THE WARBIRD'S FORUM

A shark-face Camry and other good stuff for May

Gotta love the nose art of Bubba Wallace's Camry, painted in tribute to the AVG Flying Tigers, with nods also to Comcast Xfinity, the USAF, and the best-selling sedan from, oh my, Toyota, with its headquarters at the eponymous city between Osaka and Tokyo. Wouldn't Claire Chennault be surprised?

Also on the Annals of the Flying Tigers is a photo of British airmen chopping up a Japanese fighter near Rangoon.

Friday night at the movies

The Warbird's Book Club continues to celebrate books, this month including a biography of the British officer in charge of Southeast Asia in December 1941, but sometimes a movie edges into the mix. Today I'm celebrating Cross of Iron, one of the great war flicks of all time. It's on Amazon Prime with a few inoffensive ads.

How Israel became the bad guy

Sixty-eight years ago this morning, Jim Dye and I were having a hangover breakfast of gehactes mit ei at the Frankfurt Press Club when our travel editor came in the door. "Hurray, hurray, the first of May!" she cried at the top of her voice. "Outdoor f-----g starts today!"

I mention this because we were in our twenties (well, Kay may have been as old as thirty) and full of scorn for the Establishment. Given yesterday's events at colleges across the United States, with Columbia showing sudden spine and Northwestern capitulating to the rioters, I've turned to Younger Granddaughter for guidance. She's a senior at Yale, where the keffiyef-masked protestors apparently closed their encampment yesterday. My thoughts on how Israel became the bad guy are on War in the Modern World, the blog I started the last time I was a student.

Blue skies! -- Daniel Ford. You can send humanitarian aid through Razom for Ukraine (a tax-exempt US-based charity). Or donate to the military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

And welcome to the forum!

Here are a thousand or so files on airplanes, pilots, and the wars of the past hundred years, grouped under these headings: