Modesty

An airman inspects his B-25’s four nose mounted .50 caliber machine guns. The .75mm cannon can be seen on the lower right portion of the nose.
Note the machine guns mounted in pods on the outside of the cockpit.

I'm reading Indestructible by John R. Bruning. It's about Pappy Gunn and his experience fighting the Japanese in the early days of WW2 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It's a bit of a slog, about half of the book is repetitive emotional clap-trap, but the actual story is fascinating. I'm a little past half way through and he is the process of mounting eight 50 caliber machine guns to the nose of a B-25. His group is also involved in flying missions out of Charters Towers, Australia, supporting the garrison at Port Moresby, New Guinea. On page 300 we get this report of one flight to Port Moresby:

After work after weeks of working long hours and stifling hot hangers, those flights to Moresby afforded him the chance to air himself out a bit, much to the astonishment of the skeleton crew who ran with him. 

He donned an aboriginal loincloth and would stretch his shirt and slacks out behind the pilot seat to let them get some air, too. This cost him dearly once when somebody opened a side window in the cockpit somewhere over the Coral Sea the sudden jet of the slipstream into the cockpit blew his clothes into a whirlwind. Before he could catch them, they spun right out the side window. Normally, that would just have been an aggravation, but Pappy's pocket contained at least $1,000 in pay and poker winnings. The actual amount varied on the telling and retelling by his pals but even worse was his arrival at Port Moresby in nothing but a loin cloth. As they parked at the Airdrome there, a group of females - either Red Cross workers or nurses - showed up with coffee and snacks for the crew. Pappy refused to get out of the cockpit. Always modest, the idea of a woman other than Polly [his wife] seeing him in such a state roused him to panic fury. He demanded that somebody get him a change of clothes, and when his crew wouldn't stop laughing, legend has it he threatened to shoot them. Somebody finally got him a shirt and a pair of slacks he dressed while muttering a constant stream of invectives, then dropped out of the B-25's hatch and stormed off.

Charters Towers to Port Moresby

Update next day replace Darwin with Charters Towers.

Papua New Guinea

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Pallavia Rao, locates the known overseas bases of the American military, categorized by who controls the base.*

Graphics from a story in Zerohedge about U. S. Military Bases Worldwide. There is also a list of all the bases. I'm reading through the list (my copy here) and I notice that we now have six bases in New Guinea. Really? When did that happen? I know we were there fighting the Japanese during WW2, but after that? There are always stories in the news about U. S. Military Bases in some furrin country, but I don't recall hearing anything about any in New Guinea, so I ask our friend Google, who turned up a couple of stories. One was about WW2 and the other, widely reported, was from 2023, where the U. S. is granted six bases in Papua New Guinea (PNG). I guess it didn't cause much of a stir, or if it did the stinkers were suppressed.

All this got my attention because I just finished reading Lucky 666. a story about an aerial reconnaissance crew flying a B-17 out of New Guinea during WW2.

* Methinks the map is trying to convey too much information. Europe, for instance, has a bunch of military bases. Each military base is individually marked, but if you zoom in far enough to be able to distinguish one from you can only get a vague idea of their location because the borders have been pixelated.

Termination Shock - Notes Part 2

Notes on the book Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. The book is set in the not-too-distant future.

Part 2 - Louisiana

Part 1

There is some discussion about people in the mining business and the Paguna Mine in Bougainville comes up: "The place was famous for its hugeness and infamous for political reasons."

Paguna Mine, Bougainville
The central pit is over one mile across.

Excerpted from Wikipedia:

Panguna is one of the largest copper reserves  in the world, having an estimated reserve of one billion tonnes of ore copper and twelve million ounces of gold. The site was at one time the world's largest open-pit copper/gold mine. The mine caused devastating environmental issues on the island, and the company was responsible for poisoning the entire length of the Jaba River, causing birth defects, as well as the extinction of the flying fox on the island. Dissatisfaction with the company led to an uprising in 1988, led by Francis Ona, a Panguna landowner and commander of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army. The outcome of the uprising was the Bougainville conflict, between the BRA, who sought secession from PNG, and the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. The ten-year conflict resulted in over 20,000 deaths, as well as the eventual closure of the mine on 15 May 1989, and the complete withdrawal of BCL personnel by 24 March 1990. It has remained closed to this day.

There is also an extensive backstory about Willem, one the queen's aides. His family was in Indonesia when WW2 broke out and were imprisoned by the Japanese. Their troubles didn't end when the war did, now we have Sukarno mounting a campaign for independence which meant more chaos and more trouble for, especially for white Europeans.

Rescue From Shangri-La

"RESCUE FROM SHANGRI-LA" 1945 C-47 PLANE CRASH SURVIVOR DOCUMENTARY 70564
I finished Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff. In 1945, the survivors of the C-47 crash in the middle New Guinea were big news. Alexander Cann parachuted into this lost valley with a 35mm camera and made this film, though it doesn't appear in IMDB.

Being who I am, I wanted to know more about snatching a glider out of the jungle.


Training Film Glider Pickup by C 47
This training film shows us all the switches, widgets and do-dads involved in setting up the winch in the tow plane. It also includes some slow motion footage of the of the pickup (just after the 11 minute mark).

The winch's main job is not reeling in the tow rope, but rather paying it out in a controlled manner so the glider is subjected to a tolerable amount of acceleration over a few seconds of time. The nylon rope stretches, but not enough to absorb the entire shock. Without the braking action of the winch, the tow rope would snap or rip it's attachment points out of the tug or the glider.


Glider Snatching (1949)
This clip shows the winch brake in action (50 second mark), smoking to beat the band, which explains why they need the ventilators shown in the previous clip.

Here's another video that has a brief shot of what happens to a glider should the tow rope snap on pickup (1:50 mark).

This story and the cloud cover that impedes air operations reminds me of the film The Valley (Obscured by Clouds) that I saw about a zillion years ago. This valley could be the same one as the one in the book or it could be a completely different one. New Guinea is a big place, full of mountains and valleys.

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

Castaways

4 guys were stranded on a tiny island when their skiff capsized.

They were rescued after they were spotted by the crew of a US Navy P-8 Poseidon. The Poseidon started showing up at US air bases in 2012. It is the replacement for the aging P-3 Orion.

The Poseidon is a militarized version of a 737. It has a bomb bay that can carry torpedoes and hard points on the wings for carrying missiles. The Australian Air Force has a good description.

There are no airstrips on any of the islands of the atoll where our castaways were stranded. They either got there by crossing 60 miles of ocean in a boat, or they flew in on a seaplane.

The atoll where they were stranded is 2,000 miles from anywhere, except Papua New Guinea. I'm not sure that helps.

The atoll is 8 miles long. The island where they were stranded is the one on the middle left.

The red markers indicate our target atoll. The yellow ones are the nearest airstrips. The green is a lagoon where a seaplane could land. The orange marker is the nearest real, jet capable airport. It's 170 miles away.

So I am sort of wondering how these guys got to this atoll, what they were doing there, where did the P-8 come from, how long did it take to get 'on station' and once they got there, how long did it take before they found our castaways?
More about flying boats in the South Pacific here.
More about the Albatross here.
Map of South Pacific airports here.
P-3 mentioned here.