Month: December 2016

History Friday — Revisiting the P-51 Mustang Historical Narrative

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James Perry Stevenson and Pierre Sprey recently (Dec 2, 2016) wrote a column over on the War Is Boring media blog titled “Arrogant U.S. Generals Made the P-51 Mustang a Necessity — With better leadership, the iconic fighter plane might’ve been unnecessary” that used my September 2013 Chicagoboyz blog post “History Friday: Deconstructing the P-51 Mustang Historical Narrative” as a basis for a lot of their article with a link back to my Chicagoboyz post with a comment to the effect that it was a “detailed post.” Given who those two men are, that is the military history good housekeeping seal or approval. ***

Yeah Me!! — Glyph of a middle age fat man doing a happy dance!

Go over and check it out at this link:

“Arrogant U.S. Generals Made the P-51 Mustang a Necessity — With better leadership, the iconic fighter plane might’ve been unnecessary”

The 165 Gallon Lockheed Drop Tank in Front of a P-38 Lightning Fighter dated Nov 1943
A 150/165 Gallon Lockheed Drop Tank in front of a P-38 Lightning Fighter. Production of the tank increased from 300 in September 1943 to 22,000 in December 1943.

That said, it turns out their closing paragraph,

“Arnold’s mindset, which caused him to forbid drop tank development in 1939, doomed thousands of unescorted bomber crews throughout all of 1943 to death and dismemberment. This needless slaughter remained unrelieved until the belated deliveries in 1944 of adequate quantities of drop tanks — and of long ranged P-51B’s.

….and my Sept 2013 blog post are going to need a rewrite thanks to my research partner Ryan Crierie’s latest find, a September 1943 fighter range chart from the Gen. Hap Arnold Microfilms Reel 122.

The “truth in the details” is that the tragically poor decision General Hap Arnold made in 1939 to halt the use drop tanks in the US Army Air Force that made the disaster the 2nd Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission inevitable was also the decision that made the P-51B technically possible.

The 2nd order effects of that procurement decision on the USAAF’s “technological development tree” gave Wright Field fighter development engineers the “design chops” to place in the P-51B the additional 85 gallon internal fuel tank that Mustangs used to reach Berlin in early 1944, when it was needed in late 1943.

-more-

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Fake News

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The concept of “fake news” appears to be the meme du jour among the serious internet news set … well, the serious mainstream news set, anyway. Calling it the meme du jour is merely a kinder way of describing the mainstream media’s primal scream of denial. Me – I have become extremely suspicious when a meme suddenly pops up all over the national mainstream news and entertainment media and social media takes it up as if they were junior fashionistas entranced with Kim Kardashian’s latest exercise in stuffing ten pounds of avoirdupois into a five-pound sack. It’s as if there were some kind of coordinated list of talking points, similar phrasing, and suggested party lines being surreptitiously circulated among influential cognoscenti … like there was some kind of briefing paper being circulated. But that’s my nasty, cynical mind speaking there. They might have a new name for “JournoList” and circulate it by other means, but yes, that playbook is still operative.

The Primal Scream of Denial from the establishment media is all the more bitterly amusing – because they themselves played a huge part in destroying their own credibility with those citizens of Flyoverlandia who tended to vote for Trump. (With varying degrees of reluctance, I should make it clear. For every voter who went out and voted for him wholeheartedly, there must be at least one who held their nose as they voted for him, and another who regarded a Trump vote as being one big middle finger of protest, extended towards the bicoastal ruling elite.)

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Evergreen Aviation Museum- Spruce Goose

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Near Portland there is a great aviation and military museum called the “Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum“. I highly recommend that you visit this campus, which includes an IMAX theater, if you ever visit Oregon.

The highlight is the “Spruce Goose“, the immense wooden plane designed and built by Howard Hughes which resides inside the facility. It is fantastic that the museum was built at a large enough scale to keep this plane indoors else it would likely soon be lost to the elements.

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Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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A USAF jet fighter pilot flies a WWII P-51 Mustang.

An argument that China will never be as wealthy as America.  (‘Never’ is a long time, though)

A huge database of artworks, indexed on many dimensions.

An ethics class that has been taught for 20 years (at the University of Texas-Austin) is no longer offered.  According to the professor who taught it:

Students clam up as soon as conversation veers close to anything controversial and one side might be viewed as politically incorrect. The open exchange of ideas that used to make courses such as Contemporary Moral Problems exciting doesn’t happen. It’s not possible to teach the course the way I used to teach it.

At the GE blog:  Direct mind-to-airplane communication…and, maybe someday, direct mind-to-mind communication as well.  Although regarding the second possibility, SF writer Connie Willis raises some concerns.

Also at the GE blog:  The California Duck Must Die – a very good explanation of the load-matching problems created when ‘renewable’ sources become a major element of the electrical grid. Media discussion of all the wind and solar capacity installed has tended to gloss over these issues.

The Battle of the Bulge, December 1944 – January 1945.

Portland Winter Weather

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Recently I re-located to Portland, Oregon. While Portland has a reputation as a rainy, gloomy place, we had a great April through November, with lovely and mostly sunny weather. In December, however, things have taken a turn for the worse.

I grew up in the Midwest where it snows all the time. The difference, however, is that we salt our roads and plow them with vigor. This wikipedia article shows the “salt belt” of states that use this method; Oregon is not one of them.

While snowfalls are infrequent in Portland (some parts of Oregon see immense snowfalls… like this town and anywhere near Crater Lake) we have already had 2 “major” snowfalls that snarled traffic to an inordinate degree – the city ceases to function and everyone stays home when they heed the weather warnings (if they turn out to be accurate). On Wednesday, however, the snowfall and ice occurred during the evening rush hour and caused chaos with hundreds of abandoned cars litering the streets and highways. Commutes that would take 20 minutes could take 4 or more hours; many (including myself) went on foot.

Streets were still icy and treacherous a day later, since the temperature remains below freezing. Cars that drive were generally either all-wheel drive, trucks, or used chains. I had to buy a pair of chains for my Jetta for $85 but I hope to never need to use them.

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