Puttering in the Study

2021 Modeling Review - Four Essexes, Nine Aircraft and a 88mm

https://imodeler.com/2022/01/2021-modeling-review-four-essexes-nine-aircraft-and-a-88mm/

1/700 USS Randolph (CV-15) – August 1945

https://imodeler.com/2022/01/1-700-uss-randolph-cv-15-august-1945/

Leppla/Liska "Sail 12" SBD Dauntless – Battle of the Coral Sea

https://imodeler.com/2022/01/leppla-liska-sail-12-sbd-dauntless-battle-of-the-coral-sea/

Beans, Bullets, and Black Oil - The Story of Fleet Logistics Afloat in the Pacific During World War II - Rear Adm. Worrall Reed Carter

This is a digital reissue of a 1953 book issued by the Naval War College Press that tells the story of the floating logistics train that made the Navy's drive across the Pacific in World War II possible. 

I can't overstate how impressive a job this book does in detailing what the Navy started out with, and where it ended up.  The daunting challenge of providing logistical support to a fleet that never went back to Pearl Harbor after January, 1944 is detailed, and the author explains what the support arm did, and how it expanded to meet the challenges as the fleet grew and moved further, and further away from established bases on the West Coast and Hawaii.

I am him absolutely looking for a paper copy of this now.

SBD Upgrade

From when I started collecting kits almost 30 years ago my 1/72 SBD experience has been limited to the old Airfix/MPC kit.  While I have a couple of the Hawk/Testors kits, even I could tell they were too crude to be worth building.  I also bought every decal sheet I saw, so I probably now have enough decals to build well over a dozen aircraft, although at least half the decals are woefully inaccurate - usually the wrong size.

At present I have two of the Airfix/MPC kits built as Dick Best’s B1 at Midway and Leppla/Liska’s “Sail 12” at Coral Sea.  But in addition to being bad kits (and poorly built), both are now the wrong colors.  Best’s SBD-3 has a upper color I stopped using years ago in favor of FS 35189 for M-485, and the underside is FS 36440 which, although recommended by many sources, is not the FS 36357 of M-495.  The Leppla/Liska aircraft has the right color for the upper surfaces, but for some reason I used a different light gray for the underside.  

I had planned on simply repainting and upgrading, but recently I was able to get my hands of three of the Hasegawa kits - one SBD-5 and two SBD-2/3s (which have all the parts for -5s).  As the -2/3s kits come with markings for the Leppla/Lisko aircraft (many of which I’m not using for reasons I’ll explain in that build) that will be the first build.  After studying all the decals in my stash, I think the second will be a similar February/March 1942 Enterprise CAG aircraft with the oversized markings.  The third will be the SBD-5 box-art aircraft - a summer 1943 SBD-5 on the new Lexington with the red-outlined national markings.  

The Hasegawa kits I have been searching for for so long are no longer state of the art, even with aftermarket resin and PE - there’s a new Flyhawk kit out.  But it may be a while before I have that, so I am saving it for the Best replacement aircraft.  And with some aftermarket, it’s a tolerable build, and there are numerous SBDs I want on the shelves, so I’m still happy to have all three.

You can never have too many SBDs.

Carrier Warfare in the Pacific: An Oral History Collection (SMITHSONIAN HISTORY OF AVIATION AND SPACEFLIGHT SERIES) - E. T. Wooldridge (Editor)

This 1993 volume is a collection of edited oral histories of participants in the carrier war in the Pacific.  It's an extraordinary volume, with insights on everything from strategy and tactics to ship and aircraft design and operation.  

As oral histories will do, it focuses on the experiences of the narrators, and doesn't present a balanced narrative of the events recounted, but that's just fine with me.  I am interested in what they did, and saw, and thought was happening.

Grey Ghost: The Story of the Aircraft Carrier Hornet - Lee Merideth

I read this book before touring the Hornet last month.  Lots of errors a good proofing should have caught, but very useful information about the ship and what it contains.

USS Ticonderoga (CV-14) 1/700 – Finishing a 1994 Build in 2021

https://imodeler.com/2021/07/uss-ticonderoga-cv-14-1-700-finishing-a-1994-build-in-2021/

USS Bon Homme Richard (CV/CVA-31) 1/700 Double Build

Since Typepad requires pictures to be uploaded and situated separately, I've started posting about completed builds in iModeler, and sharing the link to that post.

https://imodeler.com/2021/03/uss-bon-homme-richard-cv-cva-31-1-700-double-build/

Warships After London: The End of the Treaty Era in the Five Major Fleets, 1930–1936 - John Jordan

This was an enlightening book.  It covers naval ship design following the second of the interwar naval arms limitations treaties, and explains why the treaty came out the way it did, and how it affected warship design in the late 1930s.  

Following the end of World War I, a major naval arms limitation treaty (Washington) resulted in the scrapping of large numbers of capital ships then under construction, and provided Britain, Japan, and the United States with the battle cruiser hulls, unusable for their original purpose, which became the first generation of large fleet aircraft carriers.  Some years later, a second round of arms limitation talks (London) resulted in a second set of limitations, which had a major impact on all countries' naval construction in the 1930s as they began to ramp up for a possible war.  

The book was very interesting in that it explained the differing strategies countries had for naval construction – for example France and Italy had very different needs, and had different ideas about the best way to allocate their limited shipbuilding tonnage.  Similarly, Britain, Japan and the United States experimented with different allocations of their tonnage based on which ships they believed would be most useful in the event of war.

It can be dry reading, especially when the book is discussing ships which did not play a role in World War II, but it is still interesting to see that there were different strategies surrounding naval construction during this period, and that all nations had false starts and design dead ends, with differing effects when the war began.