Prisoners of war: the Japanese Buffs

When I was researching the AVG Flying Tigers in the 1980s, I acquired a bunch of Japanese newsreel and feature films from WWII. A staple of these movies was a sequence showing the destruction of Rangoon in the winter of 1941-42, including the "bombing" of a Brewster Buffalo wearing a crudely painted RAF roundel on its flank. I guessed at the time that this was a Dutch or British Buffalo captured in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and this indeed seems to be the case. There's an interesting page at Dave Pluth's Japanese Aircraft & Ship Modeling site, which shows this and other photos:

The photo was taken at Tachikawa naval airfield, near Tokyo, and published in the Asahi Shimbun newpaper in May 1943. The photo was credited to Kazetagawa-san and Gohyakki-san, as shown in the reproduction, which was taken from the newspaper archives and digitally enhanced. NAMBU Ryutaro provided these photos to Dave, who gave me permission to repost them here.

Below is an even more dramatic photo of Buffalos captured in the NEI. I count at least nine Buffs in this photo. Though they don't have the hinomaru on the flank, as in the photo above, they evidently carried it on the port upper wing surface, at least, to judge by the wing in the foreground. (That's a Buffalo wing, right?) The B-395 on the flank of the nearest Buff would probably be a Dutch marking; I have no idea what the E stands for. I assume that the fate of at least one of these aircraft was to be repainted in British colors and blown up for the newsreel cameraman.

After posting these photos, I received the following email: "The nine Brewster Buffalos with those horizontal 3-colored markings on the sides are indeed of the Dutch air force in the Indies. Only, these markings were to my knowledge used after the orange triangle used in the 2nd world war." Sure enough, all other photos of the Dutch Buffaloes do show the inverted triangle. Here's a mystery that I hope we can resolve!

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Also involved in this project are KUROSU Yoshihito, the Koku Asahi magazine, and Jim Lansale (who posted the article to Dave's website). Thanks to all of you for permission to show the photos here. And a tip of the virtual hat to John MacGregor who brought Japan's War in Color to my attention.