Puttering in the Study

#IntrepidCorrected - Revell's Classic 1/720 Essex Class Carrier (Corrected)

For many modelers of World War II ships, Revell's 1/720 scale model of the USS Intrepid (CV – 11) was an early favorite. It was cheap (two dollars, compared to four dollars for a Tamiya Akagi), easy to build, and gave you a big rectangular flight deck with a dozen aircraft for  living room carpet war games.  I built my first in 1973-74, and many more since then.

 

The kit was originally released in 1967 as the USS Franklin (CV–13), and was re-released as the USS Essex (CV-9) the next year. In 1972 it was rereleased as Intrepid. (CV-11). It was the only class of wartime aircraft carrier available in plastic modeling in or near the 1/700 scale until the advent of the water line Japanese manufacturers in the 1970s. While the flight deck is basically accurate, the hull shape is significantly undersized, and the island suffers from numerous inaccuracies.  The kit was greatly surpassed in accuracy by the Hasegawa Essex and Hancock kits in1974, and over 20 years later by a far more accurate series of Essex class carriers by Trumpeter and Dragon.

 

As a result of these later kits, the Revell Intrepid is not a logical candidate for building as anything other than a toy, as one of these later kits could be accurized far more easily. In fact, it would be significantly simpler to build an Essex class carrier in this scale from scratch than it would be to accurize or kitbash this kit into one. 

 

Nonetheless, the kit is a sentimental favorite of mine, and I recently began contemplating building a "corrected"version of the kit which would have the major errors in shape and detail corrected in a way that is visible. I chose to do this by making all the corrections in white plastic and putty, and leaving the model unpainted so that the revisions are clear.  Again, the intent was not to detail or accurize the kit – the kit's armament and other details remain the same – but instead only to correct the kit's inaccuracies using the same level and type of construction of the original model. In other words, I focused on making changes that could have been included in the original kit when it was released.

 

Date of Model

 

I chose to model the Intrepid as it appeared at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October, 1944. I did this for two reasons. 

 

First, the kit lacks a  40 mm quad mount on the front of the island, has multiple 40 mm mounts elsewhere, and the box art and kit painting instructions show a dazzle camouflage pattern. This does not match the Intrepid's appearance as built in 1943, but does match its appearance after a March-June 1944 refit following its torpedoing off Truk in February 1944. Intrepid returned to service with the fast carriers of Task Force 38 in August 1944, so Leyte Gulf two months later was a logical time. This also meant that I could use the extensive detailed (and scaled) plans of the Intrepid in its June 1944 configuration in John Roberts' The aircraft carrier Intrepid Anatomy of the Ship book, reduced to 1/720 scale.

 

Hull

 

The biggest change to the kit was obviously going to be deepening the hull significantly. I prepared a profile with the accurate dimensions, which gave me precise calculations for how much additional hull material was going to be needed. I used as my starting point the existing kit's main (hangar) deck, and determined that additional height had to be added in the underwater section of the hull, immediately above the water line, and at the top of the hull just below the flight deck.

 

Underwater Hull

 

I decided to replicate the kit's two-part hull, so that I could separate the underwater portion from the rest of the ship in case I ever wanted to paint it and add it to my  collection of 1/700 waterline Essex- class models. This meant that the first piece of construction was going to be a separate underwater hull.

 

I started by drawing up a set of hull sections to be attached to a central "keel" for the underwater section of the ship. This would then be glued to the existing kit's underwater hull. I quickly realized that this would mean cutting away most of the underwater hull, since the Revell kit is terribly inaccurate in this department. Like its Yorktown class forebears, the Essex class has a streamlined hull fore and aft that is completely unlike the North Carolina class battleships whose underwater hull the Revell kit more closely resembles. In the end, all I ended up keeping of the kit's underwater hull was the bottom, which ended up being the approximate shape and thickness of the ship's double bottom, as well as the sides of the hull amidships. Once the cut-down hull was attached to the keel with hull sections, the rest of the hull was filled in using strip plastic and white Tamiya  putty.

 

I then cut two waterline plates, one to serve as the top of the underwater hull, and the other to serve as the bottom the of the above water hull. After carefully aligning them, I cut holes in both for a series of dowels to align the two parts of the hull when finished. I finished off the underwater hall by scratch building a rudder, propeller shafts (to which the kit propellers were attached) and  bilge keels.

 

Upper Hull

 

The above-water portion of the hull was built the same way as the underwater hull, with hull sections attached to a longitudinal member glued to the upper water line piece. The approximately quarter-inch section of strip plastic that marked most of the missing depth of the hull above the waterline then served as the guide for how much of the kit's above-water hull would need to be cut away, which was a significant portion  below the hangar deck aft, and the entire forecastle forward. Once the kit's hull sides were securely in place, I added a full hangar deck.

 

If the insufficient depth of the hull is the worst flaw in the kit, the  shaping of the forecastle is the second. As a result, the hull was completely reframed forward of the #1 elevator, and topped with a new much broader forecastle deck. Again, the hull was filled out with sheet plastic and putty to the correct shape. The kit's original anchors were cut off the kit's hull pieces and then sanded down as much as possible before being glued on. 

 

Even with the substantial addition below the kit hull, the  hull was still slightly too short from the hangar to the flight deck, so another section of sheet plastic was installed between the hull sides and the flight deck raising it to the required level. Interestingly, the hangar openings in the hull were almost completely accurate – so while I had to raise the height of the openings, I didn't have to move them, as I had to do when kitbashing the Hasegawa Essex and Hancock kits. I couldn't help adding some roller doors in a partially lowered position - which I justified because the way the hull pieces are molded, it would have been easy to include this level of detail.

 

Hull detailing was deliberately limited, since I did not want to turn this into an accurizing project, but I included the level of detail that was consistent with the molding of the kit's era, including some hull piping which had been lost in all the sanding, as well as supports for the deck-edge elevator. The stern was completely missing the necessary structures, so I included them, built simply enough that they could have been included as part of the kit parts.

 

Last, the 5 inch gun platforms forward and aft on the port side in the kit completely lacked the necessary sponsons, so I built those up with sheet plastic and putty.

 

Flight Deck

 

The kit's flight deck has always been a favorite of mine so I decided early on not to modify it, other than rebuilding the deck edge elevator. The elevator on the kit is not correctly shaped, but more importantly is not the right size, so I cut it out and installed a correctly sized elevator at the hangar deck level. After the bow was lengthened by including a correctly shaped forecastle, and the stern was reduced by eliminating the sponson for two 40 mm quad mounts, which the Intrepid didn't have until later in the war, I had to trim off a portion of the flight deck aft, and add a section forward. The kit's flight deck is slightly wide for scale, but not enough that it demanded change, so I left it alone.

 

When I checked the gallery deck antiaircraft gun mounts against plans of the ship for the relevant time period, they were surprisingly close to correct. Because the kit's 20 mm mounts are oversized, the gun tubs, while generally the correct size, only hold about two thirds the number of weapons they should, but I thought that was close enough to leave as is. The only place where I modified the shape of an existing gun tub was the aft starboard side, where I substantially increased it in order to get to the same two thirds ratio that the other tub show.  I particularly like the Frankenstein's monster appearance it gives the model!

 

On the starboard side forward, the Intrepid didn't have the forward 20 mm mount gun tub that some other ships of the class had, so I snipped that gun tub out and replaced it with strip plastic, and added another section a little further back on the starboard side gallery deck. Intrepid did have three small gun tubs near the stern that aren't shown on the kit, so I scratchbuilt those and filled them with matching mounts from another kit. The spares box also provided two more lattice masts aft.  The last change to the gallery deck mounts was replacing 5 inch 38 caliber guns in two tubs on the port side aft with 40 mm quads - why they didn't have them in the first place is a mystery.

 

Island

 

The general shape of the island was, surprisingly, pretty close, but there was some reshaping necessary. Most notably, the kit's island has a rounded shape at the front, which is incorrect, so I squared that off using putty and plastic. 

 

One of the most prominent errors in the kit's island is the inclusion of an open tube at the front of the flag bridge. It isn't intended to be an AA mount, but instead the gun director that sits on a stalk just in front of and below the flag bridge. I cut it off and installed it on the necessary stalk. I then modified the island platforms to match the Roberts plans, which included both trimming existing platforms, which remain in their original gray, and installing new platforms, including a completely new flag and navigation bridge.

 

The "hat brim" stack cap on the Revell Intrepid is one of its most characteristic features - and does bear some resemblance to the famous photo of the Franklin afire, but it is still completely wrong. I replaced part of it with sheet plastic cut and carefully sanded to match the actual stack cap, but topped with the original stack covers from the kit trimmed and thinned. The Mark 37 gun directors were a little tall, so I cut the radars off and shortened their attachments, and spent some time sanding off the mold marks. I also added strips of plastic to the 5 inch 38 caliber twin turrets to improve their appearance.

 

The kit island's worst error is that the tripod mast was molded backwards so that instead of the back legs leaning towards the front, the front leg leans towards the back. I could not fix the kit part, so I scratchbuilt a new tripod mast from rod plastic, and put the kit's mast head platform on top of that. The pole mast on top of the platform is actually the kit mast chopped up. The kit mast is so overscale that I was able to cut it and use the parts for the Intrepid's configuration in the fall of 1944. The yardarms and new mainmast are stretched sprue, but could have been included with t he kit in 1967. The SK and SC radars are sheet plastic, and the SC is mounted on a bracket salvaged from the kit's stack cap. 

 

Influence of the USS Franklin (CV-13)

 

As noted above, this kit was originally released as the Franklin, and numerous details in the kit match the Franklin far better than the Intrepid.  

 

First and foremost, the kit mast is actually fairly accurate for the Franklin. After being damaged in Japanese attacks twice in October 1944, Franklin went through a refit that resulted in several changes that match the Revell kit. First of all, the topmast was still a single pole as shown in the kit, not a stepped one as in the Intrepid.  There are also indications that the kit designers had access to the bomb damage drawings of the Franklin, as they show a longitudinally aligned topmast that may have been the source for the kit's - which way the actual ship's was aligned is not completely clear in photos. The unique dog-eared deck edge elevator in the kit is also a close match for the kit. And unlike the Intrepid, Franklin did have twin 40 mm quad mounts at the stern, thanks to a late 1944 refit.

 

The Franklin may have contributed one other detail to the Revell kit. In that late 1944 refit, the 40 mm quad mounts on her port side gallery deck were all lowered to the same level as the 5 inch .38 caliber mounts, likely for stability reasons. Previously they had been at a slightly higher level, and many other Essex kits show them this way. Only the Revell kit has all of the portside mounts at the same level – even if it inexplicably has two of them with 5 inch guns instead of 40 mm quads.

 

The Franklin may be noteworthy for one other reason – many of the images of the burning Franklin taken after the attack on March 19, 1945 show her listing heavily to starboard, presenting a profile that is very similar to the shallow–draft Revell model.

 

Conclusion

 

All in all, this is the model that I always wanted the Revell Intrepid to be.  The only question is whether it'll stay gray and white to show the modifications, will get that hand painted tan flight deck and dark gray patches on the hull that I remember so fondly from almost half a century ago, or will get an accurate camouflage scheme.  I still haven't made up my mind about that one.

This week's books - military history & a little Apollo music

• This week's only new paper book is Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe by James J. Sheehan. It's part of the reading for my World War II Today class. These four came in in Kindle editions - more should follow next week in time for the class' start Monday week:
• The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (New Press People's History) by Vijay Prashad;
• D-Day in History and Memory: The Normandy Landings in International Remembrance and Commemoration by Michael Dolski, Sam Edwards, John Buckley;
• A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (American Encounters/Global Interactions) by Emily S. Rosenberg; and
• Holocaust, Genocide, and the Law: A Quest for Justice in a Post-Holocaust World by Michael Bazyler

I've read the first 3/4 of Sheehan in order to get to the assigned reading, which is 172 to the end.

Also picked up Brian Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks on CD. It's the 2019 remaster which includes a second disk along the same lines.  Really enjoying it as study and model workshop music.

Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan – Ronald Spector

I ran across this on Audible and decided I'd give it a shot.  It's a little older - 1985 - but provided a thorough and not-too-lengthy overview of the war in the Pacific. I ran across a used hardcover of it in Dallas a few weeks ago, but it was a little on the expensive side and wasn't a first edition, so I held off adding it to the paper library for the time being.

This week's books - military history and new fiction

Brought in four this week - three paper and one audiobook. Two books on military history from Half-Price Books in Waco, and two new fiction, one hardcover from Amazon and one audiobook.

Eisenhower - A Soldiers Life, is a 2002 book by Carlo D'Este, whose book on the Normandy campaign I finished a couple of months ago. It's a 2002 hardcover with dust jacket first edition, and should provide a good source for additional detail on Eisenhower's assignments during the war, which is a subject I'm interested in reading more about. The book on Normandy reflected a detailed knowledge of Eisenhower, so I'm looking forward to seeing how much more the author learned in the subsequent 20 years.

One Hundred Years Of U.S. Navy Airpower is a 2010 Naval Institute Press book (first printing)  consisting of a collection of chapters by multiple authors edited by Douglas V. Smith. I am most interested in the two chapters on U.S. aircraft carrier evolution by Norman Friedman, which I expect will bring up to 2010 the information contained in his 1983 design history. I've already skimmed chapters and the endnotes for information on postwar Essex reconstruction.

I also picked up via Amazon earlier this week Arthur Phillips' new book The King At The End Of The World, which is about an ottoman delegation to the court of Queen Elizabeth I. I remember reading his prior book The Egyptologist years ago, and thinking it was brilliant and had been urged to find some new fiction to read in paper. It's hardcover and happened to be a first edition.

Finally, I saw that Ben Aaronovitch had a new Rivers Of London book out, False Value, and as I am desperately fond of anything narrated by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, and needed something to listen to on the long drive home last night, I got the audiobook of it.

 

Emperor - Peter Webber (2013)

I decided to watch this while working on my WWS 562 paper on the end of the Pacific War, and was really glad I did. Regardless of how bad Rotten Tomatoes says it is, I found nothing to nitpick or really even to dislike. 

Tommy Lee Jones is solid as MacArthur, but Matthew Fox carries the movie as an American general detailed by MacArthur to report to him on whether Emperor Hirohito should be tried as a war criminal or not. The movie offers an interesting look at the beginning of the Allied occupation of Japan, and the clashes (or lack of clashes) with the Japanese culture.  The prewar romantic subplot between the American and the Japanese college student didn't detract from the story at all (I'm in the minority here), and my favorite part was when the American researching Japanese culture was taken in by her aunt and uncle (a Japanese general) and had a chance for a frank discussion about the competing cultures on the eve of war.  It was at least as good as the few minutes between Yamamoto and Layton at the beginning of Midway.

The climax was well-done and I really appreciated how well the entire cast did dramatizing the meeting between MacArthur and Hirohito at the end of the movie.

Landing Ship Medium LSM-233 (1/700)

Finished (more or less) my first Landing Ship Medium (LSM) LSM-233 in the foreground.

LSM-233 was built in San Pedro, California, one of 558 constructed during the war, and like most of the class, it served in the Pacific theater, participating in the landings at Leyte and Luzon in the Philippines in 1944-45. It was decommissioned 19 months after its mid-1944 commissioning and sold for scrap two years later.

It is camouflaged in the common Measure 31/10L, which consisted of Dull Black (DB), Navy Green (5-NG) and Ocean Green (5-OG), with Deck Green (20-G) on the decks. It has a partial load of 1/700 vehicles consisting of one tank and pairs of ambulances, jeeps and trucks.

The LSM behind it is only partially completed and will be wearing overall Navy Green (5-NG) because I'm tired of painting dazzle schemes.

For scale, in the rear is a mid-1942 destroyer USS Fletcher (DD-445) in Measure 12 (Mod.) which consists of Navy Blue (5-N) (technically it should be Sea Blue (5-S) but I'm from the school of thought that anything that was supposed to be Sea Blue in 1942 was actually painted the darker Navy Blue), Ocean Blue (5-O) and Haze Gray (5-H) with Deck Blue (20-B) decks. The "Navy" and "Ocean" paints should be the same shade - just a different hue - as they were all made using the same base paint - the tinting medium was changed from blue to green for Pacific landing craft. The various shades were determined by how much of the tint was used.

"Higgins boats" - LCVPs

I have been on a kick about landing craft recently for some reason, and have been building hell out of Skywave's 1/700 kits of LCTs, LCT(R)s, LCIs, LCMs and most recently a pair of LSTs to go with my collection of more traditional naval ships in the divine scale. They give me a chance to explore some camouflage schemes and ship types I had not had the chance to learn about previously. It still feels weird to be camouflaging ships in shades of green, but that's absolutely what they did with many landing craft in the Pacific theater.

I also bought a 1/72 Airfix LCVP "Higgins boat" a couple of weeks ago because the kit was nice enough to give me the precise paint colors for the British (and American-operated, it turns out) LCT and LCT(R)s, and Saturday I decided to knock it out with a quick build that I finished in time for the Super Bowl Sunday evening.

It never surprises me how much I learn about a subject when I try to model it, and even though the 1/72 LCVP was an out of the box build, I was still surprised at what I learned. I had just attached one side to the bottom when I realized that the hull form was not remotely the flat-bottomed boat I'd expected.

References describe the boats as "flat-bottomed" or as having a "spoon-shaped" or "spoonbill" bow. None is correct. As this photo shows, it is the underside of the hull and not the bow, strictly speaking, that is decidedly "spoon" shaped. In fact the hull looks like nothing so much as a giant Frito dip chip.  Or to use a more colloquial term, the boat looks like a pregnant jon boat (a boat used for fishing in these parts) with an 80's hairstyle.

Neither in person nor in photos is this bulge apparent. In part, this is because the hull shape is hard to see both in person and in photos because the skeg (not attached the model in the above photo, but shown in the cutaway drawing at left) that gradually descends from the hull masks its change in shape from convex to concave as it runs aft, creating the "tunnel" for the propellor. But in part it is also because the basically flat deck inside the boat tricks you into assuming that the underside is the same smooth shape that you'd expect a boat to have. (For me, it may also have something to do with the fact that Revell's attack transport model came with dozens of flat-bottomed LCVPs, and that's the mental image I've always had of these boats). The computer rendering of the LCVP at right makes clear just how far above the keel the deck was forward.

I am no marine architect, but I can understand the benefit of having this enormous amount of buoyancy forward - it would boost a shallow bow over obstacles, especially if the bow was reinforced, as Higgins' bayou craft were.  My references tell me that the LCVPs were much weaker in the bow than the original Higgins boats, but then they did not need to be - they were expected to run up on a gradual sand beach, not ride over half-submerged logs

I've always said that modeling is a great way to understand a piece of equipment, but this has been the biggest surprise I've had.  I have a completely different understanding of what a Higgins boat is now.

"Dracula" by the creators of "Sherlock"

The first time I read Dracula I was enthralled with the way the epistolary form and the subject told a story than grew gradually more horrific even though the words Stoker was using were prosaic at best, and banal whenever he tried to be dramatic. The creeping sense of dread was simply magnificent and made the subject so much more frightening than any vampire reference I'd ever seen or read (admittedly one of each at that time).

Although other authors have mixed language and horror even more successfully (see Lovecraft, King and oh my god that one Isaac Bashevis Singer short story) I remain fascinated with the question of how did dull-as-dishwater theater manager Bram Stoker, for crying out loud, pull this off? His other books don't have a fraction of the weight Dracula had. No one is lining up to remake Lair of the White Worm, and they should be for The Jewel of the Seven Stars, which is not totally bad. (I am not impartial here - I had a crush on Stephanie Zimbalist when she starred in the 1978 version so I have a weak spot for the story, however told).

Stoker's story in Dracula has been told and retold on screen likely hundreds of times to the point that a literal retelling would interest no one but me.  Each version seems to come with its own message, usually the one thing that wasn't present in Stoker's Count - undying love. As much as I love Coppola's 1992 train wreck - and oh I do - it's a love story that Stoker would have found completely inappropriate. And as obvious as the sexual undertones in the story are to anyone but Stoker, Coppola's version goes a bit overboard with them, and to my mind they serve as prurient little speed bumps in the story. Less would have been more.

But Dracula has become almost like Shakespeare in that it can be staged in dramatically different ways to tell a different story, without having to worry about having to replicate the original text. Coppola's version did that with a fair degree of fidelity to the original, and others have as well.  The 2006 version seen on Masterpiece Theater was period as well, but introduced a diseased twist. 

Which brings us to Netflix' three-episode Dracula that just came out.  This version is by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, who are the creators of Sherlock, the modernized version of another Victorian classic. What Gatiss and Moffat have done copies Sherlock rather closely in that they take the character and the stories in the original book and craft three quite original stories set within the framework of the book. As in Sherlock, the original themes and sayings are tweaked ever so slightly. "The blood is the life" becomes "the blood is the lives" for example, which takes the framework of vampiric existence in a slightly different direction that enhances the storytelling aspect.

But the snarky, comic dialogue that played so well in Sherlock fares poorly here.  Two young men with mental health issues coping with bitter humor makes sense.  A centuries-old monster exemplifying evil and a nun joking back and forth about how dangerous a situation she is in is not.  There are places - especially in the third episode, when the characters are on a more equal level where the humor is terrific, but 21st centry snark is just not a good fit for late 19th century polite society when an undead monster is involved.

Most reviewers seem to have thought the first episode was okay, the second a little baffling, and the third batshit crazy.  I was pretty much the opposite. I found the first disappointing, the second pretty interesting, and the third almost completely terrific. The story moves to the present time, and while I never like an effortlessly smooth and debonair Count (I hate the perfect hair), I found the recasting of the familiar scenes with the three suitors and Lucy to be original, creative, and engaging.  The scene at the cemetery and Lucy's story were brilliantly told, and at times frightening as hell.  And while the end of the episode was as bizarre as the end of Sherlock (WTF was that?) it was still a pretty good reimagining.  I always give points for a vampire story that takes care to build its back story - it's one reason I liked the early Anne Rice novels and loved Moonlight. 

No, it's not Sherlock.  The story is just too limited and too dark for the kind of characters and storytelling that made Sherlock so much fun. And while Claes Bang does okay, I'd have appreciated him looking a little more haggard and unkempt while he wisecracks.  But if the capacity of Dracula to tell a story that interests and frightens and fascinates you is what you're after - it's really not bad.

D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II – Stephen E. Ambrose

Ambrose's book is ten years newer than D'Este's Decision in Normandy, but that isn't what makes it different.  What makes it different from any of the other D-Day works I have read recently is its sheer weight of personal accounts.  Ambrose presents the story by scene the way a painter fills a canvas, adding this story here, then that one there, gradually moving the narrative forward.  This is immensely helpful for later reference since you can go back to the story you remember, whether it's the destroyers off the beaches or a part of the story of the airborne troops.

Each chapter is filled with firsthand accounts, and after a while I began wondering how much of the book's tone and theme was actually just the veterans' words, but when I went back to the beginning I realized that Ambrose was in fact telling an overarching theme in the book.

I actually already knew that, because about 20 years ago I was at a judicial conference in New Orleans at which he spoke, and he described D-Day as the place where we would see which system would prevail. Would it be the young men trained in the Nazi system in Germany, or the young men brought up under freedom?  Who would take the initiative when the time came, and make decisions and move forward?  The book begins with the same question Ambrose posed at the conference he spoke at probably a year before he passed away.

It then provides a riveting setting of the stage before moving into the episodic treatment of the actual battle. The book takes forever to read, but it was never a slog.  It was a collection of stories, well-told, although in places credit certainly belongs to the men that were telling them for coming up with the right words.  They frequently reminded me of Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed in the way that he calmly describes something that really beggars description, and you finish reading it wondering how he managed to find the words. 

There's a phrase in Hamilton that I thought of a number of times where Eliza says about the death of her son that "there are places that the words don't reach" and with that in mind I'm filled with appreciation that the men, their interviewers, and Ambrose found the words to tell their stories.

Decision in Normandy – Carlo D'Este

D'Este published this book in 1983, and the date is significant, because it differs from more recent scholarship in several ways.

First, D'Este actually spoke with numerous people who are mentioned in the text, and was able to include personal observations or comments by several of the commanders who were still living, either because they were made to him or because he is in many cases reciting the history of the ... history of D-Day. By that I mean that he spends much time, especially at the end of the book, reciting how the official histories of the armies were written in the United States and in Great Britain, and in many places that required reference to letters from Eisenhower or Montgomery or others who were commenting on accounts that were being or already had been written.

Why?  Because given the time period that the book was being written, the two sides were still arguing over who was right and who was wrong in the conduct of the campaign.  No, no, not the Allies and the Germans - the Americans and the British.  At the time D'Este was writing, the campaign in Normandy was still a subject of serious controversy between, basically proponents and detractors of Field Marshal Montgomery, with the sides breaking down largely on national lines.  According to D'Este, the U.S. Army's account of the war was largely balanced and correct, but the British account was, for political reasons, decidedly not, and gave Montgomery far more credit than was appropriate. At bottom this was because of Monty's decision both during and after the campaign to pretend that everything had gone according to his plan, and absolutely so at his end of the front. Pay no attention to the Germans holding Caen for six weeks longer than predicted, in other words. As a result, D'Este spends an inordinate amount of time documenting what Montogomery had said he would do, and what he did, seeking to disprove this claim. He does not present this as a negative on Montgomery's generalship - had he admitted that he had had to changes his plans to deal effectively with changed circumstances on the ground it would have been to his credit that he did so as effectively as he did.  But he steadfastly denied that was the case, and the British accounts generally backed him up.

Decision in Normandy is one of the older of the World War II books I have read lately, and it shows. Closer to the time of the events it recounts, it shows the grudges that the Allied military leaders brought back at the end of the war, and how they affected the history that was being written - so much so that almost 40 years after the events D'Este finds it appropriate to document the history of the documentation of the history of the campaign. But it also means that he is frequently noting that certain sources are not yet available, or have just become available, which makes the thought of being able to read texts that have the benefit of over three decades of additional sources exciting.  (That I am sitting at home on a Friday night writing that this is exciting is perhaps best not examined too closely). I don't note the age as a bad thing - it just means that things are emphasized a little differently than they would if the author was dealing with the controversies over McClellan's conduct as head of the Union Army.

But for these reasons, while the book is a good one about the campaign (I wonder how it would compare to John Keegan's Six Armies in Normandy published the year before - but I'm not willing to reread that one just yet) it is equally interesting for the stories it tells about the postwar grousing by the participants about each others' version of events, and the perspective it gives on historical scholarship when the participants were still alive, kicking, and nursing grudges.