I think we all understand why this was done back then, but man this is hard to watch.
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Thanks for sharing.
Different era, no way to see the future of how many WW2 related museums & multi millionaires would eventually want a Japanese plane of their own to display etc.
That’s the most color footage of a Sherman flamethrower tank in operation I’ve seen.
There ya go! Finding the silver lining!
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A pile of obsolete IJN float planes & flying boats, not a Kikka or Shusui. What’s to mourn???
Agreed, not exactly as intriguing as a Zero or Hien but even float planes can be interesting.
Piles of junk…like this can sometimes be restored…
…into fantastic exhibits like this…
The Japanese even had a hair brained plan to use float planes carried by submarine to bomb the Panama Canal in WW2.
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Wade, dang right! About 30 years ago I move to a somewhat small town to start my new job, and shortly thereafter on a trip to Phoenix, visited the Champlin Fighter Museum. Talking to one of the staff I found out that there was a Oscar on the back lot in a crate, recovered from, IIRC, the Kiriles. What you know but the shipping company was based couple miles from my new job. That’s interesting enough but in front of me was a 47-or-so year old recovered Oscar. At least, parts of one. I recall it was basically the rear fuselage aft the cockpit and trailing edge, back to near the eppenage would have been connected. A couple of bullet or shrapnel holes in the corroded skin.
If I recall correctly, that debris became the first airworthy Oscar since the war. I’m not sure if it’s out at Casa Grande or up in Seattle.
One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. I’m far more interested in Alfa, Rufes, Lauras and they like that I am in most late war Japanese aircraft.
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It’s about as ugly as a picture I remember seeing in a book on the P-38 Lightning, showing an airfield in Alaska with dozens of P-38s that had been bulldozed into a ditch on the side of the field because the USAAF didn’t think it was worth the fuel cost to fly them back to the States to be scrapped.
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The Fifth Air Force C-47 pilot I used to fly with told me he watched the exact same thing at Clark Field after VJ day. Brand new P-38s that arrived right after the war ended, stripped of some instruments, weapons and I can’t remember if he said engines or not, and then bulldozed into a ditch. I can’t remember if he said they burned or not. I think he talks about it YouTube interview he gave a few years ago.
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Hey what do you expect from a government that dropped an atom bomb on ships like Prinz Eugene, Nagato and Saratoga and let the Enterprise be scrapped… All that history, patriotism and heroism gone for ever and reduced to words now…
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WW2 aircraft boneyards…
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/wwii-airplane-graveyards.html
H.P.
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