Word: becking
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...that Abe, who visited Yasukuni in the past and has questioned the validity of the Tokyo trials of Japan's wartime leaders, will worsen the damage. "There's a lot of apprehension in Seoul and Beijing about whether Abe will be as hard-line as his reputation," says Peter Beck, Northeast Asia project director for the International Crisis Group...
...items in Syd Beck's military and aviation collection, his favorite is a P-39 Airacobra. Back in April 1942, Beck says, it landed in New Guinea with four other brand-new P-39s, all emblazoned with the U.S. Army Air Force insignia, a blue circle containing a white star with a red dot at the center. The Australians on the ground were aghast: Japanese aircraft were marked with a red dot. An Australian officer immediately ordered all of the dots painted over. (Soon after, the red dot was removed from standard U.S. markings...
...There's hardly an exhibit in the Beck Museum-housed in a hangar and shed beside his home at Mareeba, 60 km west of Cairns-that the retired farmer doesn't have a story about: from the recoilless cannon built for a Russian czar to the empty 250-kg chemical bomb from Australia's World War II stockpile, to the Vietnam-era Centurion tank...
...Beck's interest in militaria started during his wartime childhood in Townsville, where there was a huge Allied military base. "The Australian Army had a camp and firing range on our farm," he says. In the 1950s, while Australians tried to forget about the war, Beck set about ensuring that they wouldn't, buying military vehicles and equipment at knockdown prices. "It's preserving history,'' he says of the collection, which he and his wife Barbara opened to the public...
...museum's reconstructed WWII Igloo hangar, the P-39 occupies pride of place. Beck battled bureaucrats and rival collectors to take possession of the plane after it was salvaged from Cape York, where it crash-landed with five other fighters in May 1942. "When I die," says the 67-year-old, only half joking, "I want my ashes placed in the cockpit...