Puttering in the Study

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.

The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II - Alex Kershaw

Another one of the 2019 conference package was this new book by Alex Kershaw which tells the story of the first wave of troops that landed on D-Day.  It has less of the planning and more of the actual stories of the soldiers that came ashore, and continues their stories through the end of the war and beyond.

I ended up liking this book more after I finished it and realized what it had that other D-Day books didn't.  Because it took a narrow slice of the action, it gave you a better understanding of the limited perspective of the participants.  I generally like books that tell the entire story - in this case here's what happened from the beginning of the landings through the push up the bluffs and off the beach and into the hedgerows beyond, and how the various engagements were fought and ended up resulting in this objective being successfully taken. 

This book wasn't like that.  Instead, it skipped back and forth around several different stories, but staying with the same participants.  They landed, found a way off the beach, and here's what they did after that. The larger drama isn't present, but it was a bite-sized story that was told at such a personal level that I felt like I understood what was happening.  But my favorite part of this book was the story of Lieutenant Spalding and his second in second in command Segeant Streczyk as they made their way up the bluff at Omaha, eventually attacking German trenches at the top of the bluff, and eventually making their way through the orchards and hedgerows into the countryside.

First of all, it's a great story.  Second - the path they took still exists as paths up from the beach to the American cemetery at Colleville, which has replaced the orchards and fields they passed through by 0900 that morning.  We saw it when we visited the battlefield in 2017 - the gully they worked their way up is behind us in this picture.

The book follows the men's stories through the war, showing which stayed through VE Day and which didn't, and what happened to them after the war. Often, it's sad to read, how successful they were on D-Day was often a sign that their personal lives after the war would be correspondingly unhappy, or even tragic.

One story stood out.  Many years after the war one of the soldiers who led a drastically undermanned group of paratroopers in taking a gun battery that had been assigned to them went back to the site.  He reluctantly shook the hand of one of the Germans who had commanded the battery's garrison, and later in the day saw families picnicking on grass near the battery.  He shooed them off angrily, and explained that he just didn't like people doing that where he remembered his men had bled and died. I found that interesting, because when we were at Omaha Beach and saw large numbers of tourists swimming and playing on the sand, and I had assumed that veterans of the landings would like that the place was one of pleasant things now.  It was interesting to see that his reaction was still to the contrary.

There are many ways the tell the D-Day story, and this isn't the best one for the overall story.  But it is a useful one for obtaining a better understanding of what happened to the soldiers that landed and what it was like being there.

 

Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings - Craig L. Symonds

I got this book as part of a batch I wanted to have signed by the author in November at the WW II symposium, and really enjoyed it.  It focuses on the actual landing portion of Overlord, and as such goes through the history of the concept of landing on the French coast as a means of ending the war in Europe.  Lots of interesting information about the actual landings, with less on the leaders and the overall campaign.

The Washington War: FDR's Inner Circle and the Politics of Power That Won World War II - James Lacey

Lacey followed Keep From All Thoughtful Men with this book on the broader topic of the bureaucratic warfare in Washington during World War II.  The book tells the fascinating story of the interagency decision-making process that flourished in FDR's administration during the wartime mobilization - who was effective at it and who was not. KFATM makes up one chapter of it, but interestingly Lacey's conclusion on the role of the economists has changed. He no longer believes that the economists caused Army chief of staff George C. Marshall to conclude that the D-Day invasion had to be postponed from 1943 to 1944, but instead notes that it was simply one of several factors in his decision.

 

One of the most interesting observations in the book, however, is in Lacey's introduction, where he explains that he thought the story the book would tell is how inefficient the U.S. government was at making war, especially in producing the material that was needed for combat, but when he finished, the story was the opposite.  While there were of course miscalculations and inefficiencies for a variety of reasons, some of which were hardly the result of poor decisionmaking - the pitting of agency against agency and power broker against power broker actually tended to result in a fairly optimal result in the end, since all viewpoints tended to have a chance at being heard, and the bad ones usually melted away. The inefficiencies seemed to me to be caused in large part by FDR and Harry Hopkins' desire to avoid having a strong leader coordinating the home front until late in the war, preferring to control the decisionmaking or at least the decisionmaker. 

This is in sharp contrast, he notes, to more authoritarian planning systems such as Germany and Japan, for example, where gigantic errors in planning by unchallengeable leaders or factions remained unexamined and undisturbed.  The administration can be faulted for a less than optimal process, but at least it avoided the enormous errors that could have occurred had Donald Nelson exercised almost supreme power - and then been wrong. The system was actually very Washington - agency heads and industry heads fought each other for money, power and influence, and had opportunities to make their cases to the powers that be, and in most cases the solutions that the process generated worked out to be either magnificent (the creation of adequate aircraft manufacturing plants before the U.S. entered the war using the expected demand by foreign powers such as Britain and France) or at least adequate when it counted.  The example here is the relative priority in shipbuilding given to shipping tonnage, escort vessels and landing craft, as well as combatants such as battleships, aircraft carriers, screening vessels and so forth.  The balance changed throughout the war based on needs at any given time, but the end result that there was enough - even if only barely - of everything when it was needed.

For example, adequate shipping capacity was always a significant constraint, but it didn't cause Britain or the USSR to drop out of the war, or prevent the US from entering the European theater as a combatant within a year of Pearl Harbor.   Escort vessels for convoys was always a need, but there was enough to keep losses at an acceptable level.  And landing craft were always in short supply, but production was able to turn to maximizing landing craft in time that Eisenhower only had to delay D-Day one month, and the Anvil invasion by an additional two months due to landing craft shortages.

Again, Germany is the primary example of how wrong this could have been done.  German naval production emphasized surface combatants over submarines far too long - a decision that at least balanced the concerns in the late 1930s would likely have won Germany the war against Britain by 1941.  Similarly, German aircraft design was largely ineffective at producing the planes Germany needed from 1942 on due to an air force that was unable to get good ideas past Goering and later Hitler.  An example here is Hitler's micromanaging of the best aircraft that German industry did come up with - the Me 262 jet fighter in such a way that it contributed virtually nothing to the German war effort.

The branch politics of the American war effort nearly did the same thing with the superior piston-driven engine fighter of the war, the P-51 Mustang, but in the end, the fighter that the Allies needed finally became available as ideas that were simply too good to fail rose through the process. Similarly, the Navy's torpedoes were almost useless until 1943, but eventually their defects became known in time for improved versions to become possibly the key piece of ordnance in starving the Japanese war machine.  Time and time again, the Allies' system was able to identify and corrected problems while their opponents did not.

All in all, a really good book if you want a look at what was going on behind the scenes.

Keep From All Thoughtful Men: How U.S. Economists Won World War II - Jim Lacey

This was required reading in my WWS 562 class, and told a very interesting story about how economists played a role in planning the U.S. industrial production that generated the material necessary to fight World War II.  The subtitle is an exaggeration because while they played an important role in getting across to policymakers - primarily the U.S. joint chiefs - that the military's equipment orders needed to be adjusted, the economists didn't exactly win the war, or even make a decisive contribution. Arguably they played a role in seeing that the war in Europe ended in 1945 rather than 1946, but that's about it.

The role the book explains is the creation of national income statistics, which were still in their infancy in the years before the war, and more importantly GDP (gross domestic product) statistics, which allowed a more precise measurement of what war production the economy could sustain.