Dave HomewoodThat’s right. Stephen Spielberg’s “The Pacific War” will have an episode recreating the Battle of Midway. A number of other key batteles are scheduled to also be covered.
This from this site – (I posted this link a few months ago too).
http://www.upcomingepics.com/pacific_war/index.shtml
What battles/campaigns will be featured?
Episode 1: Pearl Harbor – late May 1942
Episode 2: Midway
Episode 3: Guadalcanal
Episode 4: Guadalcanal
Episode 5: ?
Episode 6: ?
Episode 7: ?
Episode 8: ?
Episode 9: Hiroshima?
I can’t wait…
Dave HomewoodI haven’t seen this film for many years but I remember I was a little disappointed after Tora Tora Tora. I don’t recall seeing a Herc in it, or a Panther. I must have switched off by then.
I do know that the makers (director and many crew) of Tora Tora Tora were very unhappy that their film stock had been used by the makers of Midway.
I seem to recall a lot of real footage being spliced in wasn’t there? Including a brilliant long piece of gun camera footage of a Jap flying boat being chased and shot at just above the water – vague memory here. May have been a different film.
At least Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks should hopefully make a better and more accurate account in their upcoming version of the Battle of Midway.
Dave HomewoodThat’s a great question. I’d like to know more about this too.
Dave HomewoodThanks Mark, sorry I mentioned it.
Dave HomewoodIsraeli spies apparently stole the plans of a French designed aircraft which I understand became the Kfir. I may be wrong – maybe it became another of their jet types. That is what I have been told, but it was a long time ago, yet I have no reason to disbelieve it.
Dave HomewoodStewart, I may be mistaken, but didn’t you state a few days ago that you worked on the Mosquito repaint? Surely if anyone has an inside tip it’d be you through your contacts?
Dave HomewoodRed Bull is by no means the first drink company to emblazen its product name onto a historic aircraft to help keep it flying by the way.
An example – A DH89 Rapide was seen in NZ in the early 1980’s wearing the sponsorship of Montieth’s Breweries. I loved this wonderful scheme. It now flies in authentic colours, but the sponsorship then kept it in the air. I have a photo but cannot upload it.
Dave HomewoodSorry Mark12 and Voytech, I just realised that the Ventura Pubs Classic Warbirds Number 7 may not actually be the “ANZAC Spitfires” edition I was thinking of. Sorry, was assuming it was the same book you mentioned before with Dereck Kain’s Spitfire in Mark. My mistake.
Dave HomewoodMy God I’m drunk…. sorry, I didn’t realise till now….
Dave HomewoodCT4E’s, really… I remember the Chubby Checker’s real days in CT-4B’s, piston engines! Then they struggled to do a loop, and made it all the more worthwhile…. None of yer turboprops in them days. Plus we had to eat brown bread and walk five miles in the snow to see them.
Of course no-one outside of NZ has heard of the Red Checkers, despite their huge fame and admiration here. Let’s just say they were/are the most amazing, highly skilled formation aerobatics pilots in the world. They are the only team to still do the actual mirror formation, which was so unsuccessfully done by the Blue Angels in the 1980’s….
They don’t get around much these days though like they used to. I loved summer lunchtimes at RNZAF Wigram, every day they practised, every lunchtime an airshow for us baggies. I’ll never ever forget the day two collided, one’s aerial gashed the other’s canopy in the mirror manouvre. Talking to the engineers on PTS later they all said the prop of one must have been dangerously close to cutting the other open. Yikes. Never happened in an airshow yet, thankfully. And all was ok, no-one hurt.
I have a brilliant documentary from about 1985/86 following the team through a season. I later got to meet and work with some of those pilots. I remember the 1992 Checkers were unofficially (at their own volition) called the Brown Checkers on base because three of the five were Maoris. They did a brilliant display over a cricket match I was at on Lancaster Park in 1992, and the rest of the crowd were wondering why we 20 or so airmen were cheering so hard and chanting “Chubby Checkers”, as we were all disguised as civvies.
One theory I have for the reason no-one internationally knows who the Roulletes are is because they don’t seem to travel outside of Aussie, do they? I mean even our two top teams, Kiwi Red and The Roaring Forties, went internatonal, displaying in Aussie often in their time. The Roullettes never even came to NZ.
There was a Roulletes model though, Esci’s MB326 is in their colours from the 1980’s.
Dave HomewoodDaveH,
Well no clash here with Malcolm Laird’s Ventura Pubs Classic Warbirds Number 7 from New Zealand
He has a colour three view in Brown, Green and Azure, Temperate Land Scheme and with the same upper wing roundel as the MA793 ‘Evelyn’ scheme. He says in the text most aircraft with 40 Squadron were like this, however he shows a shot also, and says an exception, in Green/Grey Day Fighter Scheme.
In the nicest possible way I am always a bit wary of pilots and crew re-call on the finer details of specific colours, forty, fifty and sixty years after the event. There is a certain Mk IX Spitfire not a million miles from the Seattle area with a grey/green scheme but pale blue undersides. I was over-ruled on the Medium Sea Grey by a 2nd TAF Spitfire pilot who just happened to have been operational in Malta also. 😉
Mark
I am still having trouble posting images…anybody else?
Sorry Mark12,
I’m puzzled (or perhaps just too sozzled). I don’t have my copy of Ventura’s ANZAC Spitfires book to hand and will look it out tomorrow, but are you saying Laird talks about SAAF Spitfires in the book about ANZAC Spits?
South Africa has never been part of the ANZAc’s. :confused:
I agree with you about veteran’s memories after that length of time. I’ve interviewed a lot of them and yes sometimes their memories play tricks. I believe it was about 50 or so years later that Kerry (and I on one occasion) interviewed Bill but he was very, very precise about everything we asked. You know how some people are like that, remember everything? (not me, doh). Plus he had a great collection of photos and newspaper cuttings. He became a celebrity in the press in the Battle of France because he had the same surname as Cobber Kain, and was in the same squadron, so the press called him “Cobber’s Cousin”. In reality Bill was no relation. If you look at almost any 73 Sqn BofF photo and see a thin man in a long scarf, that’s Bill. He was as synonymous with his scarf as Private Pike!
Actually Bill was even interviewed for the extraordinary TVNZ series New Zealanders At War, made in 1995, which was a little after Kerry had interviewed him. In the end however they cut either most or all of his interview from the final edit. We were very angry then, but now as a film maker I understand reasons why things have to be cut. He was almost totally deaf and had been for decades. Bill was actually grounded eventually because of his deafness, which was service related! He’d been flying deaf for a while before they caught up with him if I recall right!
Dave HomewoodWho would have won the Second Battle of Britain?
No doubt the New Zealanders again 🙂
Damien, I read once that very near the top of that list of people the German’s were intending to execute once they got to Britain was the radio comedian Tommy Handley, because Hitler was so outraged that he’d sung “Who Is That Man Who Looks Like Charlie Chaplin”!
That’s a true story.
Dave HomewoodHow intriguing.
There is quite a lot about the colours of 40 Squadron in the Ventura Publications Classic Warbirds No 7. A well respected series. They show a Mk V colour side view of D-K in Brown Green and Azure in Egypt in May 1944.
I think I need to read this in some depth.
Mark
Mark12,
I can wholeheartedly confirm that the colour of that profile is totally spot on. Dereck “Bill” Kain lived here in Cambridge. He has since sadly died. But, all the information in that book and other mentions of Bill in the Ventura series were researched not by Malcolm Laird the author, but by my very good friend Kerry Carlyle.
Kerry got to know Bill Kain and decided to get his RAF story recorded. On one occasion he invited me to accompany him for one of the interviews at Bill’s home.
I was present when the Spitfire photos he had were discussed. Kerry was very intrigued too by the scheme – he is an expert modeller and knew a lot more about Spitfire schemes than me. He decided as a gesture of thanks for Bill’s time he’d make Bill a model of his personal Spitfire, the one coded D-K. So he and Bill went into great depths talking about the colours and Bill was adament that the colours were right. He had a fantastic memory and I guess you’d remember what your own personal aircraft looked like after you’d flown it for many months. From memory he also had a photo of that plane on his mantlepiece, so he obviously cherished the memory of it.
Bill also gave Kerry much more detail that has not been published, especially about his time in No. 73 Sqn in the Battle of France with Cobber Kain. Kerry has given me permission to use it all on my Cambridge website, and I will add it eventually. Incidentally Kerry also was the one who told Bill about Sir Tim Wallis’s Hurricane that was the being restored, and its No. 73 Sqn history. Bill checked his logbooks and found he’d not flown it but he had been on the squadron at the same time and flown with it. In fact I’m, almost surte Bill also flew in the funeral flypast for Cobber alongside Tim’s Hurri. Kerry arranged, on Bill’s wishes, for the spadegrip from Bill’s own Hurricane that he’d been shot down in by the French(!) to go to Wanaka, and today the Hurricane flies with that genuine 73 Sqn spadegrip.
If you want to know more about the Spitfire I can contact Kerry and see what else he has about the scheme.
Dave HomewoodAh, thanks Mark. Now it all makes sense. Sorry if I was a little slow on the uptake there, it is late here.
Cheers mate.
Dave HomewoodThis is an amazing thread.
I find it interesting how untidy the scrap yards were. I’d have thought anyone scrapping aircraft and other things would sort different types of metals and materials out into seperate piles rather than just shove and bulldoze it into a big mishmash. It must certainly have caused much more work in the end when they were scrapped after this storage, sorting out what was what in the mangled twisted wrecks. Seems silly to me.
When actually doing the smelting, do/did the scrappers go to the trouble of seperating each different specification of alloy type and keep them seperate for future use in the aviation industry, etc, or is the lot melted down into a slurry of undefinable metal usable only in low grade stuff like pots and pans?
The photo I find most sad is the one of the airliner (Britannia?) on page six, second photo in HP81’s post. It looks like a dead and decaying animal, with such a sad expression on it’s face. Awful.
This thread has got me wondering about the scrapping of aircraft here in NZ. As well as the massive aircraft grave yard at nearby Rukuhia, I know a lot was also scrapped at RNZAF Hobsonville, including a Seafire XV, a Firefly I, a load of Sunderlands (as late as the 1970’s) and goodness knows what else. I wonder if anything was buried, maybe in the base dump. I have a photo in an issue of NZ Wings of a load of Sunderlands all beached on Hobsonville’s airfield, awaiting the axe. Eventually one went to Motat and a cockpit was flown to Ferrymead in Christchurch.
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