December 7, 1941

SaparotRob said:

Closest I got to that was when I was a 3rd grader. I did a book report on "The Sinking of the Bismarck ". The teacher told me airplanes don't carry torpedoes.

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Airplanes don't carry torpedos.

They carry Aerial Torpedoes.

So I like the pedantism.

A lot of kids today (and their parents) are woefully and willfully ignorant of the past, probably because it's "uncomfortable" for their teeny-weenie little sensibilities. I have been accused of being an insensitive asshole more than once, and I just laugh at them, because, yes, I'm an insensitive asshole and proud of it. I credit growing up on a farm and spending time in the 82nd. Airborne DIv. for that. I also have little tolerance for their ignorance and bedwetting tendencies.
The past happened, get over it, learn from it, and get on with the rest of life.
It drives my stepdaughters nuts.

glennasher said:

A lot of kids today (and their parents) are woefully and willfully ignorant of the past, probably because it's "uncomfortable" for their teeny-weenie little sensibilities. I have been accused of being an insensitive asshole more than once, and I just laugh at them, because, yes, I'm an insensitive asshole and proud of it. I credit growing up on a farm and spending time in the 82nd. Airborne DIv. for that. I also have little tolerance for their ignorance and bedwetting tendencies.
The past happened, get over it, learn from it, and get on with the rest of life.
It drives my stepdaughters nuts.

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You know, no one reads real books, today. Maybe, online. Maybe just maybe, audio books. For maybe, 10 minutes.

It's so much easier to get all your history and today's events from Twitter. No?

muskeg13 said:

I now see that Chuck Yeager has passed.

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I knew Yeager was in a hospital ICU. I told co-workers about it. They said, "Who?" I said you know, The Right Stuff. "Oh! That was the movie on hip-hop artists!"

I guess maybe we are different because a lot of us grew up around the WWII vets. My father had loads of was stories and Christmas dinner was really entertaining with my dad (AAF 8th & 15th Air Forces and P.O.W.), his cousin Jerry (an army Lt in Europe ) and his uncle Ray (army who was all over the place, building the pioneer road for the Alaskan Highway, France, and riding out a Hurricane on Okinawa in the back of a duce and a half). Those guys would go on and on with their stories, feeding off one an other.

At the Planes of Fame, we have an Aichi D3A Val dive bomber that is in need of resstoration as well as a statically-restored Yokosuka D4Y-3 Judy that can taxi. We have one Japanese member we call Sam and he lived near Nagoya, Japan. He used to come over to the Museum about every 6 months to a year to work on the Val. Sam lived in the U.S.A. for 20 years and worked for IBM here before going back home. Yes, Sam is older, like me.

In looking up the history of the D4Y-3 Judy, we found it had been built at a plant near Nagoya, right near his home. Sam said almost nobody in the plant knew it had been used to build war materiel even though his father had worked there during the war and HE knew. When we started the static restoration of the Judy, we eventally got to the wing. When we removed the central fuel tanks (there were several), Sam found one of the tanks had been signed by his father! He got a pic in the cockpit with a white slk scarf and a sign saying "fly the friendly skies!"

Anyway, it's just like over here; the younger generations have little to no knowledge of the worst war in the history of the world. Most Japanese younger people have very little knowlehde, if any, of WWII. Unfortunately, it seem to be going the same way here.

I recall seeing the movie "The Quick and the Dead" with Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone. When we were leaving the theater, there were a few young women who were saying "I didn't know there waere female gunfighter in the old West!" I asked them if they knew that was only a movie with no connection to fact and they were adamant that the movie depicted history! Methinks the younger generations are saddled with a somewhat crappy school system! The "no child left behind" program has ruined what was once a good school system. Now they get trophies for participation, not just winning. It's enough to make you cry.

T Bolt said:

I guess maybe we are different because a lot of us grew up around the WWII vets. My father had loads of was stories and Christmas dinner was really entertaining with my dad (AAF 8th & 15th Air Forces and P.O.W.), his cousin Jerry (an army Lt in Europe ) and his uncle Ray (army who was all over the place, building the pioneer road for the Alaskan Highway, France, and riding out a Hurricane on Okinawa in the back of a duce and a half). Those guys would go on and on with their stories, feeding off one an other.

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I dunno. Seemed like when I was growing up there was pressure to know history. At least American history. Like if you didn't know Stonewall Jackson or anything about the Civil War, you where considered an ignoramus, un-American. Nowadays, if you know anything older than 5 year ago... you are sometimes made to feel like a Neanderthal man.

GregP said:

I recall seeing the movie "The Quick and the Dead" with Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone. When we were leaving the theater, there were a few young women who were saying "I didn't know there waere female gunfighter in the old West!" I asked them if they knew that was only a movie with no connection to fact and they were adamant that the movie depicted history! Methinks the younger generations are saddled with a somewhat crappy school system! The "no child left behind" program has ruined what was once a good school system. Now they get trophies for participation, not just winning. It's enough to make you cry.

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Belle Starr, Calamity Jane, and countless other women who lived, sometimes alone, on the frontier, were certainly familiar with firearms, some of them were quite deadly, but as far as "gunfighters" go, I suspect you're right. Then again, hardly anyone knows much about the black cowboys, either, who made up at least 10% of the numbers, and most of the western movies left out the Hispanics who also provided large percentages. The American West was ill-served by the movies Hollywood made, no matter how much we love John Wayne, Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, and the others.

Although now days my memory is foggy about details, in the mid 1970s a young (about 10 years younger than most of the club) Japanese man came to our flying field (control line) to visit. He had stopped at the local hobby shop for info as he flew C/L in Japan. He was in the U.S. to tour car dealers and solve problems, for Honda (not sure now). He was checking out hobbyshops along the way and C/L clubs. Eventually, he brought up war time aviation and was impressed about reference books in the U.S. He told us in Japan, the schools taught only up to 1943 and then went to the atomic bomb drops and the war was over.

GregP said:

I recall seeing the movie "The Quick and the Dead" with Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone. When we were leaving the theater, there were a few young women who were saying "I didn't know there waere female gunfighter in the old West!" I asked them if they knew that was only a movie with no connection to fact and they were adamant that the movie depicted history! Methinks the younger generations are saddled with a somewhat crappy school system! The "no child left behind" program has ruined what was once a good school system. Now they get trophies for participation, not just winning. It's enough to make you cry.

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The "Wild West" period was incredibly short, there may have been A female gun fighter or even a few, enough to weave a story into what is wanted but not actually what happened. I remember reading a book on "clan feuds" in Inverness when I worked there, one "battle" involved six people four from one clan and two from another. Unfortunately one guy died, which is easy to happen when there are no hospitals, drugs or people with even the basics of medical care. The feuding went on after this battle for 200 years, when in fact it wouldn't make the local headlines today as a pub brawl.

History? Maybe.

But history can be very subjective. Pick n mix history to suit agenda.

What about the fall of the Philippines which was said to be Americans worst military defeat and cost more lives than Pearl Harbour. That's not in the public consciousness.

The Basket said:

What about the fall of the Philippines which was said to be Americans worst military defeat and cost more lives than Pearl Harbour. That's not in the public consciousness.

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MacArthur's insistence on retaking the Philippines, at that time of the war, may also have cost more American and Filipino lives than necessary. Something also not discussed that much. History Channel had an interesting show on Wake Island. The defenders and their fate. Some parts I never really knew.

special ed said:

When I was in jr. high and high school, most of my male teachers had been involved in the war, either in it, or in production. My 9th grade history teacher had flown P-40s and that is how I learned about gun convergence. He did not talk of any thing else. One of my gym teachers had been on destroyers in the North Atlantic. When anyone complained about cold weather, he would say "You don't know cold until you are chipping ice in the Atlantic". My wood shop teacher had Malaria one day and then I knew he had been in the Pacific, but he didn't discuss it.

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My father was also on Atlantic and Arctic convoys, one day they struck an iceberg, fortunately the ship didn't sink. I foolishly asked him if he could swim "where the hell would you swim to, the iceberg"? was his reply.

I remember a while back when I used to work in aviation museums, at one I was at, I was asked to edit the aviation section of the education programme written for kids and I used the term 'maritime patrol'. The Education head said to me, "what does that even mean?!" I did also have to explain to this woman once that 'Natural Metal' was actually a colour! Slightly different, but on another piece of work I had written, a press release about a Beaufighter the museum had just bought, one of the press officers, a young girl kept putting the letter s after every mention of the word "cannon", when describing the Beaufighter's armament. I had to explain to her that the plural of cannon was cannon.

All is not lost, however. Down here in our neck of the woods, things are changing for the better historically, thanks to our government - who said polis were ignorant. During the 100th anniversary of the Great War, Gallipoli and Passchendaele entered the school curriculum as subjects for the first time (I remember doing the Great War in brief at high school, but never as separate campaigns) because of their impact on the national psyche. This corresponded with a major nationwide drive to bring these events into people's minds since they were so significant to our founding as a nation. In time for the centenaries of both these campaigns, memorials at sites on the Western Front where New Zealanders fought have been jazzed up with more information and given a uniquely New Zealand feel, to set them apart. Money well spent, in my opinion.

This is what they came up with; these can be found at all the major sites where the New Zealand Div went to battle on the Western Front. This is the one that overlooks the Passchendaele battlefield in Flanders. Nga Tapuwae means Sacred Steps. Note the fern leaf emblem, our national plant, is made up of soldiers marching.

Great War Tour 146

Somewhat earlier, despite having what I thought was a good knowledge of the Battle of the River Plate, which we were taught at school because the Achilles was a 'New Zealand' ship, when I went to Montevideo a number of years ago I went to the naval museum and the staff there have leaflets that the New Zealand government had written, in Spanish, to sell to visitors describing the New Zealand angle of the battle. It describes the connection between our countries as a result of the battle (slightly tenuous, but good on them nonetheless). Tenuous or not, a national connection to Uruguay was not something that I was aware of at all.

This is a plaque donated to the museum by the New Zealand River Plate Veterans Association.

River Plate 07

There's more, this year the government also ruled that the New Zealand Wars (the Maori Wars, the Musket Wars, call them what you will), a state of conflict between the natives and colonists that existed for nearly thirty years in the 19th Century was to be studied in greater depth in the school curriculum, This all gladdens my heart and allows me to believe that our kids will be less ignorant that we might believe they are.

The young ones use "aircrafts" as plural. When I point out it is the same as one sheep, two sheep and one moose, two moose they go away completely confused.

I'm wondering if we should have a separate thread, "Everything WE know is wrong".
A list of all the times we were "corrected" or heard something ridiculous or flat out wrong.

The Basket said:

Airplanes don't carry torpedos.

They carry Aerial Torpedoes.

So I like the pedantism.

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The Pedants revolt!

Trick of history is to remember something while convenient forgetting every other time when the opposite happened.

The future WW2 will be won by equipment which is readily available in CGI like P-51Ds and Hurricanes.