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Of all the pictures this guy could be in, THIS is the one history chose to remember! I hope his grandkids have a copy!

That's interesting.  Looks like basically strapping some V-1 engines onto it.   The fuselage looks similar to the Japanese man guided suicide fighter, the Ohka.

After the war he became a dental laboratory technician. One year, you’re taking out tanks and antitank weapons by the dozens, the next your polishing up a set of dentures . Ahh...life.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_As_014

Argus pulse jet, was on Fieseler V-1 too.

A similar individual, Otto Carius, became a pharmacist. Named his drugstore "Tiger Apotheke"

Desperate times, British Home Guard pikemen (surplus rifle bayonet welded to steel pipe):

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High-class tankers got the bitchin' leather jackets.

I’ve heard about him..another good one.

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Well worth reading:  Tigers in the Mud -- by -- Otto Carius

I saw the one in Hamburg up close  it is huge ,looming structure . The walls are 12 ft thick. They keep trying to repurpose these but it never seems to stick .

"U.S. Postal employees feed 17 tons of reading matter, labeled by postal authorities as propaganda, into a furnace in San Francisco, California, on March 19, 1941. The bulk of the newspapers, books, and pamphlets came from Nazi Germany and some from Russia, Italy and Japan"

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My how history seems to repeat itself...

4 guys died while eating from this field kitchen.

One of the absolute FUNNIEST bullshit war stories was from a guy that claimed to be a cook (he was actually a grunt) that says he got the DSC for singlehandedly retaking a fire base he was in that had been overrun.

He claimed he left a pot of stew on the burner when he unassed and the VC ate it and got so sick they retook the base without a shot being fired.

The way he told the story made you laugh yourself silly.

Japanese Me 163, J8M Shusui
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Training gliders:
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Wildcats escort an SBC-4 Helldiver of VB-8 carrying the markings of the country of "Red" in the enormous 1941 Louisiana maneuvers.
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SBC-4's were delivered 1939-1941 but were recognized as obsolete even before delivery.  Hornet was equipped with SBC-4's while on shakedown in the Atlantic until preparing for the Doolittle Raid in 1942, all others were replaced on carriers before Pearl Harbor by the SBD-3 Dauntless and retained in CONUS as reserve or training aircraft.  

Hornet at Norfolk February 1942, an SBC-4 of VB-8 or VS-8 on deck with Wildcats:
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The Marines kept a couple dozen until mid-1943 as emergency defenses on the South Pacific island of American Samoa.  Curtiss reused the name Helldiver for the aircraft that replaced the Dauntless, the SB2C.

50 "surplus" Helldivers were sold to France in 1940 which sent the carrier Bearn with 145 tons of gold across the Atlantic to buy pretty much whatever combat aircraft could be found.  Due to a tangle of neutrality laws Bearn docked in Nova Scotia to load a variety of American warplanes, newly built and surplus, but the Helldivers could not legally be flown into Canada.  Thus they were landed in Houlton Maine, repainted in French colors, and towed across the border to Woodstock New Brunswick, where they took off for Nova Scotia from a temporarily closed highway:
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Bearn didn't make it back in time and sat out most of the war in Martinique at the insistence of the United States government, which didn't want it reaching what was now Vichy France.  Her cargo of aircraft were parked in a field on Martinique where they were destroyed by weather and parts cannibalization.  Helldivers and Brewster Buffalos rot:

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What a waste.

We weren't at war with Vichy France and the Free French were literally rebels against their government.  A government under duress, certainly, but still the legal French government.  Also, nobody liked de Gaulle.  Operation Torch wrecked relations with Vichy France, which was dissolved by the German occupation of Southern France after Vichy troops surrendered in North Africa.  Martinique joined the Free French in 1943 and the Bearn was sabotaged on Vichy orders by running her aground.  She was refit into an aircraft ferry by the US for the Free French and supported the reoccupation of French Indochina after the war.

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Published February 13, 1942 in the left-leaning, pro-FDR New York City daily newspaper "PM", check the signature.
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Six days later FDR ordered mass internment of Japanese citizens.

They started it.
Thanks for posting, never saw that, going into my 'archives'.
Wow, is all I'll say........

Neat precursor to RealTree camo on the French tank
I wonder if anyone has tried to model that in 1/35?

Philippine Maneuvers, 1941.  Seversky P-35's and Douglas B-18 Bolos mock attack infantry who have taken cover in the ditch.  

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They and other aircraft took heavy loses on the ground at Clark Field from Japanese air raids on December 8th (Bolos were also destroyed at Pearl Harbor on Dec 7th) and the remainder, slow and poorly armed and armored, didn't last long.  In one of the few notable successes a P-35 sunk a Japanese minesweeper off the Philippines by strafing, the explosion tearing the wing off the plane and killing the pilot.  The B-18 was the most numerous bomber deployed outside CONUS at the moment the war began, but many were destroyed in the opening attacks and the survivors were reassigned to tasks that didn't involve exposure to enemy fighters, such as ASW, cargo, and placed in reserve in the event of an attack on the west coast.

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That's a hell of a lot of work, that guy is a hero.  Beautiful results.

Boeing P-26 Peashooters were also destroyed at Clark Field, I was surprised to learn that they shot down a Nell and three Zeros (plus several unconfirmed claims), half of which were bagged by Filipino Jesus Villamor.  Looking into it more they were deployed fairly widely in early WWII, though the survivors were moved to peripheral theaters shortly after the war started.

USAAC at Clark Field, 1940
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Philippine Army Air Corps P-26, 1941.  Philippine independence was scheduled for 1946, so on Dec 7th the PAAC was being readied for the transition and was a nominally independent force operating alongside the USAAC as the Far East Air Force
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14 USAAC P-26's were in Hawaii on Dec 7th, destroyed on the ground.  Morse Field, Hawaii 1940 (with Bolos)
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Wheeler Field, Oahu
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Surviving Peashooters were deployed to Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala to strengthen air defense for the Canal Zone and Caribbean.  Guatemala declared war on Japan on Dec 8th, and then on 13 December against Germany and Italy to make it's friendship clear to the US and coordinate defense against submarines and raiders (and to seize some valuable German and Italian property).  Some of the Peashooters were transferred to the Guatemalan Army Aviation Corps in 1943 when the USAAC upgraded aircraft.  GAAC P-26's, La Aurora airbase:

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The last combat use of a P-26 was in 1954 when the last three Guatemalan Peashooters attempted to intercept a CIA owned C-47 supporting a coup by dropping anti-government leaflets on Guatemala City.  But the C-47 was only marginally slower than the P-26's and was headed back for it's airfield in Honduras, where the CIA was operating a P-38 and several P-47's, so the Peashooters had to break off.  The CIA upgraded to a couple of Mustangs after the P-47's were damaged by AA fire and after several pilots defected the Guatemalans prudently kept the P-26's grounded while CIA converted transports engaged in a few light bombing raids.  Two surviving P-26's were used as training aircraft until 1957, then sold to museums in the US.

Peashooter warming up to fly CAP against the CIA over Guatemala City, 1954
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@JQ66

Flakpanzer IV "Kugelblitz". Published in a Soviet tank industry bulletin, 1945

This goes back MANY pages when a pic was posted of a dead Soviet soldier, 'posed' by the Finns.
I 'lost' this thread so I have a LOT of catching up to do!
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It's said that P-47's were known to come back from ground attack missions with turnips stuck in the cowling.

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P-47N 44-88908 crashed 1951 in maryland.  No fatalities.

Francis "Gabby" Gabreski was a renowned P-47 Ace would routinely come home with tree limbs and parts of phone poles stuck in his wings and dents on his propeller. He was known to get very low on strafing runs and eventually while attacking an HE-111 on an airfield it bit him in the ass when he got so low that is propeller clipped the ground and he ended up becoming a prisoner of war

"While on a mission near Milan, struck the ground during a strafing attack. The pilot successfully flew the vibrating aircraft 150 miles back to Grosseto airfield."
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Any ID on that bomb group?
My dad saw a round go thru the wing of a b17, gas was pouring out the hole and the guys "piling out of it"

Is that the turn around point?

Probably not.  Bomb bay doors are open.

Curtiss A-12 Shrike ground attack aircraft, 46 built 1933-1934
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The A-12 was a re-engined A-8, the original inline replaced when USAAC decided to focus on radials
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The Chinese bought 20 in 1936 to fight the Japanese.  They lucked into shooting down a flight of IJN dive bombers, but were easy meat for fighters.  ROCAF Shrike:
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The Chinese experience proved they were obsolete, but a squadron were still stationed at Hickam Field on Dec 7th.  Surviving aircraft were never flown in combat, all scrapped or used for training.
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L-8 was a small Goodyear advertising blimp purchased by the Navy near the outbreak of war.   L-8 delivers 300lbs of modified B-25 navigator domes to the carrier Hornet for the Doolittle Raid, April 1942:

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16 August 1942 L-8 went on anti-submarine patrol a few miles past the Golden Gate Bridge.  Contact with the two crewmen was lost after they reported investigating an oil slick that could be from a submarine.  Fishing boats scattering away from the possible contact saw the blimp make one pass then rise abruptly into the clouds.  Some time later the blimp reappeared and landed momentarily on a bluff where two fishermen tried to restrain her, but the lost ballast of a dislodged depth charge caused her to rise again.  Hours later the blimp drifted in a gentle descent over Daly City California, landing gently in a residential street.  There was no one aboard, the blimp was in perfect working order, and the gondola door was locked open.  The crew remains missing.  It's presumed that one man slipped while dropping a smoke bomb from the door to mark the oil slick from about 300' up and the other was pulled out while attempting to rescue him.

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Something for the Arfcom millionaires:

https://silodrome.com/ford-gpw/

He was shooting over the bomber and did the ultimate no-no, he eased the stick forward to lower his aim and promptly felt his prop strike the ground.

On his 2nd pass...

Now they are flying for themselves.


As they make their post-bombs away turn for home.

Optimistic UK Home Guard training, 1942
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Life during the Blitz