Puttering in the Study

Last Knights of Columbus Fall-out in Old Regalia at St. Josephs

We celebrated the 110th anniversary of the Marshall Knights of Columbus chapter this evening with a mass celebrated by Bishop Strickland. It was bittersweet because tonight was also the last time our Assembly will fall out in the regalia we've worn for over 70 years, and I've had the privilege of wearing for the last 27.

A couple of years ago National decided to update the 4th degree's official "color guard" uniform from the traditional capes which have been worn with tux and chapeaux since 1940, and were worn for decades before that with white tie, tailcoat and top hats.  The new look is navy blazers and neckties with dark gray slacks and a black beret.

It was a good time to get a final picture with Mom & Pop's window in the sacristy with my sword, which was Pop's back when he was wearing the tails and top hat in Waco in the 1910s and 1920s.  The baldric (diagonal sash which holds the sword) and sword may still be used with the new uniforms, but we don't know for sure if they will as a matter of course yet.

I actually wore Pop's tail coat as well, which was still in the attic in the early '70s in a school play as the Mad Hatter (the top hat was not original).

The tree behind me has a bit of family history as well - here's Mom and Pop helping Mother past it on her way into the church for her wedding in 1957.

Anyway, as soon as we got home from the event, instead of putting my chapeaux back in its bag I put it up on the religion shelves in the study. (You can tell they're the religion shelves because there's a trompe l'oeil medallion of St. John Paul II over it).

I know the change is bothering a lot of Knights, but not me.  It's what we do and stand for that's important - not what we're wearing.

George Bush's TBF Avenger "Barbara III" - 1/72 Academy

Another recent finish was the a 1/72 TBF Avenger finished as George Bush's final TBF, the Barbara III. 

My tail markings are not wrong - the aircraft shown below behind Bush and his crew was the Barbara II, which had a dark panel behind the aircraft number on the tail.

The kit is the 1/72 Academy, which seems to be a modified version of the even older Frog kit.  It is (mostly) of the British version, the Tarpon, and the further I got into it the more I realized this wasn't going to make a very good model.  Nor were the decals very good - the national insignia were a royal blue.  And don't get me started on how the flat finish coat went on like snow.

In the end, I decided to just finish this one as best I could as practice for airbrushing a three-color paint scheme, and look for a better kit to use the Barbara II decals - and better national insignia - on later.

Me 262A - 1960 and 2017 Airfix 1/72 kits

I recently finished a double-build - two 1/72 Me 262A German jet fighters.  The reason for the double-build was that I had two kits - a 1960 Airfix kit which I sat on for so long they came out with a much-improved version in 2017, which I then bought.

The newer kit on the left was a 262A-1a day fighter, had far more parts and was magnificently engineered. The older kit was a -2a - the bomber variant - and came with bomb racks and a pair of torpedo-shaped bombs.

I decided to build the older kit as a bomber - as Hitler intended - and the newer as a day fighter.

For my model for the bomber I chose the only surviving bomber version, the "Black X" that is on display at the Australian War Memorial. In part this was because it was one of the few -2a aircraft I could document markings for, but also because it had a very interesting paint scheme. 

The latter Me 262s weren't even finished in factories - they were assembled in open fields or forests, and by the time this plane was assembled it only got a light and ragged application of two-color camouflage, which meant that the bare aluminum with dark puttied seams tended to show through on the top.  On the bottom, most of the aircraft was unfinished aluminum with the dark putty seams, which was a fun opportunity to show a partially painted aircraft.  The actual colors I used were the first time I tried the late-war RLM 81/82/83, and the RLM 83 was not green enough. But I was happy with how uneven and watery the paint as applied worked out, even though it doesn't come across in the photo. 

The 2017 version I finished as Adolf Galland's last plane, known as "White 3".  While there are no photos of it to use as reference to confirm the details of the camouflage, it seems to match most of the artwork and models I have studied.  The kit is simply magnificent, and I really wish I had paid more attention to weighting the nose down properly so it didn't need a tail stand. I used aftermarket decals, and there were approximately 50 to reflect the many stencilled warnings on, under and around the plane. Both aircraft got repeated black washes after completion, and could probably use even more.

All in all, a really fun build, with challenging camouflage patterns.

 

Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea - the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, November 13-15, 1942 - Eric Hammel

This is the third of Hammerl's three books of the Guadalcanal campaign.  I had read The Carrier Battles, but not Starvation Island, and thought this might explain the surface actions a little better.  Did it ever.

The book began by patiently explaining that in the first year of the Pacific War, U.S. ships had both a poorly prepared cadre of combat leaders based on prewar caution, and widely varying fits with respect to fire control, radar, and training on both.  Some ships relied on manual firing of their guns, some had various systems to more accurately direct their fire, and some had the brand-new "radar" units, some of which could aid in firing accurately, especially at night, and some of which could aid in locating enemy vessels in the first place.  Importantly, some commanders did not yet understand that it could do that.

This explains the two nights of battles covered in the book.  In the first, a poorly organized and led line of U.S. ships was heavily damaged by a Japanese formation, despite having the tools on various ships to do much better.  The second battle a couple of nights later saw a more evenly matched engagement, where the U.S. flagship, the battleship Washington made effective use of its radar-controlled fire to destroy the Japanese battleship Kirishima.

The emphasis on the various radars had a distinct effect on my next modeling project, in which I updated an old Matchbox destroyer USS Fletcher (DD-445) which was tail-end Charlie the first of the two nights.  But it had both fire control radar, SC air search radar and - crucially - the new SG surface-search radar.  So unlike the two flagship cruisers where the admirals sat, it could - and did - accurately locate the enemy.  So I scratchbuilt a new mast to carry carefully fabricated photoetched versions of all three.

How Carriers Fought: Carrier Operations in WWII - Lars Celander

Now this was an unusual book.  It dealt with the nuts and bolts of how aircraft carriers operate - from what happens in the cockpit to how aircraft and the ships that carry them actually work, to the battles they fought in.  The book concludes with an analysis of various carrier design and combat tactics which I found very interesting. 

Carriers tend to be approached either as historical objects or as tools used in significant historical actions.  Some books deal with them from a design perspectives, but few deal with carrier tactics, much less analyze why the tactics were what they were, and whether they, the the ships' design, should have been otherwise.  

Celander's book also discusses postwar developments to a certain extent, explaining how carriers developed postwar and why, and - I especially liked this part - why they would not have developed as they did had the wartime need for "deck-load" strikes persisted.  It never occurred to me that angled decks only made sense if a carrier is constantly rotating aircraft, and would have been highly problematic had carriers still been launching massive strikes as was usually the case in naval combat. Celnader's book doesn't get into this, but had that need remained we might have seen carrier design divide into "rotating" air operations carriers, as we have now, with a few "battle" carriers which are designed to launch and land large numbers of aircraft in a short period of time, while protected by "rotating" carriers.  WW II task forces did that by sometimes having certain carriers assigned to provide CAP (combat air patrol) while others launched strikes, but that isn't how modern air operations work.

All in all, a very interesting book.

Hitler’s Jet Plane: The ME 262 Story - Mano Ziegler

I read this on the Kindle while working on my two 1/72 Me 262s.  It was written by a former Luftwaffe pilot, and he does a good job telling the story of the development of the aircraft and the units that operated it.  The usual controversies over its development and Hitler's role in it are detailed, and the story ends up being more complicated than we usually hear.

It seems that it was Willy Messerschmitt that answered Hitler's question as to whether it could be used as a bomber with an emphatic "yes" with visions of more aircraft contracts dancing in his head - when in fact it was a terrible use of the aircraft.  But to what extent that decision delayed its introduction into Luftwaffe air defenses is unclear.  What is clear is that the introduction of the aircraft into operational use was as poorly executed as the rest of the Luftwaffe's decisions, although - again - whether even the best decisions would have helped the aircraft through its teething troubles is unclear.  It began reaching units just as Allied air superiority ensured that it could be destroyed at its bases, where it was highly vulnerable, rather than in air to air combat. 

1/700 Yorktown (CV-5) - 4 June 1942 (Midway)

I finished up another one this evening, the 1/700 Trumpeter Yorktown (CV-5) in her Midway appearance.  Like the Essex, she was essentially complete - I just needed to finish a few minor items (add a couple of guns, a flag, and weather the flight deck a bit) and come up with a decent air group.

The kit is really well done - the only real scratchbuilding I did was, again, masts and radars.

The air group is three SBDs, six TBD Devastators with wings folded (snip, snip), and in a blast from the past, four 1970's F4F-4s with wings folded.  Midway marked the first appearance of the folding-wing Wildcat.

The model goes in the display case under my 1993 Yorktown in its December 1940 appearance - again, not quite complete.  Here it's shown with Lt. Bill Leonard's F4F from 4 June 1942 in 1/72 scale, with a copy of his signature when I met him at the Nimitz Institite symposium in 1992.  

1/700 Essex (CV-9) - May 1943

I've been adding ongoing models to the Scalemates website, which allows you to create "projects" and then photo albums for models and link the two, and the act of uploading photos of the 1/700 Essex I've had on the workbench for years finally nudged me to finish it.

The model represents the Essex in the class' earliest configuration, with its initial radar rig and limited AA armament, and no hull number or prominent striping on the flight deck. I removed all the kit's masts and radars (painted red) and replaced them with photoetch and plastic, most notably lowering the SC radar to its initial (and extremely unsatisfactory) lower location on the starboard side of the funnel.  It was raised before the Essex went into combat to the location shown atop a lattice tower in the first photo.  

While the lead ship of the class initially carried aircraft in the familiar blue gray over light gray camouflage with round national insignia in six locations as shown in the March 1943 photo below taken during Essex's shakedown, by May the left wing locations had been painted over.  This was what the Essex looked like during her early 1943 shakedown and as she entered Pearl Harbor in May 1943, as shown in the photo to the right, which was the appearance I wanted to model.

Completing the ship today didn't take much - I added the five deck-edge lattice towers, and I had to scratchbuild the director tower located in front of the island since I lost the kit pieces, but after the LUT, that's a piece of cake with rod and tube plastic and a kit director.

I could not avoid a very noticeable seam at the hangar deck level - that's just the nature of the kit, and one reason I didn't go overboard on detailing it.

The Essex makes a nice addition to the 1992 Lexington (CV-16) and 1993 Ticonderoga (still incomplete) on the late war shelf. It does make clear that the Navy Blue (5-N) I was using back then was entirely too dark.  While I'll correct that on CV-14 when I get around to finishing it - the other two colors are close enough - the Lexington has far too much detail to ever be wholly repainted,  so it'll probably stay as is.

 

Nigel Hamilton’s FDR at War trilogy

I enjoyed the first two books of Nigel Hamilton’s series on FDR as a war leader so much on Audible and Kindle that I have been looking for hardback copies in used bookstores.  I found both, and recently reread Mantle of Command in a week.  That got me interested in the North Africa campaign, so I started Ric Atkinson’s Army at Dawn, another I got in hardback after enjoying the Kindle versions.  Then I happened to see that the third volume, War and Peace was coming out May 7.  Oh crap - have to get Commander in Chief down before then.  I think I finished it in less than a week.

These are just great books, written from FDR’s perspective as a war leader, and telling the complete story of Churchill’s bad military strategizing and backsliding - all of which he deleted when he wrote his war memoirs, making himself look like the architect of the war-winning strategy when in fact it was FDR.

It was FDR that refused to send US troops into battle against the far superior Wehrmacht on the coast of France in 1942, instead sending them into North Africa where they could learn how to fight.  That continued into 1943 when he again demurred on opening a second front in France, but authorized the invasions of Sicily and later Italy, but of which materially aided the Russians. It was at this point that he insisted on an invasion in May (eventually June) 1944 over the objections and Churchill and his military chiefs, who were more interested in peripheral operations.

Here’s the concern I began having on rereading them.  We know from Hamilton’s use of the Elliott Roosevelt and Mackenzie King papers that Churchill’s memoirs are deliberately false in places, and that FDR has an overarching set of goals for the postwar order - goals which clashed with Churchill’s goal of preserving Britain’s colonial empire.

We also know generally that it was FDR that insisted on Torch, and that his chiefs of staff didn’t want it and were hell-bent on a cross-channel invasion six months after Pearl Harbor.  Hamilton repeatedly explains this as FDR’s wisdom in knowing that American troops would not be ready to fight the experienced Germans without experience of their own.  But I don’t see a lot of evidence for that, and Hamilton repeatedly says things like “FDR shook his head - how could his chiefs not see” or things to that effect which are simply fiction.  I don’t doubt that they are likely true, but he doesn’t know that what he says actually happened, and it has the effect of making both books a constant string of Roosevelt being right all the time, while his chiefs were wrong in 1942 and 1943, but then right in 1944.

Put another way, its easy to show that the parts of history that Churchill omitted make clear that FDR must have made these decisions, but I think the story is a bit overwritten when it would be more accurate to say that “This probably irritated FDR because it didn’t take into account” or something like this.

But town points here.  Hamilton has nailed his colors to the mast that these are the war memoirs FDR didn't live to write, and had he, and had he not had to remain concerned that his words would be hurtful to his service chiefs, this probably is exactly what he would have written.  And for that reason I don’t mind the light fiction touches.

Besides, you don’t really want to nitpick how Batman couldn’t really have done that because of the laws of physics.  It’s way too much fun to just enjoy the story.

I look forward to the next volume, which is now only five days away.

 

Casino Royale - Ian Fleming

I have been listening to an audiobook about Ian Fleming, and decided recently to reread the books, this time in order of publication.

First up is Casino Royale.  I have all the Bond books in the 1960's Signet edition paperbacks, and while they are amber with acid, they're still readable.  I am up to five in hardback, but after reading the Janeway book I know that those are Book Club editions, which are worth the $5-7 I paid for them.  First release hardbacks - to say nothing of first editions - are thousands of dollars each, so I'll be sticking with the paperbacks for now.

Knowing this is the first book changes the reading.  I also notice now - because of the movie - that this is really Bond's first adventure as a 00 agent.  Fleming's writing is just outstanding.  It's a pleasure to read, and especially to get a first hand view of life in the 1950s.  When I first read these books it was a surprise how different things were than the Roger Moore Bond films I was familiar with (remember that was the 1970's, before VCRs so Moore was the only Bond I had ever seen).

Anyway, a great book.  I'll save my comments on Fleming's dated view on women for the next book in the series, Live and Let Die, where they're accompanied by even more offensive views of minorities.

But I can't let the opportunity pass to note how great a film the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale - which I also watched last week - was.  It's a great film version of the book, and Craig is portraying the Bond in this week - younger and less experienced.  It is unsteady after the torture scene - the professions of love were actually more painful - but it was so good to see an actor that reflected Fleming's image of Bond as cold and cruel above all else.  Not that I don't think Pierce Brosnan did a great job doing exactly that.  It's just so much more raw with Craig, which I think makes for an even better Bond.