LAST EDITED ON Sep-26-22 AT 06:42 PM (EDT)
Episode 20: "H&H Ltd., Shipwrights"HMS Barbican - The Royal Navy has a tradition of naming its most significant shore installations as if they were ships (the traditional term is "stone frigate"). HMNB Folkestone is fictitious, but many similar naval bases existed in the British Isles in wartime (and a few still operate today). A "barbican" is a type of medieval fortification.
Zuiun - More formally the Aichi E16A Zuiun ("Lucky Cloud"), a single-engine reconnaissance seaplane employed by the Imperial Japanese Navy toward the end of World War II. Aviation battleships such as Hyūga and Ise carried them. Intended as the replacement for the E13A, which was itself the successor to the Mitsubishi F1M biplane (one of which Mio Sakamoto can be seen flying in Strike Witches the Movie). The 501st JFW has one as part of its small fleet of conventional aircraft for training and (as seen here) liaison purposes.
Atago - Second of the Takao-class heavy cruisers. The real one was sunk by American submarines in October 1944.
Chikuma - Second of the Tone-class heavy cruisers. Sunk the day after Atago.
Nagato - Name ship of the Nagato-class battleships. Survived the war only to be used as a target ship in the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests. Likes to snuggle with destroyers.
Amagi - The second Unryū-class fleet carrier, completed near the end of the war. Not to be confused with the scrapped-before-completion name ship of the abandoned pre-war battlecruiser class by the same name, the second hull of which was converted into the fleet carrier Akagi. The wartime Amagi appears late in season 2 of Strike Witches, and in the movie.
Zuihō - Name ship of the Zuihō-class light aircraft carriers. Should not be confused with Zuikaku, second of the Shōkaku-class fleet carriers.
Katsuragi - Amagi's sister ship, the fourth planned but third-and-last-completed ship in the class. In this setting, with Fusō one of the most prosperous and militarily productive members of the Alliance, one expects the other planned Unryū-class ships actually were (or are still in the process of being) built, making her the fourth of, eventually, seven.
more destroyers than you can shake a stick at - Since they were smaller than capital ships, cheaper and quicker to produce, less costly to operate, required much smaller crews, and could do a number of different jobs, WWII-era navies had hordes of destroyers. Depending on how you count them, the wartime Imperial Japanese Navy had either 20 or 24 destroyers of the Fubuki class, and 15 or 16 other classes of destroyer besides. (Admittedly, one of those classes, the Shimakaze class, had only one ship in it, but still.) Meanwhile, the US Navy had hundreds of the damn things, including a hundred and seventy-five of the Fletcher class alone! (One of which, interestingly enough, was the USS Hutchins. No relation.)
Kyōto - Evidently the capital of Fusō didn't move to Tokyo during their version of the Meiji Restoration.
polar convoy system - Based on a similar strategy for getting supplies and equipment to the Russians during WWII.
Baltland - The Strike Witches world's equivalent of a combined Sweden and Norway.
Satō - No relation; Satō is the most common surname in both Japan and Fusō.
that doesn't stop a certain sort of girl from trying - In real life, too, women have been finding ways into military roles reserved for men pretty much as long as there have been military roles reserved for men. It isn't the source material's intent or function to explore the social and political implications of witches' special place in society, but I find it interesting to consider, since they're simultaneously privileged and much-demanded of - and I suspect that in the setting, the dividing line in terms of taking part in the war effort would particularly rankle some young women who didn't happen to be born with magical ability. In that world, the tagline on this notoriously patronizing WWI recruiting poster is probably "Gee! I wish I were a Witch" - and gets on just as many people's nerves as the real thing. Hence, young women like Megumi Satō, while not exactly common, are - as Admiral Sugita observes - far from unknown.
Mogami - Name ship of the Mogami class of heavy cruisers. In real life, sunk two days after Atago and one after Chikuma during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Akebono - The real Akebono (a Fubuki-class destroyer) rescued Mogami's survivors before scuttling the wreck with a torpedo. She was herself sunk only a couple of weeks later.
oh, a long time ago - Or a long time in the future, depending on how you reckon it; he's talking about his time in the Morita Navy in Aegis Florea.
A7M Reppū - IRL, the successor to Mitsubishi's highly successful A6M Zero line of fighters. By all accounts an extremely capable aircraft (Saburō Sakai, Mio Sakamoto's ace archetype, tested it and said it was the fastest airplane he'd ever seen), but it came along too late to make any difference; only 10 were ever built.
Imperial Order of the Rising Sun and Waxing Moon - Based on the real-life Japan's oldest order of merit, the Order of the Rising Sun. The real badge looks basically the same, but without the bit of obsidian to represent the moon that exists in the Fusō version of the national crest.
the Emperor's Great Seal - Fusō uses the Imperial Seal, the golden chrysanthemum, where Japan would use the State Seal.
In terms of its use here—"caused the Emperor's Great Seal to be affixed"—there is only one physical object which can serve this purpose. This indicates that Hirohito (or one of his entourage, anyway) had the foresight to bring it with the imperial party to Brandenburg, just in case His Majesty needed to issue an official order while he was abroad.
the accession to the throne of Empress Jingū - In the real world, Empress Jingū is a second-century-AD figure whose historicity cannot be firmly attested, and who is therefore considered legendary-if-not-mythical by modern historians. Even the ones who agree she exists customarily don't consider her a regnant empress these days, instead relegating her to the status of consort empress while her husband was alive and a mere regent for her underage son after said husband died.
In this setting, Jingū takes the place of Emperor Jimmu, the similarly mythical grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu and first emperor of Japan, whose reign is traditionally dated to 660 BC, and of whom all the emperors since, right up to the present day, are asserted to be direct descendants. Imperial Fusō, like imperial Japan, uses three calendars: the Gregorian, for dealing with the outside world; the one dated according to the reigns of emperors; and one in which the first year of Jimmu's reign is year 1. (As noted elsewhere, this last is where the "Zero" in things like the Type Zero naval fighter come from; it was adopted in 1940, or the imperial year 2600.)
Mio Sakamoto's radio callsign is a reference to (this version of) Empress Jingū.
a pair of medals and a neatly folded length of red-and-white ribbon - The Emperor, however, does not travel with spare high-level decorations and honors along, just in case His Majesty needs to hand some out on the spur of the moment. We will probably never know which member of his entourage he took this set from. (He will presumably have replaced them when they got home.)
I didn't realize your Emperor had a sense of humor - Indeed, this would come as a shock to many, if not all, Fusōnese. Yoshika's taking it very well! A lot of her countrymen and -women would be disturbed at the very thought; but I assure you, this is as humorous as it is physically possible for this Emperor to be.
a couple of ideas that worked for a few of my friends - He's deriving a fair bit of the operating principle for Mogami's new rig from what he knows of how Ishiyaman kōbu-kai battle machines work.
a thing I have to take care of - In the original draft of this scene, Shizuka just played her usual straight-man routine, calling Wilma's attention to the breach of security like a combination of Sam the Eagle and the Kirstie Alley Saavik from Star Trek II. Upon reflection, I decided it was time for her to progress along that arc a little bit. She's learned how to deal with these people, and not just by letting their antics pass.
The Compasses - Not based on any one real pub.
Mio seemed to know and be known there - A lot of people, including her wingmates, forget that Mio spent a lot of time in Britannia even before she joined the 501st. The development work on the Miyafuji engine and the Hurricane Striker that was the first production model to employ it were both done there, and she was Dr. Miyafuji's techno-magical consultant and test pilot for all of it.
Some talk of Atalanta and some of Artemis - This is the local version of the old marching song "British Grenadiers", which long-time NXE readers will know is a favorite of DJ Langley-Croft's, and which traditionally begins, "Some talk of Alexander and some of Hercules." The tortured pronunciation of "Artemis" to make it rhyme with the next line is a typically Britannian method of dealing poetically with loanwords from classical antiquity.
Of Dido, Alexandra... - The original song mentions Hector and Lysander here. In this setting, Dido, the legendary queen of Carthage, was presumably a more heroic figure than the tortured, screwed-around-with-by-the-gods, and ultimately suicidal figure she is in the real-life Aeneid; Alexandra is, of course, the ancient witch version Alexander the Great, one of the few witches of antiquity to take a direct hand in world affairs beyond the slaying of monsters (and equally revered and reviled for doing so).
"Umi Yukaba" - Traditional Japanese sailor's song. A rough capsule translation of the lyrics would run something like, "If I go to sea I'll end up dead, but it's for the Emperor, so that's OK." Banned by the occupation authorities after World War II, even though it's one of the relatively few popular military songs of the time that doesn't specifically mention killing Americans.
I assigned him to guard the top-secret prototype - She's an officer now; she can do that kind of thing. :)
according to the Hays Code - The equivalent of how someone familiar with American/Liberion motion pictures would say "keep it G-rated" before the imposition of the MPAA ratings system in the 1960s. The Hays Code (formally the Motion Picture Production Code) was the MPAA ratings system's stricter, stonier-faced predecessor, a set of moralistic guidelines about what was and was not acceptable content for American movies. Compare to the Comics Code of the 1950s, although, ironically, by the time the Comics Code came along, the motion picture industry was already moving past the strictures of the Hays Code.
I think I'll go and lie down for a while - In the animated version of this scene, she'd be staggering away with the spiral-y eyes.
a little top-heavy - Jokes about Kancolle character design aside (and in fact, the design of the shipgirl Mogami is quite modestly proportioned), the real Mogami class was very top-heavy as initially configured. This was a common failing of Japanese warships designed in the Washington Treaty era, a result of trying to cram as much firepower as humanly conceivable into hulls that at least looked like they were obeying the treaty-stipulated tonnage limits.
metal at one of the welds glowing - As originally built, the first two Mogami-class ships also had serious problems with failed welds, which were still a relatively new technology in warship construction at the time.
As an aside, in this scene and going forward, the logic for whether Mogami's name is italicized in any given reference has to do with whether she's acting as the ship, or just the girl. Hence, you will note that it's italicized in most of this scene, but when her rig sinks and she's trying to swim back to shore, it no longer is. Just for the record, that's not accidental.
Episode 21: "Sea Trials"
I'm sorry again for ramming you the other day - The real-life Japanese heavy cruiser Mogami was involved two unfortunate collisions in the course of her service, neither of which was her fault. The first was on June 5, 1942, during the Battle of Midway. While performing an emergency turn to starboard, Mogami rammed her sister ship Mikuma when the latter mistakenly made a 90° turn instead of the 45° turn commanded by the flagship.
This time around, Mikuma was tied up pierside minding her own business when Mogami crashed into her side, having lost control during a propulsion test, and holed one of her fuel tanks. The resultant mess made the base commander lean on Admiral Sugita to get the weird witch experiment the hell out of his dockyard.
(Two years later, during the Battle of Surigao Strait, she was accidentally rammed by the heavy cruiser Nachi and so badly damaged that she had to be scuttled.)
Kancolle fan art showing Mogami and Mikuma and/or Nachi banged up and bandaged after running into each other are thus fairly common.
Lieutenant (junior grade) Toshiro Nishimura - An ancestor, or meta-ancestor, of Tezuo Nishimura of Iron Age (and Dìqiú Suite) fame.
at Vickers here in Britannia - Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd. of Barrow-in-Furness, England, built a number of warships for the Imperial Japanese Navy in the days before Japan's native shipbuilding industry was up to constructing really large combatants, most notably the battlecruiser (later converted into a battleship) Kongō.
Modern Witch magazine's "Our Witches at War" feature - "They said the name of the movie in the movie!"
two-hundred-magic-mass - The "magic mass" unit seems to have been devised for the World Witches setting in order to have an alternate expansion for "mm", so that witch guns based on real-life ones but scaled down to suit can still be designated with the same numerical labels as their real counterparts, despite not being the same size any longer. In this case, these guns are equivalent to the 20-centimeter (200mm) by 50-caliber Third Year Type naval rifles fitted to the real Mogami after her conversion from light to heavy cruiser in 1937. (A "Third Year Type" naval gun, in Japanese parlance, was one using the Welin breechblock system, which the Japanese started using in 1914, aka Taishō 3.)
Type 6 O-To super-heavy Tracked Land Striker - The Imperial Japanese Army had plans for a series of super-heavy tanks in World War II, but they were never realized, possibly because it occurred to someone that tanks the size of office buildings were about the last thing the IJA needed with the style of fighting they usually did in the environments where they usually found themselves. They've shown up as fantasy tanks in World of Tanks, the line concluding with the Tier X Type 5 Heavy; the Type 6 mentioned here is the Land Striker version of a purely hypothetical Even Bigger Tank.
Not to be confused with the similarly fictional "Heavy Tank No. 6" to be found elsewhere in the Japanese tech tree in World of Tanks, which is just a German Tiger I with a Japanese gun in it.
a twin-engined transport aircraft of a type she wasn't familiar with - A Caudron C.440, utility aircraft and light transport built in France in the 1930s and used by various European air forces and airlines before and after World War II.
the Kenpeitai investigation - The Kenpeitai ("Military Police Corps") is, as the name suggests, the military police arm of the Imperial Fusō Army. Unlike the real-life IJA's equivalent, which was also a brutal and much-feared secret police organization along lines similar to the German SS or SD or Soviet NKVD, the IFA's Kenpeitai is a straightforward MP force, providing security, law enforcement, and criminal investigation services within the Army. In her capacity as Inspector-General of the Emperor's Witches, Reimu is the nominal head of the Kenpeitai bureau that deals with magical matters, such as the military discipline of the Army's witches, and so it fell to them to investigate the Zauberschule phenomenon when it came to the Emperor's attention.
There was no opportunity to mention this in the text, but I should note that this was roundly resented by the much more numerous Navy witches back in Fusō who were involved in the movement at the time of the investigation, because the Kenpeitai has no business investigating/harassing (as they perceived it) naval personnel. The IFN has its own separate internal police/security/CID service, the Tokkeitai (short for Tokubetsu Keisatsutai, "Special Police Corps"), which, naturally, the Kenpeitai officers investigating Zauberschule for Reimu did not bother to consult. The IFA/IFN rivalry isn't as openly violent as the real-life IJA/IJN one, but it's still definitely a thing.
a pained expression, as of someone whose friend has just committed a catastrophic faux pas - Picture, for instance, the look that must have crossed Baron Alvenley's face in 1813, when Beau Brummell turned to him and inquired of the Prince Regent, who was standing right next to him, "Alvanley, who's your fat friend?"
Rasputin. Paracelsus. Emperor Nero. - Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (1869–1916), the Orussian "mystic" whose disastrous influence on Tsarina Alexandra, though curtailed by his assassination, eventually led to the revolution of 1940 discussed in The Fall of Petrograd; Theophrastus von Hohenheim (1493?–1514), a Helvetian physician/theologian who did some good work in the infant field of medicine, but was also an astrologer, self-proclaimed prophet, and general metaphysical charlatan; and Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37–68), fifth Roman emperor, tyrant, maniac, matricide, and generally unsound dude.
Perrine's Calaisienne [palate] - A bit oddly, Perrine's official biography says that she's the daughter of the noble family that once ruled the Pas-de-Calais region of Gallia, while the real-life flying ace she's inspired by, Pierre Clostermann, was the son of parents from Alsace and Lorraine (and was actually born in Brazil, because his father was a diplomat who happened to be stationed there at the time). Had they kept his Alsace-Lorraine origins in Perrine's design, her family might have had an old connection to the Count of Haut-Colmar.
my spleen will grow back - Fun fact: IRL, I don't have one! It was collateral damage in the great kidney débâcle of 2012.
we'll rant and we'll roar like true Fusō sailors - This is the chorus of "Spanish Ladies" ("Iberican Ladies" in this setting), a British sea shanty (circa 1796?). The original line refers to British sailors. You probably heard this sung by Robert Shaw's character in Jaws.
through adversities we'll conquer - These are some of the seldom-sung lyrics to the trio section of "Royal Air Force March Past", the RAF's official anthem. Note the embedded reference to the RAF's motto, per aspera ad astra ("through adversity to the stars").
we fought, we drank, she made her ancestors proud - A bit strangely, given how young the characters are supposed to be, "Reimu and Marisa throw a sake party at the Hakurei Shrine and everybody gets hog-wallowing drunk, often with spontaneous danmaku duels rendered inept by alcohol" is a very common trope in Touhou doujinshi.
began to snore like an idling diesel submarine - The particulars of what sort of drunk most of the players in this scene are were largely suggested by Geoff.
mes fleurs de la nuit - "My flowers of the night".
Karlsland-Liberion Line steamship Hyperion - A very Titanic-like liner called Hyperion appears in the opening cinematic of X-COM: Terror From the Deep, wherein it is attacked and sunk by the aliens. An X-COM submarine then arrives to investigate, and it is strongly suggested that the lone aquanaut dispatched on the mission is killed. This incident kicks off the game's storyline.
the cruiser's tactical radio callsign... Schwarzkatze - "Black Cat", presumably a reference to Oskar.
Nakajima Ki-201 Karyū - The planned successor to the Nakajima Kikka, Japan's first jet fighter, based largely on an Me 262 technical data package sent over by Messerschmitt in the closing stages of the war. As far as anyone knows, the war ended before any Ki-201 airframes could be built. The name means "fire dragon".
refuel and rearm - Mogami's sea rig doesn't burn fuel as such, but it's a handy verbal shorthand for replenishment of the water her steam plant needs to function.
Episode 21a: "A Day at Crone Rock"
a poncho and a pair of galoshes - Based on Mogami's official rainy-season art from a few years back.
Shanghai and her red-clad counterpart, Hōrai - Alice's dolls don't have names (or even really identities) canonically, but the fandom convention has developed that the two most often depicted with her, one in a blue dress and the other in red, are special and have their own names. (And, much like a certain other pair of predominantly blue and red automatons, there is a standing argument among some fans as to which of them is which.)
the International Settlement in Shanghai - IRL, the International Settlement was formed in 1865 by the mergers of the British and American concessions in Qing-dynasty China, both of which were founded in the 1840s under the terms of the unequal treaties imposed after the First Opium War. It was an enclave within the port city of Shanghai in which foreign traders enjoyed extraterritorial rights (i.e., they were subject to their own laws rather than those of China). The real-life version was stormed by the Japanese at the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, and the Allies renounced their extraterritorial status in an agreement with the Chiang government in '43.
In the OWaW universe, the Settlement's origins were broadly similar, and its ending came because the Cathayan government expelled all foreigners and sealed its borders at the start of the Second Neuroi War. It's not entirely clear to the members of the Grand Alliance why this was done; opinions are split between "the Cathayans were hoping to avoid the Neuroi noticing their country" and "the Cathayan government has a secret pact with the Neuroi," although the latter is considered a daft conspiracy theory by most mainstream authorities, given how disinclined to parley the Neuroi generally are.
Shanghai can move by herself - Touhou fandom does not have a consensus as to exactly what the deal is with Alice's dolls. The canonical explanation is that she's controlling them all herself, which makes scenes in which they're doing housework and otherwise interacting in mundane fashions just examples of her very elaborately playing with dolls, but as noted above, there's a substantial following for the idea that the one or two most commonly depicted with her may be semi- or completely autonomous. Here, that is the case.
killed by a tsuchigumo - Spider yōkai, associated with pestilence. Very nasty. Not to be confused with tsuchinoko, the booze-loving fat snakes.
a skipjack tuna - The skipjack, Katsuwonus pelamis, is not a true tuna (they all belong to the genus Thunnus), but a similar pelagic perciform fish (it is also sometimes classifed with the bonitos, which, technically, it isn't either). Common worldwide, it is a staple of Japanese cuisine. They can grow to 40+ inches long and weigh as much as 75 pounds, although the one Marisa brought was a more average specimen, around 30 inches and 20 pounds—still a fairly substantial load for a five-year-old to carry up a mountain.
They're also reasonably well-known in naval history circles as the namesake of USS Skipjack (SSN-585), the U.S. Navy's third nuclear submarine and the first to be the lead boat of a class of more than one.
this obnoxious hāfu girl - Hāfu, which is literally a Japanese transliteration of the English word "half", refers to a person with one Japanese and one non-Japanese parent. The usage is the same in Fusōnese.
Who's General Araki? - General Sadao Araki (1877–1966) was a right-wing ultra-nationalist general of the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s. After participating in the February 26 Incident (an attempted coup by the right-wing faction within the Japanese armed forces) in 1936, he was purged from the Army, but two years later he became Minister of Education in the government of Prince Konoe Fumimaro, in which position he was one of the key figures behind the promotion of militarism in Japanese society in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Pacific War. As if that wasn't enough, he was also one of the architects and principal proponents of the "Northern Strategy", i.e., the seizure of Manchuria, which was not authorized by the government and which was one of the incidents that ultimately precipitated the war. He was convicted of war crimes in 1946, was released from prison on grounds of ill health in 1955, and died in 1966.
When Reimu met him, the Fusōnese version was Deputy Inspector General of Military Training, a highly placed member of a branch of the IFA that reported directly to the Emperor rather than the Army Ministry or the General Staff. For bureacratic reasons, this is also the department to which the Inspectorate General of the Emperor's Witches belongs, so Araki fancied himself Reimu's superior officer, even though he actually wasn't. In OWaW, he was pushed out after the February 26 Incident as in real life, but not named to a ministership in 1938, as the Fusō Sea Incident had happened in the intervening year and put Fusōnese society on a different course that rendered his views marginal at best.
Episode 22: "To Glory We Steer"
Ho-155/5 twin cannons - The Ki-201 was never built IRL, but it was planned to have a pair of Ho-155s and a pair of Ho-5s, although not built into twin mounts of one each or anything like that. That is a liberty taken for the sake of making them (even vaguely!) plausible for a witch to handle manually.
"To Glory We Steer" - A lyric from "Heart of Oak", the march of the British Royal Navy:
Come cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer,
To add something more to this wonderful year;
To honour we call you, as freemen not slaves,
For who are so free as the sons of the waves?
Heart of oak are our ships, jolly tars are our men,
We always are ready: steady, boys, steady!
We'll fight and we'll conquer again and again!
The "wonderful year" mentioned in the first verse was 1759, a year in which British forces achieved several major victories over the French in the Seven Years' War (better known in the United States as the French and Indian War). The song was originally written in that year for a stage play.
Aichi A6M Seiran - The attack aircraft developed especially for use with the I-400-class sen-toku submarines. By all accounts, quite an aeronautical achievement, but they never saw action, and all but one were destroyed after the war. (The survivor is in the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center.)
The name means "storm out of a clear sky," no doubt a reference to the aircraft's intended use to attack land targets in the US and Panama that American forces thought were out of reach of Japanese attack.
a spare Seiran sitting around - In the second season of Strike Witches, a group of witches launch from I-400 as part of an anti-Neuroi operation in the Mediterranean. It's never established whether the submarines were specifically developed to deploy witches, Special Forces-style, in-universe, or whether they, too, were originally meant to carry conventional airplanes. Here I take the view that the Seiran was developed for this purpose, but then the project was abandoned and the submarines recycled as witchcraft carriers, while the planes were pushed into a more general reconnaissance and opportunistic surface attack role, alongside other float planes such as the Zuiun.
breakbulk - Non-containerized freight. Freight containers did exist before World War II, but they were mainly used for military logistics, and didn't take their internationally standardized commercial/intermodal form, as we know them today, until the 1950s.
What outfit they got you with these days? MI5? SIS? - Respectively, the UK's internal security agency, and the Secret Intelligence Service, commonly (but inaccurately) known as MI6.
MOE... Baker Street Irregulars, the Ministry of Unladylike Witchcraft - The Magical Operations Executive, the witchly version of the real-life Special Operations Executive. Part spies, but mostly infiltrators and saboteurs behind enemy lines, plus occasional other audacious activities. Called the Baker Street Irregulars partly as a Sherlock Holmes reference, because their headquarters were in Baker Street, London, and also sometimes nicknamed the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Colonel Donovan's motley band - The Liberion War Department's Office of Strategic Sorcery, this world's equivalent of the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA).
TUBE ALLOYS - Even by Annotations standards this is a big spoiler if you don't get the reference, so, if you'd rather find out anon, don't highlight within the box below:
TUBE ALLOYS was the code name for the British research project into the development of nuclear weapons, which was consumed by the American Manhattan Engineering District midway through the war.
DAMCON team - Short for "damage control", the party of sailors tasked with, if not repairing harm their ship has come to, at least making sure it doesn't get any worse, and restoring the ship to fighting condition. DAMCON teams put out fires, stop flooding, jury-rig damaged equipment--whatever it takes to prevent the ship from sinking and keep her in the fight.
Type 6 autocannon - Basically a twinned rig of Type 99s, as mentioned back in H&H Ltd. Called the Type 6 because it was standardized in 1946.
suicidal zeal and high explosives - Hannelore doesn't realized that Alice's "bomber" dolls aren't destroyed, merely returned to spirit form until she casts them again.
I don't really wanna walk home, but... - She also doesn't really want to drown all those Karlslandic sailors who are trapped inside if the ship really has turned evil, but she's keeping it light. She knows Perrine is aware of her real meaning.
Sonderkraftstoff - "Special fuel".
chicken carbonara for everyone - Chicken and pasta served with a sauce made from eggs and/or cream, hard cheese (usually Parmesan, sometimes combined with Romano), pancetta (or bacon), and pepper. A characteristically Roman dish. Suuuuuper yummy.
I can getcha there in an hour - The docks at Le Havre are around 120 miles from the Hôtel de Crillon, which should give you an idea of how fast Marisa is expecting to go. She can fly much faster than that, as it happens, but not with a passenger.
Episode 23: "Typical Circumstances"
why don't you take all my bloody aircraft - This anecdote is based on something that happened to the real Sir Frank Whittle in 1930, when he was a junior RAF pilot trying for a slot on a flying stunt team for that year's RAF Air Display at Hendon. During his flying days, Whittle was renowned for his skill and airmanship—and notorious for his recklessness and his habit of doing aerobatics without permission. That day he crashed not one but two aircraft while practicing stunts, escaping unharmed (apart from Flight Lt. Raeburn's wrath) both times.
back at the Heptagon - The differing number of sides on the War Department's new-in-1943 headquarters building near Washington is another of those little details that set the OWaW universe apart from the real world, like the country names. (As far as I know, it's one I made up myself, as opposed to the names, which I inherited from the World Witches setting.) In the real world, it has five sides; here, it has seven.
Fun fact: The Pentagon was designed with five sides because the plot of land it was originally intended to be built on happened to be a weird, irregular five-sided lot, and the War Department wanted to maximize the building's footprint for the available land. When FDR then decided to build it somewhere else, it would've been too expensive to completely scrap the design and start over, so the architects just converted it into a regular pentagon. (It also happens to resemble a modernized version of a medieval bastion fort, but that seems only to have occurred to anyone after the fact.)
All-the-Way LeMay - In real life, one of LeMay's several nicknames was "Bombs Away LeMay", based on his tendency to believe (as a disciple of the US Army Air Forces' infamous "Bomber Mafia") that heavy aerial bombardment could fix basically any military or diplomatic situation. That one doesn't fit as well in this setting, so I adjusted it a little. The others are true to life, however. (In some circles he was also known as "The Big Cigar", partly in reference to his fondness for big cigars, partly because it was a more polite and deniable way of calling him an enormous dick.)
I'll let you know what Hap decides - General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold (1886–1950) was the commanding general of the US Army Air Forces during World War II. Arnold was known for his explosive temper and his colossal capacity for overwork, both of which eventually combined to kill him. Technically speaking, he should have been disqualified from active duty in February 1943, when he suffered the first of four(!) heart attacks he suffered before the end of the war, but his services were considered so essential to the war effort that the rule was ignored; he wasn't forced to retire until early 1946, when he came close to suffering a fifth heart attack on a trip to South America. He then got around to that fifth heart attack in 1948 and died two years leter, never having fully recovered.
As such, by July of 1946, he should be out of the service, but perhaps in this setting he takes better care of himself. Or has a very talented medic witch on his headquarters staff.
Schloss Hexeberg - Witch Mountain Castle. Roughly analogous to the real-world Waldeck Castle, a ruined castle near Calw that is believed to date to the 12th century.
thanks for the vote of confidence in my SERE skills - "SERE" is an acronym for "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape" (or, if you're in the British Forces, "Survive, Evade, Resist, Extract"), a training program meant to teach aircrews how to survive in hostile territory, evade efforts by the enemy to capture them, and conduct themselves in/escape from captivity if evasion fails. Shirley's use of it here is a mild anachronism—SERE wasn't codified as a doctrine under that name until well after World War II—but the root principles date from aircrew survival training conducted by Allied forces beginning in that conflict.
(Obviously witch SERE training is a bit lighter on the "Resistance and Escape" part, since the Neuroi don't take prisoners, but their program probably at least touches on those points in case they go down someplace where the locals may not be friendly.)
Episode 24: "Witch Hunt"
the red chemlight the Countess wore - These things, which are basically milspec glow sticks, are normally used to mark landing zones and points of interest at night, when smoke from a signal grenade wouldn't be visible. IRL, chemlights weren't invented until the 1970s, but what with the lively alchemical scene in this setting, I assume some form of (possibly magical or quasi-magical) chemiluminescence would have been discovered long before then.
Their placement in this application is derived from the positions of real aircraft formation lights, which, in turn, are descended from the side marker lights on ships: red on the port side, green on the starboard.
Was ist das? - Karlslandic: "What is this?"
instant ramen - Another mild anachronism; IRL, instant ramen soup of this type wasn't invented until 1958. After I'd had the mental image that led to this scene, though, I couldn't resist.
bitte - "please".
mein Fehler - "my mistake".
I regret I can't come with you - In the actual Touhou games, Sakuya can fly. This is because basically everyone in the actual Touhou games can fly. No explanation is provided for this in the cases of characters who aren't some kind of flying supernatural creature anyway; it's just sort of required by the gameplay mechanics.
the first time a beagle and a rabbit have ever worked together - Beagles were bred to hunt rabbits, from larger dogs meant to hunt larger, more dangerous prey.
she could clearly see the Stuttgart Hive = Here I'm taking the view that Neuroi Hives, like the Neuroi themselves, have a lot of variation in appearance. The Stuttgart one is meant to call to mind things like the Citadel from Half-Life 2, filtered through the Neuroi's usual "design language".
the white flag of the beagle's tail tip - Zoology fun fact #1: That's why they have that! Not necessarily for low-light conditions, but so the hunters following the hounds can see where they are in tall grass and underbrush. (It's also why scent hounds tend to walk with their tails held up.)
Teufelhunde - Some sources claim that the term "devil dogs" for members of the United States Marine Corps comes from a nickname given to them by the German soldiers who faced them at the Battle of Belleau Wood during World War I, and was derived from a terrifying mythical creature of that name in western German folklore. Today, most historians agree that that whole story was made up by a newspaper reporter back in the States to exaggerate how intimidating the Germans found the Marines, but like a lot of fake war lore, it has a nice ring to it.
cousins to the Welsh gwyllgi... - The spectral black dog of Welsh and English folklore, as referenced in (among other things) The Hound of the Baskervilles and "Laura Kinney and the Black Shuck".
... and the Black Beast of the English moors - A similar but distinct cryptid, exemplified by the Beast of Bodmin Moor, which most modern believers think is not a supernatural creature, but rather some kind of escaped big cat.
Howard Carter's Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen - The famed Egyptologist's memoir of his 1922 discovery of the eponymous tomb, published in three volumes between 1923 and 1933. Present-day reprints usually use the modern English spelling of the pharaoh's name, Tutankhamun. Sakuya is reading Volume 1, Search, Discovery and Clearance of the Antechamber.
a black jaguar - Zoology fun fact #2: Despite the generic name Panthera for the large cats, there's no specific animal called a "panther". The animals so described are either African leopards (Panthera pardus) or American jaguars (Panthera onca) with black coats. The technical term for them is "melanistic", i.e., they have an excess of melanin, the pigment that gives dark hair and skin its color. Black jaguars and leopards still have their spots, which can usually be seen on close inspection under the right light.
It's unclear which type of panther Lucchini's canonical familiar is (every source I've seen just says "black panther"), and since it seems equally unlikely for an Italian witch to have encountered either species (since neither is native to Europe), I basically just mentally flipped a coin.
And yes, the fact that Lucchini and Ombra briefly borrowed Yoshika's new Striker does mean that, technically speaking, Ombra is now a jet jaguar.
Episode 25: "The Wedding Bell Blues"
wireless PTO - "Power Take-Off", the same way other magic weapons draw power from Miyafuji engines without a lot of awkward wires.
Ursula built it - Waaaay back in Episode 9! Amusingly, shortly after I wrote this scene and while the rest of the episode was still under construction, someone wondered whatever happened to both the lightning rifle and the Episode 9 mini-jet in a reply to the episode teaser I had posted.
Gute Nacht, meine Geliebte, und süße Träume - "Goodnight, my beloved, and sweet dreams."
Nichts verraten! - "No spoilers!" (More literally, "Tell nothing!")
Oui, oui, comme tu veux. Bonne nuit, cheval de ma soeur - "Yes, yes, as you wish. Goodnight, my sister's horse."
Else where would they keep the nightmares? - I'm very sorry about this. (Koakuma is not.)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom - T.E. Lawrence's memoir of his time fighting in Arabia during the First World War. Presumably a somewhat different narrative in this setting. IRL, the title comes from a quotation from the Bible (Proverbs 9:1 in the King James Version), and was originally to be the title of a different book Lawrence, who was an archaeologist before the war, was writing about seven great cities of the Middle East.
'Tschuldigung - A contraction of Entschuldigung ("apology"). Germans say Entschuldigung where an English-speaker would say "sorry," "excuse me," etc. Clipping off the first syllable is common in conversation, akin to the English "'scuse me."
a stranger's prana - From the Sanskrit word for "breath", prana is the word for vital energy or lifeforce in Indian mysticism. In OWaW, it's one of a number of different words magicians of various traditions use more or less interchangeably to talk about magic power (compare the Polynesian term mana, commonly used in RPG magic systems IRL). It does not literally have a scent—Patchouli is being facetious—but some witches adept at esoteric fundamentals can identify prana from specific individuals.
Runway 31 - Runways are numbered based on their heading divided by 10, so any runway that can be used in either direction has two identities, derived from the directions one is facing when looking down the runway from one end or the other. The single physical runway at Saint-Ulrich is slightly off northwest-southeast, so from the castle looking outward, it's Runway 13 (130°), and from the other end facing back toward the castle, it's Runway 31 (310°).
it's a motorcycle - Specifically, a 1937 Moto Guzzi GTS 500, like this one.
the slightly taller hill that stood to the northeast of Mont Saint-Ulrich - IRL, there's a third castle ruin (Château de Haut-Ribeaupierre) in approximately this position, at the top of the massif of which the hills where Saint-Ulrich and the Girsberg stand are also part.
didn't have any proper blueprints to work from - In fact, the only reference they had was a Taishō-era travel book they found in the base library entitled A Tour of the Shrines of Fusō, featuring numerous but not outstandingly high-quality black-and-white photographs of, well, the shrines of Fusō. The model they chose was not the Hakurei Shrine, which is so obscure it isn't in the book, but rather another, similar-size shrine in Kyūshū.
get me some dango - Round rice-flour dumplings, usually served three to five on a stick. They come in many varieties. Reimu's favorite is hanami dango, the three-colored variety (pink, white, and green) traditionally served at flower-viewing (hanami) time in the spring.
aboard His Majesty's battleship Kongō at sea - This indicates that the Emperor was on his way back home from Neukarlsland when he promulgated this edict (the text of which was then telegraphed to Kyōto be announced and distributed).
a veteran's land grant - Marisa Kirisame, gentlewoman farmer. ... Yeah, maybe not.
Episode 26: "Dearly Beloved"
streams and swirls and intricate geometric arrays of multicolored light - The visuals here owe something to minusT's "Eternal Night Part One", which must have taken forever to render.
taijitu - The formal name for what is better known as the "yin-yang" symbol in the West. (Technically there is a range of Taoist diagrams which fall under the taijitu rubric, but the yin-yang variant is the best-known nowadays.) A common motif in Reimu's danmaku, which strikes me as a little odd since she's a Shinto priestess, but hey, I don't make the rules.
pointilist representations - Pointilism is a 19th-century art technique that involves painting a picture out of individual colored dots that resolves into an image at a distance. Halftone printing works on a similar visual principle (as does modern video imaging, come to that, at a much higher resolution).
in Ōita, that one time - Ōita Prefecture is in the northeast corner of Japan's westernmost home island, Ky&363;shū—quite far from Reimu's home prefecture of Nagano, which suggests how far afield her duties sometimes took her even before the Emperor sent her overseas. Ōita is known for its hot springs and traditional inns.
the great unsealing in Aokigahara - Closer to home, Aokigahara or the Sea of Trees is a forest in neighboring Yamanashi Prefecture, south of Nagano, near Mount Fuji. Aokigahara has been notorious as Japan's "suicide forest" for decades, and was traditionally believed to be haunted by the spirits of the dead long before it earned that reputation.
period costs of World War II vehicles - These are surprisingly difficult to find on the spur of the moment, and are little more than educated guesses based on scanty evidence. Similarly, the exchange rate of US$4.20 per German Karlslandic Mark is based on a historical figure—that is what the real German Empire's Mark was pegged at in the days before World War I when both the Mark and the dollar were based on a gold standard. That's probably not the case for the Karsland Mark and Liberion dollar in 1946, but still, it conveys the general idea. Type 82 Kübelwagens were not terribly expensive, but they were also not free. (For comparison's sake, the 1941 Willys contract to produce the MB jeep specified a unit price of $738.74, which would be around $15,000 today depending on which inflation calculator you consult. Ford GPW jeeps cost slightly more per unit, around $780.)
an eight-pointed star... surrounding a circular medallion featuring an eagle - This is the star of the Order of the Black Eagle, a Prussian chivalric order, membership of which was limited to members of the House of Hohenzollern and their closest retainers. It ranked just above the Order of the Red Eagle, the one the Kaiser made Gryphon a member of back in season 1.
Winifreda - A Karlslandic name which means "peaceful friend". Fritz probably thought himself very clever for coming up with that when he decided he needed a proper name to put on the paperwork ("Witch-Type Anomalous Neuroi X-11" is so impersonal). Technically speaking, only about half of it is right, but it's the thought that counts.
Reimu's ribbon on Marisa's hat - I've seen this in at least one illustration, but I haven't managed to find it again. The search terms are tricky to formulate, since both the hat and the ribbon appear in virtually every picture of the two of them together anyway.
Semper paratus - Latin: "Always prepared". Also the motto of the United States Coast Guard.
the time difference between here and Kyōto - Alsace, along with the rest of Gallia, is on Central European Time (GMT+1), while Fusō is on Fusō Standard Time (GMT +9). Thus, Kyōto is eight hours ahead of Ribeauvillé, and it is not, in fact, the middle of the night there in this scene. It's 6 AM at Saint-Ulrich and two in the afternoon in Kyōto.
kosode - The top worn as part of a traditional miko uniform. Like a kimono (which evolved from it), but shorter and with wider sleeves. Originally underwear, it later graduated into an everyday garment, not unlike the modern-day T-shirt.
winding her sarashi - Bandage-like cloth wrappings commonly used for a variety of underclothes purposes in Japan, before the arrival and wide popularization of Western-style undergarments. In this instance, being used as an alternative to a brassière. (In Touhou art, Reimu is often shown obviously wearing sarashi in this way, since her customary top has large armholes and no sleeves, so the binding can be seen at the sides.)
it felt weird to have her shoulders covered - By an amusing coincidence, kimono (the garment that evolved out of the kosode) literally means "thing to wear on the shoulders".
Sakamoto-taisa - There's an oddball little detail here that I had to stop and think about for a moment while writing this scene. In the WWII Japanese armed forces on which Fusō's forces are based, 海軍大佐 (kaigun-daisa) and 陸軍大佐 (rikugun-taisa) were equivalent ranks of the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army respectively, the former equating to a Western navy captain, the latter an army colonel. In both cases they contained the same rank component, 大佐; the leading two characters denoted which service the rank applied to. IJN personnel usually pronounced their 大 "dai" rather than "tai". In OWaW (following a convention in Strike Witches canon that is probably really just a translation error), Imperial Naval Air Service witches use the army-style ranks despite being naval officers, so Minna pronounces Mio's untranslated rank "taisa" in the army fashion.
the details of the ceremony - The wedding, as presented, is a hybrid of an early-twentieth-century Japanese Shinto wedding ceremony, a few fragmentary bits of Western tradition (e.g., the rings), and whole-cloth extrapolation based on my reckoning of how these two would personalize their approach.
what they were drinking - It is sake, but Mio is carefully pacing herself and not drinking as much as it looks like.
men and women in eldritch robes - These guys get everywhere!
could just about burn down a barn with a tenor saxophone - Based on the evidence presented in this video.
the Emperor's kikumon - The chrysanthemum seal of the Fusō imperial family. Not to be confused with the government seal, which is a paulownia flower in real life and a cherry blossom in Strike Witches.
I love yoooouuuu~! - Not drunk enough, forsooth.
technically they're orbs - The yin-yangs. She's talking about the yin-yangs.
Bastille Day... that detail had slipped my mind - Remilia may have forgiven the Fourth Republic for the sins of its predecessor, but that doesn't mean she's particularly eager to celebrate the Revolution.
![[ EPU Foyer ]](/GFX/e-p-u-black-0.gif){kind=small}
![[ Lab and Grill ]](/Grill/GFX/Buttons/grilltop.gif){kind=small}
![[ Bonus Theater!! ]](/Grill/GFX/Buttons/big.gif){kind=small}
![[ Rhetorical Questions ]](/Grill/GFX/Buttons/questions.gif){kind=small}
![[ CSRANTronix ]](/Grill/GFX/Buttons/rant.gif){kind=small}
![[ GNDN ]](/Grill/GFX/Buttons/gndn.gif){kind=small}
![[ Subterranean Vault ]](/Grill/GFX/Buttons/vault.gif){kind=small}
![[ Discussion Forum ]](/Grill/GFX/Buttons/forum.gif){kind=small}
![[ Gun of the Week ]](/Grill/GFX/Buttons/gotw.gif){kind=small}
Printer-friendly copy
