"Whole nine yards" : some negative evidence

[Jonathan Lighter]

Doug, the caption is interesting, but I would not read much into it.  It sounds to me that it does as much to refute the "MG belt" etymology as to support it.  Why?  Because, irrespective of whoever wrote it, the caption's rhetorical stance seems to me to be, "Look! We've got so much ammo to use against the Japs that we load it by the yard!"  If belts were seriously loaded or measured by the "yard,"  I think there would be more and better evidence than this caption.

The caption would be more intriguing if it said, "nine yards of it!" That would demonstrate at least that "nine yards" of ammo was a relevant and contemporary measurement; that and the fact that the earliest printed example of the idiom "the whole nine yards" comes from the USAF (albeit 20-odd years later) would be sufficient to lend some credence to the rumored etymology. But the fact remains that nobody has produced a single example of ANYONE ever routinely counting or measuring ammunition by the yard prior to the earliest known appearance of "the whole nine yards."  Furthermore, we should remember that the "explanation," NEVER given in the first person ("WE always used to say 'the whole nine yards' in WWII" or Korea, or whenever, because of the ammo belts) seems to have surfaced decades after that.

I tend to agree that the idiom was at least popularized by the military, because of the military provenance of the earliest known cites. But the factual evidence that it originally alluded to ammo belts was essentially zero before the discovery of this caption, and now, in my view, is only a tiny bit better.

Two final notes: when I inspected the inside of a WWII Liberator bomber some years back, I saw with my own eyes that the ammunition boxes that supplied the fuselage and tail MG positions were filled by reference to rounds, not to measurements of length.  Stenciled on each wooden box were the words "AMMUNITION AVAILABLE AT THIS STATION."  Each box was perforated so that one could see the belts folded within.  At each fold, or level, was stenciled the number of rounds left, not the number of yards, was stenciled.  More negative evidence for the theory.

I don't have Freeman's book handy, but the the pilots accounted precisely for the number of expended rounds. The lowest count was (roughly) 324; the highest was about 852.

Just about anything is possible, but if the "ammo belt" theory were correct, I feel that much more persuasive evidence would have appeared by now.

JL

"Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Douglas G. Wilson"
Subject: Re: "Whole nine yards" : some negative evidence
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>Roger Freeman's recent book, American Eagles: P-51 Mustang Units of the
>8th Air Force (Hersham, Surrey: Classic Publications, 2003), contains
>three passages which cast further doubt on the assertion that "the whole
>nine yards" originated among American fighter pilots in World War II.
>
>On pp. 74, 88, and 95 Freeman prints the after-action reports filed by
>three P-51 pilots in 1944 describing the details of successful encounters
>with Luftwaffe fighters. In each case, the writer ended his account,
>routinely it would seem, with an accounting of "Ammunition expended."
>
>In each case (as many of us would expect), the amount of ammunition spent
>is indicated by the number of rounds fired (in these cases between 300 and
>900 per mission) rather than by "yards" or any other measurement of length.

I've read several books of accounts of aerial warfare from WW II, and I
found the same thing: measurement of ammo was in rounds (which is what one
would expect, surely). Did the P-51 book show exact counts of rounds
expended, or estimates? I think the P-51 had six guns, so estimates might
tend to be in multiples of 300 rounds.

>Naturally, this observation won't hinder the folklore that "fighter
>pilots" invented the phrase in World War II, especially since the pilots
>in the story are frequently specified as stationed in "the South Pacific"
>(the 8th AF flew in Europe), but it would be more than remarkable to find
>that American pilots anywhere on earth customarily referred counted their
>ammunition in any way other than by "rounds" or, if the context warranted,
>"belts." The same goes for aerial gunners, who never get a mention in
>these rumors, probably because they're not invested with the pop cultural
>"glamour" of the "fighter pilot in the South Pacific," perhaps
>specifically the fantasized flyboys of TV's "Black Sheep Squadron."

But note that I did post here one example of belted aviation ammo being
referred to in terms of yards from WW II times: I think this is the link:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0312d&L=ads-l&D=1&F=&S=&P=10071

I do not believe that the information available to me permits any strong
position on this etymology.

-- Doug Wilson


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