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Best, Jan

Wow. A friend of mine found this dog tag in a flea market.
It’s a german erkennungsmarken for sure, but what about the unit ? It’s quite hard to read it. A real mess..
If anyone has a small idea about what it could be…. it’s great

Danke !

Cheers

The seller of this FJ and I are in contact. We agreed to post pictures of the helmet on this forum. So we are hoping on comments on it being Original or not. I asked for pictures of the markings. I do not see them in this pictures. Maybe I am overlooking it. But asked for detail pictures of the markings (if any on the helmet). Hopefully some opinions can already be formed without the markings highlighted.

Thanks!

I bought a nice japanese 25 mm round .It hasn’t its fuse ,just a bakelit plug.I ‘ll be very happy if I can get a fuse to complete.
Please , help me in this search .I’m looking for a japanese round since a very long time,and now I ‘ve got one,and it need just a fuse to be perfect .
Thanks to all .

Cheers

EUR 49,99 (0 Bids) End Date: 17. Feb. 13:24 Bid now | Add to watch list

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Hitler Jugend Siegernadel 1935 der HJ Reichssportwettkämpfe
Hitler Youth1935 Sport-Festival Badge
Markers Mark:
Ferd. Wagner
Pforzheim 8
Made out of Aluminium

Regards
John

Foreword

I wrote this primarily to satisfy my own curiosity over some questions about an incident of a century ago. For my earlier story about army aviation uniforms, I researched the early days of Army aviation and saw how the army was quick in grasping a ripe moment to promote flying as a new career for army officers and attract the best possible talent by setting up a pilot’s badge in 1913, less than 3 years after the first plane flight in Japan,. However, when the navy followed suit in 1915 they failed quite miserably, and as a result could not even bring it up again until as late as 1927. In the days when the military significance of aviation kept rising almost day by day, the navy’s failure to acknowledge its fliers seemed unnaturally negligent. Why was that?

However, I did not feel fully equipped to tackle that question until I gained some insight on how the navy approached proficiency badges, for which my recent story on the navy gunnery badges provided a solid grounding.

Another less profound curiosity that motivated this story was inspired by a work of fiction. When I read the novel “Eternal Zero”, I was quite impressed with the insight the author expressed for the events in WW2. That book was based on conversations the author had with his own uncles, who had been navy pilots during the war, so it was very real in that sense, but I could not help asking myself, if Miyabe, the protagonist of that novel, was such a skilled flyer, would he not have won himself a Master Class Aviation Badge? That prompted me to get a feel for how much of a challenge it would have been for those pilots to win the badges.

It is not only about the Navy Aviation Badge, but covers the Army’s badge as well to make it a complete evolutionary history of Japanese military aviation badges which also offers a good comparison between the Navy and the Army traditions.

Also for every theme I research, I always end up making some interesting new discoveries. This time there was a bonus in suspecting something fishy going on behind the army’s sudden decision to scrap its officer’s pilot badge in 1940 and forbid further wear of it. Army documents were quite unconvincing in their reasoning on this point, so the badge was revoked under suspicious enough circumstances to build a conspiracy theory around it.

Once again, I thank Nickolay Rudyk (Japan X) for kindly supplying me photos from his reference library for this article.

1910 Learning to fly French Style

In 1911, the year after Japan’s historical first flight at the Army’s Yoyogi Proving Grounds on 19th December 1910, the Army started to set up flight training in the brand new Tokorozawa airfield outside Tokyo.

Captain Yoshitoshi Tokugawa, a 26-year old army engineer, who piloted that first flight the previous year, himself only a rookie flyer, just having earned his wings in the summer of 1910 at a flight school in France, was now given the task of establishing a cadre of airmen, starting with a fleet of only 4 planes at Tokorozawa.

Until WWI ended and countries like France and England happily sold their war surplus planes to Japan, there simply weren’t enough planes to go around, so while they tried to build some planes of their own, they did the best with the few planes they had to train as many pilots as possible. Cpt. Tokugawa was going to set up a one year pilot’s course at Tokorozawa Airfield for such trainees.

A full year course was a far cry from the training Tokugawa himself got in France in 1910. His lessons were at Henry Farman’s flight school located about 50 km north of Paris. He was enrolled there with a dozen other students from France, England, Italy, Russia and Poland and each student only got 5 minutes of air time per day, piggybacking behind the instructor/pilot and occasionally reaching out to take the control stick from behind. They got only 10 days of such practice (thus less than a total of an hour’s flight time with the instructor) after which one had to make 3 successful solo flights and you were supposed to be completely ready to take the French pilot’s license exam.

That exam consisted of 3 tests.
1. Flying around two poles set 500 meters apart in a figure “8” pattern 5 times
2. Flying for more than 5 km while maintaining a minimum altitude of 50 meters
3. Glide-landing from an altitude of 50 meters by stopping the engine. Landing point had to be within 50 meters of a marked point.

During this stay in France, he also had to make time to do research and purchase a plane to take back with him to Japan, so the first thing he did was to buy a motorbike. On it, he would speed out early every morning to flight school to be the first student in line to take the 5 minute flight, so he could spend the rest of the day visiting plane manufactures, etc.

Compared to that, a full year for learning to fly was a luxurious extravagance.