RyanShort1 wrote:
Rumors are indeed "out there" that seem promising regarding the NHC and future recoveries. But why should we go on speculating? Really now, what good does it do?
Wrong question. The real question is, if we enjoy speculating in our spare time, what harm does it do?
JDK wrote:
<Donning Anorak> There's more to 'value' than cash or zooming about. Most recreations of nose art, like the (in-)famous d-day stripes are far too neat. if we want to know how nose are really was, we need to have originals to look at. We are currently creating a sanitised, 'neat' and tidied up version of W.W.II with the current hardware restorations. At the end of the day, they're tools, and like stone age flints or bronze age daggers, original examples tell us stuff about humanity that replica's don't.
I'm with you this far.
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Like the ghastly 60s hairdos in 60s war movies, modern restorations of original nose art will almost certainly become obviously 'fake' when time intervenes.
That's a short run view. The hairstyles become obviously fake when a little time intervenes, as it now has. When a few more centuries intervenes and folks lose track of the evolution of 20th-century hairstyles, they will become much LESS obviously fake. But, see below.
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How we painted or engraved our heart's desires on our weapons is part of everyone's history, and is priceless.
Here you jump the tracks. It would be more accurate to say "How we painted or engraved our heart's desires on our weapons is historical trivia probably irrelevant to anything important." Not every relic or bit of information about the past is a priceless treasure. We cannot foresee with certainty which relics from the not-so-distant past will be regarded as recording important "stuff about humanity" for the distant future, but the chances of a piece of fighter plane nose art telling any future historian anything relevant to the big picture of WWII are pretty remote. I'm a preservationist too, but in the scheme of things, I'd call the loss of these nose panels no big deal.
August