Vintage shots from days gone by!

The cruiser Astoria and destroyer Northampton arriving in Portland,Or for Rose Festival Fleet Week 1937. Both ships would be lost to the Imperial Japanese Navy at Guadalcanal in 1942.

 

Cruiser Indianapolis, famously lost to a Japanese sub in 1945, at the 1937 Fleet Week.

 

Also 1937, Imperial Japanese Army soldiers celebrate victory in Shanghai China.
WW2 had already begun, we just didn't know it yet. The ugly result of unbridled militarism and nationalism, sprinkled with religious fanaticism.

 

El Mirage

 

ellora caves, kailash temple

 

The destroyer is a WWI flush-decker, sometimes called a "four piper". Destroyers are named after military heroes, not cities. That cruiser is the Northampton. The Astoria is a heavy cruiser of a different class and looks very different.

 

It looks like bumper car.

 

Coulson tankers recently announced that they will be retiring the last one at the end of the year. What a loss. I love when it fly's over here, what a sound! Check out their site for more info. www.coulsonflyingtankers.com

 

Took my department to see "Witchcraft," the Collings Foundation B-24J, today in Montgomery....there was a gentleman standing with his wife who had been a B-24 waist gunner, 5 1/2 missions, was shot down, POW .... what a priviledge to thank him for what he did...(took the guys inside, got them to experience how cramped these bombers are, and what guts it took to look out of the barrel of a 50 Cal gun at a fighter whose pilot is trying to kill you.....hope they got it.)

 

Here's my contribution to the B-24 sub topic. A camouflage experiment that apparently didn't make the cut in WWII. Intended to confuse enemy fighter pilots, it succeeded in looking thoroughly bizarre.

 

Ich binein Berliner