Puttering in the Study

Stanley Johnston's Blunder: The Reporter Who Spilled the Secret Behind the U.S. Navy's Victory at Midway – Elliot Carlson

I saw this 2017 U.S. Naval Institute book at the National WW II Museum in New Orleans a week ago today, and finished it two days later.  It is full of detail you wouldn't expect from a dispute that blew up in 1942 as a result of a Chicago Tribune article containing details of a secret message from CinCPac commander Chester Nimitz to the ships under his command.  That it does is because the article triggered a full scale FBI and Navy investigation which produced numerous documented interviews which became accessible a number of years ago, and eventually a grand jury proceeding, the transcript of which was unsealed just two years ago.  

It's for that reason that we know so much about a piece of note paper in a state room of a ship which was carrying many of the officers and men of the just-sunk carrier Lexington back to San Diego, where it docked just as news was breaking of the Navy's triumph at Midway.  Living in the stateroom with the executive officer of the Lexington was Johnston, an Australian who was working as a war correspondent for the Tribune, and who was already working on the manuscript of his immensely popular book Queen of the Flattops about the Lexington's fight at the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Johnston admitted that he saw and copied the exec's list of Japanese units and ships and units, which were certainly copied from Nimitz' message, since the misspellings in the ship names of the Tribune article matched those of the message. It is also likely he heard what the ships and units referred to - the likely contents of the Japanese fleet bearing down on Midway.  This was because the stateroom became a sort of after-hours hangout for the Lex's former officers, who insisted on having the ship they were hitching a ride on decode the current messages from CinCPac and circulate them. And in addition to conversation identifying what the list of ships referred to, he may have seen the original message itself, security had become so lax on the ship as it plodded towards California.

So when he heard on landing that the Japanese had just lost four carriers at Midway, he realized that the list he was literally carrying in his pocket had four carriers listed on it.  One thing led to another and before the Yorktown had even sunk, the last casualty of the Midway battle, the Tribune was running a front page headline, "NAVY HAD WORD OF JAP PLAN TO STRIKE AT SEA" based in part on the note he carried. 

The Navy was furious at having its codebreaking activities event hinted-at, and the Roosevelt administration - who was a frequent target of the Tribune and Navy Secretary Frank Knox - who was publisher of the Tribune's cross-town rival - were as well.  The Administration pressed Attorney General Biddle to prosecute Johnston and the paper's editor under the Espionage Act - the only such prosecution of a newspaper during the entire conflict, but the prosecution fell apart in the middle of the grand jury proceeding when the Navy refused, point-blank, to provide witnesses to testify about its code breaking activities and that the article had caused damage in the form of the changing of Japanese codes.  Without the necessary testimony the special prosecutor (Hoover's Attorney General, as it turned out) could not get the grand jury to indict.  The Navy's wariness was well-founded - if the paper hadn't tipped the Japanese off that their code was compromised, the prosecution certainly would, if it had not already.

Events seemed to have proven the Navy right.  While the Japanese regularly changed the codes during the war, including a week after the prosecution was announced, those were regularly scheduled updates, and the basic structure of the code never changed.  While nothing can be said with absolute certainty, there is no record that Japan ever realized that its codes had been successfully broken.  To put it simply, Japanese intelligence wasn't reading the Chicago Tribune, and also managed to miss the radio and subsequent newspaper articles regarding the grand jury proceedings.

Johnston's was not the only leak of the Japanese order of battle for Midway based on Nimitz' mid-May message, although it was the most public.  According to historian Alvin Kernan, who was on the Enterprise during the battle, historians eventually traced the leak within the Pacific Fleet at least to Admiral Fletcher's sharing the message with his staff while on the Yorktown returning from Coral Sea.  In fact there were numerous leaks already known in 1942, as Carlson points out, noting that they caused prosecuting attorney Mitchell headaches trying to tie any specific leak to Japan's changing their codes - the harm necessary for a prosecution under the Espionage Act. In the end it did not matter because the Navy simply would not talk about the sources of its information.

It's a well-written book about an interesting bit of the Pacific war story.  

1/700 USN aircraft - tranche 1

I finished airbrushing the blue gray over light gray for all the Yorktown and Essex aircraft this weekend, and started pulling the rubber masking off the cockpits.  The new technique of under painting the (clear) aircraft undersides with Interior Green before applying the final coat worked great, as did the cockpit masking.  The aircraft look like they have glass canopies, with the interiors predominantly green.  The SBDs shown to the left are older, and weren't painted the same way, so their "interiors" just look black..

I am trying to finish a few aircraft for each of the carriers, the May 1942 Lexington, the June 1942 Yorktown and the May 1943 Essex.  This afternoon, it was two SBDs for the Lexington, three TBD Devastators for the Yorktown, and three F6Fs for the Essex. 

Unfortunately, the shortcomings in the Trumpeter decals (all three carriers are Trumpeter kits) are becoming apparent.  The Lexington decals are too small - especially the wing roundels. The Yorktown decals are better sized, but for some reason are royal blue.  Nor is that the only error.  The decals come with aircraft specific unit markings - but for the Hornet's air group.  It's nice to have "8-T" markings for Torpedo 8, but they are of no use for the Yorktown.  Only the Essex decals are more or less the right size, and the right shade of blue.

I got on the Internet and discovered that Starfighter has decals for the 1942 Yorktown and Lexington, as well as the 1936 Saratoga that I'm building next, so I ordered those.  As they're printed, they will have to be individually cut out, but I'm getting better at this.  But that does mean that all these aircraft will shortly get their decals soaked off in favor of aftermarket ones.

I also did some research last night on which combination of aircraft to use for each ship, and that's helping narrow down how many I need for each.   I will be modifying the TBDs to make the wings fold, and fortunately it doesn't appear many of the Yorktown's new F4F-4s had their wings folded while on the flight deck at Midway, which will make life easier.  But on the Essex everything but the SBDs folded, and that's not a modification I can make to the F6Fs or TBFs, so I will have to rethink what flight deck scene to show.

The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders - Stuart Kells

I'm a sucker for books about books and libraries.  One of my favorite was a history of shelving for books.  I was absolutely enthralled with the evolution of book furniture from a table to a desk to a shelf to more shelves - well, you get the picture.  But then again, I've already read a book about the potato and was almost as excited.

This little book is a nice set of ruminations and observations on libraries and books.  It's a collection of short chapters - many one page essays, actually - about some aspect of books or libraries.  It does remind me that while I do enjoy books and libraries, I am in no way bibliomanic in the way it describes - people that throughout history have bought books by the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands.  I am even getting to the point that I don't actually read - or enjoy reading - all that much.  I enjoy books as a source of information, but increasingly have a hard time immersing myself in one - most notably fiction.  My days of being obsessed by what I classify as "archaeology porn" seem to be gone.  

No, that's not a reference to 1950's Playboys, but the subtype of fiction that is premised on the discovery of a lost archaeological artifact.  The genre took off with Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, but for some reason it just doesn't give the thrill it used to.  I suppose at some point you've seen the lost tomb of Alexander the Great so many times that it's just not as interesting. 

But that's really beside the point of this book, which is devoted to the physical book and its storage.  Or maybe not - AP by Brown, Berry or Rollins is something that I'm more likely to read in e-form anyway - which Kells memorably analogizes to kissing a girl on the other side of a plate of glass.  Well, perhaps he's right.  I do recall less and less about the fiction I read when it's in electronic form.  And I am increasingly interested in books in paper form again simply because the reading experience is better, and I enjoy having the book on the shelf afterwards.  That's really the point of his book - that the preservation of the written words in physical form is worthwhile.  And I certainly can't argue with that.

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs A New History of a Lost World - Steve Brusatte

This book got good reviews, and I thought (incorrectly) that Parker might read it, so I picked it up in hardcover.  It's a very interesting history of the dinosaurs incorporating current science on them. It provides the current state of the art on fossil discovery, dinosaur evolution and the effect of plate tectonics and climate change, the impact of the meteor that ended the age of the dinosaurs, and the relationship of birds to dinosaurs, which is pretty simple - birds "are" dinosaurs.

If you leave a chicken alone long enough it will turn into a T-Rex. Seriously.  It's done it before.

Battleship Yamato: Of War, Beauty and Irony - Jan Morris

This is a beautiful little book that defies description.  The best I can say is that it's naval history crossed with bonsai.  It's a short book that notes - it doesn't explain or describe, but instead just notes - the beauty and the irony of the short-lived Japanese superbattleship Yamato. It looks like a well-designed book on Japanese gardening, but has as its subject a battleship.

It's weird, but it's a nice reflection.

Carter & Lovecraft (Carter & Lovecraft #1) - Jonathan L. Howard

I picked this up as a audiobook and then got the Kindle version - or maybe it was vice versa, on a recent office trip, and generally enjoyed it.  It was well written, and an interesting take on the Lovecraft mythos, although it had less Lovecraft to it than any Lovercraftian fiction I've ever read.  Usually stories load the narrative up with shoggoths et al. right out of the box because they love the universe so much.  This book seemed almost uninterested in the actual corpus compared to telling the story in the book.  Which you have to respect.  It will be interesting whether the subsequent books delve more deeply into HPL, or simply continue with the story (and universe) this book has created.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World - Simon Winchester

I got this book for Grayson's birthday, but (of course) read it first.  It's a typical Winchester - fascinating stories and fascinating topics.  Especially if you're interested in the intersection of history and science.

1942-43 U.S. Navy aircraft - 1/700 scale

With the adorable Meng Lexington out of the way, it's back to work on the 1/700 scale Yorktown (CV-5) (far left).  What that ship needs now is the same thing my last two 1/700 carriers Lexington (May 1942) (lower right) and Essex (May 1943) (upper right) need, and that is aircraft, and lots of them. 

Coincidentally, all three need the same thing - aircraft in the blue gray over light gray camouflage scheme, as shown by the 1/72 F4Fs and SBD.  Lexington's aircraft still had red roundels and red and white tail stripes at the time of her loss in May 1942 (see 1/72 SBD), but by the time the Yorktown was lost a month later her aircraft had deleted the red roundels and tail stripes (see 1/72 F4F).

Interestingly, the Essex came into service and into Pearl Harbor in May 1943 with aircraft in the same colors, although the left upper and lower wings had the roundel deleted.  As my model shows her in her as-built appearance, I wanted to show her with the blue-gray air group and basically no flight deck markings (the prominent "9" hull numbers are absent) looking a lot more like a 1942 carrier than the other 1943-45 Essex class ships.  So I need SBDs, TBDs and F4Fs for the first two, and SBDs, TBFs and F6Fs for the latter.  For more information on the color schemes used during the period, see this article.

Lexington already has several TBDs and a couple of SBDs, so I will be continuing to assemble and detail the planes I painted for her last year.  Yorktown and Essex both need their air groups painted, so I started that process tonight for both tonight, masking the canopies so they can show as clear later, and
painting the underside of the fuselage zinc chromate green so the interior color will show through the clear cockpits (hopefully - this is a new thing I am trying).  I also painted all the aircraft undersides light gray tonight.  The blue gray topsides will follow later this week after I put one more layer of mask on the cockpits.

You might notice Yorktown appears to already have a full air group - I had painted and decaled up a lot of extra aircraft 26 years ago for a Midway Enterprise, including several Devastators, some with folding wings, so I decided to put those on the flight deck just for morale.  (Mine.  Installing the landing gear on these aircraft is a bear).  The color is two shades wrong - it's what I used back then, but later replaced with a lighter and bluer shade, and last year with the correct dark blue-gray - as shown on the Lexington's aircraft and the 1/72 SBD.  

 

Warship Builder Lexington - Meng

Meng Models has put out a "Warship Builder" line of kits, starting with USS Lexington (CV-2).  It's a ridiculously detailed kit for a toy, and just adorable, as Parker likes to say.  The lower hull is detachable.

The kit is shown in early WW II camouflage, like I'm going to do that. I went with my usual prewar colors, Standard Navy Gray overall with Gunship Gray decks and mahogany flight deck stain with Chrome Yellow markings. 

The air group of TBDs, SBDs and a F4F (I didn't feel like building both) are in matching colors, making for a very colorful (as well as adorable) Lady Lex.