“Chinese Cadets Prepare a Greeting for Hirohito” — photo card, Luke Field, Arizona

The objectphotographed as held, uncropped

Catalogue description

About fifteen young men in fatigue uniforms fill a dark room, some standing along the sides, some squatting on the floor, gathered around a small finned bomb held horizontally between two of them. One man's hands rest on the bomb's nose; three lines of red lettering already run along its flank, and black marks are drawn on the nose of the bomb, partly covered by the man's hands. Behind the group, white lettering on a dark panel reads “努力飛行！” [Strive in flight! / Fly with all your effort!]. At the head of the image area a band of red letters on a white field between blue rules reads KEEP ’EM FLYING!. The colour lies flat and uniform over the image — the uniforms one khaki, the faces one pink — which is consistent with colour added in printing to a black-and-white original. If the edge number is a Curt Teich production number, the process would be the five-colour one that firm used on its linen cards.

The credit line under the image names the Headquarters Photographic Section at Luke Field, Arizona, so the photograph is an official base product. The caption above the image is numbered LF-15, which indicates a numbered Luke Field series; no other card of that series has been located by this archive. The production number on the edge, 3B-H831, is of the form Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago used on its linen-finish cards. The format — a card carrying a base photographic credit and a series number — is consistent with souvenir sale, but the distribution of this card is not established.

What the picture shows is a group of men lettering the name of the Japanese head of state onto a bomb in front of a camera; the caption printed above them calls this preparing a greeting. Neither the caption nor the credit names any of the men, and the caption's word for all of them is “Chinese Cadets.” Two texts stand above the group, one in English and one in Chinese, and nothing on the card states a relation between them: the band reads KEEP ’EM FLYING! and the panel reads 努力飛行！ [Strive in flight!], which is not a translation of it. The archive's reading — offered as a reading, not as something the card states — is that the card holds the men's Chineseness and an American aviation slogan in a single frame, and that the identification the photograph itself cannot supply, of who these men are and which service they belong to, is supplied instead by one word in the caption.

The first of the three lines lettered on the bomb is read here as SO SORRY, the second word marked doubtful: it is small, hand-made, and reproduced through the printing. If that reading is right, the line belongs to the register of wartime American mockery of Japanese speech. The archive has not verified the phrase as a set formula of the period, and the reading is not secure, so nothing here rests on it.

The face of this copy carries no writing, stamp or cancellation. Postal use cannot be determined without the reverse, which was not photographed and which would also carry the publisher's imprint.

Transcriptiontext on the object, as printed

[caption line, top margin of the card face, italic serif:]
LF-15   Chinese Cadets Prepare a Greeting for Hirohito

[band at the head of the image area, red letters on a white field between two blue rules:]
KEEP ’EM FLYING!

[white lettering on the dark panel behind the men; the double quotation marks are part of the lettering, not editorial:]
“努力飛行！” [Strive in flight! / Fly with all your effort!]

[hand-lettered in red on the bomb, three lines:]
SO SORRY[?]
HIROHITO
SPECIAL

[below the image, small letter-spaced capitals:]
HQ. PHOTOGRAPHIC SECTION, LUKE FIELD, ARIZONA

[printed vertically along the right edge of the card face, reading bottom-to-top:]
3B-H831

[No other text on this face: no stamps, cancellations, pencil notes or signatures on either margin or along either edge. The reverse was not photographed.]

Historical context

Luke Field, an Army Air Forces advanced single-engine flying school west of Phoenix, was formally renamed Luke Army Air Field on 6 June 1941, the second field to carry the name after the original on the Army-Navy island in Pearl Harbor. Over the war it graduated 17,231 student pilots, including 13,568 United States and 508 Chinese Air Force pilots trained on the AT-6 and 2,483 United States and 331 Chinese Air Force pilots on the P-40; the first Chinese Air Force advanced flying training class, Class 42-E, graduated 42 students on 27 March 1942, and Chinese Air Force P-40 training at the field ended on 13 October 1945. Chinese cadets trained at several Arizona fields — Luke, Thunderbird and Williams, and from early November 1942 Marana, where the 5th Chinese Training Detachment reported and where about 800 of the 13,000 pilots trained were Chinese Nationalists. Their presence was public and publicly used: nine Chinese cadets from Luke Field flew over Tucson during a Bowl of Rice benefit ball on 6 May 1942, held at the Pioneer Hotel, attended by two thousand people and raising about $4,000 for Chinese war relief. Curt Teich & Co. of Chicago produced linen cards, marked by an H in the production number, between 1931 and 1957, printing them by a five-colour process from black-and-white original photographs.

What is not known

• Only the face was photographed. The reverse — publisher or distributor imprint, the Art-Colortone line, any message, stamp or postal cancellation — is unread, so postal use is unknown.
• On the bomb, the doubt marked by [?] attaches to the second word only: SO is clear, and the five letterforms of the following word fit SORRY without settling it.
• None of the men is identified, and nothing on the card identifies them beyond the caption's phrase “Chinese Cadets.” Whether they were Chinese Air Force cadets sent to the United States for training or Chinese American trainees is not established by the object.
• The photograph's own date is not established; 1943 is a date of printing only, and the photograph could be earlier. date_sort of 1942 is the earliest year for which the cited source gives a Chinese cadet graduation at Luke Field, not the earliest year the photograph could have been made.
• The 1943 printing date depends on reading 3B-H831 as a Curt Teich production number, an attribution that rests on the form of the number alone; the source consulted is also loose on how the year digit works.
• Whether the KEEP ’EM FLYING! band is a printed element of the card's design or a banner hanging in the photographed room is not settled. Its colour is flat and its edges are sharp, which favours a printed panel; against that, its blue rules slope slightly against the card's own edges. The card gives no way to decide.
• The medium and support of the white Chinese lettering are not established: it is white strokes on a dark panel, which could be chalk on a blackboard, or paint or whitewash on a board, wall or cloth.
• The ordnance is described only as a small finned bomb. Nothing on the card identifies it as a practice bomb, a live bomb or a prop.
• Whether the lettering on the panel was written by the men in the picture or arranged for the camera is not established.
• Nothing on the card states a relation between KEEP ’EM FLYING! and 努力飛行！ [Strive in flight!], and the Chinese is not a translation of the English. Any connection between the two texts is the cataloguer's reading.
• No other card of the LF-15 series has been located, and it is not established whether the card was sold singly or came out of a souvenir folder; the slightly ragged left edge leaves the second possibility open.
• The card was not measured; no dimensions are given.
• Curt Teich's authorship of the printing rests on the form of the edge number alone, since the imprint would be on the unphotographed reverse.
• The origin of the slogan KEEP ’EM FLYING! was not verified for this record; it is described here only as a wartime American aviation slogan, with no institutional attribution.
• The Luke Field figures and the Bowl of Rice account come from a base-history site and a local-history page respectively, not from official Air Force publications; Class 42-E is an unusual designation for a March 1942 graduation and would repay a second source.
• Whether the rounded corners are as manufactured or the result of wear is not established.
• What the black marks on the bomb's nose represent is not determinable at the resolution photographed.