Tempest?
Picture of the day
- Thread starter jwhc
- Start date
Tempest?
Donny Fenn1
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- East Kootenays
Sharps, yes.
bjmurata, yep, although there's some debate he was flying 115 that day. Worth noting he is the only enemy combatant to have a shrine in his honour in Japan.
bjmurata, yep, although there's some debate he was flying 115 that day. Worth noting he is the only enemy combatant to have a shrine in his honour in Japan.
Lets not forget that more than 40,000 British civilians were killed during the Blitz. We dont know how many were maimed. And the V1 and V2 rockets certainly didnt discriminate civilian from military targets. My mother narrowly escaped injury during several raids and replaced ops centre crew at biggin hill who had been killed in a raid. My grandmother managed to quickly take cover as two German aircraft straffed civilans in her small town in Surrey. You would have had a tough time convincing British civilians of the unjustice of bombing almost any target in Germany. As for Germany..there were people who stood up to the Nazis (and the later occupying forces fwiw) Cardinal Count von Galen being one very good example.
As for the Japanese...before making any judgement you would have to see personally (as I did as a child) the results of their treatment of british soldiers that they imprisoned in their POW death camps!
Dark Alley Dan
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Darkest Edmonton
AP, you and I can agree that the blitz was a war crime. Bombing civilians in an effort to crush their morale was Douhet's idea and was proven, both by the blitz and the best efforts of Bomber Command, to be a fiction. You can kill and dehouse and maim an awful lot of civilians before it has any real effect on the war. In fact, it seems to agitate them to no end. Makes 'em WANT to fight, to come to YOUR nation and bomb the sh!t out of you. Pretty basic human stuff. The "Oh yeah? Well, take THIS" reflex.
I'm not forgetting or negating the crimes of Fat Hermann's lads over England. It was swinish to bomb civialians, and once proven ineffective, it should have, had logic been in play, been stopped. If we agree that killing children in their homes is wrong, then it's wrong all around, isn't it?
Morality aside, one wonders if Bomber Command couldn't have refocussed their efforts on more effective methods of fighting the war. They had a few better options after January '44. The night area bombing of cities was doing nothing to reduce war production. In fact, it increased. The Yanks were having a real effect on the war effort by bombing fuel production faciities. By the Spring of '45, the Germans had planes, but no fuel for them and no fuel to train pilots. THAT made a difference. Levelling cities didn't.
I hold the aircrewmen of Bomber Command in very high regard indeed. Their losses were the worst of any arm of any force in the war exceot the U-boat sailors. They operated at night, likely scared most of the time, and with a minimal chance of completing a tour. The guts it would have taken to climb in the back door of a Lanc night after night - I don't believe I could have done it. But I believe these young men were misused. I think, for the losses they suffered, they could have made a greater difference and ended the war sooner than they did had Harris not been driving the boat.
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I recall that he won the VC and was just about the last Canadian to die in the war.
I also seem to recall he was flying off a British carrier, which had an armoured deck.
Why does the Corsair have what looks like a USAF insignia? Should be Royal Navy, no?
To hopefully prevent trigger happy and Kamikaze shy Pacific fleet USN AA gunners and fighter pilots from causing a friendly fire incident.
Regular British rounds too easy to confuse with the Japanese "Meatball" roundel at distance and bad weather conditions like fog and rain.
This photo of Corsairs running up on HMS Illustrious' deck shows Pacific theatre markings - all blue paint and white centred roundels with American style bars. Photo RN
The only photo yet to be found that shows the original Corsair number 115 of the Royal Navy’s 1841 Squadron. It is generally accepted that No. 115 was not “Hammie” Gray’s usual aircraft, as his was unserviceable at the time that he launched from Formidable on that fateful day. Here we see 115 chained and battened down for inclement weather enroute to some action - with engine cowl and canopy covered in canvas to protect them from the effects of salt spray. Inset - the squadron crest for 1841 shows an eagle preying on a dragon above the waves - a heraldic depiction of Robert Hampton Gray’s final action when he pressed home his attack on the Japanese escort ship Amakusa, sinking her in Onagawa Bay. There are some who believe that 115 was not the aircraft he flew that day and others that insist that the markings were slightly different (the numeral "1" before the roundel and "15" after). Others insist that the serial number was not KD658. Still others insist that his personal aircraft was 119. This is possible too, but until the day that incontrovertible proof is offered as to different markings, we will fly our own Corsair in these markings - it will be easy to make a change. Regardless of long-lost records which may or may not support these claims, our Corsair will always be a flying tribute to Gray.
Regular British rounds too easy to confuse with the Japanese "Meatball" roundel at distance and bad weather conditions like fog and rain.
This photo of Corsairs running up on HMS Illustrious' deck shows Pacific theatre markings - all blue paint and white centred roundels with American style bars. Photo RN
The only photo yet to be found that shows the original Corsair number 115 of the Royal Navy’s 1841 Squadron. It is generally accepted that No. 115 was not “Hammie” Gray’s usual aircraft, as his was unserviceable at the time that he launched from Formidable on that fateful day. Here we see 115 chained and battened down for inclement weather enroute to some action - with engine cowl and canopy covered in canvas to protect them from the effects of salt spray. Inset - the squadron crest for 1841 shows an eagle preying on a dragon above the waves - a heraldic depiction of Robert Hampton Gray’s final action when he pressed home his attack on the Japanese escort ship Amakusa, sinking her in Onagawa Bay. There are some who believe that 115 was not the aircraft he flew that day and others that insist that the markings were slightly different (the numeral "1" before the roundel and "15" after). Others insist that the serial number was not KD658. Still others insist that his personal aircraft was 119. This is possible too, but until the day that incontrovertible proof is offered as to different markings, we will fly our own Corsair in these markings - it will be easy to make a change. Regardless of long-lost records which may or may not support these claims, our Corsair will always be a flying tribute to Gray.
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Donny Fenn1
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- East Kootenays
Which I always find amusing as it wasn't like the IJN had anything that remotely looked like a Corsair, and as an adversary you might notice the shape of an aircraft before a flash of red somewhere?
To appease the people wanting rifles, check this out. STG-44 with a nice compact night vision system put into play before the war ended. Later made famous in literary circles as the antagonists weapon in Stephen Hunter's "The Master Sniper".
Attachments
We might think so, although the novice pilot or gunner is perhaps more likely to revert to his recognition of markings over his recollection of what was in the FM 30-30 Aircraft Recognition Pictorial Manual.
I never cease to learn on this forum. It would make sense to add the bars to the roundel, to help everyone know it was a 'friendly", although in the case of the Corsair, there is no fighter more distinctive as to its identity.
While I generally agree with your comments I don't think it is as clear cut as you make out. The Lancaster's and Halifax's were simply unsuitable for daylight bombing while Germany had air superiority. The losses were bad enough with night bombing but much much worse for daylight. Late in the war when Allied fighters could escort all the way then RAF bombers were often used in the daylight. They were also used for precision raids in daylight but often with very heavy casualties. In addition it is often either forgotten or underestimated the amount of German resources tied up by the bomber campaign which would otherwise have been available elsewhere. I do agree that Bomber Harris was obsessed with the Strategic Air war which has been proven over and over again to be ineffective. It tends to just piss of the people being bombed and when something like only 5% of your bombs fall with a few miles of the target it is largely ineffective. They tried it again in Vietnam but again it didn't work. You will note that in modern air war huge effort has been put into precision bombing so at least the lessons seem to have been learned.
The courage of the bomber crews was amazing just getting into the plane night after night knowing that you probably weren't going to make it through alive. As an ex military guy I always accepted that there was risk but bomber command was way beyond risk it was pretty much a death sentence. For people in hindsight to criticise the aircrews for bombing cities as they were ordered to do makes my blood boil. Harris deserves criticism but not the aircrew. He stuck with the strategic plan way to long but then the USAF did the same thing in the 50's so Harris was far from alone.
