"Top hole. Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how's your father. Hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper's and caught his can in the Bertie."
“The Whole 9 Yards” also from WWII. The machine-gun belts were 27 feet long, so when the gunner fired the entire belt, he gave them the whole 9 yards.
The earliest known citation I know of for ‘the whole nine yards’ is from 1907, which disproves any WWI or II origin. From The Mitchell Commercial (an Indiana newspaper) 2 May 1907:
“This afternoon at 2:30 will be called one of the baseball games that will be worth going a long way to see. The regular nine is going to play the business men as many innings as they can stand, but we can not promise the full nine yards.”
The same paper a year later, 4 June 1908:
...Roscoe went fishing and has a big story to tell, but we refuse to stand while he unloads. He will catch some unsuspecting individual some of these days and give him the whole nine yards.
Can also mean the number of yards of cloth in a Scottish kilt. The best kilts were made from nine yards of cloth.
” ... “The Whole 9 Yards” also from WWII. The machine-gun belts were 27 feet long, so when the gunner fired the entire belt, he gave them the whole 9 yards.”
Whatever the origins, this has become an internet urban legend. The other attributions (kilts, baseball) probably have a more credible claim as to origin, as it could not possibly have originated from fighter aircraft in the Second World War.
By the late 1930s, all (allied) aircraft guns (fixed or flexible) used disintegrating metal-link belts, which do not have any fixed or standard length. They were pieced together round by round and link by link, to the exact size required to fill the ammunition boxes of any particular airplane and application (some aircraft mounted both fixed and flexible guns - B-25H, A-24, Grumman Avenger, A-26, B-26 are some).
No two different makes/models of aircraft were equipped with the same ammunition boxes.
US and British fighters (and nearly all other aircraft flown by those two countries) were armed with Browning guns during WWII. “Standard” fabric belts were still used at that time for ground guns and they held 250 rounds in the 30 cal version. Just a minute or two with a ruler can tell you that such a belt will never be nine yards long.
If there is any chance that the slang originated in ordnance circles, it likely dates to the First World War. Canvas belts for the British Vickers gun held 250 rounds when standard-built; the cartridge pockets are spaced quite differently than those in a Browning belt. Length is remarakbly close to 27 feet.
The Maxim, the other widely used gun of the day (very extensively by Germany and Russia/USSR in both World Wars), used a belt of very similar configuration and size.
"Top hole. Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how's your father. Hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper's and caught his can in the Bertie."
must be the water-cooled mg’s. that is a lot of weight, (30-cal). You’d have to have a number of men to carry a 27 foot belt of 50 BMG. LOL