WWII Equipment - Vics, Aircraft and Kit

[de officiis]

The reluctant kamikaze of the Second World War

From October 1944, when the first attacks took place, to the end of the war, nearly 4,000 pilots flew kamikaze sorties – creating guided explosive missiles out of piloted planes.

Why did they do it? Why throw away a young life in an act of such spectacularly destructive suicide? For many years after the war, these questions were answered in the west through popular imagery of brainwashed zealotry, of reckless inhumanity. Even in Japan, the word kamikaze – coined by the military to recall the ‘divine winds’ that miraculously saved Japan from seaborne Mongol invasion in the 1200s – came to be used to admonish dangerous drivers or irresponsible skiers.

But the diaries, letters and poems of some of these pilots, belatedly making their way into English in recent years, tell a very different story. It is a far less comforting tale than the old one, because the real lives and deaths of young men like Ichizo Hayashi turn out to be more moderate and human than we might like to admit.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

I heard they got 'em pretty cranked up as well... but that may be apocryphal.

[de officiis]

The Bovington Tank Museum recently assembled a collection of Tiger tanks. The one they couldn't get in real life (the very rare Sturmtiger) has been made available through a virtual reality setup.

[de officiis]

Birth of the Cobra

Now among a skeleton staff in the design group that March, Folse took out a sheet of vellum paper and began rendering the sleek outlines of what would become the Bell AH-1 Cobra, the world’s first production attack helicopter. Designed, built, and deployed to the battlefield in just over two years from that day, the Cobra at last gave the rotary-wing genre a combat game-changer, purpose-built for offense.

I always thought that the pilot-controlled chin guns on the Cobra were a totally cool innovation.

[BjornP]

Danish boy finds remains of German Messerschmitt in a field

When Klaus Kristiansen tried to bring his son's history homework to life, he probably wasn't expecting the boy to unearth a buried World War Two warplane.
...
But that's exactly what happened when 14-year-old Daniel Rom Kristiansen found the remains of a German Messerschmitt plane, and its pilot, in an unremarkable field.

According to Mr Kristiansen, his grandfather once told him that a plane had crashed there in November 1944.
..."When my son Daniel was recently given homework about World War Two, I jokingly told him to go out and find the plane that is supposed to have crashed out in the field."

Father and son joined forces with a metal detector .... Mr Kristiansen, an agricultural worker, believed the wreckage had been removed years before. But then, a telltale beeping on a patch of boggy ground. The pair ...borrowed an excavator from a neighbour, and around four to six metres down, the plane's carcass began to reveal itself.

Their haul included an engine from the ME 109 Messerschmitt ... and the bones of a crew member who died in the crash.

"In the first moment it was not a plane," ... "It was maybe 2,000 - 5,000 pieces of a plane. And we found a motor... then suddenly we found parts of bones, and parts from [the pilot's] clothes. "And then we found some personal things - books, a wallet with money... Either it was a little Bible or it was Mein Kampf - a book in his pocket. We didn't touch it, we just put it in some bags. A museum is now taking care of it. I think there's a lot of information in those papers."

Hard to believe that no one would've at least retrieved the pilot's body after the crash for burial. But maybe the bog existed back in '44. I wonder if they'll be able to reconstruct who the guy was and notify his family or descendents...

Just looked through this thread and found out you covered this. I recently worked at the museum (or rather its storage/archive/conservator/restoration facility) where they recieved, cleaned up, and researched who this guy was. As well as putting the pieces of his body back together. His identity was actually discovered a little before it hit world media, but the archaeologist was in the process of working with German authorities to find out if he had any living relatives. They would have to be told first, after all. He didn't have any living relatives, though.

The pilot's, or rather trainee pilot's name was Hans Wunderlich, 19 years old, from the German state of Bavaria.

German archives confirmed the crash as happening on the 10th of October 1944, and that German personnel aborted the recovery of the plane due to the swampy/boggy state of where it crashed. They let the parts they couldn't recover stay in the bog, where it would eventually sink. It was a hard, fast crash direct into the earth. No whole body to recover.

The little book in his pocket that the father speaks of wasn't a Bible or Mein Kampf. It too has been restored, and the North Jutland Historical Museum just finished a special exhibit of the crash and who Wunderlich was. It was a very popular exhibit and is currently being planned to become a permanent exhibit at the historical museum in Aalborg. At the top of this page is a photo of the (restored) book they found, and on the bottom the pilot's watch.

http://www.appetize.dk/fly-udstilling-f ... aa-museum/

The "Soldatenfreund" was like a...primer? That the word? A soldier's book of enemy plane types and markings, practical tips and advice for pilots, that sort of thing. The book also had blank pages that the pilot could use as a journal.

While the museum kept the book and several artifacts from the pilot, most of the wreck was handed back to the 14 year old kid. Lots of it is simply scrap metal resembling crumpled up paper... though valuable scrap metal, but there were some few parts of the plane that were more or less intact and he's apparantly got offers from foreign museums and collectors already for those.

[de officiis]

Poor bastard--to die so young like that, and before he could accomplish very much. At least we can believe that he didn't suffer more than an instant or so. A good friend of my family who was a CFI (and helped me finish getting my pilot's license) died in a plane crash nine years ago when his plane lost power on takeoff. It caught on fire and five other people were killed. I really hope he was killed on impact or at least was unconscious at the time of the fire.

[ssu]

While the museum kept the book and several artifacts from the pilot, most of the wreck was handed back to the 14 year old kid. Lots of it is simply scrap metal resembling crumpled up paper... though valuable scrap metal, but there were some few parts of the plane that were more or less intact and he's apparantly got offers from foreign museums and collectors already for those.

The photo shows how scrap the plane was. But with especially WW2 airplanes, anything that can be salvaged is nowdays done so. Even for shot up rusted WW2 tanks there is a market, and with aircraft the market is even bigger.

I think this is a picture of the kid and the aircraft:

[BjornP]

The photo shows how scrap the plane was. But with especially WW2 airplanes, anything that can be salvaged is nowdays done so. Even for shot up rusted WW2 tanks there is a market, and with aircraft the market is even bigger.

I think this is a picture of the kid and the aircraft:

It is. Looks to be from the small exhibit they did. It's the archaeologist in charge of the excavation of the plane on the far right.

There were people who heard the crash back then, but they don't speak of any firefights in the sky that night, so it was probably a malfunction or, perhaps just as likely, pilot error.

The scrap stank like a kind of fuel I never smelled before. Not a gasoline or diesel smell, according to the archaeologist it was some sort of special German fuel they made because of the German scarcity of oil. Nearly all the pieces were soaked in it and they had to procure a special storage space for the exhibit that could get aired out every once in a while.

[de officiis]

[C-Mag]

That was good, not many of those old boys left. Funny too, 'Frozen Meat Medal'