For some, it started…

Unintended consequences. So, given that any Naval base will attack an unidentified intrusion…Who started it? I suggest we contemplate Japan moving
from the side of the angels in WW1 into the dark side in 1931, invading China. http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/summary.cfm?q=905

Unconvertible currency (so said Western Finance); can’t buy food for its folk. What do you expect? Paddy fields were invaded. League of Nations toothless; US bombast, but no action. Japan gets away with it. So, does it again, “by invitation”, in Vichy Cochin China, of no relevance other than onway to ripe-for-plucking, no credible Power (defeated) Netherlands East Indies, and its oil. Abhorrence of vacuum.

(You could present Germany’s territorial expansion, 1935-38 very similarly, plus the issue of pre-empting the foul baboonery of Bolshevism).

So: did we that professed negotiation cause WW2 by appearing not to care to expend the bones of grenadiers on far-off countries of which we knew little? Did we surprise Germany and Japan by rousing ourselves? So, did we fail in communication?

The generation of leader/politicos that has seen us through 1945-about now thought just that, so invented UN/NATO/EU, encouraged town-twinning, exchange of accredited Attaches (=spies: the Russian Federation has a Liaison Office at SHAPE), Open Skies. All to reduce the chances of stumbling, unintended into WW3. Oh, and we spent to create what we hoped would, this time, be a credible Deterrent.

So, the received wisdom is that we stumbled into these Wars. Because that is boring, pranksters would have it that Stalin’s man Roosevelt propelled US into concocting causes to attack the Powers threatening to encircle USSR (and/or: armaments as welfare for capitalism).

Boring is much more likely.

Mark,

Your “trench art” definitely isn’t a Betty, or any other Japanese aircraft that I can think of.

Well I did say “…or similar”. 😮

As with much ‘trench art’ I think it is more representational of a Japanese twin engined WWII aircraft rather than a faithfully dimensional model.

“Postwar occupation Army souvenir market” sounds very credible to me.

Mark

Could even be Sicilian

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbatax

😉

Clearly not a “Betty” (seemingly the “go to” designation for any Japanese aircraft …rather like every UK piston fighter is a Spitfire)
…perhaps a Mitsubishi Ki-46…but I think it resembles the little known Yokosuka P1Y Ginga.

And at the risk of sounding like an Antiques Roadshow wonk….don’t discount the possibility it’s a fictional type made for the postwar occupation Army souvenir market.

Mark,

Your “trench art” definitely isn’t a Betty, or any other Japanese aircraft that I can think of.

TIGHAR will claim it was made from aluminium from Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed.

Jeez – anything to blame America, eh?

Oh dear.

If i may i think you have rather badly mis-interpreted and subsequently in a rather pompous and self-rightous way mis-represented the comment.

Jeez you Yanks, anything to get yerselves all wound up that everybody is against you eh?

Mark is in Japan…? I await his report on a Japanese Spitfire in due course! Unless there’s something else of interest nearby…

No, not on the search for Ginger Lacey’s MK XIV RN135, struck off charge in Japan in 1948, this was more a cultural visit and ticking a few boxes on the bucket list…super fast on the ‘Bullet Train’ etc.

One unexpected find. We over shot the directions trying to locate a recommended stationers in Kyoto and came upon a small antique shop selling mostly china and porcelain items. There was a little table at the rear of the shop with a few knick-knacks. Thereon a piece of what I call ‘trench art’. What appears to be a Betty bomber or similar flying over a hemisphere of the globe with the Pacific, Japan and the US. Quite crudely and robustly made and weighing in at a hefty 850 gms. with 70 plus years of patina. It has the word ARBATAX cast in the ocean. Modestly priced …a nice memento of the holiday.

Anybody know anything about these sorts of things?

Mark

I think he is investigating a dormant volcano which may spit fire very soon. A buried spit-fire, sort of…

Mark is in Japan…? I await his report on a Japanese Spitfire in due course! Unless there’s something else of interest nearby…

The thing I can never get my head round is they say the Japanese started the war without declaring it on the “day of infamy” though prior to the attack on Pearl Harbour the Americans sank a Japanese sub prior to any side declaring war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/30/us/japanese-submarine-sunk-at-pearl-harbor-is-found.html

Jeez – anything to blame America, eh?

So your position is that an American destroyer attacking and sinking an unidentified sub well inside a military exclusion zone around the mouth of Pearl Harbor starting at 0637 – when the Japanese aircraft took off from their carriers on their attack runs at 0600 – somehow exonerates the Japanese?

When the ships and aircraft for not only the Pearl attack but several others across the Pacific started on their transits to their attack positions over a week earlier (12 days for the PH group), and the orders to commence their attacks had been sent before or about the time Ward responded to the call from Condor reporting a periscope sighting just outside the harbor? Two 1/2 hours before Ward fired on the IJN mini-sub?

You can’t “wrap your head around” the reality of a long-planned widespread attack readied months earlier, put in place days earlier, and actually commenced before the Americans fired – and that the only reason that sub was there was as a part of that planned, authorized, and in-progress Japanese attack – and that by international law the US was 100% within its legal rights to sink that unidentified sub at that location whether there was a declaration of war or not?

Hostilities were already underway – it was sunk at about the same time that the Japanese were invading Malaya.

I still cannot understand how so much energy can be released just by breaking the bonds of an atom.
An amazingly terrible thing.

Not so much energy as that released (in the form of heat, rather than light) by the controversy generated subsequently……

The thing I can never get my head round is they say the Japanese started the war without declaring it on the “day of infamy” though prior to the attack on Pearl Harbour the Americans sank a Japanese sub prior to any side declaring war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/30/us/japanese-submarine-sunk-at-pearl-harbor-is-found.html

I still cannot understand how so much energy can be released just by breaking the bonds of an atom.
An amazingly terrible thing.

The destructive power of nuclear weapons is indeed awesome. I cannot however seperate the type of weapon from the damage and loss inflicted during hostile acts of war in many centuries. It is now possible to use research to uncover the facts about deceptions,lies,propaganda etc which have resulted in outbreaks of terrible wars and conflicts. If as a human race we are to progress to a more peaceful co existence we need to develop our own diplomatic approach to solving potential conflict at all levels. A phrase comes to mind, Blessed are the peacemakers. Tolerance and understanding are needed.

Seeing the “Beginning” and “end” photos of this thread reminded me of a book I had read many years ago by Stanley Weintraub it was called ” Long Day’s Journey into War: December 7, 1941 ” I recommend anyone to read it as it covers the events “48 total hours” of in that whole day all around the world. It contained what I thought at the time was a ‘full circle’ moment
Anyway… On page 655 he has this passage about 6th August 1945
“In the Great Artiste, an accompanying B-28 that carried no explosives other than defensive hardware, some of the crew needed no explanation. They were scientists monitoring the equipment that would photograph and measure the effects of the explosion. . At eight-fifteen and seventeen seconds the morning, Japan time, the bomb-bay doors of the Enola Gay opened. From The Great Artiste an instrument package drifted down from a parachute.
Forty-three seconds later, with the Enola gay at 31,600 feet in a 155-degree diving turn to the right racing away from the impact “Little Boy” erupted 1,890 feet over Hiroshima like a thousand rising suns. The plane lurched upward on lightening its load; it shuddered again in the shock wave, then trembled in the echo effect. “I think this is the end of the war,” Tibbets observed to Bob Lewis, his copilot. “Bingo!” the Enola Gay radioed to Tinian.
Monitoring the instruments in The Great Artiste was Luis Alvarez, later a Nobel Prize winner in physics. On December 7, 1941, he had been working at the M.I.T. Radiation Laboratory on radar. Now he saw a bright flash illuminate the crew compartment, “the light from the explosion reflecting off the clouds in front of us … I looked in vain for the city that had been our target”
On Page 666 is the following section
“Captain Mitsuo Fuchida (leader of the first wave of carrier planes over Pearl Harbor, rescued later from a ditched plane during the Battle of Midway. Fuchida was a survivor. As Air Operations Officer for the Navy, he had been at a conference at Hiroshima on the defense of Kyushu; it had ended just the day before. Leaving his assistant, Lieutenant Toshio Hashizume, at their hotel in Hiroshima, the Yamato (since obliterated by the bomb), he had flown to Nara to troubleshoot a problem at the new underground naval headquarters being built remote from Tokyo. The headquarters would lack a navy. The fuel-starved home fleet was down to one battleship, four small carriers, four cruisers, and twenty-eight destroyers. Many were damaged and barely operable. Could the essentialFuchida return urgently to Hiroshima to explore the whereabouts of a second, apparently unexploded, bomb? Witnesses had seen a second B-29 drop something by parachute. If Fuchida could find it, the secret of the awesome explosive might be solved. He flew back, circling over the smoking rubble that had been that had been Hiroshima Near the river, at what seemed the blast center, the charred
skeleton of a domed building somehow stood. Little else remained the fires were going out. There was nothing left to burn. With Captain Yasukado Yasui, Fuchida flew about the nearby hillsuntil darkness, spotting nothing resembling a crumpled parachute. At dawn the pair began, searching likely sites in a truck from Kure.
Up a mountain road, five miles north of Hiroshima, they saw what appeared to be white silk billowing in the wind. Stopping, they climbed out and cautiously followed the parachute cords down to a metal cylinder, three feet long and about a foot wide. It did not look like a bomb, but it was clearly what observers had described. Tugging at a metal ring, they dislodged the contents — instruments connected by wires, including a thermometer and a radio transmitter. They had found Luis Alvarez’s scientific package, which had measured and reported the performance of the bomb. To Yasui, Fuchida explained the likely purpose of the contents, adding, “Whatever made us think we could beat America?” Gingerly, they pushed the wires and instruments back into the cylinder, loaded it into their truck, and left the hills from which they could still see the horror of Hiroshima. “

Aren’t we nitpicking a bit? The point is made, surely.:)

Note, the above photo matches neither the detonation point of the Hiroshima bomb (Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park) nor that of the Nagasaki bomb (Hypocentre Park).

Maybe the aiming point?

The Peace Park…adjacent to the Hypocentre at Hiroshima.

Mark

Note, the above photo matches neither the detonation point of the Hiroshima bomb (Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park) nor that of the Nagasaki bomb (Hypocentre Park).

Hmmm.

This image taken last week…on the spot.