To the Stratosphere

Solar-powered fixed-wing aircraft attached to a high-altitude balloon -  Ondirae Abdullah-Robinson

Defence Blog reports:

U.S. Army soldiers attached a solar-powered fixed-wing aircraft to a high-altitude balloon at Orote Airfield on Naval Station Guam on June 24, 2026, and prepared to launch the combination into the stratosphere as part of Valiant Shield 2026, the largest U.S.-led joint exercise in the Indo-Pacific.

This aircraft can cruise indefinitely at an altitude of 60,000 feet, which is 50% higher than commercial airliners. This is like U-2 territory (U-2 can reach 70,000 feet). Spy satellites will only have a specific spot on Earth visible for like ten minutes out of every 90 minute orbit, plus you only need a conventional radio to talk to an aircraft, not a specialized satellite communicator. Not sure why you can't use a conventional radio to talk to a satellite. Maybe because spy satellites have low power transmitters so you need a directional antennae to pick up their signal.

Previous posts about balloons and high altitude.

B-29 Superfortress & Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima: A Hard Won Haven by John Shaw

Iwo Jima as a crucial emergency landing site for crippled bombers returning from missions over Japan. It is estimated that these emergency landing strips saved the lives of nearly 25,000 American airmen during the war. - Google

A B29 Bombing Mission Is Interrupted by Japanese Fighters 💣 Air Warriors | Smithsonian Channel
Smithsonian Channel Aviation Nation

Top to Bottom: Kobe, Iwo Jima, Tinian

It is 1,500 miles from Tinian in the Mariana Islands to Kobe, Japan. Iwo Jima is right at the halfway point between them.

B-29 and P-51 : Forging Air Supremacy from Iwo Jima
After Action Report

Mitsubishi G4M2 Betty Bomber

Mitsubishi G4M2 Betty Bomber

Paraphrase of the introduction on Wikipedia's page about the G4M:

The Mitsubishi G4M was a twin-engine, land-based medium bomber operated by the Imperial Japanese Navy from 1940 to 1945. It was commonly referred to by Japanese Navy pilots as Hamaki ('cigar', literally 'leaf roll') due to the cylindrical shape of its fuselage and its tendency to ignite after a hit. The Allied reporting name was Betty.

The G4M boasted good performance, excellent range and was considered the best land-based naval bomber of the time. This was achieved with flimsy structure and almost total lack of crew protection, with no armor plating or self-sealing fuel tanks. The G4M was introduced in 1941, but its problems resulted in heavy losses.

It was the most widely produced and most famous bomber flown by the Japanese during World War II, and it served in nearly all battles during the Pacific War. Attacks by G4M and G3M bombers resulted in the sinking of the Royal Navy battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse, the first time capital ships actively defending themselves were sunk solely by air power while in the open sea. G4Ms and G3Ms were also credited with sinking the heavy cruiser USS Chicago during the Battle of Rennell Island. The G4M later served as mother ships that carried the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka, the anti-ship suicide weapon. Of the 2,435 G4Ms produced, no fully intact aircraft have survived, though several airframes exist as unrestored wreckage or in partial states of restoration.

Probably the best-known incident involving a G4M in the war came during the top secret mission to intercept the aircraft carrying Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, resulting in Yamamoto's death. On 18 April 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightnings shot down a G4M1 carrying Admiral Yamamoto.

As part of the negotiations for the surrender of Japan, two demilitarized G4Ms, given the call-signs Bataan 1 and Bataan 2, flew to Ie Shima, carrying the first surrender delegations on the first leg of their flight to Manila. The G4Ms were painted white with green crosses and were escorted by American P-38 fighters.

Mitsubishi G4M Betty bomber training footage - 732nd Kōkūtai (1944)
Lancero99

Japanese Mitsubishi G4M "Betty" bombing raid
Aviation videos archives part2 1935-1950

Wikipedia has a collection of photos of the G4M here.

The Greatest Act of Political and Economic Spite in History

The Greatest Act of Political and Economic Spite in History
Today I Found Out

What happened to all the war material we shipped to the South Pacific during WW2 when the war was over? It got dumped in the ocean. Madness? Or logical? Very bizarre in any case.

I found the narrator speaking too fast for comfort, so I dialed down the sound and turned on the subtitles (CC in the options bar) and that worked pretty well.

Melanesia Map
Captured from the video

War with the Newts

 War with the Newts by Karel Capek

I'm reading War with the Newts by Karel Capek. It tells the curious story of the discovery of a race of six foot Salamanders in the South Pacific and their exploitation by various 19th century organizations. 

It's not a great story, but it is a curious one, and I am plugging along.

At the beginning of chapter 8 I find a list of islands, and me being me, I have see if they are real islands or just figments of the author's imagination. Turns out most of them are real, and the only three I didn't find (Hiau, Uap, Fukaofu) could well be because of the funny spelling of island names.

Chapter 8

Andrias Scheuchzeri

ENDLESS is human curiosity. It was not sufficient that J. W. Hupkins (Yale), the greatest authority alive at the time having anything to do with reptiles, declared that those mysterious creatures were unscientific humbug and sheer fantasy in the scientific journals and in the news-papers accounts began to increase of the discovery of so far unknown animals resembling huge salamanders in the most diverse parts of the Pacific Ocean. Relatively reliable statements claimed their discovery on the Solomon Islands, on Schouten Islands, on Kapingamarangi, Butaritari, and Tapeteuea, as well as on the whole group of smaller the islands: Nukufetau, Funafuti, Nukunono, and Fukaofu, then as far as Hiau, Ua Huka, Uap, and Pukapuka. There were legends quoted of the devils of Captain van Toch (mainly in the Melanesian zone) and of the Tritons of Miss Li (more in Polynesia) then the newspapers inferred that it was a matter of various kinds of submarine and antediluvian monsters mainly because the summer season had begun, and there was nothing to write about. Sub-marine monsters are usually well received by the reading public. In the United States especially Tritons became the fashion: in New York a showy revue ran for three hun-dred nights featuring Poseidon with three hundred most beautiful Triton girls, Nereids, and Sirens in Miami and on the beaches of California youth bathed in the costumes . . .

War with the Newts Chapter 8 Islands

Pago Pago

This Is CRAZY! AI Reality Generation on Quest 3 IN REAL TIME!
DiscoVR Tetiana

A Meta Quest 3 Virtual Reality Headset came to me from a friend who didn't want it. Some things have happened and now it's time to put up a post, so I'm looking for a video that will demonstrate just what this thing can do. This is the shortest one I found.

Meta Quest 3 Virtual Reality Headset

I had no interest in it, so I decided to put it up for sale on Ebay. I've got a a bunch of stuff that I would like to get rid of, and if I could sell it on Ebay, that would be great, and I thought selling this headset would be a good way to get my feet wet in the Ebay world.

My post wasn't up for long before I started getting offers. One offer came in that looked pretty good, but by the time I got around to looking at it, it had already expired. Evidently timed offers are now a thing. Whatever. Eventually, like after a week, or so, the headset sold for $300. Cool!

Pago Pago

Now I have to ship it, so I print the labels, take it to UPS to get it boxed up. They take it and pass it to the post office. Somewhere along the way I look at the address. The buyer is in Pago Pago which is half a world away in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. However, since Pago Pago is in American Samoa, you can mail packages there. Cost of shipping was like $13. I think the cost of boxing it up was like $20.

The idea that you could mail this box halfway around the world for a pittance struck me as miraculous. I was so blown away that I neglected to insure the package. But now it's packaged, labeled and on its way.

Pago Pago Post Office

It's going take a week to get there, but that's okay. However, a month goes by and it still hasn't shown up, so I file a lost mail report with the Post Office. A week later I get a notice that the buyer wants their money back. So maybe it was all an illusion and you can't really send mail to Pago Pago.

I go around and around with Ebay trying to get this deal sorted out. A couple of day later I get a notice that Ebay has refunded the buyer of out of their own pocket. The next day I get a notice that the package has finally arrived and Ebay sends me my money. Kind of weird, but it seems to have worked out.

Pago Pago

Lucky 666

Lucky 666

I got to thinking about WW2 in the Pacific the other day. My Dad flew as a tail gunner in a B-24 during the war, but he never told me much about it, so I'm thinking there ought to be some books about it, and there are. This one is pretty great.

Port Moresby, Rabaul and Bougainville Island

Lucky 666 is the story of Jay Zeamer, troublemaker, misfit and pilot enamored of the B-17 bomber. The story concentrates on Port Moresby on New Guinea, Rabaul on New Britain and Bougainville Island. The distance from Port Moresby to Rabaul is 600 miles, the same as the distance from London to Berlin.

The climax occurs when Lucky 666 is attacked by a mess of Japanese Zeros while they are attempting to photograph the west coast Bougainville. The Zeros preferred method was to attack head on as the front of the B-17 has the fewest number of guns available to shoot back and is the most vulnerable with the glass nose. The book tells us that after they have made an attack run, it takes the Zeros ten minutes to circle around and come back for another pass. I'm guesstimating a zero can make a U-turn in about 6 seconds, but that will only put them about 1,000 feet to the side of the B-17's flight path. They will also now be a third of a mile behind the B-17, so they will still be in range of its guns. Zeros fly over 300 MPH and a B-17 taking photos is only flying at 200 MPH, so the Zero will be able to catch up to the bomber. The Zeros don't want to just catch the bomber, they want go way past it so they can turn around and head back towards it so they are heading right towards each other. That tight turning radius means they will only be 1,000 feet away from the bomber as they go by which is well within range of the top, tail, waist and belly guns, so they might want to be a little farther away which means a larger turning radius and more time taken. Now the Zero has to catch up to the B-17, then it needs to get several miles ahead so it has time to make another U-turn and time to line up its sights and fire a mess of bullets at the nose of the B-17. So, yeah, I can see that it could take ten minutes.

Metrogon Camera

Trimetrogon camera installed in B-17

Aerial reconnaissance was done using Trimetrogon cameras which were a lash up of three Metrogon cameras arranged so they covered a wide swath of ground. This swath of ground was perpendicular to the line of flight. By taking a set of three photos every few seconds a great deal of land could be covered with one pass.

Relationship of cameras to ground for trimetrogon photography (three cameras)

Metrogon cameras used nine inch wide film. If we assume a resolution of 600 pixels per inch, that's like 30 million pixels. Modern 35mm film might have a resolution equivalent to 3,000 pixels per inch. Funny, I could not find an article that gave a good account of the film versus digital images. They all seem to be tangle of mumbo-jumbo. Seems to me you should be able to make straight forward comparison.

Fairchild K-17 Camera

The Fairchild K-17 camera also used nine inch film. I suspect the camera body is the same as the one used with the Metrogon. Near as I can tell, the Metrogon name comes from the fancy, wide-angle lenses they used.

Bomber LeMay and the Destruction of Tokyo

Bell-Marietta Georgia, B-29 Assembly Line – 1944

Bomber LeMay strikes again. 80 years ago today, the United States Army Air Forces firebombed Tokyo.

Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 1 by  Brad Schaeffer

The bombers headed for Japan in three parallel streams stretching 400 miles across the darkening Pacific sky.

Link goes to The Daily Wire. You need to give them your email address to read the whole story.

Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 2 by Brad Schaeffer

In a single raid, the B-29 was vindicated and the entire trajectory of the war had been altered.

Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 3 by Brad Schaeffer

 "The thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29.”

 

Civilized Coffee

Civilized Coffee

Saw this scene while I was watching Story Of The Black Cats | Stealth flying boat of the South Pacific (1944). Living in a war zone, getting ready for another night of bringing savage vengeance to the Japs, but still drinking coffee like a civilized man. I mean, look at that cup.

PBY Catalina Night Attack

Story Of The Black Cats | Stealth flying boat of the South Pacific (1944)
Armored Archivist

The Catalina is one of my favorite airplanes, but these night time bombing missions are new to me.

• Wikipedia has a page about the Catalina, which has a brief section about night time operations. 
• Navy Times has long page about the Catalina and most of it was new to me as well.

The Navy Times story mentions the Attu Zero, which I suspect means this airplane.

Previous PBY posts.

Kind of curious that I take an interest in these stories about events that happened 80 years ago, but we seem to have an endless supply of new wars, most of which I don't pay attention to. Perhaps it's because the number of people killed in new wars in one year amounts to one day's worth of carnage from WW2.

The Last Bomb - 1945 (Remastered Full HD, Sound)

Dad gum WW2. The thing is just a monster, zillions of people, zillions of dollars and zillions of stories. It's just endless. This war in the Pacific is incomprehensible. The only way to make any sense of it is by looking at the numbers. The war cost $300 billion. The population of the country was 130 million. Figure half of them were taxpayers, then the war cost each taxpayer roughly $5,000 which is roughly equivalent to half a million today, i.e. the price of a house. I think my folks paid like $4,000 for their first house back in 1950.

B-29's had 4 engines each, each engine had 2 rows of cylinders, each row had 9 cylinders, each cylinder had two spark plugs. You send 500 planes on a trip to Tokyo, you're going to need to change all 72,000 spark plugs plus you're going to need another four million gallons of gasoline for your next attack. This is the modern day equivalent of an Egyptian pyramid.

By the standards of western civilization, the Japanese were deranged. However, apparently, for the  most part, the Japanese actually believed the crazy shit Tojo foisted on them. We see the same thing with radical Islamists, ISIS, Nazis, and any number of other smaller cults. All it takes is control of the media and an obedient office of propaganda and you can get people to believe all kinds of shit.

There's gotta be something that can be done. Elon seems to be the only one with any clout who is fighting the tsunami of bullshit that is flowing out of Washington. Yes, I'm contributing my two cents, but given inflation two cents is worth less than zero. Oh, shit, now we've got a song:

Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Less Than Zero - 5/5/1978 - Capitol Theatre (Official)

So who's Oswald? Wikipedia knows:

The song expressed Costello's anger after seeing former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley interviewed on television, attempting to deny his racist past. In the liner notes to the Rhino edition of the album, Costello writes:

"Less Than Zero" was a song I had written after seeing the despicable Oswald Mosley being interviewed on BBC television. The former leader of the British Union of Fascists seemed unrepentant about his poisonous actions of the 1930s. The song was more of a slandering fantasy than a reasoned argument.

And here we are full circle.

The Pacific

'Our Cause Is Just' Trailer | The Pacific | HBO Classics
HBO

Story about the Marines rooting out the Japanese soldiers from one South Pacific island after another. I put up a post about this movie once before. The show seems to be about equal parts combat, support and personal life, i.e. girls. 

Much of the combat scenes on Guadalcanal happened at night when you can't see shit, and on the TV it's even worse. Until something catches fire or somebody sends up a flare, you really can't see much at all.

One heroic dude gets sent home to sell war bonds. They put him on board a DC-3 in Australia and I'm wondering how the heck is this going to work. A DC-3 doesn't have the range to fly across the Pacific. Airlines were carrying passengers from San Francisco to Australia, but they were using big, four-engined, flying boats, and they still had to make several stops for fuel.

Pacific & Adjacent areas 1942 showing key air ferry route.

The blue arrows in the lower right corner are the air route to and from the USA. Wikipedia has a page about South Pacific air ferry routes in WW2.

More posts about WW2 in the Pacific.

Ulithi

Beechcraft Super King Air 200 (N875SP)
Flying over Falalop, Ulithi

Looking over the weekly photos from FlightAware, this one caught my eye and then the caption piqued my curiosity. Ulithi? Where the heck is Ulithi?

Ulithi is in the Pacific Ocean. I don't remember hearing about it before, but it's  on my map of Pacific island airports. It's not much of a place, a few tiny islands lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but during the last year of WW2 it was a very big deal.

1940s World War II: Ulithi, Anchorage
MyFootage.com

Did we win WW2 because we were strong and brave and true and free? Or did we win because we were able to marshall our forces to exploit a continent of resources that had barely been tapped? I suspect it was a lucky combination of both. I suspect Asia, namely China and Russia, suffer from some kind of ingrained, mental stumbling block caused by thousands of years of strife and terror at the hands of an endless succession of fire-breathing warlords bent on slaughter. We know there are some very smart people in Asia, but we also know some capitalist ventures there failed because - well, we're not quite sure why they failed - but it seems that the people employed to work there did not quite believe in themselves.

P.S. Samaritan's Purse donated two of these airplanes to Pacific Mission Aviation, a Christian organization spreading the gospel, doing good works and providing air transport services around Micronesia.

Colonel Robert G. Emmens

Col. Robert G. Emmens 2013
Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum
I was cleaning out my email today when I discovered a message that Posthip Scott sent me a year ago. It's a photocopy of an article about Mr. Emmens. The copy was of rather poor quality, I could read it if I put my mind to it, but it is not something I want to inflict on either of my followers. I uploaded it to Google Drive if you want to give it a try.

OCR

My first thought was to run it through an OCR program and see if it would generate something I could work with. I tried an online OCR service and I also tried Google Docs. The online service did better than Google. The online service recognized that the text was laid out in columns and if you selected DOCX format for the output, it did a creditable job of copying the layout. If you select text output, you get the same result as you get from Google, which is that it's all run together. The first line of the second column is appended to the first line of the first column, which means it's a lot of work to take it apart and reconstitute it as plain text. The DOCX format was superior, but it still wasn't all that great. I worked through half a dozen paragraphs before I decided to see if maybe somebody else had already done this. 

Other Resources

I found several mentions, but they all pointed back to Wikipedia, which has a pretty good article about him. Then I remembered YouTube. I found several videos about the Dolittle Raid, and this one (above) about Colonel Emmens.

30 Seconds Over Tokyo

I remember reading 30 Seconds over Tokyo, a story about the raid, when I was a lad. It was a great story. It's about one crew and their airplane that went on that raid. They crash landed in China like most of the other bombers and the author lost his leg. I don't remember how the story of how he lost his leg was related in the book, but I remember my father telling me about a guy who had dug a hole and burned his gangrenous leg off in the hole. I don't know how that worked, I'm just trying to include all the relevant words I remember.

Map

Dolittle Raid. Launch point in red.
Vladisotok, Russia, upper left. Chuchow, China, lower left. 

I got the destination of Chuchow from one of the YouTube videos. I wondered why they didn't go north, because China is right across the border from Vladivostok and Vladivostok is a heck of lot closer than Chuchow and then I remembered that all that area was probably occupied by the Japanese. Likewise the coastal areas of China around Shanghai were probably under Japanese control. So, Chuchow is farther but hopefully you won't get a hostile reception.

Back to Colonel Emmens

I suspect the reason Posthip sent me this article is because Colonel Emmens is from Medford, Oregon. Medford is what passes for a big town in southern Oregon. It is not far from the border with California. Colonel Emmens returned to Medford when he retired from the Air Force. He took up piano and became a real estate broker.

Airplane of the Day - Vought Kingfisher

World War II Color Photos of OS2U Kingfisher
airailimages

The Vought Kingfisher was a WW2 era seaplane that was launched via catapult from the fantail of capital ships. It was used for reconnaissance, rescue and occasionally for combat.

I originally started this post with a bunch of pictures, a sequence capturing the operation of this airplane from launch through recovery, but then I came across this video. Google watches over me. Usually I dismiss videos composed of nothing but a sequence of still images, but I would need half a dozen photos to cover this sequence, and if I posted that you would be scrolling down for a while. This way you can relax for minute. A slide show would be my preferred method, but I don't know of one anymore since Picasa went away. Oh, well, the video is okay. The most important part is the pacing. Does it linger too long on each photo? Or does it move on before you are finished looking at it? I suppose it's different for each person and what kind of mood you are in. At least if it's going too fast, you can pause it with the space bar.

I found three sites with good collections of photos of this airplane:

• avgeekery
• Clasp Garage
• HISTORYNET

Back in elementary school, me and my buds went through several phases of model building: shingle racers (models of unlimited hyrdroplanes built on cedar roofing shingles) that we towed on strings, custom car models and battleships. The battleships all had a pair catapults with seaplanes mounted on the tail. I was kind of curious about them, but there wasn't much information available and the scale was so small that you couldn't make out much detail. But now, here we are 60 years later and everything I wanted to know back then has been revealed.

The Kingfisher was not a glamorous airplane. While similar sized fighter aircraft sported 1,000 HP engines, the Kingfisher has less than 500. One thing that bothered me was how they got airplane back on the ship. The ships all had cranes, but no one ever explained how exactly the operation was conducted. Or maybe my ten year old brain didn't care. I mean it is a bit of a trick, once you have a zillion tons of steel up to cruising speed, you don't really want to slow down, much less stop, just so the pilot can grab the hook and connect it to the plane. No, what they do is the ship tows a raft that just breaks the surface. The seaplane taxis up and onto the raft and a hook on the bottom of the float snags the raft, so the plane can sit there on the raft and it's relatively motionless relative to the ship, which makes it relatively easy (possible) for the pilot to grab the hook.

During wartime things happen, and some of those incidents make good stories. This photo isn't in the video.

Downed American airmen near Truk await rescue on the wings of an OS2U Kingfisher

In 1942, a Navy pilot flying a Kingfisher rescued America's World War I ace, Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker, and the crew of a B-17D Flying Fortress (see NASM collection) forced to ditch in the Pacific. With Rickenbacker and two other passengers, the bomber and its five-man crew had left Hickam Field, Hawaii, bound for Canton Island in the Phoenix Islands group, 2,898 km (1,800 miles) southwest of Hawaii. The Flying Fortress wandered off course and the crew got lost. When the aircraft eventually ran out of fuel and ditched, the eight survivors put to sea aboard three life rafts. Several weeks passed without food or water. By chance, a Kingfisher crewed by Lt. Willam F. Eadie, pilot, and L.H. Boutte, radioman, spotted the raft carrying Rickenbacker and two other crewmen. Eadie strapped the sickest man into the gunner's seat, and then he lashed Rickenbacker and another man to each wing. A Kingfisher could never take off with such a load, so Eadie began to taxi toward his base on Funafuti Island, about 64.4 km (40 miles) distant. Soon a Navy Patrol Torpedo boat met the airplane and the other five men were soon rescued. Only one of the eight failed to recover from the long ordeal. - Clasp Garage

The story of Eddie Rickenbacker's crash and rescue has appeared here before.

Disappointment

 

Disappointment Island

Just because we need a picture

Stolen entire from retiredmustang:

Disappointment can be a killer. Let me see if I can explain.

There is currently a bit of kerfuffle taking place on FB. It involves Larry Correia and David Brin as the two “antagonists,” if you will. The specifics aren’t all that important and I won’t link to it here. You can travel to the book of face and a quick search will allow you to read all the unpleasantness, should you so choose. What I want to suggest is that one of the two, David Brin, seems to exhibit what I’ve seen from other people when faced with profound disappointment when society consistently fails to change to meet up with their expectations. If this goes on long enough, some people don’t seem inclined to accept that and move on (or re-evaluate their expectations). Instead, something else happens. They begin to become bitter. With each successive year or realization that what they want or what they predicted hasn’t occurred and isn’t likely to, that bitterness increases. I have seen it happen to people in all walks of life more than once. In the end, they tend to become not just bitter, but angry, old and used up. It’s sad, really, because quite often they are people who held such promise and who were so optimistic about the future. To see them reduced to increasingly shrill sniping at those who dare disagree with them is almost embarrassing.

I don’t have a guaranteed recipe for how to avoid this. I just know I don’t want to wind up a tired, angry, bitter old man.

Sisters of War

Sisters of War | Telemovie | 8.35pm Sunday 14th November, ABC1
Sisters of War is a right horror story. It follows a small group of Australian women trapped by the Japanese Army on the island of Rabaul (near New Guinea) during WW2. Just in case you had any doubt's about how awful war can be, this movie shows it to you in excruciating detail. And it's not just the physical difficulties (like torture), but the mental strain of knowing horrible things are happening and there is nothing you can do about it. And then there's not knowing what is going to happen, or if the information you are given is correct or meant to deceive you. No wonder people bitch about war. Of course you could eliminate all this mental anguish by getting yourself killed, but there is no guarantee that your death would be quick or painless. So unless you have got a sure way out, you don't even want to consider it. However, if you decide to stick it out, and you survive (always a dubious proposition) without too much brain damage, you should be well equipped to deal with the kind of everyday bullshit makes the evening news cycle, i.e. turn it off.

Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino

Picture Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino taking his WW2 battle rifle and telling those kids to get off of his lawn.

P.S. We have a picture of the Gran Torino because when I first wrote about this movie eleven years ago I couldn't find a decent picture of the car, and even now this is the only one of the movie car I could find.

P.P.S. According to my post about the New Guinea rescue operation, we never attacked Rabaul. I'm going to reconcile that with this story by saying even a little scouting mission could easily result in significant damage. I mean, here we are sending our headstrong boys, mounted on fire breathing dragons, to go take a look at the enemy, and hey, if you happen to see any 'targets of opportunity', give 'em a lickin'. Now a clot of white clothed nurses might not be the most likely looking target, but coming in at 300 knots and 300 feet of altitude, it might be a little difficult to positively identify an enemy target.

Japanese US2 Flying Boat

【4K】US 2 父島での訓練 Part5
([4K] US 2 Training in Chichijima Part5)
The video is a little slow moving, but it is a big, expensive aircraft, so you want to be careful. Engine startup begins before the one minute mark. after that:
2:10 aircraft starts moving, but the motion is barely perceptible for about 15 seconds
2:50 nose wheel touches the water, using reverse thrust to slow their descent into the water.
3:25 aircraft is afloat
3:45 landing gear retracts
5:45 the aircraft has turned sideways and one of crew is waving, or maybe he's just wiping the window
7:05 break in recording, airplane has completed its turn into open water
7:35 break, aircraft continues taxiing across the harbor
8:24 break, spectators standing on the breakwater
8:32 break, wide shot of breakwater with aircraft in the distance
8:42 break, aircraft maneuvering, rock in foreground
9:42 break, aircraft begins takeoff run

Flying boats are the epitome of cool. They were the first aircraft to cross the oceans, reducing days of travel time to hours. Plus all the people who flew on them were cool. Of course they were cool, they were rich and could afford to buy fancy clothes that made them look cool. Plus Jimmy Buffett had one, and what could be more cool that island hopping in the Caribbean in your own private flying boat? I mean this is the stuff of a million fantasies.

Recorded on October 23 at Ogasawara Village, Chichijima Futami Port

The ramp is clearly visible on a satellite image:

Chichijima Aircraft Ramp

Okinawa (center left), Chichijima (center), Iwo Jima (just below Chichijima)

Chichijima is really out in the middle of nowhere. It is about 600 miles from Tokyo, 900 miles from Okinawa and just over 100 miles from Iwo Jima.

I think the US-2 was the largest operational flying boat for a while. It has recently been eclipsed by one from China, which might be operational.

Eddie Rickenbacker's Raft

Eddie Rickenbacker's Raft, an Updated History Guy Episode
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Back during WW2, Eddie and his posse were heading out from Hawaii on their way to check out the military situation in the South Pacific. Their first stop was supposed to be Canton Island. Haven't I heard of that place before? Yes indeedy, it was a refueling stop for the China Clipper.

This story has some similarities to the plot of Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon.

Update April 2022 replaced missing video.

1945 New Guinea Rescue

1945 New Guinea Rescue
The History Guy is borderline too cheerful,  but the intro is over in a few seconds and then you get right into the story, and quite a story it is.

New Guinea & New Britain
Click the link to see the map and read the labels on the placemarks.

Southeast Asia, especially the islands between the mainland and Australia is complicated mess. It covers a large area, so distances are vast, but then you find out things like New Guinea is a stones throw from Australia. (Yes, that's Australia sticking up from the bottom of the map.)

The whole WW2 New Guinea campaign was kind of weird. There were a whole bunch of battles fought there, but they were just so we could build up enough clout so that we could attack the ginormous Japanese base at Rabaul on the neighboring island of New Britain, and then we didn't. By the time we had enough clout in the area we were able to blockade Rabaul, which made attacking it superfluous.

Three volcanoes are simultaneously erupting on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea.
Two, on opposite ends of the island, are indicated by red markers. The third is marked by the stream of ash flying south.

Links, if you want more.

• Ray T. Elsmore
• Battle of Hollandia
• Dani people
• 1945 New Guinea Gremlin Special rescue
• Wewak