Puttering in the Study

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.

1/700 U.S.S. Fletcher (Matchbox) - weekend rebuild

I've had this old Matchbox 1/700 Fletcher destroyer model for at least 25 years.  I had built it partway down to the detail parts and left it, as shown in the picture to the right (no U.S. flag).  Last weekend I decided that I wanted to take on a small project, and rebuilding it with aftermarket parts and the correct camouflage colors seemed like a good idea.  It ended up taking three days, not the anticipated two, but I finished it this morning, as shown on the left (finished model has a US flag).

The inspiration for the rebuild was Eric Hammel's Guadalcanal: Decision at Sea, which I finished over the weekend.  The Fletcher was the last ship in the line at the naval battle off Guadalcanal on the night of November 13, 1942, and the book really got me interested in the different fire control systems on the ship.  Unlike almost all the rest of the U.S. Navy ships that were there that night, Fletcher as a new ship (and first of her class) had a full suite of radars, including SC, the brand-new SG, and radar fire control.

First step was to take the ship apart as far as it would go, including discarding the kit turrets and torpedo mounts.  I then shot the whole model, including the Skywave USN equipment parts I knew I'd need, with Ocean Gray (5-O), which is the middle color in the Measure 12 Mod. camouflage scheme, then handpainted the Deck Blue color for the decks.

I reassembled the kit using new 5" .38 cal. Mk 30 gun houses with separate barrels with blast bags, as well as new rafts, lifeboats, searchlights, torpedo mounts and Mk 37 gun director from the Skywave parts kit.

I hadn't planned on scratchbuilding the foremast, but as the kit part was the wrong height and I needed to add photoetch radars I went ahead and scratchbuilt it, complete with SC and SG radars in the correct positions.  The Skywave Mk. 37 director got a photoetched fire control radar as well. I added a gaff for the national ensign on the aft stack, and pole masts at the bow and stern.  As the ship is modeled underway, the U.S. flag is on the stack gaff, and nothing is flying at the bow or stern.

Keeping in mind that this is a poor quality 1978 Matchbox kit, I used 20mm mounts from the Hasegawa Essex kit with strip plastic shields, and scratchbuilt K-gun depth charge projectors, three to a side on the main deck aft of midships.  They're not particularly accurate, but I make exceptions for things that are smaller than an eighth of an inch.  The only photoetch rail is on top of the superstructure, where I thought it added a nice detail.

The camouflage pattern uses Navy Blue (5-N) for the lower hull color.  It might have been Sea Blue (5-S) but the Fletcher commissioned right around the time that color was replaced with Navy Blue, and in any event I tried Sea Blue and it was way lighter than almost any of the many photos of destroyers in late 1942, so I darkened it to Navy Blue - which is still markedly lighter and bluer than the color I had been using at the time, as shown in the "before" photo above.  The lighter color used in the superstructure is Haze Gray (5-H).  I added some weathering and chipping at the waterline based on a mid-1942 color photo of the similarly camouflaged destroyer Buchanan.

I have had a state of the art kit of the Monssen - the prewar destroyer that was next in line ahead of the Fletcher on the night of November 13, for a couple of years now, and now that I know more about that ship's history it might be the next build. 

Pacific Thunder: The US Navy's Central Pacific Campaign, August 1943–October 1944 - Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

This book focuses on the U.S. Navy's Central Pacific drive from August 1943 to October 1944.  It really begins ten months earlier with the last of the 1942 carrier battles, Santa Cruz, which left the U.S. with only one damaged carrier, Enterprise, in the South Pacific to face the entire Japanese navy.  It contrasts that with the picture only 24 months later, when after the Battle of Leyte Gulf the U.S. had nine light and nine heavy CVs, with another three working up and twelve more in the pipeline, and the Japanese navy was virtually destroyed as a fighting unit.

Unfortunately, my practice of reading every book on this subject that I can on the Kindle and several at the same time means I don't recall much about each particular book.  So while I don't have anything negative to say about the book, it just didn't make much of an impression.  

First Man - the annotated screenplay - Josh Singer

I picked this up to see what decisions they made making the movie - how much was strictly accurate, how much was moved around or modified, and what was admittedly created for the movie. And I absolutely loved it.

As you’d expect, the book reveals the movie that was written, the movie that was filmed, and almost all of the movie as it was edited - the book wrapped four weeks before the film did so some final cuts aren’t reflected.  

Hellcat: The F6F in World War II - Barrett Tillman

I pick up Tillman's books whenever I see them as reference material, but decided to read this one as I'm getting close to building my first Hellcat model.  The book was surprisingly light on the design and origins of the F6F, and is devoted more to blow by blow, day by day accounts of the operational career of the aircraft.  It's dense, but interesting.  Frustratingly, the book is printed in sepia toned ink, so the photos are even less useful as references.

World War II At Sea: A Global History - Craig Symonds

I've enjoyed listening to Craig Symonds' Midway book at least twice now, so I thought I'd give his naval history of World War II a try.  The problem with reading so much similar history, however, is that unless I take notes while reading I have no clear recollection of the book when I'm done.  I liked it, and I know I saw a few minor errors (ship names or types), but I can't be much more specific than that - with two exceptions where I learned things I definitely didn't know. before

First, Symonds emphasized that WW II was in fact a naval war above all else because the U.S.'s sea lift capacity was the determining factor in the war.  With due respect to the Red Army, what enabled the Allied victory was America's ability to build the ships to keep Britain from starving, and at the same time create the sea lift capacity to project its military overseas in both theaters of the war.  We forget that every solider, weapon, bullet, and box of supplies had to be carried over thousands of miles of seas on ships, and the ability to build the ships that did that was what won the war.  Naval engagements almost pale in comparison to the race to build adequate shipping, because without it there was no way the Allies could have gone on the offensive in either theater.  The shipping necessary to keep small tasks forces at seas for a few weeks at a time was one thing.  The shipping necessary to carry and supply 

Second, scratch any account of the American campaigns in either theater and you hear about the overriding need for "landing craft" but this was the first book that explained what was being referred to.  Yes, the services needed craft to carry soldiers to the beaches, but according to Symonds it was the LSTs - landing ship "tank" that were pure gold, as they brought to the beaches (over and over) the supplies and hardware that enabled troops to fight once ashore.  The Allies forces never had immediate access to port facilities after amphibious assaults, making LSTs the lifeline for both the Army and the Marines.  Eisenhower postponed Overlord a month to get a handful more, underscoring that they were the crucial bottleneck in 1942-44 in the same way that escort vessels had been two years earlier.   

On the other side, the lack of sea lift doomed the Japanese war effort from the beginning, when the garrison on Guadalcanal could not be adequately supplied.  The undersized and similarly undersupplied U.S. forces could have been forced off the island, but Japan could never assemble sufficient strength to do so.  The reason was that the Americans controlled the air, but the campaign is still an illustration of the crucial role that (adequately protected) sea lift played. Then, once the problems with American torpedoes were fixed, the U.S. submarine campaign completely throttled Japanese industry.  Conversely, the American forces in the Pacific were able to project themselves across thousands of miles of empty ocean because they had sufficient shipping.  In the European theater, after the landings at Normandy supplies only had to cross a few dozen miles of Allied-controlled sea, and even without port facilities the necessary supplies were landed.  Even the destruction of one of the two "Mulberry" artifical harbors did not fatally crimp the supply chain, as the LSTs' beach unloading produced an equivalent amount of supplies. 

Learning that is what made the book worthwhile to me.

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.  

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.

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.