For a while you could purchase on EB old BBC sound affects records – one had fly-bys of various Merlined apparatus during WW2. These sound NOTHING like ANY Merlined device I have ever heard in my life. Basically the doppler sound/engine affect, if you close your eyes, makes you see a 20 year old, tongue hanging out the side of the mouth, wind blown dribble running across the cheek, flogging an aircraft at FULL BOOST, FULL THROTTLE past the sound recordist. It’s like a jet, in terms of doppler speed and the engine is SCREAMING. If I were a Boche on a French seawall HEARING a Rhubarb Mosquito coming in the gaulise would fall out of my mouth as my chin grew slack.

Sound is a form of energy. More sound, more energy. More boost, more energy, more sound. So I would suspect that the modern display pilot, seated in a portable before an airshow, is shown a range of medieval thumb screws, and informed that the engine management system records boost, and more boost equals application of thumb screw to gonads, after they have paid the USD250,000 to rebuild an overboosted engine. More display pilots today are airline pilots, screened and trained not to make passengers vomit up nuts and beer or hit the luggage racks, selected for maturity, nothing like the 20 year olds in WW2. Probably if you heard a Merlin roar in the 70s or 80’s, it was the same 20 year WW2 old pilot trapped in a 60 year old body doing what was ‘normal’, and if the engine failed, you just went down to the scrap yard and bought another three.

So forget about hearing a Merlin at full throat, it’s gone. Never going to happen to an engine that costs as much as running Venezuela for a year. Unless the Russians get some Hurricanes dug up out of swamps and the vodka flows, then all you have to worry about is not being hit by a piece of something falling out of the sky, but it will sound good, and historically correct.

A worrying subject but a fantastic, useful and generous post.

CD, you are a very handsome man. Clever too ! Um, would you part with that chunk of Merlin II ? Did I ever say how much I admire your work ?

Good that these airframes are recovered in an equitable arrangement with Solomon Islanders, before they oxidise away. To greinert might become a verb.
I too have mixed emotions about recovering artifacts from a place so soaked in cruelty and injustice. If these artifacts serve to tell that story, then there is some form of justice, at least. The theme of wartime Japanese forces disposing POWs with barbarity recurs through the Pacific War, from RAAF personnel stranded in 1942 in the Dutch East Indies to POWs on the cusp of release in 1945.

A great deal of effort went into the dismantling of the Japanese military industrial complex as a specific postwar policy and the Japanese postwar constitution has given the region a remarkable period of peace. This makes Japanese wartime artifacts rare. But the usual market forces have been held in check by shame, if not outright discouragement by Japanese postwar consensus. All this is changing with the posturing of China, and much of this posturing is driven by some painful Chinese memories of WW2. I can see a resurgence of Japanese militarism as an inevitable reaction and feature of the next decades and a renewed interest in Japanese military history and the artifacts of that history among historically and politically minded Japanese. They have always been there, but perhaps more visible and less marginalised. Good line in putting some Japanese metal back in the air.

The job of an aircraft restorer is to panel beat, not beat folk around the ears. It is hard enough making a living, let alone alienating a paying customer. The simple pleasure of admiring the competent engineering of a samurai sword or gas chamber is as deep as it gets for some. Certainly I don’t understand why you would put a Swastika on a German aircraft restoration if you had some sensitivity to the fact it is connected to boiling down people for soap.

In my perfect world the airframes would be restored and the context of their service and what happened to the POWs would at least remain connected. In that most sacred of Japanese shrines to their war dead, Yasakuni, their is a locomotive from the Burma Siam railway. It was brought there by a Japanese ex- serviceman in the 1960’s. It is confusing why he would do this, as if you wanted to memorialize Japanese war dead, better to bring in truckloads of soil from Burma and Iwo Jima. Why bring in something associated with the death of slave labourers? I figure it was his effort to ensure that a shameful thing could not be glossed over. If a locomotive exists, then the railway must have existed, and the story must be true. It is hard to deny Nazi concentration camps existed when you stand in Auschwitz.

Maybe all the remaining relatives of those slave labourers, denied even the dignity of a bullet, could crowd fund the static restoration of a Betty, and gift it to the Yakusuni shrine, to stand in memory, invariably, of brave pilots and common loss, but under the paint let the story be allowed of the lost souls of Ballalae.

FB, as far as I can make out, Hawker part numbers, at least from 1928 to 1946, are a sequential block system, with the following characteristics: (1) the alpha prefix, eg A12345, E45678, refers to paper/print size, where A is a tabloid newspaper page and E covers your dining table. So B upwards are assembly drawings, E general arrangements and A individual parts. (2) Hawkers have standard parts used across all airframes, called A Standard, sequentially numbered, generally no more than 3 digits, ie A123. For clarity, A part drawings start at about A10,000 in 1928, getting to around A100,000 by the Hurricane, and A200,000 by the time you are interested in. So a 1928 Hart and a 1948 Tempest can have a A123 standard bolt, but the 5 digit Axxxxx issued in blocks around particular aircraft coalesce around particular designs, with a bit of drift as parts on the shelf at the time were adapted to new designs. A Hart will go A10,000 to A40,000, a Hind up to A60,000, a Henley A90,000, a Hurricane A100,000 with a perverse A20,123 hinge hanging in there. An A50,000 Hind may have an A90,000 part when later retrofitted as a trainer with dual controls. My knowledge starts to drift away with new fangled machines above A100,000 Hurricanes, but I am sure the principles carry forward. There are folks on here that have Napier Sabres on loop on their car stereos that will no doubt know more but A200,000 drawings. The definitive answer to what your part may belong to is in an AP, Vol III Illustrated parts list index for these monoplanes, no doubt.

Closer up [ATTACH=JSON]{“data-align”:”none”,”data-size”:”large”,”data-attachmentid”:3845605}[/ATTACH]