A Piece of U.S. Navy Heraldry

Well, there I was, at the annual Aviation Discovery Fest hosted by the Commemorative Air Force at a nearby local airport. And because I have had an interest in and love for old military aircraft, especially planes from World War II, and having some "free" time, I spent a pleasant afternoon seeing what was on display and taking photographs. I was also reveling a bit in just being able to be near some of these aircraft, as well as being reminded just how big (F4U Corsair) or comparatively small (B-24 Liberator long-range bomber) these planes seem now.

Anyway, there I was, reveling and looking and taking photographs, and I spotted a bit of heraldry on a display off to one side.

It wasn't an aircraft, but it had a coat of arms on it, and so I had to snap a picture of it to share with you.

It's a pretty standard Willys Jeep of WWII vintage, but unusually painted blue. The lettering just below the windscreen explains: "Tribute to: NAVY BLUE ANGELS".

For those of you who don't already know, the Blue Angels are the U.S. Navy's Flight Demonstration Squadron, a precision aerobatic team. (The U.S. Air Force also has a flight demonstration team, the Thunderbirds. I was lucky enough some years ago to have seen both the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels flying at an airshow, and got a nice photo of both teams' planes lined up in a row. This was back when both were flying the F-4 Phantom jet. So it was kind of cool -- sorry, but I'm kind of a plane nerd, in addition to heraldry -- to see all these Phantoms lined up in a row with the two different paint schemes, one white, the other blue, used by the two teams.)

Anyway, if you look closely at the Jeep, you'll notice a shield on the left rear fender.

This is the U.S. Navy Blue Angels insignia, designed in 1949 by Lt. Commander Raleigh "Dusty" Rhodes, featuring the team's diamond formation aircraft silhouette flying through clouds on a per bend blue and gold shield. The charges in the lower portion of the shield include a "nose-on" view of an aircraft carrier above a Navy pilot's wings, surrounded by the words "Naval Air Training Command" between two stars. The scroll beneath the shield simply says: "Blue Angels".

The overall design of the shield has remained the same since 1949, but the specific aircraft depicted in the clouds are updated to reflect the current aircraft used by the team. Zooming in (and you can click on the image above to do that yourself), the planes here do not appear to be the F/A-18 Hornets that the team currently flies; they may be the A-4 Skyhawks that were being flown around 1985.

It turned out to be a pleasant afternoon seeing a bunch of old airplanes, but it also turned out to have a bit of heraldry in it as well. And how nice is that?

And Now, For a Little Japanese History and Heraldry

Let me just say this right up front: I probably spend more time watching various shows on NHK, the Japanese English-speaking channel, than I do just about any other channel. (Although PBS probably runs a reasonably close second.) I like shows about Japanese art, history, scenic travel, and so on, and over the years I have learned a lot about the country.

So much, in fact, that my late wife and I decided that we could never visit Japan. Not because we didn't want to, but because we couldn't afford to ship all of the stuff we would buy there back home. You know, the pottery, the metalwork, the art, the fabrics and the yarns (for her), the paper, and so on and so forth. 

With all that as background, I was recently watching a show entitled Samurai Castles, and it covered, in part, Nagoya Castle and its history.

The Castle was built in the early 1600s on the site of an earlier castle. The port of Nagoya was important at that time, because it lay on the main route between Edo (now Tokyo) and Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, and it was a way for the new shogun to help consolidate his newly-acquired power following his victory at the Battle of Sekigehara in 1600.

And as I was watching that episode of Samurai Castles, it was obvious to me that the new castle there had been built by the new shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Now this was in part because I had been listening to the narrator, but more than that, because the castle is covered, Covered!, I say, in the Tokugawa kamon.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, mon, also called monshō, mondokoro, and kamon, are Japanese emblems used to decorate and identify an individual, a family, or (more recently) an institution, municipality or business entity.

While mon is an encompassing term that may refer to any such device, kamon and mondokoro refer specifically to emblems that are used to identify a family.

Let me show you what I mean with these screenshots of the program.

In each of these photos, on the eaves at various places, and on the circular ends of the roof tiles, you can clearly see the three hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa kamon. All of which serve to designate just whose castle this is.

Naturally, though, Ieyasu didn't build this castle himself. Following the Battle of Sekigehara in 1600, he reorganized roughly 200 daimyo and their territories into han, which were assessed by rice production.

Now, daimyo were powerful magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and nominally subordinate to the emperor and the kuge (an aristocratic class). In the term, dai means 'large', and myō stands for myōden, meaning 'private land'. (So, not terribly unlike the counts and their counties in Europe. Just sayin'.)

So in 1609, when the new shogun decided to rebuild Nagoya Castle, he levied the daimyo in central and southern Japan to supply the money, materials, and labor to do so. (As a plus, at least from his point of view, this would keep the daimyo sufficiently occupied and sufficiently poor that they couldn't set up an effective opposition to his rule. This tactic worked so well here and elsewhere that Japan had a nationwide peace for the next 250 years.)

Anyway, all that is basically an introduction to this next graphic, which shows the kamon of the daimyo from central and southern Japan who were drafted into helping to rebuild Nagoya Castle:

And there you have it! A brief introduction and explication with examples of Japanese "heraldry" as found in the history and in the structure of Nagoya Castle in central Japan.

Who knew you could find out so much about Japanese heraldry in a single 50-minute show while sitting in your own living room?

Heraldry of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick

"The Duchy of Grand Fenwick?" I hear you ask.

Well, yes, but ...

The fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick was stated to be the smallest independent country in Europe, in the novel The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberly.

In 1959, the novel was made into a movie of the same name, starring Peter Sellers (in three different roles), Jean Seberg, William Hartnell, and David Kossoff.

The plot of both the book and the movie is: An impoverished very small nation declares a war on the United States of America hoping to lose and then get financial support, but things don't go according to plan.

In the book, the arms of the Duchy are said to be a red double-headed eagle displayed, with two small scrolls held one in each beak, one with the word Aye (or here in the movie, Yea) and the other with the word Nay.

Unwilling, apparently, to leave it at something so relatively simple, the movie includes a much grander, far more complicated, coat of arms, complete with quartered arms on the breast of the eagle, complete with inescutcheon, along with other shields placed on the eagle's wings, as well as three crowns à la Russia. All, I have to assume, on the theory that a duchy with "grand" in its name should have an equally "grand" coat of arms.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the arms of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, as appeared in various scenes in the 1959 movie, The Mouse That Roared:

There was also another coat of arms that appeared in the movie on the side of a building in the Grand Duchy. It was very crudely painted, and, frankly, looks a little too much like something from a bucket shop to be real arms.

Nonetheless, there it was, and so I include it here for your perusal:

It is a quartered coat. I cannot make out what the charge in the first quarter is supposed to be. It looks vaguely like a seated human figure facing dexter, but that is only a guess. The second and third quarters appear to be Argent a lion passant gules, and the fourth quarter is an argent bend on a field of indeterminate color.

The shield is surmounted by a gentleman's helm which is so drawn as to be impossible for anyone to have actually worn (i.e., no one could get their head through that neck!), flanked by what looks like palm branches trying to be mantling. Above the helm is something golden, but impossible to make out what it is supposed to be.

Be that as it may, this is what the 1956 filmmakers used for heraldry in the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

Another Old Movie, Some More Old Heraldry

So there I was, watching the 1936 movie Rembrandt, about the life of Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn and starring Charles Laughton, Gertrude Lawrence, and Elsa Lanchester, produced and directed by Alexander Korda.

And by golly, wouldn't you know it? There were a couple of scenes with heraldry in them!

The first was this great flag with the arms of Amsterdam:

You can click on the image above to see the full-size picture, which shows the arms surmounted by a crown and the lion supporters more clearly.

The arms of Amsterdam are remarkably identifiable. Here's a depiction I saw, and photographed, in Maastricht:

There was a later, interior scene which also had some coats of arms. Alas, the combination of old black-and-white movie, watched on a television screen, and photographed with my phone's camera, left them just a little too blurry to adequately identify.

If you click on the image above to go to the full-size version and then zoom in, it's possible to get an inkling of what some of the charges on the shields might be, as well as the crowns that ensign each shield.

But, alas, not quite sharp enough for me to be able to see if these are real Dutch arms, or something just created for Hollywood. And this was back in the days before "on-location" shooting.

Still, I have seen windows like this, with many clear glass panes containing a single coat of arms more or less central to the window in a number of places in the Low Countries, so it's certainly evocative of the Netherlands of the time. Here's a modern example, found in Antwerp, Belgium:

It is nice to see Hollywood, even back in the day, getting at least some of the heraldry right!