Mitsubishi G4m 'Bettys' retrieved for possible restoration!

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great link, very good information, be good to see more jap aircraft flying real as can be thank's oxcart mate

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Well fingers crossed they get sympathetically restored.

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It would be nice to see some Japanese aircraft restored. I have always found it a bit strange given the lengths people go to recover the Allied & German aircraft how much the Japanese stuff has just been neglected. It's still part of the historic story even if the regime they represent was brutal. I can understand ex combatants not wanting to see them again, but couldn't the same apply to Bf 109s and Fw 190s?

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Shorty, I can only think the reason Japanese aircraft recoveries are so rare in comparison is because it's so politically difficult to get the wrecks out, and the tropical conditions aren't as healthy for the structures.

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Politically difficult, or perhaps outright difficult? Hacking heavily corroded airframes out of the jungle must be pretty treacherous, and shipping the remains anywhere must be pretty expensive. I imagine there isn't vast supplies of NOS Betty parts kicking around either.

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I’m at the front of the queue for axis restorations, but was horrified to read that the British POWs who built the runway on the Island concerned are likely to have been bayoneted or beheaded. It leaves me with a mixture of emotions.

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That's grim about the POWs, I just had a quick flick through the pictures before posting without reading that. I must admit I don't think I could have any old German WW2 items as you don't know what poor person may have died producing it.I look at preserved V2 rockets with a certain amount of unease having found out how many slave labourers died producing them.

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but was horrified to read that the British POWs who built the runway on the Island concerned are likely to have been bayoneted or beheaded

Is there a CWCG Graveyard there I wonder?

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Good that these airframes are recovered in an equitable arrangement with Solomon Islanders, before they oxidise away. To greinert might become a verb.
I too have mixed emotions about recovering artifacts from a place so soaked in cruelty and injustice. If these artifacts serve to tell that story, then there is some form of justice, at least. The theme of wartime Japanese forces disposing POWs with barbarity recurs through the Pacific War, from RAAF personnel stranded in 1942 in the Dutch East Indies to POWs on the cusp of release in 1945.

A great deal of effort went into the dismantling of the Japanese military industrial complex as a specific postwar policy and the Japanese postwar constitution has given the region a remarkable period of peace. This makes Japanese wartime artifacts rare. But the usual market forces have been held in check by shame, if not outright discouragement by Japanese postwar consensus. All this is changing with the posturing of China, and much of this posturing is driven by some painful Chinese memories of WW2. I can see a resurgence of Japanese militarism as an inevitable reaction and feature of the next decades and a renewed interest in Japanese military history and the artifacts of that history among historically and politically minded Japanese. They have always been there, but perhaps more visible and less marginalised. Good line in putting some Japanese metal back in the air.

The job of an aircraft restorer is to panel beat, not beat folk around the ears. It is hard enough making a living, let alone alienating a paying customer. The simple pleasure of admiring the competent engineering of a samurai sword or gas chamber is as deep as it gets for some. Certainly I don't understand why you would put a Swastika on a German aircraft restoration if you had some sensitivity to the fact it is connected to boiling down people for soap.

In my perfect world the airframes would be restored and the context of their service and what happened to the POWs would at least remain connected. In that most sacred of Japanese shrines to their war dead, Yasakuni, their is a locomotive from the Burma Siam railway. It was brought there by a Japanese ex- serviceman in the 1960's. It is confusing why he would do this, as if you wanted to memorialize Japanese war dead, better to bring in truckloads of soil from Burma and Iwo Jima. Why bring in something associated with the death of slave labourers? I figure it was his effort to ensure that a shameful thing could not be glossed over. If a locomotive exists, then the railway must have existed, and the story must be true. It is hard to deny Nazi concentration camps existed when you stand in Auschwitz.

Maybe all the remaining relatives of those slave labourers, denied even the dignity of a bullet, could crowd fund the static restoration of a Betty, and gift it to the Yakusuni shrine, to stand in memory, invariably, of brave pilots and common loss, but under the paint let the story be allowed of the lost souls of Ballalae.

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A powerful and well-thought through contribution, powerandpassion. Thank you.

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Politically difficult, or perhaps outright difficult?

Maybe political isn't the right term, but several times in the last twenty years I've read of governments such as that of Papua New Guinea putting an end to exports of wrecks because of their historical value, and the wrecks then either being chopped up piecemeal for scrap by locals and/or deteriorating to nothing.