mother, a witch doctor,* doesn't wear trousers or a skirt either (though her doctor's coat does reach to her knees). (Her mother wears hakama, but then, she's an old lady. That is presumably her prerogative.)

It might thus be a general witch thing, but there again, in various scenes we also see hospital nurses (magical status unclear) and Yoshika's childhood friend Micchan (who specifically does not have any magical ability) similarly un-bedecked. So if you go by that and don't assume that it's an animators' oversight, it appears to just be customary in the setting that young women don't wear lower-body garments other than underpants, witches or not.

(There's also the suggestion that it's to provide clearance for their tails, but then Fusō Navy witches, e.g., Mio and Yoshika, wear one-piece swimsuits with a slot at the back for the purpose; so that doesn't stand up to scrutiny either. As it were.)

For OWaW purposes, I'm proceeding from the assumption that it is in fact a witch custom and not something muggle women do. This is contradicted by the canon, as I've noted, but I think it makes more internal sense.

--G.
* One never really gets tired of this.
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--G.
* I'm not 100% clear on whether their familiars are supposed to be individuals or Platonic type examples.
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Well given his family would have preferred that the evacuation plans in the event the Neuroi over-ran Britannia (which would have sent them to Canada) included the King accompanying them*, I imagine the sentiment flows in both directions.

*I'm assuming, having not yet watched Strike Witches, that Neuroi occupation doesn't involve eradication of the human population and thus that remaining behind to lead a resistance movement would be feasible.

-Droken

They don't get into the details in the TV show, but in the one of the novels I've read a translation of, it's not so much that the Neuroi specifically wipe out civilian populations - indeed, they don't seem to notice or care about them - as that their presence in force makes areas they've occupied toxic to animal life and therefore uninhabitable.

(Mind you, the Neuroi in the books are very different from the ones who appear on TV - less technically advanced, but smarter. In the anime they fight very similarly to the Fleet of Fog: stupidly, but with such superior durability and firepower that it doesn't really matter if they're up against conventional forces. They don't have death rays or anti-gravity flight in the book I read, but they do seem to understand tactics.)

--G.
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Come to think of it, the Neuroi mostly seem interested in land targets, while the Fog are after the seas. If my brain weren't currently in a pain/painkiller addled state, I could probably make a few interesting points out of that.

Edit: OK, now that I'm not posting from my phone, thanks for the catch, I've fixed that. (Just noticed how curt the original acknowledgement looks when standing on its own. :)

--G.
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This mental image amuses me every time I see it. It's nice to get a good reminder that, even after 400+ years, the universe can still really mess with Gryphs head.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

He's probably also a little surprised to realize - as I was, after writing the scene with Eleanor and Phee interacting, based on 40 years of watching the real articles in the wild - that my grandmother is in fact a tsundere. It didn't contextualize until I actually envisioned her as an anime character. :)

--G.
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Things that make you go, "...huh."

-Droken

Huh, and for some reason up until now I was under the impression that Farawayland was Australia/ New Zealand, not Canada. Darjeeling's choice of service to enlist in makes a whole lot more sense now. :)

...and I was under the impression it was a word Gryphon was mentally using because he had no idea where she was from. Tricky.

Nope, those are Australis and Kiwiland, respectively.

--G.
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Soldier Bear! I've loved stories of this guy ever since I heard of him.

Amusingly enough, I now have a coworker named Wojciech -- which is apparently the name from which Wojtek was derived as a diminutive form.

Witolda similarly insists that any photo of herself and Wojtek be appropriately captioned.

"Uh... what is that?"

"This? This is Wojtek! My good friend and number one rocket shooting comrade!"

"No, I mean... why do you have a bear?"

"Wojtek is not just bear! Wojtek is... what is English word? Wojtek is MAGIC bear."

"... He's your FAMILIAR?!"

"Yes! That is exactly."

--G.
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The series is on Crunchyroll, and I will agree with drakensis that Tanya is a horrible, horrible person. The only thing that really makes it watchable is that Karma is a Bitch. No matter how she plots and plans, things will never go completely her way because she literally pissed off God.

I don't think she's a good fit for OWaW, though, as she's just too nasty to fit the tone. Now her Sancho Panza, Viktoriya Ivanovna Serebryakov, would fit, but by 1946 she would be either ruling the universe from beyond the grave or checked into a psycho ward for extreme PTSD.