Does anybody know where these pickle barrels came from? Were they Lend
Lease? AFAIK we didn't make pickle barrels in the UK at that time, and
I'm not sure if we do now. You can't get the wood, you know

Of course, the Mosquito figured into all of this. Pickle barrels had been
coopered in the UK for many dozens of years in the run up to the "disagreement
among cousins" (as Goebbels described the conflict between Britain and
Germany). During that rather spirited disagreement, the de Havilland company
created the aerial equivelent of a grand piano in its DH 98, and this new
wooden wonder required every barrel shaper, clog carver, and cabinet finisher
in the realm to bend their oars in production of the Mosquito.

But what of the pickle barrel? Production in the UK ceased abruptly with the
first order to DH - an immediate vaccum was created, a wartime critical
shortage in pickle barrels. Just another damned inconvenience of the war.
Even with the required coupons, there was simply no guarantee a proper pickle
barrel could be found.

Well, you all are familiar with the story by now. While touring the great
pickel barrel factories that once lined the Mississippi, Japanese
future-Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto could only marvel at America's pickle barrel
production capability. "We're doomed", he muttered. (In Japanese, of course.)
Later he was able to use his acquired knowledge - one captured JN 25 message,
decoded in the days prior to Pearl Harbor, included the exact locations of each
of the pickle barrels on board the Oklahoma and the Arizona - only luck and a
Seaman named Mojo Nixon kept the Nevada from suffering a similar fate; he is
widely credited with having moved the Nevada's pickle barrel to the dock
alongside the battleship, so he could polish it on the early morning of
December 7th, 19 Fo-tee-won. Tragically... well.. you know.

All of this is pickle barrel history, known by most school children.

The mystery of the English wartime pickle barrels is solved by checking the
makers mark on the bottom of one of the few wartime survivors - on the Imperial
War Museum's pickle barrel, "Old Smellysides", all of the coopers signed their
names as it was the 5,000th pickle barrel to roll off the production line at
the Cape Girardeau plant. That makers mark, faded by decades of service and
overpolishing, is clearly the mark of Henry Ford. Perhaps most famous for his
innovation in pickle barrel production, he earned the nickname 'the American
Coopernicus'.

Yes, of course they were lend-lease. What a ridiculous thing to say.

v/r
Gordon
====(A+C====
USN SAR

An LZ is a place you want to land, not stay.