06/09/2025
Welcome to a new series we’re calling , where we debunk some of the biggest urban legends from the WWII era.
Today's target: "The whole nine yards."
You’ve probably heard the phrase “the whole nine yards” used to signify going all out or doing something to the fullest extent. A popular urban legend attributes this expression to World War II fighter pilots, suggesting that a fully loaded .50 caliber ammunition belt was nine yards long. Supposedly, when a pilot used all their ammo on a target, they gave it “the whole nine yards.”
However, linguistic research tells a different story.
The earliest known use of the phrase actually appears in 1855 (20 years before the first belt-fed machine gun), in a humorous short story titled The Judge’s Big Shirt, published in the New Albany Daily Ledger of Indiana. In the story, a character says, “she has put the whole nine yards into one shirt!”—clearly referring to fabric, not firepower.

In 1907, the idiomatic use of “the whole nine yards” surfaces in The Mitchell Commercial, a newspaper from Mitchell, Indiana. An article mentions, “we can not promise the full nine yards,” indicating a metaphorical usage. And in 1912, a variation, “the whole six yards,” is found in a Kentucky newspaper, suggesting that the phrase existed in different numerical forms before settling on “nine."
Besides the linguistic evidence, it's worth noting that there was no single "standard" aircraft ammo belt length in WWII. The length of a belt depended entirely on the aircraft, its gun configuration, and the internal space available for storage. While some were coincidentally around nine yards, others varied widely. Even on the B-17 Flying Fortress, nearly every machine gun position had a different length belt or belts.
So did that bust a myth for you, or were you already in the know?
