Puttering in the Study

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.