Disgusting.
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Idiots. Doesn’t bode well for the museum and working with the town for the future.
Course the MC is no better on how they treated the exhibits over the years begin with. Did get to visit the museum in the late 90’s. 
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That’s a mild word for it, but it’s difficult to be critical given the U.K.'s record with historic (war)ships as well as aircraft…
Regards,
M
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@MoramarthT M, I did not know that the UK has not preserved much. I thought that they did. They have so many steam locomotives running, they even recently built a brand new one from scratch, Tornado. Then I think Bovington museum, Duxford etc. I figured that the UK was well ahead of everybody else preservation and restoration. Sorry to read that they are not.
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Irvine has changed. Once upon a time, that aircraft scrapping would not have happened there. The city was very tight with their long association with MCAS El Toro. Now they want to erase it and forget it. Typical of what has happened between California and the military and aerospace as a whole.
Appalling but not surprising.
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My friend that lives up in Northern Virginia says the same thing. A generation ago people revered veterans and active duty military in the area. Now there’s developing a form of anti-military snobbery in the region according to six different friends who have fled California. They, and a friend who has to make occasional business trips out there for the DoD say the same thing, at California is at best embarrassed by the military heritage they have, and at worst outright hostile towards it. Wasn’t it about 10 years ago that the Navy offered USS Iowa to dock as a museum attraction in San Francisco, and they said move along we don’t want you?
Despite the government printing money hand over fist, I guess there really isn’t an endless supply of it, and individuals and organizations have to decide where they want the money to go. I’m betting that outside of veterans and a few historians, there are very few people who really care about tributes to the servicemen outside of a couple holidays a year where they can get drunk and eat barbecue. It’s the insincerity and duplicitousness of this event that is reprehensible.
Note, edited to remove political rant.
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RAF Cosford used to be wonderful. About 20 years ago they scrapped the entire BA collection of historic airliners, including the only 707 in Europe. This has given them the excuse to get rid of the BOAC Ju52 recently. I think it was Spanish built version? It’s gone to the BoB museum on the south coast. It’s been repainted in Luftwaffe colours and is outside in the elements. Within a few years it will have rotted like their other outdoor exhibits. Just the Comet remains from that collection.
Cosford moved a load of it’s other aircraft outside this year to make way for interactive exhibits. These include the Danish Catalina and the unique prone-position Meteor. The Pucara has also been placed in storage away from public viewing.
One of the best current UK air museums is the Fleet Air Arm Museum, they’re lovingly looked after (at least when we last went) as is the Tank Museums collection. The carrier deck exhibition at the FAA is amazing and great fun!
Hmmm. Just to nix anyone questioning my credentials, like most of you I revere our fathers’ generation (including my own Dad) and their immense sacrifices in WW2 that allowed us to be who we are today.
That said, compare what we’ve preserved compared to the previous generations regarding WW1. There’s no comparison, they couldn’t wreck/discard WW1 equipment fast enough, my grandfather who served in the Royal Flying Corps kept a chopped-up Sopwith Camel prop as an ornament.
For many of us WW2 is very real & raw albeit second-hand, but we have to accept that for succeeding generations it just isn’t going to be the same. That’s Life, every generation moves on to what’s more relevant and important to them. Sure we can shout & scream & do everything possible to preserve everything, but ultimately we must accept the inevitable reality. You yanks have done a fairly good job of preserving Civil War memorabilia, unlike the Brits who have what I consider too-small records of Napoleonic & Crimea war records. The Peninsula war is hardly mentioned today, with precious few memorials yet it paved the way for Napoleon’s first defeat along with the abortive Russian campaign. Waterloo isn’t much different.
That’s what’s going to happen with WW2 too as the decades roll forward. Despite lamentable examples such as the OP has cited, overall I think “our” generation has done the best-ever job of commemorating WW2/recent conflicts compared to previous generations. The politicisation I detect in some posts above is irrelevant and (in my opinion) says more about the posters’ prejudices than it does about the bigger picture.
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Quite frankly, I’m glad people won’t be tracking feces aboard the Iowa.
@Dioramartin, I think you’re completely correct that the past few generations have donee a great job of preserving remembering World War II, at least. In the US it seems that the Second World War is well represented by museums and memorials and tributes around the country, even in European and Pacific countries. I also agree that history eventually becomes irrelevant to successive generations. Another site member and I discussing that very thing a month ago. I was thinking the other day that this generation is as far removed from World War II as the World War II generation was removed from the American civil war - 80 yrs. As far as that goes, more years have passed since the first Gulf War than since World War II when I was a teenager.
Ultimately, like the other site member mentioned, there are finite resources and people have to decide where to go, a lot of that will depend on the public’s interest and what is valued. Apparently in New England is a World War II submarine that has sunk into the mud and there’s just not enough money to try to raise it, let alone restore it. I’m sure we can look all over the world and see such examples.
Your opening sentence is disquieting to me because nobody should be attacking a person’s reverence for the military or history regardless of whether they think there are too many or too few military museums. I’m sure it’s happened though. As much as we of later generations decry the lack of preserved (fill in one’s favorite object here), the fact is that so many veterans returned from war wanting to forget it, and to literally beat those swords into plowshares; I think most of us have seen the aircraft collection centers in Kingman Arizona, Walnut Ridge Arkansas and other places, rows and rows of B-17s and B-24s and fighters. Within a few years they were all gone, having been melted down into cookware and other materials for new products.
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Now the same mob are building another loco, a P2, one of Gresley’s less successful designs. Only half a dozen made, and all drastically rebuilt before they were eventually scrapped. 2007 “Prince of Wales” will a P2 as built, but it’s not the only P2 under way, another mob are building a copy of the first of the series, but with the fully streamlined casing that was fitted later. Apart from the big mainline jobs, there are at least a couple of extinct smaller locos being resurrected for the smaller heritage lines. “Tornado” proved that with computer design and modern manufacturing techniques, that which once was, can be again - only better.
Unfortunately, it’s the maritime heritage that we’ve been trashing, at the least since HMS Implacable in 1949 (fortunately the furore over that atrocity helped save the “Cutty Sark”). We damn near destroyed “City of Adelaide” and in a sense we did loose her, she’s gone to Australia for preservation (pity the Aussies can’t salvage HMVS Cerberus). After a couple of decades of preservation HMS Plymouth went to Turkey in 2014 to be reincarnated as razor blades, while her neighbour HMS Bronington sank at her moorings a couple of years later. (She’s still there, and capable of being salvaged: hopefully her old Skipper - HM The King - might be inclined to help any such efforts in some way). I could go on quite a bit more, but enough’s enough…
Regards,
M
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Time is the great healer as we distance ourselves from the past . Perhaps it is best to not dwell on the horrific events
( I don’t want to use the term “ forget “)
- but it would be a mistake for anyone to forget the causative factors that led to the events and even worse to forget those that made the ultimate sacrifice.
Even the American Civil War is not so distant for me - My maternal grandfather was born in 1865 .
Two generations .
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It’s been many years since I idly flipped through it – I think it was Bodie’s book on the P-38 Lightning – but a photograph of an airfield in Alaska with dozens of P-38s that had been bulldozed into a ditch because the USAAF didn’t think they were worth the fuel cost to fly them back to the States just to scrap them is something I’ll remember forever as a waste no one recognized at the time.
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@srmalloy that sounds very similar to what Fifth A.F. C-47 pilot Stan Bagnall told me he witnesses in the Philippines at the end of World War II. He said there was a nice long line of factory fresh P-38s that had been delivered, and the Army just dug a hole on the field, stripped them up guns and a few expensive instruments, bulldozed them in and burned them. I don’t know where the stock was but I read that in the late 40s South Korea was trying to buy 100 new P-38s for their fledgling air force, but the US or UN or whoever would not sell them to South Korea for fear of antagonizing the North Koreans.
@RDT1953 neither side of my family was in the United States until after the Civil War so I have no connection to that conflict. However on my in-laws, both of my life’s paternal and maternal side had relatives who fought on both sides. On her dad’s side, one was with the Confederates at Vicksburg and died in a prison camp outside of philadelphia, well another one defended Louisville from a raid by Morgan. I forget what my mother-in-law’s relatives did, I guess they had a quieter time. However, a few miles from where I live now, my father-in-law’s family still owns the property including a house that was built in the 1820s, and a barn that was standing before the Civil War. His teenage ancestor heard a commotion the barn one night, found some people trying to steal a horse, shot and killed one. Turned out to be government people requisitioning the horse for the army. They grabbed him and took him down to the Battle of Bulls Gap about 20 mi away, and he was dead within 48 hours. The mom had to take a buckboard down to bring the body back. And it turns out the horse was blind.
You’re my best friends, he had a relative that fought at Shiloh and I’m not sure if it was the same person or not, but he had another relative who was killed outside of Atlanta.
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Of the over 500 U.S.N. PT boats that served in WW2, the vast majority were (after some salvaging) were burned in theatre. Barely a dozen survive, frw in anything like their original form.
Regards,
M
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