I wish a Merry Christmas to all wwiiafterwwii readers, a few days early. Below is a Christmas card of the British XII Army of 1945, the first peacetime Christmas which Great Britain had since 1938.
Tag: aircraft: fighters
the WWII gun turret in the Nevada desert
The Nevada National Security Site, the nuclear test site north of Las Vegas, is closed to the public. Deep within this desert facility remains a most improbable thing, a turret off a WWII US Navy cruiser.
(The WWII cruiser turret at the NNSS.) (US Dept. of Energy photo)
(The “B” (upper forward) turret of USS Louisville (CA-28) prior to WWII.)
(A nuclear test to the north turns night into day on Fremont St.)
happy Thanksgiving / last days of the Hellcat
This F6F-5 Hellcat, still on duty on 19 November 1947, received a most unusual paint scheme. The WWII fighter was assigned to NAS Columbus, OH and was pulled through downtown Columbus as part of the 1947 Thanksgiving Parade.
For readers outside the USA, the Thanksgiving holiday is the fourth Thursday of November. Most American cities have a parade, which starts the “holiday season” running from Thanksgiving to New Years. These parades are often sponsored by retailers as it also kicks off the unofficial “Christmas shopping season” and hence there is a subtle emphasis on that December holiday.
The Hellcat was painted in water-soluble temporary white and silver paint. Below is a bit more on the air station after WWII and the end of the Hellcat’s career after WWII.
USSR exploiting WWII German jets and the Yakovlev “Feather”
The Yak-15 “Feather” was a post-WWII fighter with a twist: a WWII piston-engined airframe mated to a WWII jet engine, which is more difficult than it sounds. This largely-forgotten fighter’s story also intersects with how the USSR handled advanced Luftwaffe technology it found itself with in May 1945.
(Captured Me-262 being tested in the USSR after WWII.)
(A quite improbable thing: The Yak-15 was the airframe of a WWII Soviet propeller-driven fighter, the Yak-3, mated with WWII German jet technology.)
WWII weapons in the Indonesian Independence War
From WWII’s end in 1945 until 1949, pro-independence Indonesians in the Dutch East Indies and the Netherlands military fought a conflict which saw a huge variety of WWII weapons, both Japanese and Allied, in further use.
(A WWII Dutch M.95 rifle rechambered to .303 British by Indonesia during the 1950s.)
(Kawasaki Ki-48 “Lily” bomber of the Indonesian air force during the late 1940s.)
(Indonesian troops with Arisaka Type 99 rifles during 1949.)
merry Christmas 2023 / a look at the Loon
I would like to wish a Merry Christmas to all wwiiafterwwii readers.
Below is the Rocket, the newspaper of Redstone Arsenal, AL from 23 December 1952 – 7 years after WWII and 71 years ago today. Santa Claus is on a JB-2 Loon. If the Loon looks like a WWII German V-1 buzz bomb, there is a good reason, because that is what a Loon was.
WWII tanks in the Soccer War 1969
Depending where a person might be reading this, the 1969 conflict between El Salvador and Honduras is called Guerra de las Cien Horas (100 Hours War), the Fútbol War, or the Soccer War.
Beyond the (often incorrect) cause cited, this war is famous for the dogfights between Mustangs and Corsairs. A quarter-century after WWII ended, this would be the final time that WWII fighter planes would ever meet in the skies anywhere.
(Honduran Corsair)
(Salvadoran Mustang)
By now the air aspect of the conflict is beaten to death; indeed there are entire books covering it. On the other hand little is usually said about the war’s ground fighting, which included WWII-vintage M3 Stuart tanks.
(Salvadoran M3A1 Stuart tank parading a captured Honduran flag during 1969.)
the last Mustangs in the US Army
The P-51 Mustang was one of WWII’s greatest fighters and one of the best era-adjusted fighter planes of all time. Within the American consciousness it is almost synonymous with WWII.
Decades after WWII and after the P-51 had left service as a fighter, the Mustang briefly “came back from the grave” to serve not in the US Air Force, but in the US Army.
(P-51 Mustang during WWII.)
(F-51D Mustang chase plane follows the Sikorsky YUH-60A prototype during the US Army’s UTTAS competition of 1976, seeking a replacement for the UH-1 Iroquois of Vietnam War fame. Sikorsky’s design defeated Boeing’s YUH-61 to win UTTAS and was developed into the UH-60 Blackhawk of today.) (official US Army photo)
(US Army F-51 Mustang during 1970s experiments with airborne recoilless rifles.)
what happened to Japan’s WWII aircraft companies after 1945
When WWII began in 1939 Japan was an aeronautical giant; one of the top five aerospace powers on Earth. Six years later the industry lay in ruins and a year after that, no longer even existed on paper.
With the possible exception of Mitsubishi, very little was ever written about Japanese aerospace companies before WWII and most were unknown outside of their homeland; in contrast to companies like Messerschmitt or Boeing which were famous worldwide. Nearly no attention at all was given to what happened to them after WWII.
A study of their final fates also has a second story. This is how defense contractors – which dominated Japan’s GDP during the early 1940s – were dismantled in a controlled way to limit the “contagion” of their loss to the wider postwar economy.
(Mitsubishi’s bombed-out factory at Nagoya at the end of WWII.)
(The Nakajima Aircraft corporate offices in Ota during the post-WWII American occupation. Today a Subaru factory; one of Nakajima’s descendants, is on these grounds.)
MG 151: post-WWII use
The guns arming WWII warplanes were usually of limited general interest, just a component of the overall aircraft and leaving service with the planes they were installed in. Germany’s MG 151 on the other hand, had an extremely long and varied career after WWII, being used in any number of roles in the air, on the ground, and even on the sea; all around the world for many decades.
(MG 151 being serviced on a Luftwaffe fighter during WWII.)
(French MG 151 crew on a “Pirate”, or up-gunned H-34 Choctaw, during the Algerian War.) (photo via tenes.info website)
(Image from a 1980s South African VHS video promoting Vektor’s helicopter mount of the MG 151.)
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