On this day of remembrance, some thoughts about my paternal grandfather, the last member of my family to see active service (thank God). Like so many veterans, he did have PTSD after World War II. The eastern theatre took him around China and to Malaya and Singapore. He never talked much about his experiences but […]
Tag: World War II
Modern masculinity doesn’t involve reinventing the wheel
When Douglas Bader recorded in his log book on the aeroplane accident that cost him his legs, he wrote, ‘Bad show’. It was men like Bader, Audie Murphy, Claire Lee Chennault and Douglas MacArthur that my father spoke of as heroes from his childhood. There were plenty more from our own culture but […]
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Mitsubishi’s latest scandal: enough to shake it right out of the passenger-car market?
Above: The Mitsubishi eK Wagon, one of the cars at the centre of the company’s latest scandal. One thing about creating and running Autocade is that you gain an appreciation for corporate history. Recently, I blogged about Fiat, and the troubles the company is in; it wasn’t that long ago that Fiat was the designers’ […]
Parts of Japan are decimated, and I think back to my grandfather
My grandfather, Col. Tung Wan Yan, of the Chinese Constitutional Army, had a very interesting war. He was on a Japanese hit-list and was hiding in trees when some soldiers opened fire on him with automatic weapons. By some miracle, he escaped unharmed. It’s one of the close calls he had in China […]
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