Recon, South Pacific
- Thread starter Taco
- Start date
:salute:A very nice flight. Sure was excited about the possibility of spotting a IJN Big Bad Boy (Battleship). Man! Was the crew screaming about that "If we find it what %^$# are we going to do be a bloody target for her guns! Yea right, give those boys some target practice! I Don't think these machine guns will bother her much!" "
Just throw those empty beer bottles at her! Hehe. But alas, we never saw her, but we did throw out those beer bottles, and the whistling sound sounded just like bombs going down.
Just throw those empty beer bottles at her! Hehe. But alas, we never saw her, but we did throw out those beer bottles, and the whistling sound sounded just like bombs going down.
Well, we went crazy with the picture taking on this leg. Weather was good, conversation was excellent! One worry is that it was mentioned that some of those bad guys still had control of the inland parts of Bougainville! Sure hope those fellow don't start sending some of big shell thing in our direction. Again, here are a few pictures of a Marine fighter group outpost. Our crew on this low level pass dropped out with parachutes some care packages for the troops, now don't ask me what it was! But I think there will be a few happy Marines and maybe a few tomorrow with a big hangover. hehe.
In 1926, a portrait artist named Caroline Mytinger, with her friend Margaret Warner, embarked on a four year journey to the Solomon Islands to document the people and culture of the islands. Caroline's account of her experience is, in light of events that would bring these islands to dubious fame less than twenty years later, is fascinating. There was of course no Henderson Field on the island then known as "Guadalcanar." What there was was unbearable heat, humidity, mosquitoes, and other insects. They arrived in 1927 aboard the steamship Mataram, just after “The Malaita Affair”, as they called it. Some of her descriptions bring the place to life almost 100 years later:
On arriving at Guvuto (Tulagi):“The first thing I could see of the Solomon Islands was the gray corrugated-iron side of a huge warehouse. The heat was writhing off it's iron roof so that the top fronds of some coconut palms sticking up behind looked as if they were out of focus. The sky above was the blank white of pure glare...”
As they approached Malaita the first time: “With the early morning sun behind it the island was a long slender strip of solid behind a stretch of water so dazzling with sunbursts that the land itself seemed colorless. It was an abstractionist's marinescape. Both ends of the hundred-mile island were left unfinished, dissolved in hot vapor the colorless note pf sky and water. The portion dead ahead of us was flat gray from jagged skyline, sharp against a glaring sky, to level shore. There was no height to those unexplored mountain tops, no nearness to the white surf below, which looked like teeth clenched on the lower lip of ocean, a barrier to outsiders who would penetrate the mysteries of the island.”
From: Headhunting in the Solomon Islands, Around the Coral Sea, by Caroline Mytinger, New York, The MacMillan Company, 1942.
http://www.headhuntrevisited.org/index.html
On arriving at Guvuto (Tulagi):“The first thing I could see of the Solomon Islands was the gray corrugated-iron side of a huge warehouse. The heat was writhing off it's iron roof so that the top fronds of some coconut palms sticking up behind looked as if they were out of focus. The sky above was the blank white of pure glare...”
As they approached Malaita the first time: “With the early morning sun behind it the island was a long slender strip of solid behind a stretch of water so dazzling with sunbursts that the land itself seemed colorless. It was an abstractionist's marinescape. Both ends of the hundred-mile island were left unfinished, dissolved in hot vapor the colorless note pf sky and water. The portion dead ahead of us was flat gray from jagged skyline, sharp against a glaring sky, to level shore. There was no height to those unexplored mountain tops, no nearness to the white surf below, which looked like teeth clenched on the lower lip of ocean, a barrier to outsiders who would penetrate the mysteries of the island.”
From: Headhunting in the Solomon Islands, Around the Coral Sea, by Caroline Mytinger, New York, The MacMillan Company, 1942.
http://www.headhuntrevisited.org/index.html