God bless 'em all.

On a side note, an interesting article at Fox News today about what appears to be the sole remaining P-40B Warhawk that survived the Pearl Harbor attack. Worth a read.

Quote from: TboneAgain on December 07, 2013, 08:52:22 AM
God bless 'em all.

On a side note, an interesting article at Fox News today about what appears to be the sole remaining P-40B Warhawk that survived the Pearl Harbor attack. Worth a read.

Now that I did not know.

QuoteHe said only a handful of P-40Bs exist, including one owned by Microsoft founder Paul Allen.

Quote from: walkstall on December 07, 2013, 08:59:08 AM

Now that I did not know.

There were many thousands of P-40s made before and during the war. They were sold to the British and supplied to the Russians, as well as other countries, and became famous before Pearl Harbor as the mounts of the American pilots of the Flying Tigers in China. The particular variant on station at the airfields near Pearl when the Japanese attacked was the P-40B, which featured armor plating to protect the pilot, but did not have self-sealing gas tanks, and was armed only with a pair of relatively puny .30-caliber cowl-mounted machine guns, firing through the propeller arc WWI style. Shooting through the propeller arc necessarily slowed the rate of fire, as the guns had to be prevented from firing when a prop blade might be struck by means of a synchronizer or interrupter gear. Later variants boasted as many as six .50-cals. arrayed three to a wing.

By war's end, the P-40s were already being scrapped; they had long been pretty much supplanted by better, faster fighters like the P-51 and P-47. Today there are fewer than 30 P-40s left in the world that can still fly, compared to roughly 150 airworthy P-51s.

I almost missed this. Thanks for the tribute to our fighting men.

Reminders are everywhere in Pearl Harbor still. Pock marks in the concrete around WWII era warehouses, and of course the hulks of the Arizona and Utah.

the newst dox show that us mil intel's knew about attack but they let them to do this.

Quote from: moxen on February 26, 2014, 06:27:36 PM
the newst dox show that us mil intel's knew about attack but they let them to do this.

No they knew the Japanese were attacking somewhere, because they could track ship movements south; but the fleet that was attacking Pearl Harbor maintained radio silence all the way across the North Pacific, while phony radio traffic made it sound as if that fleet was still in port. The US could read Japanese DIPLOMATIC traffic; but it was only when they translated the final part of the last message - which instructed the Japanese embassy to destroy all codes and coding machines - that they realized that was a war message. They still didn't the recognize the significance of the explicit instructions on the timing on the delivery of the message from Japan. It was to be delivered just 30 minutes before the Japanese were to attack.

Quote from: moxen on February 26, 2014, 06:27:36 PM
the newst dox show that us mil intel's knew about attack but they let them to do this.

And another 'newst dox' shows that the Imperial War Council knew that Midway's water-distillation equipment was working perfectly, but they silently let Yamamoto's carrier-armada blunder into the trap... to teach the average Japanese man-and-woman-on-the-street a lesson about the evils of military-industrial corporate payoffs that wouldn't be 'invented' for another 10-years, or something.