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New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
Anyone a WWII history expert? I can't find anything like these on the internet, but I may be Googling the wrong thing. If these are fairly unique I'd like to know so we can properly care for them.

A little background on this- my grandfather fought in the Pacific during WWII as an Army radio carrier. He hit all the major island invasions- Saipan, Leyte, Okinawa, etc. These shots are from a scrapbook he made soon after he got back to the states. He died around 2000 and a lot of his stuff got packed away. My grandmother re-discovered the scrapbook earlier this year, so we've all been taking turns flipping through it, but these really caught my eye. I haven't seen these cards in ~20 years, so my story may be full of holes- so please bear with me. My understanding is that during the island-hopping campaign, the Marines lost a bunch of their radio carriers as they began to become major targets, so they would pull in Army radio carriers to go on missions with them. He saw quite a bit of action in his time. I wish I was older when he was talking about it more, but I remember bits and pieces of some of the old stories. As far as I can remember, he found these during an attack on a Japanese airbase- possibly on Saipan, but I'm not positive. There was a note at the top of the page that can be seen one of the shots but I only got the last couple letters of the name, and I can't remember right off what it said. They are roughly 3x5 note card size and are glossy on the front, papery on the back, and are all creased in the middle. Not sure if that was by design or if that was done when he put them in his pocket. Three of them had writing on the back but I can't really decipher what any of it means. The English text looks to be his handwriting but who can really say at this point? What appears to be Japanese characters appears on two of them and it looks to be the same. The third with something on the back was fairly insignificant so I didn't take a shot of it, but it was a square with 3 lines intersecting one side. Apologies for the quality on some of these, they looked nicer on my phone.























I swear he had a big stack of these outside of the book somewhere, but again, the last time I saw these was around 20 years ago, so I have no idea where it would have migrated. Thanks in advance if anyone knows anything about these. My assumption is that they were handed out to pilots going on runs to know what they were up against but I have no information to back that up.

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New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
Shameless bump. Can anyone at least read the Japanese? Does it say about what you'd expect it to?

Shooting Blanks
Jun 6, 2007

Real bullets mess up how cool this thing looks.

-Blade



You might have some luck posting these in the Airpower/Cold War thread in TFR. Interesting item and your guess is a good one, someone there can probably tell you more.

New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?

Shooting Blanks posted:

You might have some luck posting these in the Airpower/Cold War thread in TFR. Interesting item and your guess is a good one, someone there can probably tell you more.

Nice, thanks, I'll copy my OP over there! Didn't know that thread existed.

the JJ
Mar 31, 2011
The first number listed is horsepower, amusingly literally so. The top boxes of the tables with the katakana just say phonetically what's in the boxes over the picture: "Bell P-39" -> "Beru P-xx" "North American P-51" -> "Noosuamerikan P-51."

They seem more like pilot cards than ground spotter cards, what with head on and profile views, the breakdown of safe approach angles and listing poo poo like horsepower etc. (I think the rest are like max speed, ceiling, those sorts of things.)

Bacarruda
Mar 30, 2011

Mutiny!?! More like "reinterpreted orders"
That's a very cool historical find. It's a great illustration of how air intelligence worked during the war. Intelligence officers on both sides debriefed pilots, poured over publicly-available available information like newsreels and photographs (embassies in neutral countries would often gather up newspapers like the American Stars and Stripes for intelligence purposes), interrogated captured aircrew (Hans Scharrf offers a good German example of this practice), poked around crashed enemy aircraft, and even had captured enemy aircraft test-flown (the Akutan Zero is a great example of this). With this information, they'd produce briefings and informational materials like the one your grandfather found.

These cards are also a great illustration of the limitations of this approach to intelligence-gathering. A lot of "intelligence" was simply educated guesswork (there's lots of "(?)" marks on these cards), and those guesses could be wrong. Thake for example, the B-26 Marauder's card.

Here's the Japanese silhouette


And here's the real aircraft


Most of the general features are right. But Japanese intelligence officers also got quite a bit wrong. Their per-engine horsepower figures (1,500hp) are pretty far off. In reality, the Pratt & Whitney R-2800's on a B-26 each put out about 2000 horses. The gun configuration is also wrong. The B-26 didn't have a belly gun. The nose gun was a Browning M2 12.7mm/.50 machinegun, not the 7.7mm marked on the image. The drawing also fails to mention the four .50 cals B-26s sometimes carried in cheek pods.

You can also see cases where the intelligence officers confused different variants of aircraft. For example, the P-51 Mustang's armament is wrong. The P-51A variant the drawing depicts only carried four wing-mounted .50 cal machine guns, not the eight 7.7mm guns shown. Neither the P-51A nor its successor, the P-51B, carried any cowl guns.

However, there was a ground-attack variant of the P-51A, the A-36A Apache that did have cowl-mounted guns. A-36s did see service in Burma as part of the 311th Fighter Group. Since A-36As and P-51As looked virtually identical, it's probable some Japanese intelligence officer got them confused



Very cool find. Thanks for sharing!

You may also want to share this in the Aeronautical Insanity thread (http://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=91) and the Military History thread here in A/T.

Bacarruda fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Nov 25, 2014

Kaislioc
Feb 14, 2008

New Leaf posted:

Shameless bump. Can anyone at least read the Japanese? Does it say about what you'd expect it to?

quote:


Just to eliminate any doubt there may still be, using this one as a template.

マーチン B-26 - Martin B-26
中型爆撃機 - Medium (Strategic) Bomber

空冷 - Air cooled engine, 1500 horsepower
最大速力 - Maximum speed, 547 kmh
翼幅 - Wingspan, 19.81 metres
全長 - Length, 17.74 metres

The others are generally the same. Naturally the role changes based on plane. Sometimes they write 最高速力 instead of 最大速力 for maximum speed for no real reason I can think of, it's the same.

They also sometimes write 液冷 (liquid cooled) instead of 空冷 (air cooled). It seems Bacarruda covered the liberal figures they had for horsepower so I took a quick check on Wikipedia and it seems like they had at least a basic understanding of what kind of engines the planes were using. Admittedly, I'm not sure how hard it is to gently caress something like that up.

quote:


The only problem I can think of is this one. I can't tell if they think it has some sort of special engine or if the guy writing it tried to write 空冷 (air cooled) and hosed it up really badly.

Kaislioc fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Nov 27, 2014

Bacarruda
Mar 30, 2011

Mutiny!?! More like "reinterpreted orders"

Kaislioc posted:

The only problem I can think of is this one. I can't tell if they think it has some sort of special engine or if the guy writing it tried to write 空冷 (air cooled) and hosed it up really badly.

The PB2Y Coronado had four air-cooled Pratt & Whitney R-1830 radial engines. iirc, they each put out about 1,200 horses, so it looks like the intelligence guys were right on the mark for once.

Although they've greatly over-estimated the aircraft's max speed and under-estimated it's size. In reality, it was even larger.

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New Leaf
Jul 24, 2013

Dragon Balls? Are they tasty?
This is great info, thanks guys!

If anyone else is curious, I did put up another thread on TFR that starts midway down this page: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3373768&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=428

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