Creaking DoorBad enough a relic like this radial is dragged into a clearing but to be cutup as well?
Looks pretty ‘surgical’ oxy-acetylene work! I doubt it is being cut-up for scrap…..eBay relics more like!
Somebody clearly regards it with some reverence as there is the traditional Japanese offering of food and drink for the dead nearby.
Creaking DoorInteresting to see that the Japs fabricated the crank case ,from steel components welded together…
I don’t think the crankcase will be welded; it is probably drop-forged (steel) and machined from billet.
I think (to use the technical term) ‘one of the American radials’ was manufactured the same way and I believe many Japanese radial engines of that era owed a lot to American influence. (I know almost nothing about American radial engines.) ‘Old school’ aluminium alloy crankcases are drop-forged too; the good ones anyway!
I also don’t think that the video clip is being made by those responsible for cutting the engine up. Also notice the size of the cut pieces; why such small pieces if you’re just going to scrap it? Not to carry it away surely. Ask yourself this; how did they get the heavy oxy-acetylene gear there? And the cutting seems to have been done to avoid damage to the major components, crankcase excepted.
To me it seems that somebody deliberately cut the engine open with a view to ‘sympathetically’ removing the cylinders (by cutting the slave rods) with the pistons still inside. They’d probably sell well on eBay.
Creaking DoorCREAKING DOOR…you can see the weld bead and its “uneven” width holding the “outer face ring”.
Do you mean the ‘weld bead’ in front of the Lumix camera at 3:30 on the second video?
Personally I don’t think that is a weld bead. It looks to me like a raised feature on the front of the crankcase that has been peened-over in an irregular way during impact with the ground (which looks fairly rocky near the engine).
That’s just my opinion of course.
Creaking DoorMy apologies; I should have made myself clearer. I think it is drop-forged and then machined.
I’ll take a look at the second video again.
Creaking DoorExcellent…..I haven’t missed it after all. 🙂
Creaking DoorCreaking DoorAre we not confusing coupe with coupé?
A coupé is the two-door automobile familiar to us all but the word comes from the description for a two-seater horse-drawn carriage.
I looked it up and the term is derived from French, short for carosse coupé, literally: cut-off carriage (from couper: to cut). So the word doesn’t describe what the thing is, rather what was done to it (a bit like the word toast).
The MOD stores (and the automotive industry) quietly dropped the accent so coupé becomes coupe and cut-off becomes ‘dessert dish’.
Coupé translates also as ‘half-compartment’.
I could be wrong though. Does anybody speak French? :confused:
Creaking DoorI’m not aware that after 1941 they were ‘enemies’ though. They ‘liberated’ Poland in their advance on Berlin, don’t forget.
If Poland was truly ‘liberated’ by the Russians then how could they have a grievance?
Churchill made promises to the Polish government in exile that he didn’t fulfil.
Churchill should not have made such rash promises. I’m not sure why he did; did he think perhaps that the promise was to ‘guarantee Poland’s sovereignty’ from being a puppet of the west? Possibly he thought that Britain would reach Russia before Russia reached Poland?
What would the Polish government in exile have done without such promises? I hardly think that Poles would have stopped fighting Germany.
His denial of permission for the Polish marchers in the victory parade was an (IMHO) un-necessary kowtow to Stalin’s demands.
I thought Polish forces weren’t forbidden from marching absolutely; rather they withdrew after all Polish arms were not allowed to be represented?
He, as did the other powers, failed to use diplomatic pressure to hold Stalin to recognising a properly constituted Polish government rather than a Soviet puppet.
Maybe Churchill had no options in negotiations with Stalin…..but even if he had no choice, he failed the Polish government and people.
As for diplomatic pressure, Russia was unlikely to give up anything that she already had, and started out to gain, not to mention lost so many lives over. No, Russia was going to move her borders as far west as possible and by any means.
Couldn’t the west have applied diplomatic pressure over a little thing like the Berlin Airlift in (only) 1948, and that was just for West Berlin, not a whole country like Poland?
How can he have failed if he had no choice? As you rightly said the real failure was that the treaty was a bluff (a game of chicken); once it failed, it failed absolutely and there was no going back.
I’m not sure of the wording but did the original treaty actually say Britain would ‘guarantee Poland’s sovereignty’ or was that promise made by Churchill later?
Creaking DoorAs to Poland’s postwar options, there are two interesting factors I think. Churchill’s pragmatic / reneging behaviour was one that’s been touched on, and the story of the Warsaw Uprising.
With ‘friends’ like Churchill and Stalin, who needs enemies?
But Russia and Poland were enemies.
Often forgotten is that Poland’s war started by being invaded by Russia (and Germany) and it ended by being occupied by Russia again. Did Russia betray Poland during the Warsaw Uprising, hardly, if you consider the above. The only thing that Russia really betrayed was any pretence at being an ‘ally’ of Britain and America; denial of bases to RAF aircraft could only mean one thing.
Did Churchill or Britain betray Poland? I don’t think so, no more than Poland betrayed herself. Why didn’t Poland throw off the Russian yoke in 1945? Because she couldn’t…..and neither could Britain.
Creaking DoorDid Britain and France really go to war ‘over Poland’? Wasn’t war inevitable as Germany rearmed and started to flex her muscles in Europe? Britain and France honoured their treaty with Poland but that changed nothing; once Poland was invaded the treaty had failed and everything after that has to be judged from how the situation actually was, not from how any country would have liked it to be.
From early 1943 it was clear that Germany would eventually lose the war and those that would be on the winning side must have considered what the world would look like after it. Germany had been, was and probably would be again, a big strong country right at the heart of Europe, and they were already fighting Russia. If Russia was the enemy, or was going to be the enemy, it made sense to have Germany ‘on our side’. I don’t know if that would have prevented the dropping of nuclear weapons (had they been ready) because, apart from the radiation issue, the Allies had already done more damage and killed more people that either atom bomb (or conventional bombing) did in Japan. Anyway the atom bombs weren’t ready.
Could the allies have rescued Poland? Unless the Russians gave Poland willingly (and why should they) it would have meant war between the other allies and Russia and who can say how that would have turned out. Certainly many more Poles would have died, and Poland had already suffered the highest proportion of war dead. And where would the post war east-west border have been, assuming the border headed east (over Poland again)?
Creaking DoorTo me as I have stated before this is just tired old Cold War rhetoric…
Emphasising the western ‘betrayal’ in the hope that Poland would forget both of the Russian invasions and occupations you mean?
No doubting the sacrifices made by the Russian millions but IMHO I don’t think for a second that Stalin was fighting to save Britain and the rest of Europe. Once they went onto the offensive Russia was heading west as fast as they could, ignoring vast losses, not to defeat Germany but to make sure the finish line was as close to the Channel as possible. The ‘iron curtain’ could well have started at the borders of France, or at the Channel!
I often wonder about the Russian ‘demands’ to start the second front earlier. Could Stalin have wanted D-Day to actually fail but provide the sort of behind the lines distraction that the Warsaw Uprising did but on a vastly greater scale? After all wasn’t the Warsaw Uprising encouraged by Stalin as the Russian forces drew near?
Creaking DoorI don’t think we disagree, it’s just looking at the same story’s facts with different expectations…
No, no big disagreement at all…..just a bout of insomnia on my part!
Thanks for the company. 🙂
Creaking DoorWhich is precisely not what I mean and you know it.
Sorry, you genuinely did lose me as to what exactly was rhetoric, and by whom.
The Polish question is not as simple as a poor inoffensive little nation being swallowed up by greedy neighbours – it is the product of many centuries of political and military actions, and why we should risk the complete loss of Europe to the Russians because of it is quite beyond me. There was no betrayal – the losses suffered by the Allies from 1939 to 1945 give the lie to that claim. In the end it came down to the fact that we could nothing more than we had.
You make that point well.
Perhaps the only option worth considering was to cut-off the supply of military aid from the west in an attempt to handicap the Russians in the race to the final (iron) curtain. Personal sacrifices aside, the Arctic Convoys are perhaps overestimated in the west (and underestimated in the east) but the Russian drive to the Elbe could IMHO have been slowed by the non-supply of thousands of US-built trucks. It may have meant that the Iron Curtain started at (or even past) the Polish border.
Creaking DoorSome aircraft canopies/layout fit the car ‘coupe’ meaning but others do not.
I do not really see where the ‘cut’ meaning fits either unless it refers to cut down rear fuselage for the ‘crikey’.
To me the ‘bowl’ meaning is perhaps closest but certainly would not argue it with any certainty.
I’m not arguing with any certainty either but it does seem strange that a French word for ‘a glass dessert bowl (usually with a stem)’ would suddenly be adopted for the canopy of (particularly) the Westland Whirlwind when there are so many other similar shapes that each have their own different description. And I think coupé was in common (automotive) use at the time and was used (later?) to describe other aircraft cockpit arrangements.
Was it so different from any other canopy (possibly the earliest bubble canopy in RAF, or any, service admittedly) but subsequent aircraft (except Canberra which is significantly unique) didn’t adopt that name.
What about blister, astrodome, radome, radar dish and weren’t some of the early transparent Lancaster or Shackleton radomes known as radar bowls? Why wasn’t ‘coupe’ applied to any of those?
Just thinking out loud! 😀
Creaking DoorRigging!
Good one.
I discovered just last night that ‘yoke’ is a part of the (tiller) steering system on a sailing ship. I’ve always wondered about that one.
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