I found a couple of Wake pictures. I'm thinking these were taken around early to mid 2001.
http://community.webshots.com/user/bradleypilgrim
Some of the wreckage in the "airplane parts" picture was American and some is Japanese. I found a data plate on one of the wings that had Japanese writing on it, but you could only make out two or three characters. I found a wing that I really thought was from a Wildcat, and brought back a few parts of it. I compared them with an F4F and an FM-2 and nothing matched up so I guess it came from something else.
I did find a prop that I know came from a wildcat, it still had the writing on the cuffs. I also found part of the nose case of an R-1830 engine. Now if it was one of the destroyed Wildcat's or one that was shot down later, I don't know. None of it appeared to have come from the water.
I also found LOTS of ammo casings and such. One of my crew chiefs found a broken bayonet. All you have to do is go down to the beach and kick through the sand. Wakes a fun place for about two days at a time!
On a side note: Towards the end of this trip around the Pacific islands, I showed up back in Hawii with a bag full of airplane parts and souveniers. It was all pretty filtly so I decided to wash it all in the bath tub. It was going pretty well until I started cleaning out the mortar caseings and I clogged up the drain with dirt and crap that was down in them. Needless to say, the housekeeping staff wasn't happy with me!
Another side note: While I was still flying around Sarajevo and such places during the Bosnia stuff, we lived at Sembach Airbase in Germany. Over behind our barracks was the cop shop. In front of their building was a 100 pound practice bomb and a mortar tube sitting in the flower bed as a decoration. Naturally, we had to have it so one night just before Christmas, we snuck over and took them. We got about ten feet when we found that the mortar base plate was chained to the ground. It took three or four of us but we finally got it all loose and carried to my barracks room. How the cops never heard us is beyond me. A bunch of drunks draging bombs and mortar tubes down the road tend to make alot of noise. Of course, the next morning the cops were mad. We all denied any knowledge of the event and a few days later, drug everything out of hiding and decided to wash it off in my bath tub....which clogged up the drain.....which another loadmaster tried to clear.....which broke the drain pipe.....which caused water to leak through the roof of the room below me.....which caused the maintenance staff to show up......who called my commander....who never thinks anything is as funny as I do! We managed to keep the souveniers hidden, but everybody in the squadron knew who had them. When packing up the planes to go back home, we got tired of dragging the base plate to the morter around and threw it in the dumpster. The rest of the mortar is now in the back yard of an officer stationed in Texas and the practice bomb resides in a barn in Oklahoma.
About two weeks after we broke the tub, maintenance had finally forgiven us and the First Sergeant had quit checking in on us every time he walked by my room. Things went good and then one of the pilots hit a deer with a crew van. We were gutting it in my bath tub when we got caught......but that's a story for another time. Dang we had fun that year!
Anyhow, if I find any more Wake pictures, I'll post them.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
