Recent content by cherry blossom

Boring comment – He made the hand exactly follow the shadow of a sundial, which is why clockwise turns the way it does.

The A5M would be another example a5m fighter - Japanese Forces | Gallery

Last surviving Battle of Britain pilot, Group Captain John "Paddy" Hemingway, dies aged 105 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/03/18/john-paddy-hemingway-word-war-2-battle-of-britain-raf-pilot/ or John 'Paddy' Hemingway, the last surviving Battle of Britain pilot, dies aged 105

Admiral Koga Mineichi was possibly the most boring admiral of the IJN. He managed to reach the top without making many enemies or achieving anything too notable. Koga was promoted to Vice-Admiral and placed in command of the Training Fleet on 1st December 1936. The Training Fleet had for some...

A fairly early but possibly not immediately published report came from Colonel Henry Watson, who was not impressed when he tested a G8N1. The turbosuperchargers had been disabled by Japanese engineers before the surrender, presumably because of unreliability. He reported that the engines would...

As Mitsubishi superchargers seem to have been better than those from Nakajima, at least late Pacific War as the J2M was kept in production because it was best against high flying B 29 raids, let us imagine how Mitsubishi might have produced a powerful 18 cylinder radial early enough to change...

Presumably practise mortar bombs with a small charge to indicate their fall and release smoke. Doubt if they would have caused much excitement if they had exploded.

From the Telegraph https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/02/07/andre-nadine-dumont-comet-line-nazis-french-resistance/ Andrée "Nadine" Dumon, codename "Nadine", who has died aged 102, was a Belgian courier on the Comet Escape Line, who helped save the lives of dozens of Allied airmen...

I received this today. It is not about aviation but it is about WW2. I bought it for myself but I also hope that my wife will like it and we have a friend who knows a former WREN who served at the end of WW2.

The point of those moustaches was that they would fit inside a gas mask. Thus wearing one suggested that the wearer had served where wearing a gas mask was necessary.

It is often argued that the He 100D-1 was too small to be a very useful fighter for the LW. However, what if one stripped out the armament, polished everything, added as much fuel as possible and put a camera into the rear fuselage? Could it have caused the RAF problems until they had the...

I am not sure if the panther was as expensive and hard to build as some posters seem to imply. Figures at other fora suggest 117,000 RM for a Panther against 103,000 RM for a Panzer IV and also only slightly more man hours than a Sherman, 55,000 against 48,000...

Since some "handwavium" powered aircraft such as a 1940 Fw 190 have been considered, it seems relatively plausible to imagine that Messerschmidt in 1937 might have been encouraged to build a bomber that could carry the Olympic Flame from Berlin to Tokyo. Let us assume that his team comes up with...

For those of you who like reading about unicorns, Equoid - Reactor has some warnings.