Researcher@Large

Distant, but related

2012-01-10T22:36:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about being an American is the effort that was made in the past to make data available to American citizens. Top Secret eventually becomes public, and works that were funded with tax pay dollars are released to the public domain so that pretty much anyone can find and post photos like this without having to worry about licensing fees:

That's part of a bunch of images I scanned in of the raid on Nauru in December of 1943, by the way. These photos were shot by Navy personnel whose pay was funded by the American taxpayer, so that work now belongs to Americans and is public domain. Archives for the Royal Navy are not treated the same way, which is why there are fewer photos and models of their ships, for example. It just costs a hell of a lot more.

So this troubles me. It's a reversal of that sought by the medical publishing industry in order to lock in profits:NY Congresswoman Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research.

Tax-payer funded works ought to be public domain, and freely available, particularly medical information that can save lives. These photos and documents that I find and post are useful and interesting to few, but only in my wildest dreams could I suppose that they might save a life.

Reflecting

2011-12-07T19:47:00.001-08:00

I sit alone in a room thirty minutes from the gun that announced the United States entry into the Second World War. I'd like to visit, but I am here for work and there is not enough time. Instead, I worked on USS California's Damage Report for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which was seventy years ago tonight. Pearl Harbor was the true turning point of the war, as it ended a charade and any quibbling over whether we should get involved.But it was also a day where a lot of people had their lives torn from them or were horribly wounded. Some gave their lives, some struggled in a panic to survive and were tragically unsuccessful. Many we lost; their bodies too destroyed to identify. Life goes on, and I am able to sit in this room and be too busy to properly pay my respects partially because of their sacrifices. But they are not forgotten. To those who survived, to those who died, and to those somewhere in between; you are in my thoughts nearly every day. I run this site in a large way because I feel it is the best way I am able to give my thanks and my respect. Helping others learn about that day helps keep it in our memory.You have my respect, and my thanks.

CVE Update

2011-12-04T19:36:00.001-08:00

I touched on my Hasegawa 1/350th Gambier Bay build here back in early July and then again in mid July, but it got set aside due to modeling burn-out for a bit. With the Annual IPMS Seattle Christmas meeting looming I needed to show *some* progress for Internet Modeler Chris to see, so I picked it back up on a study break last night and worked on finishing the port side.So here is the port side before and after, showing what became a wad of tape after the Ocean Gray and Black were sprayed on the hull and then the paint. I still need to do the starboard side, aft surfaces, and bow section under the flight deck. Once that's done it's on to the decks and overhangs.

Scattered leaves

2011-10-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

As I prepare for my trip tomorrow to NARA II to try and answer, amongst other things, the appearance of Battleship Arizona during the attack, I am looking for some files on Radio Direction Finders to see if there any I have found but not posted. I came across this, one of the few documents I've found in the NARA Seattle Naval records on Arizona that still survives there:

Arizona's Roster of Officers for December, 1941. It's nearly 70 years old now. It would be a lot of work to post it as HTML, but it seems a shame to leave it where no one else can see it and perhaps make a connection to this ship and the human cost associated with her history.The wind is blowing the yellowed leaves from the branches out my window as those still green hang tight.

Picture Post - Fort Casey Coastal Artillery - Battery Henry Kingsbury

2011-10-01T23:58:00.000-07:00

While looking through my records for something else I stumbled across this tidbit I'd forgotten I had scanned in:

I have a connection to Fort Casey; having spent time there as a kid (Fort Flagler as well for that matter). It's a single-piece scan, so there's not a lot I can do with it. But, while preparing it to post I figured I'd cover the steps I used, since I do post blue-prints on a regular basis. I could just post them in all their blue glory, but I know people like to print things, and I'd hate to be the reason a few printer ink cartridges choked and died, so I always make them black and white for better printing.

The process is below, and is based on the ancient Photoshop (6) I use. Invert the image, set a white point to make most of the remaining background color go away, then grayscale and level the file to darken the dark and whiten the white and remove the noise.

Takes no more than 30 seconds once you know how to do it; the harder part is cleaning up the borders and holes.

You can read more about these guns here (and you might even see a familiar drawing!):
http://www.cdsg.org/HDPSdata/kingsbury.htm
http://fortwiki.com/Battery_Kingsbury
They were a great place to run around in as a kit!

Projects

2011-09-28T22:46:00.000-07:00

So, this December marks the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. As such, I'm going to try and wrap up some Pearl Harbor projects by then. BB-44 USS California's damage report is under way and I hope to have both it and Nevada's done and posted by December 7th. I'll also be flying to NARA College Park in less than a month to try and solve the Arizona question.

Busy otherwise... not leaving me much in the mood to be wordy....

Was Arizona Blue?

2011-08-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

I'm involved in an upcoming Battleship Arizona project and was asked if Arizona was blue or not; I get asked this on a somewhat regular basis and thought it would be good to put down my current thoughts and feelings.

Put simply, there is no definitive answer at this point, and anyone wanting to render the ship in her final configuration is rolling the dice no matter what they choose.

Now for the explanation.

Up until 1941, the Navy had painted their battleships in the #5 Standard Navy Gray that had come into use just after the end of the First World War. Starting in the mid 1930s there was a slow experimentation process that started to update the camouflage, but the experiments weren't completed and new orders finalized until January of 1941. For battleships of the Pacific Fleet, Camouflage Measure 1, using 5-D Dark Gray and 5-L Light Gray was the new standard.

Possibly because camouflage had not changed in twenty years, the Navy did not do a very good job of managing the transition. Only two Navy Yards were responsible for manufacturing paint for the entire Atlantic and Pacific Fleets (Norfolk Navy Yard and Mare Island Navy Yard respectively), and they had problems with procuring the necessary materials and equipment to suddenly switch hundreds of ships and boats from one color to another. Photographic evidence of battleships in the Pacific fleet in Measure 1 doesn't show up until June of 1941, for example, and not all of the battleships are repainted at that time.

In the meantime, the Navy had grown dissatisfied with 5-D Dark Gray and started looking for a replacement. One of the problems with 5-D had been that of supply chain; there were issues with finding the optimally sized containers and having a paint that was different from others; the two other colors used in camouflage, 5-L Light Gray and 5-O Ocean Gray came from mixing different ratios of the same white base and tinting paste together, but 5-D needed it's own separate containers and supply chain. As such, the replacement was to be made using the same base and tint in order to simplify the supply chains.

The official replacement was 5-S Sea Blue, and at the end of July the Navy ordered the paint manufacturing Yards to stop manufacturing 5-D and continue with the white base and tinting paste, with the mixing proportions for 5-S Sea Blue listed. Since this is roughly four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the white base and tinting paste had been in circulation for a while, this should make it a fairly open-and-shut case, right?

Well, not exactly.

The battleships had originally painted in a 5-D that was based on a conversion paste from the pre-war #5 Standard Navy Gray, and even if they had painted their 5-L parts in 5-L from a the mixture, the quantities they carried on board were so limited as to be insignificant in terms of suddenly mixing and repainting an entire ship. The different ratios between 5-L and 5-S mean that nearly 18 times as much tinting paste was needed to make Sea Blue versus Light Gray (9 ounces versus 10 pints)

Additionally, the original order to transition to Sea Blue had been sent to the paint manufacturing yards and not the fleet in general; this means that the Yards had to flow the new directive out, something they did in a somewhat unclear way. We see here, for example, the order to Battleship Arizona to re-request paint to the new directives, but the directives as to how a battleship was painted didn't come from the yards, it came from the group commander.

In the case of the battleships, that would be "Commander Battleships, Battle Force," and we see a request, for example, from the Captain of Battleship Oklahoma to the Commander Battleships, Battle Force, as to what to do since the Yard is ordering them to use a paint they have no information about. Not that were are about two months away from the attack at this point; how long would it take the command to reply, and the ship to then fill out their requisition? How long would it take the Mare Island Navy Yard to fulfill it and ship it out?

We do know that the paint had been produced and that some ships had been painted in Sea Blue well in advance of the attack; Helena had been ordered into Sea Blue at the end of August and that by the middle of September the Bureau of Ships had ordered the yards to directly substitute 5-S for 5-D in any paint requisition.

Arizona was involved in a collision with Battleship Oklahoma on the night of October 22 and went into the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard for repair from the 27th of October until the 12th of November. This is a month after the order to substitute 5-S on all requisitions of paint and about three months after the manufacture of 5-D had ceased. A revised SHIPS-2 was finished in September, but was not released to the fleets until the middle of October, just before Arizona was involved in the collision; this new revision did away with Measure 1 and the 5-L Light Gray above the top of the stacks that Arizona was painted in at the time of the attack.

This leaves us with the following questions:

What paint did Arizona and Pearl Harbor Navy Yard have on hand during her repairs in October/November and whose stocks were used to repaint her following the repairs?

What directives were in place at the time of Arizona's repair? If SHIPS-2 Revision 1 had come through after the orders for repair had been issued, but before the ship were actually painted, would they have performed a change order on the paint to be used?

Do we have all of the directives that were in effect at that time? We have a smattering of some from the Commander Cruisers and Commander Destroyers, Battle Force, but none from Commander Battleships, Battle Force. We have some from the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, but do we have them all?

For this reason I say that no one has the answer to the question of Arizona's final paint colors. I'm planning a trip to NARA II this fall to go through some records that haven't been explored before for this purpose to see what I can find. My hope is that we'll be able to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by finally being able to tell people how the ships actually looked as so many awoke to their last day on earth.

Hasegawa 1/350th CVE-73 Gambier Bay Build Update

2011-07-18T18:01:00.001-07:00

One of the features that initially looked promising with the Gambier Bay was a page of the instructions manual that had templates for the Measure 32/15a camouflage pattern; while not strictly necessary, I thought it a nice touch. However, when I tried using it I found yet another company that doesn't understand algebra and geometry. The templates are just copied from the original flat paper of the design sheet and don't take into account the horizontal shift as well as vertical. Pythagorean theorem, any one?

Below is a photo of the model on top of the templates, with a copy cut out and placed where it is supposed to go; as you can see, it's not even close to covering the right area. I suppose the templates will work for the straight areas, but those are the easy parts, so it's really not going to be a good help to people new to dazzle painting.

4th of July, Lake Kathleen WA, 2011

2011-07-04T22:41:00.000-07:00

Shot these tonight near where I live; a loud cacophony of light and visceral sound, from the thump of the mortars to the crack of the shell bursts, to the applause and cheers wafting across the lake.

This couple enjoyed the early portion of the show and then left; most of the rest of these photos are shot from the shoreline where they shared the show for a bit.

This family's show was literally overhead; their shells beat into me with each blast, and I could not back far enough away to actually get all of their shots in frame.

The next couple are on the eastern shore of the lake, looking down to the south:

The west side kept pretty busy too:

1/350th USS Gambier Bay CVE-73 Model Pt 1

2011-07-04T21:10:00.000-07:00

My "gateway drug" into researching was plastic model building, which I have been doing as long as I can remember. I started as an "airplane guy," and while I have a collection that consists of mostly airplane kits, a good portion is (unsurprisingly) ships. I've been working on a Hasegawa 1/350th Gambier bay for about nine months, mostly not working on it due to weather and burn out. However, we had an exceptional weekend and I decided it was time to take it beyond just the antifouling on the hull. So yesterday and today I painted the black boot stripe, and today I started on the 5-P Pale Gray of the Measure 32 design 15A she was painted in at the time of her loss in 1944. Here she is with the boot top and below taped off and the 5-P painted on. Paints used so far are White Ensign for the Norfolk Anti-Fouling and 5-P Pale Gray, and Model Master's basic flat black for the boot topping.

This is part of a review for InternetModeler.com and as I'm not a fan of leaving tape on for a long time (particularly with a few issues I had with Tamiya primer recently) I should be hitting this fairly heavily in the next week or so, so stay tuned!

What do you think in?

2011-06-22T19:30:00.000-07:00

I spent a good amount of time on the water as a kid, boating in the Puget Sound and further north into Canada. While mostly land-locked now, I miss a lot of the experience, and one such minor tradition is that of the ship's bell.

Obviously, carrying a bell around to ring as an IT consultant is out of the question; customers like a little quirk here and there but that would be rude, to say the least, during a meeting. But what do we have technology for, if not to satisfy our whimsy? Enter Ted Rathkopf's "Ship's Clock" app. I've got it running on my android HTC EVO, quiet hours set to 10PM - 8AM to keep it at least tolerable to the wife.

I found myself thinking at one point today, "one bell, it's 4:30" and wondering what sailors of yore thought. At a certain point a multi-lingual person is asked what language they think in; time is the same way. To a sailor only concerned with his watch, the concept of 4:30 isn't really important, but one bell, meaning a half hour into their watch, is more so. Ships bells were a different language for telling time.

USAT Mount McKinley Aground on Unimak island, 1942

2011-05-14T19:29:00.000-07:00

Found this in today's trip to Seattle NARA. It's a Patrol Wing Four (VP-4) photograph of the USAT Mount McKinley aground on an Alaskan shore in 1942. The caption on the back of the photo is dated October 7th, 1942, but I've had troubles confirming the date and location.

She's reported as grounded on March 11th 1942 according to this page on the US Merchant Marine web site, but the US Coast Guard History for the cutter Haida states, "On March 10th she arrived at King Cove and went to the assistance of the Mount McKinley ashore 1-1/2 miles west of Scotch Cap."

I've been able to confirm it was on Unimak island, about a mile and a half west of Scotch Cap Lighthouse (roughly here). But this photo's date would seem to suggest that she started coming apart fairly quickly (not the missing stern), so either the date on that photo or the Patrol Wing 4 photo is incorrect.

Rendering honors

2011-03-10T22:16:00.000-08:00

On the first of this month a British soldier was shot by a sniper in Helmand Province and instantly killed. What is particularly poignant about this story is that he was a dog handler, and his dog died a few hours later of a seizure.

Lance Cpl. Liam Tasker and Theo had recently set a record for the most weapons found by a team in Afghanistan, and it is clear that Theo gave his all to Corporal Tasker. There is talk, so it's said, that Theo is being considered for a Dickin Medal. The original spot I heard on the radio today had talked to a former US Marine Dog handler who commented that there is no US equivalent to the Dickin Medal; that the US Military considers the animals it uses equipment, and one doesn't award medals to equipment.

However, An animal can perform acts just as selfless and full of valor as humans, something machines really can't at this point. Some clearly go above and beyond. It seems a shame to deny them honor with something as simple as a medal and acknowledgment.

Theo and Lance Corporal Tasker, I thank you for your service to your country and against those that seek to indiscriminately harm others. You were shining examples of the best kind.

I owe y'all a post....

2011-02-24T21:22:00.000-08:00

Things have been busy and progressing... I try and keep myself productive on things that feel like I'm adding something as opposed to just sitting on a couch watching TV. Sometimes blogging feels more like the later, but I need to remember that there is more to getting the word out than just monthly update pages.

Aside from a page I missed when scanning the original report and a caption I cut off, the BB-57 South Dakota battle of Guadalcanal damage report is not finished and ready for consumption. A damage report for CL-62 Birmingham in 1943 has been started but not finished quite yet... tracking for late March or April.

A new section I started on is US Navy WWII Carrier Air Groups organized by ship. This arose out of some work I've done for a book on the Essex class as well as the Dragon CVL model project. Currently it's being used as a format test of sorts for the Essex book, so it's far from full-fledged, but CV-9 Essex has her data for the entire war posted and CVL-22 Independence has all of 1943 posted. There will be lots of tweaks to these two ships before I settle down and start posting other ships, but in the interim if you have any feedback you're more than welcome to drop me a line.

I managed to make it down to the NARA branch in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Like many trips this one ended with not much of what I had hoped to find, but much that was new and important. While I hesitate to consider R@L a damage report site, I find them fascinating for telling how dedicated the US Navy was at not only saving their ships from calamity, but also to learn from each one. So it'll take some work for me to balance out all of the new damage reports I spent about 4 to 4.5 of my five days there scanning in.

Navsource has already started receiving some of the photos I came across, so enjoyment for all!

Mare Island Battery Cart for Submarines, WWII

2011-01-08T22:58:00.000-08:00

Came across these today at Seattle NARA and figured I'd pop them up here for the model builders who like dockside dioramas or those just generally interested in Mare Island Navy Yard. Below are photos of a portable charging station for submarines in WWII. The dimensions of the shed were given as a 8' by 24' trailer with the walls being 8' tall at the eaves and 9' at the peak.

Note that the windows on the two back walls are centered while the one closest to the door in the photo is not centered.

Pearl Harbor... 69 years and two days later

2010-12-09T21:12:00.001-08:00

Been a busy month... still is. Essentially sneaking this in while waiting for some backups to finish.

To commemorate the 69th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I posted three ship damage reports:

USS Tennessee BB-43
USS Vestal AR-4
USS Oglala CM-4

I also worked with Navsource to get them some new photos, most never published before. Ship pages that had photos added include:

USS California BB-44
USS Oglala CM-4
USS Oklahoma BB-37
USS Shaw DD-373
USS Utah AG-16/BB-31
USS West Virginia BB-48

Can't let a month go by without a post!

2010-10-31T22:59:00.000-07:00

I've been remiss... it's been a busy month, and I like to have more tangible results than blog posts.

For the last two years or so I have been working with Dragon Models from Shanghai, China on a 1/350th Independence-class CVL. The kit is finally done and in final production... you can see their product page at http://www.dragonmodelsusa.com/dmlusa/prodd.asp?pid=DRA1024

Getting ready for this year's Pearl Harbor day... have Oglala and Vestal's damage reports just about done and am planning on having Tennessee's as well.

An Axe to grind

2010-09-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

I think we've all seen them, and many of us (present company included) have been them; the internet user with an axe to grind. Be it a company that did you wrong, a sports team that is your favorite / the enemy, or a historical point of fact that you think you know a lot about, there are times when someone just will not let go of something.

So for that, I created the following graphic; feel free to use it on any forum or site that you think appropriate. And for those copy write lawyers from the future with an axe to grind because they think someone other than me copy-wrote the image, I released it on this day under the guidelines of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial License.

Challenge Update

2010-08-21T15:21:00.001-07:00

I've finished the USS Enterprise Guadalcanal Damage Report other than the final proof reading. That is doable barring big blow-ups at work.

It's been interesting and sobering to read through as I work on it; her Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships Entry just says, " On 24 August a strong Japanese force was sighted some 200 miles north of Guadalcanal and TF 61 sent planes to the attack. An enemy light carrier was sent to the bottom and the Japanese troops intended for Guadalcanal were forced back. Enterprise suffered most heavily of the United States ships, 3 direct hits and 4 near misses killed 74, wounded 95, and inflicted serious damage on the carrier. But well-trained damage control parties, and quick, hard work patched her up so that she was able to return to Hawaii under her own power" but the report highlights more details that paint this in a bit more of a serious light to me:

This bomb detonated almost against the armor plate protecting the ready torpedo and warhead stowage, but no fragments penetrated the armor.

Had this armor not held and the torpedoes been exposed to the blast, what would have happened to the war?

If History happens and no one remembers, did it ever really happen?

2010-08-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

My wife and I ate lunch yesterday on the cuise ship MS Rotterdam of the Holland America line. She was docked at Pier 91 in Seattle, former site of US Navy Base Seattle. While I was there, I shot some photos of the USS Green Bay LPD-20 getting under way and heading north. It was a hazy day, so the first shot is much hazier than we'd all prefer, but just imagine it clear in your mind:

As she headed west she became less back lit and stood out in better detail:

However, as I researched to provide some extra information in this post, it became apparent that Navy Base Seattle has been largely forgotten; The first two hits were from images I sent to Navsource some time ago, such as their LST-817 page showing the ship loading for the invasion of Okinawa.

In fact, it's not until you start looking for Smith Cove that you really start finding information out, such as that the house I shot below is known as the Admiral's House:

Looking South from the "Lido Deck" (deck 8) stern, we had a great view of the bulk carrier Tian Du Feng loading grain at the Port of Seattle 'Bulk Marine Terminal':

Other than my wife's iPod disappearing aboard ship, it was a pleasurable morning.

A Challenge!

2010-08-11T13:11:00.001-07:00

While looking for some information this morning I came across a damage report that I had on my list, but lower down priority wise. However, I noticed this time that it was for action this month in 1942. So here is my challenge: to see if I can post and proofread 24 pages of text in 13 days! You can follow my progress here!

Update from way high up!

2010-07-23T20:14:00.000-07:00

Greetings from 34,00 feet, where I'm winging my way north. I just uploaded the latest update using the in-flight wi-fi as a fun little thing to do.

So, without further ado:

Interview of

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER J. R. LEE, USN
Formerly VS-10 ENTERPRISE, now C.O. AIR GROUP

With Additional Comment By

LIEUTENANT COMMANDER L. J. KIRN, USN
Commanding VS-3

in the
Bureau of Aeronautics
14 April 1943

The Flag goes up at 0700

2010-07-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting outsite the San Bruno Archives on my last day here; a half hour before they open. Building facilities just raised the American flag for the day, and 200 feet away the 380 is broadcasting the morning commute to the neighborhood. I'd like to thank John and his team members Mike & Nick for allowing me to tag along with them, without John's invitation this trip wouldn't have been possible. A thanks you as well to Robert Glass of the National Archives, San Bruno, who is "the man" for navy archival holdings here, and the staff, who always make the research here as fun and efficient as one could expect. I'd also like to give a thanks to a new contact, Jerry, who has started researching here and was kind enough to share some information with me; I'm hoping we can collaborate on projects in the future to bring everyone more great documents to read.

So far this trip, like most of them, has not seen the results I was hoping for, but at the same time has exceeded expectations. Fans of Pearl Harbor will be happy as I came across and scanned in many reports and information regarding the attack & its aftermath. Fans of Guadalcanal will be happy as well. I will be busy for many months stitching damage plates back together and posting reports.

Twenty minutes until opening... I'm going to see if I can stitch a damage plate back together before then....

Interesting factoid

2010-07-21T06:56:00.001-07:00

Cab fare between The San Francisco Airport and the San Francisco branch of the National Archives is roughly $15, or $45 if you realize when you arrive at the archives that you left your laptop on the plane and have to go back for it.

Thanks to Marcus and Joy and whomever else was in the background of Alaska Airlines for aiding me in its recovery. Thankfully I realized it within about 20 minutes of touch down so it didn't have a chance to get far into the lost & found system.

Only cost me $30 in cab fare and about an hour and 15 minutes of time, which I consider a bargain cost for the lesson, as opposed to loosing a laptop and a week's research time!

I've been stuck in a battleship quagmire... so much good stuff it's hard to get out. Damage reports for California, Nevada, Tennessee, and hopefully Vestal will hopefully be scanned in by the end of the day. Many photos of the ships of Pearl Harbor and the divers that I have not seen before have been scanned in; a section on the salvage divers is probably in the future now.

Time for breakfast and to head to the archives!

The Dangers of Airshows

2010-07-18T15:32:00.001-07:00

I have a hereditary pre-disposition to shutter-bugging I got from my Dad; yesterday is a case in point. It was the "Joint Base Lewis McChord" (nee McChord Air Force Base) air show; in something like three hours I shot over 1,000 images. Hooooo boy am I glad I'm digital!

We bopped around, trying to see both the static aircraft and the air show... occasionally when caught by surprise I would shoot from the static aircraft area, which can lead to little oopses like:

Another hazard is weather; in our case we were lucky that the marinelayer of clouds burned off by about 12:30-1PM, but while it was doing so there were times I shot photos like this:

I'm still going through and deleting the blurry shots... my auto-focus hasn't worked well for a while and my skills of keeping a fast-moving aircraft in-focus are still shaky at times, but I had a few nice ones....

Wake-up for tomorrow's flight down to San Francisco is 0-dark-300.

Moved!

2010-07-06T22:24:00.000-07:00

Man, what a PITA.. time sucker.

Time to start ramping up for the trip to San Bruno in two weeks. Have a new interview just about done; needs some proof-reading and it'll be ready to post.

Deadly, Deadly Pianos.

2010-06-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

Quiet on the blog front lately as my wife and I are moving and most free time is taken up with packing. I did manage to finish the BuOrd Pamphlet for the Mk8 Fire Control Radar and post for those interested in US Navy battleship & cruiser fire control.

I started a new interview; two scouting squadron commanders in April of 1943. One of the humorous aspects of my work is the occasional OCR glitch that happens to make a sentence a lot stranger or funnier than the author intended. For example, "planes" will come through as "pianos" due to the similar shapes in the second and fifth character. So you read sentences that refer to high-altitude bombing by carrier-based pianos, or two pianos dropping depth charges on a u-boat... gives me a little chuckle from time to time.

Also managed to arrange for a trip down to San Francisco next month for a week of research thanks to the kindness of a friend. Minor joy.....probably the only trip this year.

Memorial Day, 2010

2010-05-31T12:10:00.000-07:00

A large part of why I do the site is Veterans; I've come across so many documents that bring up actions and sacrifice unknown to me and perhaps the population at large that it seems a shame to not share them. To the ones who gave their lives defending the United States of America; we are eternally humbled by your actions, great or small. To those that survived, wounded in flesh or spirit, I offer thanks and the hopes that you feel gratitude from others not just on this day, but every day.

What a Battleship can do for your web traffic

2010-05-27T23:12:00.001-07:00

I use Google Analytics to watch what the site is doing traffic wise. I usually pull in between 75-100 visitors a day, not enough that the site makes any money, but enough that I know that people are finding interesting things to read.

Occasionally there's a spike of 40-50 hits that I can trace down to a forum stumbling across an article and discussing it, but last week I had the biggest spike I've yet seen:

Two days prior I had posted this memo regarding BB-59 Massachusetts' experience in a storm that suggested her to be not suited to rough weather, at least not early in her career. I usually toss a quick notice on Twitter and save the rest for notices on my monthly updates, but I decided for fun to post it on ModelWarships' and SteelNavy's forums to maybe start some discussions. Two days later is the spike, which coincides with when a thread started on the NavWeaps board.

Nothing ground shaking, just interesting. Truly if you want a spike in traffic you need to get noticed on a social media site or message board.

Technique - Photoshop Levels

2010-05-27T21:50:00.001-07:00

One of the techniques I use heavily is the photoshop "levels" command. Even if a document that is scanned in is on white paper, there will be background noise that shows up. Levels allows one to take much of that out. This came up when I was talking with a friend and commented that I wished the Historic Naval Ship Association would do it on some of their documents. While it can add a few seconds to each document, I do believe the results are worth it, if you're aiming for a document that prints well or is to be reproduced in a book or magazine.

The below images show the technique I came up with farting around on my own; I don't profess to be a master, and I'm using a ten year-old version of Adobe Photoshop, so your screen may look a little different if you're trying this for the first time on a newer version, but the principles are the same.

In photoshop, go to "image" --> "Adjust" and choose "levels." You'll wind up with something that looks like the below image:

Now, take the black point slider on the left and move it towards the center, to make the darks darker, and then the white point slider on the right and move it to the center, to make the whites whiter. You are essentially adjusting the contrast of the image. Each image will have a different histogram, so there is no set value in the input level boxes up top that you can memorize and set. What I've found works best for me is to move the white point slider either to the center of the hump on the right of the histogram, or a bit beyond it towards center; this will take out a lot of the background noise, but also fades the black text and lines out a bit. So we then compensate by taking the black point slider in to where there is a a little bit of histogram showing, which will darken our lines back up. Such as you see below:

So, now I invite you to compare the results below with the original, both on screen and with a print out.

This is also a technique I've found that can be used to increase OCR accuracy when converting document scans to HTML. It essentially filters out most of the noise that can confuse OCR programs but I only use it in selected sheets as it does add a minute or two to each page.

The Process

2010-05-15T22:44:00.001-07:00

I'm somewhat unique in what I do... while sites like Hyperwar and the Historic Naval Ships Association post documents from archives. I spend more time on formatting with HTML; the downside is slower "production" but I believe it makes some of the documents easier to read and "get" where one page transitions to another. All-in-all, I think we have a good ecosystem of postings with good variety and flavor. In fact, I've made arrangements that if I get hit by a bus or something similar, the documents I've posted will wind up on Hyperwar in some form, so there should be good coverage over the years.

I thought I'd write a bit about how I post a document. I could simply post jpgs or convert to PDF, but the disadvantage is that the text isn't indexable and for people with slower connections, it can take an awful long time to load 10 pages of large jpgs.

So I still hand-write my pages with the thought of trimming as much as possible out of the code to keep it fast-loading while at the same time preserving the formatting of the original. I've been aided in the last five years by the progression of OCR software, and the picture below shows a little bit of my workflow:

Left screen has the OCR program and the right screen is Homesite, my web page software of choice for a scarily long time now. I started with notepad back in 1995, and at some point soon after switched to a freeware program called DerekWare, which had buttons for dropping in pieces of code, and was a little more friendly for web design. It had one limitation I discovered after a bit, in that it couldn't handle pages larger than 21k, which was fine for a bit, but today some of my documents would blow it out of the water (the USS San Francisco Guadalcanal Damage Report is just about 100k in text and code alone, and the 1941 US Navy Fleet listing is over 125k). I purchased Homesite before the millennium and upgraded to version 5 maybe a year or two after... it's worked fine in Vista and Windows 7 so I'll probably be using it for another five years at least.

The current OCR program is Abbyy Fine Reader, which came bundled with my microtek scanner. It's a definite improvement over the OmniPage software I started with, but it's also newer... albeit itself it's at least two years old now. It does fairly well as long as the scans weren't of onionskin copies that were a couple of generations away from the original... in that cases it's faster to re-type things from scratch, and for the most part I tend to avoid those projects now. There are a couple of quirks; it consistently reads "ltr." as "Itr," and sometimes "planes" as "pianos," which can lead to some fun mental images when you read about pianos strafing or dropping depth charges. Because some of these are subtle differences in characters, I always do two passes of proofreading; one in Homesite's code view for the obvious stuff, and then another in the actual web browser to find things that are subtle, such as Os when I need 0s. Below is an example of what I consider an OK OCR pass:

As was suggested in reference (c}^ th® Bureau has mad© an evaluation of the gasoline capacity and steaming radius of the several carriers in service. These data are furnished below and are bfised on information available to the Bureau o« fuel oil and gasoline consumption for the second and third quarters of the fiscal year 1942,

Each paragraph takes maybe a minute or two to proofread and format. Document headers and things with more formatting-per-text take longer, of course.

I test the documents in IE8, Firefox, SeaMonkey (a firefox derivative that's my browser and e-mail client of choice) and recently Chrome. There are some differences in how they handle spacing so I don't sweat a space off here and there between the browsers, but what you see is probably 90% of the formatting on the original.

Today is history

2010-04-29T22:33:00.000-07:00

At least, for a little while I have decided to back-burner the "today in Pacific WWII History" feature on the site. It's been sucking up all of my work time and I'm not getting much work done on new documents, nor have I had the energy to blog. I still plan on working on it and not only finishing it, but expanding it, but for the time being I need to keep this fun and not feeling like a burden.

So... some catch-up. On the first of this month I had the good fortune to visit with Gary Kingzett and Lou Parker. Lou served in WWII on the command staff for a cruiser division; hence he bounced back and forth between the cruisers San Francisco and Wichita. He's a great guy and interesting as hell to talk to.

The Seattle IPMS club held its annual Spring Show a couple of weeks ago, at which I gave a presentation on the Aircraft at Pearl Harbor.

I have managed to get in a little document work here and there.. I've finished an interview with two of the pilots who were on the mission to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto done shortly after they returned to the states. I have another one regarding the photo-reconnaissance in place in the med during operations there, and it is quite interesting to read how much they were tasked with doing and how broad of a program it was.

I also picked up a 1/350th model of USS Nimitz CVN-68 that I'll be doing as USS Theodore Roosevelt CVN-71 during the First Gulf War. That... will be quite the project.

Happy Spring!

2010-03-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

Some house cleaning items.

I came across some aviation stuff the last two trips and am working on posting it ahead of some other items for a couple of reasons. I like aviation, I want to broaden the site from being so ship specific, and frankly the amount of digital stitching to get some of the drawings for the 1.1" manual has got me dreading the project.

The "Today in History" project continues to swallow a lot of time as well. My goal has been to have at least two items per day, and that can take some time. Each entry takes about 20-30 minutes minimum to find, research, and expand upon. It's been a fun learning process, but it also slows down the new document posting, for something that doesn't add "much" to the site.

Also adding to the slowdown is an impending move; months away, but packing needs to start now.

I think my blog is getting more traffic....

2010-03-10T08:07:00.000-08:00

Either that or the blogger CAPTCHAs are loosing their effectiveness. I'm starting to get post spam more regularly....

For something useful to the readers; March updates are posted and I've got two documents working for the April update; a memo from the captain of USS Erie PG-50 to the Secretary of the Navy in regards to the torpedoing and beaching of his ship, and an interview of USS Bogue CVE-9's captain and air group commander in regards to convoy escort and ASW activities; one interesting story was a pilot who made too fast of an approach and dropped his depth charges very low on the submarine he was attacking and the angle and speed caused them to skip and bounce higher into the air than he was in the cockpit.

Oops

2010-03-01T21:17:00.000-08:00

Accidentally broke the "Today in History" script for a couple of days. Fixed now.

For those that might have missed the new twitter integration on the front page, I finished a new damage report a couple of days ago as part of the March updates. Just need to finish proofreading another document and the March updates are both done.

Today in History.

2010-02-22T22:47:00.000-08:00

Well, the second major portion of the "Today in the Pacific Theater" is done; a script to flip between entries randomly if there's more than one significant event per day. The hope is that over time every day will have multiple entries, but obviously that'll take some time to populate.

For now, hit refresh if you want to see if there was another significant event. I'm thinking about adding another script that might scroll them instead of randomly displaying one.... but that's off in the future.

Just about finished the main entry for next month's update as well, a US Navy Sea Going Tugs booklet. Some love for the small boys that were oh-so-necessary!

Oh, Hell yes!

2010-02-20T16:11:00.000-08:00

First off, today is my 8th wedding anniversary to my wife Robin, a very beautiful woman who understands me enough to not only tolerate my interest in history, but encourage it. Such women can be incredibly rare and I am luckier than I deserve.

When I first created R@L, one of the features I wanted was a "Today in history" blurb that would automatically update. I had seen something similar on the Navy Historical Center's site, but the code was kind of ugly; it basically loaded the entire year into the main page, bloating the size up quite a bit. Since I wanted the option of perhaps having multiple entries for a day, it was not a viable way of working this out.

I took a few stabs at it, spent some time drawing out the logic, but never managed to make something that could work. I hadn't messed around with it for about a year or so, but last night I decided that I was going to see what I could do in the couple of hours I had this morning before Robin woke up. The results were a surprise; I got it working with few problems and it's far simpler than I had ever managed to conceptualize before. It's only nine lines of code in the main page....

...and 366 separate documents for each day of the year.

Sooo... yeah, I have MORE work cut out for me now.

I basically blended code I found from three pages; this one to write out the script I heavily modified from this one.

Pearl Harbor Camouflage

2010-02-18T22:01:00.001-08:00

First, a little background. For those that don't know, there is a little controversy in regards to the camouflage worn by many ships of the US Navy during the attack at Pearl Harbor. My introduction to this was the winter of 2005, when myself and a couple of others were asked for help in determining Battleship Arizona's final paint scheme. We found some highly circumstantial evidence but no proof, and I have maintained a keen interest in finding out one way or another just what this historic ship looked like at the time of her demise.

At this point the search has seen extensive research in two archives (San Francisco and Seattle) and the records of three shipyards (Mare Island, Pearl Harbor, and Puget Sound) and one naval district (13th Naval District, essentially the Northwestern US) along with some non-Pearl Harbor research in various other records such as Astoria Navy Base just to try and build a complete understanding about how the Navy went about camouflage in the Second World War.

Using those resources we have been able to build up a "higher resolution" picture of the turbulent year of 1941, and yet there is much that remains unknown.

We know that in January, 1941 a change in camouflage was ordered, but that due to production problems and supply difficulties, it took time to build up significant quantities of the new paints and adoptions seems to have started around June of that year. However, the main color for the majority of the ships, 5-D Dark Gray, was not found satisfactory and by July the Navy ordered its production halted and 5-S Sea Blue mixed as its replacement.

This is the point at which things really get murky. The Navy did not do a good job of promulgating this order, sending it only to the three Navy Yards responsible for manufacturing paint for the various fleets as well as four commands (Atlantic Fleet, Pacific Fleet, "Air Force" [Not Army Air Force but the Navy command in charge of aircraft], and OPNAV [Office of the Chief of Naval Operations]). This resulted in a lot of confusion and resentment when ships and commands kept sending in requisitions for old paint formulas.

Initially Mare Island Navy Yard answered the requests of other yards and ships with letters listing the new formulas and an order to re-request the desired materials, but by late September they were ordered to simply substitute the new paints for the old.

So it would seem that by October the Navy Yard at Pearl Harbor and ships based there should have started receiving the new paints, but this is not a hard fact at all. Indeed, a memo found in the records of the suggest that at the earliest it was late October that they knew for sure.

This memo deserves its own discussion. There is a typo in a date that can be confusing; the second paragraph starts with "Today, August 22..." This is clearly incorrect as the date occurs before the shipyard received the file. This memo discusses a letter from Mare Island to Pearl Harbor that was lost for six weeks in internal mail before being found and finally delivered. The letter in question was the aforementioned Letter to re-calculate paint needed and re-requisition the amounts. So Pearl Harbor did not officially know about the new paints until October 22.

This might not be that big of a deal in that the new paints were actually made using the same stocks as some of the old ones. 5-L Light Gray and 5-O Ocean gray were made by mixing specific amounts of a tinting paste into a white, un-tinted base. 5-S Sea Blue and 5-H Haze Gray were created by simply creating different ratios of the same tinting paste and untinted base, so if they had the stock to mix Ocean Gray they could do Sea Blue. But, at this point we don't even know when Pearl Harbor had the supplies to issue those two components of the paints.

Documents from August and September hint that Pearl Harbor did not have the facilities to provide the new paints; CL-50 Helena was not only ordered to paint into 5-S Sea Blue at Mare Island, but was also ordered to pick up paints for other cruisers at Mare Island at the end of September. Ships of Destroyer Division Nine were ordered to paint in variations of measures during overhaul at Mare Island in October.

These last documents throw in a new wrinkle; they are not from the Bureau of Ships or any Navy Yard, but from the Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet, Commander of Destroyer Flotilla One, and the Commander Cruisers, Battle Force.

The question left unsolved at this point is, if the Commander of Cruisers, Battle Force, knew about the new paints and Pearl Harbor Navy Yard didn't, would there be any sort of interaction that would bring this to Pearl Harbor's attention? Would ComCruBatFor have requested the paint from PHNY first, or is there some other documentation thus undiscovered that would explain more?

What orders could these commands have given to the ships they administered that we haven't seen yet? And if Pearl Harbor didn't have the knowledge about the paints until late October, does it really matter if the various commands of the fleet DID have the knowledge and their supply chains did not exclusively flow through Pearl Harbor Navy Yard?

Updates & Changes

2010-02-09T22:15:00.001-08:00

How about that prior petulant post ...

So, I've kicked off some changes, mainly an effort to bring things out a bit quicker and to more people, but with the intent of not changing much for those who like things the way they are.

I've started a twitter account at https://twitter.com/ResrcherAtLarge for those that like tweets. The way I'm planning on working this is that as I finish a document, I'll tweet it. It won't give any sort of context or extra commentary the way the blog and updates page do, but for those who don't want to wait around or want some sort of notification this will be a step in the right direction. The twitter page will also post links to the documents on the anniversary date they were originally released, so there's an added bit of fun as well. Blog and monthly updates will continue on as before for those who like it that way.

I may set up a facebook account for R@L in addition, that is to be determined.

Comments either way welcomed.

Rant at Receptionists

2010-02-04T09:39:00.000-08:00

I get that you have busy days and high call volumes. I get that you might not know if Bill is in the office or not. But please, would you actually LISTEN to what I say instead of presuming you know what I'm calling for?

But when I call and ask, "is Bill available," that does NOT mean "please transfer me to his extension." It is a question. You answer with "I don't know, but I can transfer you to his extension," or "He's on the other line, can I transfer...." if your phone system shows that. If I truly wanted to leave him a message I would ask for his voice mail or send a damned e-mail.

LISTEN to what the callers are saying, dammit!

Nobody Loves me and Neither Do I.

2010-02-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

First off, that's the title of the song I've got playing right now by Them Crooked Vultures. If you like Led Zeppelin, Foo Fighters, Queens of the Stone Age, or good rock in general they're worth checking out.

I simply couldn't come up with a "I haven't updated yet because I'm behind on other projects" title that was even partially witty. On to "Mind Eraser, no Chaser."

Got some camo updates that are ready to go, I just need the time to link to them all. Looks like the time this weekend's going to be spent rebuilding my work laptop; it's been running well on Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 since last May, but a test install of the latest Sonicwall Global VPN client blew up the wireless and the RC runs out at the end of the month anyway.

So, hopefully Sunday night or early next week.

I'm also leaning towards setting up RSS, Twitter, and Facebook for the site so people can be notified of updates then and there... if you'd like to provide feedback drop me a line.

Passive Defense is GO!

2010-01-18T18:24:00.000-08:00

Passive defense is now finished and posted under. This section includes the original Passive Defense Handbook 1, a supplement on fuel tank camouflage, the Second Supplement, with more on paint, and for now ends with the third supplement, with instructions for camouflaging airport runways and roads.

Happy 2010

2010-01-02T21:08:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the last year of the new millennium! A little surprise for all y'all reading this on a regular basis. Ron Smith was one of a few of us that went looking for information regarding Arizona's final camouflage to assist Don Preul in building a new model of the Battleship Arizona for the Arizona Memorial Visitors' Center. He has now sent me some of his findings, and it turns out one section was an additional part of the Passive Defense Handbook that the Seattle Archives did not have. So I'm going to work on that and finish it before I add any of the other ones, which are now all complete. The new find is only about 5-6 pages long and should not take long to add.

To give you an idea of what is in store, I've got through roughly 2/3 of his first set of documents and I've got 73 pages I've pulled aside to post.

Basic Tools for Researchers

2009-12-29T09:29:00.000-08:00

I have been on at least six trips to archives outside of my state (I.E. involving a significant investment in money and time) and countless trips to the NARA Seattle branch near where I live. I've built up what I consider a good set of tools to research with. Some may fall under the "duh!" category but some may surprise you. They are based loosely on a necessity/nice to have scale:

1) Laptop & scanner:

This might be the "Duh!" I mentioned earlier but it may also be a new concept for some, so it is at the top of the list. A researcher can reproduce documents at various archives (speaking of more than just the National Archives), but usually at cost. If one plans several tips where copies are going to be made, it may very well be a cost savings to buy these up front. Primarily though, it just gives you a better foundation to work with and makes it easier to use your research; you can back it up, trade it, send it to a publisher, etc., fairly easy in digital form.

The laptop does not need to be anything fantastic as it's main function is a scan engine. Choose something reliable and to to taste; perhaps you like a bigger screen or smaller, more compact design. One thing to keep in mind is USB capacity; my Dell Latitude has four ports and there are times when I've used all of them (scanner, mouse, USB memory, headset). Hard drive space is something to consider; will the laptop be your primary storage area or will you keep copies elsewhere, such as a home computer or external hard drive. My preferred image format is tif, and my collection of research is over 150 gigs.

Scanners: multiple flavors with different abilities and costs. My current tool is a Microtek that was a gift from my wife. It is not as portable or rugged as the Canon LIDE 30 I used previously, but the bundled OCR software more than makes up for it with its better recognition of text (To be honest, it's a couple of years newer than the software that was bundled with the Canon).

I'm a big fan of the Canon line as they are compact and don't need a separate power cord. A couple of things to be aware of, however. In my experience the Canons have an extremely narrow focal point and the edge is raised; this means that if you have a photo with any sort of curl or ripple to it you have to take care to firmly press it down or you will have areas that are blurred and out of focus. Since it has a plastic "glass" plate, there were times when I was pressing down on areas too hard and bowing the scanner plate down such that it contacted the scanner arm as it passed. The raised lip mentioned above may be an annoyance when scanning documents larger than the scanner plate to digitally stitch together later.

Along with that, notes are crucially important. You may come across something that you don't have time to scan in now but might in the future and you will definitely want to make it quick to grab. Some people prefer to save things based on the subject, I.E. they will create a folder structure something like "US Navy/Battleships/North Carolina" but I prefer to keep my documents in the original structure I found them in, something like "Settle NARA/Ship Files/Box 4/BB55 (Folder 1 of 5)." This is purely personal preference but I find it helps me retain some familiarity with the records structure and provides a bit of a backup in case I lose my spreadsheet (Not bloody likely!) The Spread sheet I have organized with different tabs on the bottom for different Archives (I.E. College Park, Seattle, San Bruno, Laguna Niguel) and then three columns set so that I can print them out if I need a hard copy without cutting off any text. I create a row or two where needed that lists the Accession (I.E. Ship Files 1940-50, declasssification review #12345) and then underneath that the left most column is the box number, then the second is the folder, and the third and most wide is the notes. If I have too many notes for one line I copy the folder down, indent it and add "(Continued)" and then write more. This excel spread sheet is THE MOST important document I have; I keep multiple backups so that even if my house and the office I keep an off-site backup burns down and both copies of my scans are lost I still know where I found stuff and can at least go back and get it. Additionally, things that I've seen but not scanned in can be used in trade; perhaps you have contacts with another researcher who wants to research a topic; I have traded information in the past.

Well, that went a little longer than expected....

2) Digital Camera:

Depending on what you are after this may make a better tool than a scanner. I have known researchers after bulk documents to use a camera for the speed. If you are only after a deck log and know that you have 1,000 sheets to do, will a scanner that takes 20-30 seconds per scan or a camera that takes a second or two per shot work better? Additionally, in some cases items that are too large for the scanner can be easily photographed.

3) USB Memory Drive or external hard drive.:

Once you have the data, how do you protect it? If you spend $500 and a week on a research trip, what is the value of what you find, and what does it "cost" if you lose it? I typically travel with my laptop and a 16 gig USB Memory stick. Once the day's scanning is over I COPY the scans on to the USB drive so that I have a backup right then and there. Once home, Copies go on to the home work station and an external hard drive that mostly stays off-site. Copies of my afore-mentioned spread sheet are saved to all four, plus a copy on a server that is out of state. The 16 gig memory stick was a cheap investment in 2009 of $40.

4) Mental Diversion:

With the extended hours some archives have, it is possible to spend up to 60 hours in 5 days researching. If you are doing research that requires mental acuity I believe it pays to bring along something to keep your mind as fresh as possible. Since rubber chickens are disallowed, it's usually easiest to set up something on the computer, be it some music (using headphones of course) or something like solitaire. Don't be afraid to get up and walk around too; a five minute break will work wonders.

Mind Eraser, No Chaser

2009-12-18T22:36:00.001-08:00

Proof-reading while sick and foggy is always an interesting experience.... I'm on page 8 of the Passive defense, about 24 of 98 paragraphs (they're numbered; I didn't count them). Little behind where I'd like to be, but I'm taking my wife and her puppy down to their first dog show tomorrow and am anticipating a little time then, if I can keep my mind focused. We'll be hitting the Centralia Veterans Memorial Museum on the way back, which I've seen for a couple of years but have never been able to visit. I've been mulling over adding a museum section to the site as I have hit up quite a few and taken pictures.

This month's haul

2009-12-13T16:58:00.000-08:00

Not a lot of progress over the last couple of days with the Passive Defense proof reading, but yesterday was NARA Saturday so I do have some news there. One of the earlier finds was this memo from King Neptune that I was able to OCR and work up while waiting for other scans to run. I have a 35 page document on refueling instructions from 1942 that will hopefully be helpful to the modelers out there. Nothing else earth shattering, but there will be some additions to the Miscellaneous section in the future.

One of the other researchers was having scanner issues.. Not fun when you are on a limited time research trip.

Passive Defense Progress

2009-12-06T22:33:00.001-08:00

I have mentioned Passive Defense before, and I've got a progress report for those interested. There are three parts to the Passive Defense Camouflage folder in Seattle NARA; the initial handbook, a supplement regarding camouflage paint, and a two-page memo with color chips in camouflage colors for fuel tanks. The first one has all of the text and figures done and just needs the color chips added and 50 pages of proofreading. The supplement has the textual pages done, but not all of the figures, and I haven't started the fuel tank memo at all. Still on track for a January release.

All of these will be linkable, so if you want to link to the section on the "Importance of Indirect Observation" for an online discussion you'll be able to.

In other camouflage news, I should be taking delivery of a large collection of US Navy camouflage documentation from Ron Smith later this year, which will hopefully expand the camouflage section quite a bit.

Stats

2009-12-05T00:35:00.001-08:00

I've had Google Analytics on my site for a bit now, and it's interesting to watch the results. For the last month, and fairly consistently before that, the top "page" on the site is the root, or main, front page. The Ship's index is second, and San Francisco's Damage report is third.

I had 1,703 unique visits last month, and of those the largest percentage (204) had no source (I.E. they came from bookmarks or favorites. 232 came from Google searchers, and 222 came from Navsource links. The two big ship modeling sites, ModelWarships and SteelNavy, sent me 154 and 103 respectively, 98 came from Google Image searches, and 97 from Wikipedia links. 86 came from Yahoo and 39 from Bing. Stats read that 15% came from direct sources, 23% from search engines, and 62% from links from other sites.

Almost 1,200 of the visitors were from the US, with Spain, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany rounding out the top 5. Of the United States, the top five were California, Washington, Virginia, New York, and Texas. Lowest was New Mexico, with two.

Average visitor viewed 4 pages on their visits and spent just over three minutes on my site. 71% of the visitors were new and had not been before.

57% of the visitors were using Internet Explorer, with 44% of them being on version 8, 37% on seven, and the pitiful rest on on IE6 (for shame!). Firefox was the second largest at 30% with Safari in third place at 5% and Chrome at 2%. 87% of my visitors are running windows, about 7% are on Macs, and the balance are on an assortment of *nix and smart phone OS's.

I size most of my pages no more than 800 pixels wide; 3% are running 800 x 600 and the top five are 1024 x 768 (33%), 1280 x 1024 (14%), 1280 x 800 (11%), 1400 x 900 (9%) and 1680 x 1050 (7%).

About 71% of my visitors are on broadband, 3% are on dial up, and 23% are "unknown." I spend a lot of time making my code as clean and small as possible for the dial up people; I hope y'all appreciate it!

Of the broadband, 9% are on Comcast (that statistic may be skewed as I am on Comcast and hit the site regularly to proofread, etc.), 7% are on Roadrunner, 5% are on Verizon's network, and 2.5% are on Bellsouth. The rest is incredibly fragmented.

It may be boring as hell but I find it interesting....

Updates are up and linked to, if you could make it through the above post ;)

Prepare to repel boarders!

2009-11-24T21:29:00.000-08:00

One of the fun things to me doing research is the contacts that are made and the information shared. One of the first was John Fitzgerald, who was the archivist at Seattle NARA in charge of Navy Records, amongst other things, when I first started researching there. John has since moved on, but we keep in touch, and when he comes across things in his research that he feels are interesting, he'll photograph them and send them on if he's got the time.

This is one such document; a history of the Destroyer Escort DE-51 Buckley written in October of 1945. She was an interesting ship, and this provides some more information than her Dictionery of American Naval Fighting Ships entry.

Special thanks to John for sending it to me!

Weird Duck.

2009-11-18T20:00:00.000-08:00

One of the things that once bothered me took place in 8th grade history; I had for some reason not been able to eat lunch at the normal time and was eating my turkey sandwich. Only when I was halfway through did I realize that the footage of a german WWII death camp that was playing on the TV featured humans whose flesh looked about as colorful as the turkey I was eating. I wasn't disturbed by this as much as the realization that I could eat while watching emancipated bodies being pushed into mass graves.

To this day, I can still watch footage of war's aftermath without revulsion. I should clarify that; the results are certainly revolting, but it does not turn my stomach or make me feel ill. On the other hand, it is also not something I enjoy; it is just an acknowledgment of war's brutality and horror.

So I find myself bothered tonight, watching The History Channel's WWII in HD, that they've blurred out *some* of the carnage. While describing the Japanese civilian suicides at Saipan, there were areas where the viewer can see dead bodies and bits smashed against the rocks, there are areas that are blurred out. One clip shows a woman's bloody, disfigured face, but most of her body is blurred out.

I believe this does a disservice to history, thus increasing the odds it will repeat itself.

We don't have a weapon that wins wars by making the enemy neatly and cleanly lie down. We are still hacking and rending bodies apart, just with fancier and more expensive weapons. A guided missile still explodes into tiny pieces that seek to smash and tear an airplane enough that it cannot function.

We still, even in this "modern" day and age, smash, tear, and destroy when we fight each other. If you don't show the FULL horror of war, people will forget how horrible it is and it will be less likely that there will be restraint and efforts to avoid it in the future.

Ops Check Good!

2009-11-11T16:55:00.000-08:00

As I wrote back in September I was only able to get half of the BuOrd manual for the 1.1" due to time... I went back last month to try and finish it off and the scanner jammed internally just after finishing the first scan.

This was not happy for a couple of reasons; the obvious being that the rest of the day and therefore month's research was pretty much shot. Second, I had disassembled the thing after returning from San Bruno to remove dust that had accumulated internally after a year and a half of scanning NARA records (Note: they don't vacuum the records: expect dust & dirty and disgusting looking white gloves by the end of the day. Bring a mask if you're allergic to dust), so there was the possibility I had damaged it in the process and would need to tell my wife the present she got me was dead.

Thankfully, it turns out there was simply a nut loose on the keyboard. Scanners have a locking mechanism to keep the head secure during transportation and I am not above forgetting to unlock the scanner when setting up. In this case I heard it start to have troubles when I did the first scan and quickly unlocked it, but apparently not all the way and the head pressed into the locking mechanism as it returned and cocked itself enough to jam. I opened it a second time tonight and was able to free it and make some test scans to ensure that it worked multiple times.

So I should be good to go for this Saturday's session, which is a full day due to the IPMS Seattle meeting being pushed back to the third Saturday. Wish that happened more often....

Finished a document on Mk 49s for December and have Kearny's initial Damage report (photos submitted to Navsource a while ago) well under way. That should allow me to get a handbook on shore based facility camouflage (useful for shipyards, airbases, etc.) going for a January posting. I'm trying to work into a schedule of two shorts and one long alternating every other month for a bit so that I can slam out the short ones and then give myself a month and a half or so for the longer ones. We shall see. The 1.1" booklet looks like it might be pretty quick to do as well, so I might try for that one soon as well.

Organization`

2009-11-06T22:44:00.000-08:00

FINALLY have finished getting all of the text into this beastie. While it's not as large as some I've done, it had by far the most amount of table work to get it to lay out the same as the original. This was the document that got me musing on growth last month; at nearly 125k it will take someone running a 56k modem nearly 20 seconds to get the whole thing.

This is the US fleet at the start of 1941. By and large the organization is the same as it was later, when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. It also contains information on turret tops and scout aircraft colors and will be linked to from the Turret Tops page. It's also... NOT PROOFREAD!

Growth

2009-10-29T22:10:00.000-07:00

I created my first web page back some time in the fall of 1995. It was just a handy place to post all my bookmarks since I didn't have my own PC at the time and was bouncing around from machine to machine in the student computer labs. Notepad was OK, for a bit, but then I came across editors that catered to people who wrote web pages and quickly settled on DerekWare, as it worked and was free. I ran into a problem a year or so later when I was typing along and all of a sudden the cursor stopped moving; I had reached a previously unknown file size maximum limit of 21k.

That led me back to notepad for a bit as I searched around; eventually I settled on (then Macromedia, now Adobe) Homesite and have been using it ever since. Being a modem user for as long as I had, I've always prided myself on writing tight code that took the minimum time to download, but even with that some of the documents I've been working on over the last couple of years have approached sizes just in code and text that I would have cringed at in years past for the total of code, text, and images.

Broadband use has grown over the last decade as well, so that according to Google Analytics just under 3% of my viewers are still on dial up. I still try and keep it as tight and clean as possible, however, because not only are some people still on dial up, I believe more people will be browsing on their phones in the future.

Going Away Party

2009-10-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

It looks like Boeing is about to start a second 787 line in South Carolina. I grew up in the shadow of Boeing and am sad to see them continue to leave Washington. I rather enjoy the amount of aerospace we have here.

Camouflage

2009-10-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

Picked up copies of Floating Drydocks 1970s-era camouflage books this week. Not knocking the research they did at all, I just find it interesting how far we've come in what we now know, and yet there is still so much we don't know for sure. We are able to do a higher fidelity research now because of what was done in the past and the records that have been declassified since then.

Back when I reviewed Squadron Signal's DD/DE Camouflage book, someone asked why I didn't just write my own instead of "trashing" someone else's. I hadn't given it any thought really because two friends of mine had already mentioned plans to do so themselves, but with one fairly assuredly canceled and the other essentially vaporware, it took me aback and I've been mulling it over... or rather, keeping my eyes on the possibility.

There are things I don't know enough about yet to do what I consider to be a credible job. Some of the dynamics of the early war politics between Admiral King and others, as well as the amphib green schemes and dazzle schemes are topics I would like to know more about before I attempt to describe them to others. But it is a tempting project with all I've come across.

Finished the ships section of the document I'm working on now and just have to finish the Marine Corps list and proofread. It's a 1940 memo detailing the organization of the fleet as of the 1st quarter of 1941 and should provide a good overview of the US fleet at the time of the US Entry into the second world war. Not sure what I'll work on after that, I've been focused on this one so long I've forgotten some of the goodies I'd planned on popping in the queue. Got to get some stuff done in November though as Left 4 Dead 2 is less than a month away!

Strange that a guy who doesn't like zombie movies enjoys a game patterned after them....

Cough

2009-10-07T21:42:00.000-07:00

Yeah, colds are great for productivity...

I had meant to post regularly during my recent trip to San Bruno but events transpired against me. Randy from ShipCamouflage.com showed for two days of research, but came down on Monday afternoon, so he was there for three nights. Of course, we had to go out for dinner and some fun each night, and by the time thursday evening came around I was just wiped. Friday was the flight home....

So one of my hopes this trip was to go through the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard files and look for specific ships; I'd hoped to find new information on the destroyers Ward, Allen, and a few other ships. The records are stored in their original order, which is according to the US Navy Filing System of the time. The system allows a couple different ways of ordering records, and it turned out that the PHNY records are not ordered in a way that makes looking for a particular ship easy.

Everything was broken down into a specific code; S44 was the filing code for propellers, for example and S74 was for anti-aircraft guns. While it would be perfectly natural to organize records by hull number / S74, S74 / hull number was also permitted. But that later structure, which PHNY follows, means that if you want to research a ship you have to go through EVERY file code looking for your particular ship. Since some of the file codes may have 8 boxes 18 inches long or longer, that can make for a slow process.

So... that becomes a project for when there's a little time here and there.

Otherwise though I did have some good results and have more documents to post.

Sometimes the clearest Sunsets...

2009-09-20T21:45:00.000-07:00

...are not the best. Shot this one a couple of days ago.

12 hours from now I should be arriving at NARA San Francisco for five days of research.

Today's NARA haul for the month

2009-09-12T22:17:00.000-07:00

Just some previews...

The above I only was able to scan half of, so it'll be a while yet.

A little over a week to go.. decisions decisions

2009-09-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

So it's time to go through notes and take the compilation of items I want to look for and match it to the notes of where stuff might be. Ever trip is as much about taking notes to get an idea of the structure of things as much as it is a scan fest (albeit there is a big pressure to get images and documents that can make the trip "profitable").

The problem in this case is that most of the records I'm going through are "unprocessed," meaning they have not been worked over since the Navy turned them over to NARA. Usually when NARA processes records they will go through and rebox things, add mylar envelopes around photos; things that will help preserve records so they don't decay as fast. Staples will leave rust like you would not BELIEVE after 70 years! But they will also compile a list of the folders in the records and list which box they can be found in, perhaps a description if the researcher is lucky. In this case... none of that.

It's nice on one hand because it's uncharted territory.. it makes it a fun and rewarding challenge, but it also means there is a higher possibility of going bust and coming home empty handed.

So, two accessions, or groups of records I had identified before are thus:
MINSY General Correspondence Classified 1941 -1946 (95 Cu Ft)
MINSY General Correspondence Classified 1941 -1946 (21 Cu Ft)
That's all I have (MINSY is Mare Island Naval Shipyard in this case)

Which to start with? There is some obvious difference between the two, but I have no idea what it is. Is there some duplication on topics or are they completely separate? Even 21 cubic feet is a large amount; A rough guess is that they can fit ten cubic feet of records on a cart at any one time. I have twelve other accessions I identified as possibly interesting in about a half hour of looking through the finding aids while scanning, plus the ten accessions I have already started going through...

I may have mentioned this here before, but I told my wife that if I ever won the lottery I was buying a condo in the complex right next to the archives and another in DC close to Nara College park and spending lots of time in both places researching! So much to filter through....

Updates are up - Two weeks until San Bruno

2009-09-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

Two updates are up, Aircraft moto-tugs for aircraft carriers (October 1943) and procedures for warming up aircraft in CVL-22 carrier hangar bays (July 1943). Both should have good information for the modeler and detail nut.

I leave two weeks from tomorrow for five days of research in the San Bruno Archives. Randy Short from ShipCamouflage.com is going to come down from Sacramento for a couple of days and if he's up to it we might introduce Mike Donegan to archival research as well.

In the interim I'm getting my notes ready and also trying to create a good list of photos that I have to replace this page that would have been too cumbersome to fully expand.

Thought for the day

2009-08-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

Do aging hippie chicks get hot flash-backs?

Snark & Camouflage

2009-08-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

I'd like to thank the city of Seattle for the speed bumps they installed on my street a couple of weeks ago. They really help smooth out the cracks, up-thrust concrete, and pot holes my car has to suffer through on that street every day. Ten speed bumps in half a mile....

Updated the Butler Class DE page on ShipCamouflage.com tonight, adding all of the design sheets I could find on the Navy Historical & Heritage Command Website.

Timing and Patience

2009-08-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

One of my hobbies is photography. I've got a decent camera, a Canon Rebel XTi that I pack around at times, but I also don't have to go far. On a clear night I can see planes stacked up in to SeaTac nearly to the coast. I sometimes try to shoot them coming in, but they fly such nearly identical patterns (duh) that they all merge into one. One of tonight's shots turned out fun though; three planes. One coming in from the east, one turning in from the east as another one came in on final:

That's about a 90-second exposure at ASA100.

At one point one of the new Airlift Northwest EC-135 Air Ambulances flew overhead and I was able to turn 180 degrees, make some adjustments, and shoot this shot"

Here's last night's sunset:

Shaw site updates

2009-08-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago someone e-mailed me looking for names and service numbers of the sailors lost on Shaw DD-373 during the attack on Pearl. It occurred to me that a KIA list would be a good thing to have so I added one. I also decided while I was at it that I should add a couple of the photos I found earlier this year at NARA San Francisco and added them to the December 7th Image Gallery (last three photos). As far as I or a couple of friends from the Pearl Harbor History Associates are able to determine, the second to last one hasn't been published before.

Started working a couple of days ago on the next document (unless I decide on another quick toss off); a 26-page listing of the US Navy fleet and it's organization circa early 1941. This document is doable even though it'll take a month if I do a page a day; ones for later in the war top out around 100 pages!

Quick Toss-off

2009-08-09T00:00:00.001-07:00

I had come across this last month and figured I'd add it; a 1938 Mail Distribution List from the US Navy. It's more for academics, I guess, as it will help people understand WHO was sent particular orders. It's pre-WWII, so it's not as up-to-date as some might like, but I felt it to be a more manageable size. There was NO way I was going to convert all those tables to HTML, and a later version, with the increase in ships and bases, would just take forever to download. Since it was one page of OCR and 8 images, I could turn it out in an hour or so.

Research Saturday

2009-08-08T19:25:00.000-07:00

Today was the monthly "extended hours" Saturday at Seattle NARA and I managed to get something done I've wanted to do for some time.

Those are some of the color chips found in a booklet the Navy issued in 1941 on "Passive Defense," which was their term for the camouflage used on shore facilities. The camouflage you've seen on Navy Yard buildings during the war? That was passive defense.

I'd never seen the colors used and no one I talked to had either, so the color chips were a great find. However, what to do with them? We need to get the information out, but computer monitors are so different in the colors they display that I couldn't just scan to a web page. Scanners aren't calibrated for colors and you can't normally bring supplemental lighting into the archives to attain a true "sunlight" wavelength light.

Ron Smith of AA Military Research had a couple of pointers given his research into WWI and WWII camouflage and photography of some of the original artwork produced for those wars. First off, a X-Rite (originally Gretag-Macbeth) Mini ColorChecker Card; calibrated colors with known values so that I can send the photos to another person with the same card and they can calibrate their output to match.

The problem was then lighting, but I got lucky in a sense. Ancenstry.Com has partnered some what with NARA to scan in many documents of interest to their clientèle, and they have a team in Seattle NARA working through some records for a couple of months. They have some pretty expensive "scanning" stations (calibrated cameras with natural lighting hooked into work stations running custom image acquisition and filing software) and I managed to talk one of them into letting me pop a couple sheets under their lights for a quick snap shot. Hoping they don't get in trouble for me mentioning that, but they could see that I'm obviously a "somewhat" professional researcher and was careful around their equipment.

We all win from their understanding though. I will have to finish scanning the rest of the textual stuff later (got 11 out of around 100 pages) and it'll take a while to post all of that as HTML, but I think it'll be worthwhile.

In other positive news, Alaska Airlines dropped the price of their fares to San Francisco from Seattle so I'll be going down for five days of research in late September. w00t!

More ShipCamouflage Updates

2009-07-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

Got some more time in on the ShipCamouflage database. The Farragut Class destroyer page is finally cleaned, linked and a design sheet added. One of the things I do is clean the code up; as the pages were originally created by an old version of Microsoft Front page, there is a lot of garbage code that does nothing (assigning a left align when that is the default anyway, for example) but cause longer download times. Even with adding all of the links in the page size dropped from about 15k to about 6k. Nothing of any concern for most internet users, but a bit of a point of pride to me.

I had also planned on folding in information from this document, 15-CN-41, which laid out plans for camouflage experiments in late 1941. That means that the Porter and Mahan class Destroyer pages have been updated as well. That also means I'll have to add descriptive pages for them at some point at Shipcamo.

That leaves just the Rudderow DE page to get cleaned and linked, and we're all done and can move on to correcting the database and tracking more design sheets down.

APA Love

2009-07-12T19:53:00.000-07:00

So, one of the areas I'd seen a while back were records for the "Assistant Industrial Manager, Astoria Oregon." I had already done a "smash & grab" for photos and had turned over photos to Navsource on APA-157 Napa, APA-160 USS Deuel, APA-166 USS Fond Du Lac, APA-169 USS Gallatin, and APA-195 USS Lenawee.

But there was a little bit of camouflage documentation, not a lot, but just enough to pique my interest in seeing what might else be there. Yesterday I finally got around to pulling the five boxes around those photos and looking through the first two of them at least, before I ran out of time. I found records covering 25 of the ships, which was enough in my opinion to finally start doing auxiliaries for ShipCamouflage.Com.

Behold the first page: Haskell Class APAs. As you can see, it's nowhere near done, but it's a credible start. For the most part it appears that the ships, when first commissioned, were in dazzle schemes, with the odd-numbered ships receiving Measure 32 Pattern 6A and the Even ships receiving Measure 32 Pattern 4T, but there are a few exceptions here and there. Later ships appear to have commissioned directly into Measure 21, and most were repainted as far as I can see in 1945 to Measure 21, with a few in Measure 22.

Various updates

2009-07-05T22:17:00.000-07:00

The updates page has been... updated!

I also updated some destroyer pages at ShipCamouflage.Com, including the Bagley, Dunlap, Gridley, and Mahan classes to include links to measures and design sheets we have. That leaves the Farragut class and one last DE class and then we can start looking through it and correcting errors... I'd also like to find more of the Benson class with the reversed pattern 1D.

Single Ship RDF is mostly finished and just needs some of the linking and proof-reading done. After that, maybe I'll finally get to the Kearny damage report I've been talking about for years now....

Cleanup on Isle Three!

2009-06-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

As of this post my Seattle NARA directory totals 4,853 images scanned in; photos and textual records. My San Francisco NARA directory is a mere 1,799 images (totaling roughly 61 gigabytes). The point of this is that with that much data there's bound to be stuff that winds up where it shouldn't from time to time.

I found an orphaned directory yesterday that had some 1945 Camouflage documents that I had not posted... they're very similar to others, but contain some more information that might be useful. Since they were so similar I was able to pop both of them online yesterday. I'd already "roadmapped" both this and next month's updates so I'm just popping mention of them here. Without further ado, I bring you:

February 1945: Camouflage Measures 12, 21 and 22 - Instructions for Application of

February 1945: Amphibious Craft - Camouflage Measures.

Next month's updates will have a "action Damage Report" for USS Shaw following the attack on Pearl Harbor and a 1938 document regarding beach landings and "surf training" authored in part by one 1st Lt. Krulak. Both are done and are just waiting with baited breath for the month of July to start.

June Updates

2009-06-14T18:58:00.000-07:00

Been busy enough at work that I haven't wanted to work on the computer much on my down time. This weekend was a nice change though and I posted a new document on prewar USN Turret Top colors that I came across in the archives earlier in the day. I also photographed some color chips of paints used to camouflage buildings in WWII... I need the text as well and will post that at some point in the future.

Earlier in the month I had posted two documents regarding the attack on Dutch Harbor to commemorate the anniversary of the attack. An often-overlooked battle.

Otherwise I'm about 3/4 through posting a document on the USS Shaw after Pearl Harbor, one of the first to talk about replacing her bow. Attached with it was a copy of an article about a similar repair done on a British Tanker that had been torpedoed. I found it to be an interesting read.

CL-62 Birmingham War Report

2009-05-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

It's mostly done; just need to finish proofing the last three pages:
http://www.researcheratlarge.com/Ships/CL62/WarRecord.html

It'll be linked from the main site & updates page later in the week; I need to do some work for Rusty first.

Card fraud is fun!

2009-05-16T17:37:00.001-07:00

So, apparently I tried to buy movie tickets in Mexico on Thursday. Bank caught it pretty fast and stopped it, but They were leaving me messages at home like crazy and apparently didn't have my cell phone so I didn't know until later in the day when I tried to get a drink and a snack. Glad I found out before trying to get my car out of the parking garage!

Almost done with the last CL-62 Birmingham document I came across in January and am hoping to have it posted today. Then, for June I have a document or two related to the Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor in June of 1942. Also busy working some super secret stuff that should make modelers happy. One of those projects was recently unveiled, but was one I spent time on back in November/December time frame.

Moot point

2009-05-06T22:01:00.000-07:00

So... yeah... Martin noticed that I flubbed the date on the memo; I had it as 1944 when it should be 1945. See... don't mess with Martin: he'll get you anyway!

I think Cyndi Lauper and Parliment Parliament-Funkadelic should collaborate. Am I the only one who thinks "She Bop Gun" would rock?

Martin, before you correct me again....

2009-04-30T20:08:00.000-07:00

Yes,I did the math wrong again and it was sixty FOUR years ago that Nimitz released this memo.

Thanks again for the first correction though! ;)

A year ago today...

2009-04-30T19:52:00.000-07:00

I lost a friend. Wally Bigelow lost his battle with cancer. Wally, you are still remembered and missed.

Fresh off the presses 65 years ago! Admiral Nimitz sent out a memo detailing some of the lessons learned from Typhoon Cobra and offering advice to commanders and captains.

And there is a largish sailboat tacking outside my window right now.

Silent usually means busy

2009-04-25T22:40:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the silence... it's been a busy month. I've been the chair for the IPMS Seattle Spring Model Show for the last seven years and we had our show last weekend. It used to get easier each show, but this year we decided to try adding seminars and I was one of the lucky few with a presentation, so my spare time was taken up with both planning for the show and trying to create an hour long presentation on the "Aircraft at Pearl Harbor."

It was a fun project and I wish I had more resources on it as there's just so much we don't know about the airframes involved. Thanks to Dana Bell and Mike Wenger I was able to showcase the six-colored PBY catalinas of VP-11 that were at Kanoehe that morning, which is a relatively unknown question we don't have a complete answer for. If you want an idea of what I'm talking about take this paint scheme and apply it to a PBY airframe.

Following that I had to catch up on some work for a model manufacturer... I hope it's well received and the changes I suggested are put into place.

I've committed to at least one update a month at Researcher@Large, but the document I'd planned on finishing has languished with these other responsibilities... so I'm changing tack a little bit and have just finished a four-page memo from Admiral Nimitz from February of 1945 regarding typhoons... an interesting read I thought and a good example of how the US Navy sought to learn from its mistakes and deaths.

It should be online in a few days...

What makes it Worthwhile

2009-03-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

My first real website was the "Unofficial Special Operations Website, started in early 1996. I still remember feeling cool when I reached 100 on my first counter. What has evolved over time is making contact with people as the true reward.

I post things on the site that I think others will find interesting because it seems a shame to just put them back after coming across them. But then sometimes you get something like this, a thank you from a vet whom you feel a debt to for the service they rendered your country. These are especially good to get. It does not matter if there are no little nuggets I never knew before or promise of further correspondence. The thank you alone is precious enough.

Franklin was hit on 3-19-1945, which is 3-18-1945 in the US, if I
understand the international date line correctly. I was on Yorktown
CV-10 when she was hit on 3-18-1945, the day prior to the Franklin hits.
Franklin was in a different task group a few miles away from us, but we
could see the smoke. Yorktown suffered relatively minor damage (five
killed IIRC).

I forwarded your post and link to a Franklin survivor of 3-19-45. He
was a flight deck crewman, and was critically injured.

Thank you for your post.

George

I got goosed

2009-03-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

Got a 1/48th Grumman JRF Goose model from my wife today as a present.. I had originally wanted it to build one of the JRFs that served in Alaska during the war, but then I came across a picture of one on Ford Island on December 8th, and since I have a Pearl Harbor collection of models going on... I just had to switch topics.

For those that are near Seattle, I'll be giving a presentation on April 18th, 2009 at the annual IPMS Seattle Spring Show (exact time to be determined) where I'll be showing, amongst other things, photos of some of the JRFs at Pearl Harbor. The loose title of the presentation is "the aircraft at Pearl Harbor" and it's one I can do repeatedly, so if you have interest in having the presentation at any of your events, drop me a line.

Now, I just need to decide if I want to do an A-12 Shrike in Pearl Harbor attack markings as well (Some were at Wheeler). It's a sickness, I tell you....

R@L & Shipcamouflage updates

2009-03-24T18:10:00.000-07:00

So the Franklin 1946 Damage Report is finished and I went on a link frenzy on the 19th, getting the word out.

Since then I've taken a break from my site to catch up on ShipCamouflage.Com, updating both the Fletcher and Gearing class. Unfortunately I didn't have any design sheets to add to the Gearing page, but there were none on the Fletcher page and I was able to toss up 13 of them.

Franklin Damage Plate 2 finally finished

2009-03-07T21:45:00.000-08:00

I finally finished this beasty (warning, 500k jpg). It took a lot longer than I'd anticipated due some subtle distortion in each scan... scaling differences that make me wonder if my Microtek scanner is not tracking consistently. I managed to hide most of the little goofs here and there in lines and intersections, but there are some there if you have too much time on your hands and want to go looking. This plate is also the reason I decided to backburner this report for a couple of months when I figured out that I'd missed about a quarter of an inch of it between the different scans and had a gap right in the middle of the ship. What's good about this plate (for modelers, anyway) is that it shows the position and type of aircraft on the flight deck, not a detail generally available before. I've been asked for this in the past and had no way to answer it before finding this.

Plate 3 is already over halfway done, and that's the last part to the report before it is officially live. In the interim I've also been retyping another piece on the Birmingham I came across that does not OCR worth a damn. Thankfully only six and a half pages long. I think after that I'll dig around for some of the memos on canvas dyeing I have.....

Things I learned at Disneyland

2009-02-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

Just back from five days in SoCal. The first two days it rained, then the sun came out and the last three were a nice break from the Seattle weather we'd brought with us. A couple of things I learned while at Disneyland on a rainy day:

- Tinkerbell is not the only fairy that works at Disneyland
- The monorail will stop for ducks on the track. It will also honk like crazy and move forward slowly to scare them off.
- It is best to give the Astro Orbiters a wide berth upon their first run after being closed for heavy rains due to the copious amounts of water that gathers in them and the distance it gets flung as they drain.

Finished proofreading the Franklin report on the way down and just have four pages of photos and two damage plates to add now. It'll be up fro sure in March, sort of as the 64th anniversary remembrance posting. I'll get another Essex class doc posted this month just to make it less lame of a month.

Advocacy

2009-02-15T14:32:00.001-08:00

NorthWest Scale Modelers 2009 Show at the Museum of Flight in Seattle

I'm a model builder, and I like to do things to try and help in the hobby. One thing is to show stuff in public areas so people can see the hobby and ask questions... maybe get interested and involved.

Northwest Scale Modelers puts on a good show every year in a great setting. The aircraft above the tables is one-of-a-kind; the M21 mother ship for the D21 drones; the only other example was destroyed in a launch gone bad.

I also spent some time shooting the newly-on-display Fieseler Fi-103 "Buzz Bomb;" drop me a response if you want to see more.

Gut-shot ship

2009-02-06T10:03:00.000-08:00

I was looking for a bunch of different ships the last time at San Francisco NARA, and ran into an interesting issue much more than in past research sessions. Due to the research I've done, a lot of ship names seem "familiar" to me for one reason or another. I go with a target list, but if I stumble across something that's of interest I don't often say no. So it was a good thing to have a 3G air card with me so I could quickly look up a ship to see what was tugging at my brain about her.

It happened with DD-689 Wadleigh, although I recognized her name enough to not have to look it up. She was one of the ships profiled in the Structural Repairs in Forward Areas During World War II booklet I posted back in 2006. She had struck a mine and the book covered the repairs done to get her back to the US< but nothing after that, and her Navsource page didn't even mention it or have any photos.

So I was happy to discover that a box I pulled of destroyer records had (amongst other things) photos of the ship in drydock at Mare Island undergoing repair. What was amazing to me was the extent of work and how much of the ship was removed and replaced to bring her back to service. From what I can tell, part of the port side shell of the ship was the only thing kept. She was not only gutted, but almost completely rebuilt amidships.

So, of course I scanned those photos in and posted them to the "Forward Repair" page as an addendum; if you're interested you can see them here at the bottom. My respect for the damage control and industrial side of the US Military continues to grow. She was repaired quick enough to return to battle in WWII, and well enough that she served up to 1983.

I added Barracuda Networks to my spam list

2009-01-29T14:23:00.000-08:00

I find it humorous and ironic that I got tired enough of an anti-spam company spamming that I added them to my list of "filter out."
Eh, there are better products out there anyway.

The Mighty B

2009-01-27T20:03:00.000-08:00

Back from San Bruno, with the first installment of items located on this recent trip. I've still got more from the first trip to post; I just started this one to show Randy of ShipCamouflage.com what I do and to get something done before the end of the month. I'd hoped to have the Franklin Report finished, but no way am I going to finish proof-reading and linking the 30 remaining pages before Saturday. The six and a half pages of this piece were OCRd at NARA between scans and at the airport and the proof reading started on the flight home. Finished last night after a couple of days break time.

So, it's a history of CL-62 USS Birmingham by her then-captain around the end of 1944. An interesting piece I thought.

THE MIGHTY "B"

(By Captain Thomas B. Inglis from "Shipmate", June 1945 Fleet Issue).

I hope you all like CL-62 Birmingham

2009-01-21T11:55:00.001-08:00

So, it's been busy, and I haven't made the time to update here recently. Surprise, I'm down in San Bruno again! I'm working on a bunch of projects, one of which lead me to keep an eye out for cruisers. They're not my forte, but I came across a folder for CL-62 Birmingham this morning and it had a bunch of textual records, a history written by her Captain in 1945, a war record, and some other interesting tidbits.

Hadn't planned on spending this much time on her, but it's too good to pass up. I've already done the OCR on the 7-page Captain's report and might get it posted later tonight; at least by the weekend.

Happy New Year

2009-01-03T12:39:00.001-08:00

2008 ended a bit chaotically due to weather and a cold. I posted another paint document, this one with formulas of flight deck stain and markings at the end of 1941; this is of interest as it probably covers the colors the carriers used during the battles of Coral Sea and Midway.

I'm not a good proof-reader when sick, so despite having some extra time off progress has been slower than I'd hoped on the Franklin Report. I did get some time during a "hurry up and wait" project at work this week and have it corrected up to page sixteen (out of 50+) and a few more photos added. One complication I discovered was that I was a little rushed or trying to fit too much into as few scans as possible and missed part of damage plate II. Thankfully I figured this out AFTER I had booked a return trip down to San Bruno, so we'll just grab what we need then. That happens to be 19 days from now! :D

More 1941 Camouflage.

2008-12-19T19:56:00.000-08:00

So as I had mentioned a while ago I found some camouflage documentation back in May at the San Francisco NARA. I'm slowly going through it as I get through stuff or if I get a bee in the bonnet to. Someone over on SteelNavy said something less than educated and I found that what I wanted to post in response as a reference wasn't online yet... so I back-burnered the Franklin report and started in on three documents regarding the shift from pre-war gray to the early war camouflage paints.

The #5 formula had been in production for quite some time at the beginning of 1941 and it's clear when reading through the documents that Mare Island had problems switching over; the first document posted (Feb 1941 - New Paint Formulas) has the formula for both 5-D Dark Gray and 5-U, a white base formula. Both contained a fair amount of zinc oxide, and even in May Mare Island was scrambling to get some. So it's probably safe to say that the west coast fleet didn't start receiving full 5-D shipments until June or so.

As always, your mileage may vary. I think it's cool that we've got the full recipe for 5-D, 5-L, 5-O, and 5-S on the net now at least!

Museum Visit Fail!

2008-12-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago while passing through Oak Harbor, Washington my wife and I saw an old gas station that had been turned into a mini-museum of sorts. Plastered across the front was the silhouette of a PBY Catalina patrol plane from the second world war. Both of us like the plane and we stopped by, only to learn that they were closed; only being open on Fridays. It was the temporary headquarters of the PBY Memorial Association, and we kept it in mind as a place to visit. This last friday made our way back up to look it over and see what they had. I burned a disc of some of the PBY items I had found during research at the various national archives I've been to.

They had since moved to a new location on base. There was no description other than "Building 12," and there were no directions on their site other than a link to the NAS Whidbey Island page that only gives vague directions to the ISLAND itself and none of the base gates. Given that they're focused on a plane that was based on the amphibious side of the base, I figured it wouldn't be that hard to find.

Two hours later, we arrived at the gate I thought was our best bet. It was in building 12 of NAS Whidbey, and we hit the gate near the base exchange, which used to be the seaplane base hangar. Just as we get close to the gate a MP comes up and says they need to close the gate for 15 minutes but that we can use "torpedo gate." I should say at this point, that my grandmother lives in Oak Harbor and while I have no idea where Torpedo gate is, I'm fairly familiar with the area, so I figure no big deal; we'll just swing it with my phone and google maps. I take one wrong turn; google maps didn't know that the Navy had closed off one road probably post 9-11.

About ten minutes after we leave the first gate we reach the gate on Torpedo Road and as we pull up I tell the guard "We were just sent here by the other gate; we're trying to get the the PBY museum." The guard gets this uncomfortable look on his face and replies with, "they just re-opened the gate, and I can't let you go driving through the base..."

So... back we go. We get to the gate, and it is indeed open. Pulling up, we get an MP with what was probably a South African accent, and I go through the spiel again. He looks confused; is the museum open to the public? The other MP says yes... and then he tries to give us directions. It's close enough; the building is literally right above us on the hill.

So we drive down, make the first left, and then left at the fork at the top of the hill and pull up to the building. No cars in the parking lot. "Uh-oh.." I think to myself. We park and walk up to the doorway and the dark hall on the other side. Edges quivering in the breeze is a little paper note that says "November and December Hours." Scanning the note, we see that they will be open on Thursday, December 11, and not the regularly scheduled Friday the 12th that we had arrived on.

I had really looked forward to posting some neat pictures of the museum and what it contains here, but at that point we just turned around, headed back to the warmth of the car, and called my Grandmother to make arrangements for a (hot) lunch at the nearby Mitzel's Kitchen. It was worth it, at least, to see her.

More Frankie

2008-12-06T22:20:00.001-08:00

Well, it's been a busy couple of weeks, so updates have been slow, but here I sit with 15 other people in a Seattle Starbucks at 10:20 PM on a Saturday night, and I've been working on the Franklin 1946 Damage Report. Most I've been able to do in a month. It's proof read to page six, but I've added about 15 blank pages at the end for photos... once I get all the way through I'll add the photos themselves and text.

In Memory: Joe Canavan

2008-11-19T10:29:00.000-08:00

For the last seven or so years I have enjoyed the chili of an amazing man. I was introduced to Joe Canavan's World Class Chili by a co-worker when I was working down town. It was truly world class chili; the best, in my opinion, on the west coast. A group of friends and I had been eating at McKinley soups at Westlake center on pretty much a weekly basis (although we also ate at other restaurants there), but we quickly started walking the extra five blocks to Joe's place in the Pike Place Market. Joe was always very friendly with his customers, although he was known as the "chili Nazi" to some people due to him chasing non-customers away from a table he had just outside his restaurant. We used to sit at that table specifically during lunch hour to make it easier on him as he was there at work, starting every day at 6AM, over seventy years old and with bad hips that hurt him.

Joe was a Marine (not Army, as his obituaray is currently saying) and had fought in the Korean War, taking part in the Battle of Chosin. You could tell he was special; he'd been there and had seen hard things, but was enjoying life; he was tough but fair and friendly if you were.

I started helping him out; I did his website and would go in once or twice a month to help him with his computer. Robin and I helped judge the chili contests he ran at the market and tabulated all the results from the voting for him so he could concentrate on other things. It was the least I could do as thanks to a man who had fought for our country, and who was so nice to those around him.

Joe died this month while snorkeling in Maui. We'd talked about his trip for a couple of months... I lived on the island for a while and sent him ideas for things to do during their first trip to Hawaii. I don't know if he was at one of the locations I suggested when he had a heart attack, but regardless, he went out as I knew him; active despite his pains, living life to its fullest.

Joe, I will miss you and keep you in my thoughts. You set the gold standard in my book for chili, and were an inspirational person in my life. I can offer no higher tribute.

EDIT: A food writer for the Seattle Times has blogged about Joe.

Lack of updates

2008-11-15T10:10:00.000-08:00

I've been working on a review of Hasegawa's 1/350th Aircraft carrier Akagi for ModelWarship.Com. Text of the Franklin report was finished about a week and a half ago, but none of the proofreading has been done yet, nor have I done any work on the photos and damage plates. Hopefully this week.....

Way to lame out

2008-11-04T21:30:00.001-08:00

I don't pull punches. If something is wrong, I usually speak my mind, unless I have to be diplomatic for work. Even then I'm pretty outspoken. If someone wants to accuse me of being too much of a hardass on this, I won't argue, but I think that ModelShipWright.Com is run by a bunch of amateurs who are knowingly trying to build their site up by theft of the hard work of others.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a couple of threads on u-boat aces such as this one that contained an awful lot of text and photos. There was extensive information, and you just don't normally see someone post that much material in such a fashion, so I got a little suspicious and started poking around. It turns out that most of the text and photos were lifted en mass from other sites, without any sort of attribution.

I posted responses to a couple of the threads to that affect, in one cases showing paragraph examples and in another simply listing the two pages that material had been copied from. The threads were removed from the message board without comment, but this morning I received two notices of actions taken upon my posts:

Hello TracyWhite,
This is a courtesy email to inform you that a recent post of yours on ModelShipwrights was removed for the following reason:

Offensive Post (LEVEL LOW)

and the kicker:

Hello TracyWhite,
This is a courtesy email to inform you that a recent post of yours on ModelShipwrights was removed for the following reason:

Inflamitory/Rant

Removed Post Text:

----------------------------------------------------------------

Sites this post directly copied and pasted text from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Schultze
http://www.uboat.net/men/schultze.htm (Copywritten)

----------------------------------------------------------------

Posting a warning is an inflammatory RANT?

And then a new "Copyright Infringement Policy" post by Mark Smith went up, with the following text:

Some of our posts of late have come under question of copyright law infringement, and after close and careful examination, the posts have been re-instated.

Simply stated, this is the KitMaker Networks policy outline on the issue:

"These posts (by a volunteer with no financial interests in KitMaker or Model Shipwright) were meant to be informative and done in the spirit of 'fair-use' as outlined by US copyright law. Further we are asking all users of the site to (as a courtesy, not a legal requirement) give credit to any sources of information they may post.

Also it is the site owners policy that if a copyright owner takes issue with any of their material being used by modelers on a community based web site such as this, than they can contact us to ask that the information be removed."

This indicates that they don't understand copyright law and are, in fact, just fine with misuse. Naming it a "Copyright Infringement Policy" is ironically apt.

Section 107, Title 17, US Code:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

In regards to part (1) while they may argue that the poster receives no monetary compensation for his posts, he is listed as a "News Writer" for the site, and the site itself does generate some revenue through banner ads and google AdSense, I.E. it is of a commercial nature.

In regards to part (3) "The amount and substantiality of the portion used," Instalment 2 has 14 images "courtesy" U47.org and the words "Extract from www.u47.org" below portions of text 14 times as well (some of those are multi-paragraph sections). I don't have the time to come up with a percentage of the U47.org site used, but that is a significant amount of both text and images. Additionally, the US Copyright office says this:

Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.

Finally, part (4); the "effect of the use." This one is harder to quantify but I believe that any time you copy text you in effect dilute the original. If there is one site on a topic, it is the un-disputed top ranked site, but if there are two, then its position has been diluted. When they permit the copying of that text, they are in effect making it so that less people may stumble upon the site that invested the time and work into posting that material in the first place. Regardless of any monetary damage, they are causing actual harm in terms of the traffic that goes to that site.

One of the reasons I post information, for example, is that it tends to draw more out. I have a site on the USS Ward, for example, and after my site went up I received somewhat regular contacts from former Ward sailors who provided me with even more information. I have received photos from at least two sailors as well as action reports and deck logs, and these are things I would not have been able to obtain otherwise.

Now, I'm not claiming there should be any monopoly on information like that, I'm just arguing that there is actual harm in such reposting of material, even if the person who originally posted it hasn't done so with any obvious commercial intent.

Mark Smith says;

"These posts (by a volunteer with no financial interests in KitMaker or Model Shipwright) were meant to be informative and done in the spirit of 'fair-use' as outlined by US copyright law. Further we are asking all users of the site to (as a courtesy, not a legal requirement) give credit to any sources of information they may post.

But there is no SPIRIT of fair use, copyright is a law. Stating that giving credit is a courtesy and not a legal requirement further demonstrates lack of understanding of copyright law as well as taking a weak stance against plagiarism; it's not an endorsement of it, but it really does nothing to discourage it either. Attribution is one of the requirements of fair use as the owner of the work in question has the right to claim ownership, and by stating it's not a legal requirement the crew over there are setting the site owner up for a nasty surprise at some point.

And in his final sentence. Mark Smith states with emphasis that if the COPYRIGHT OWNER takes issue, then they should contact ModelShipWright to have the material removed.

Written another way, UNLESS you are the copyright owner, we don't care if what we have posted is done legally or not.

Truckin' along

2008-10-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

Got about 15 pages added to the Franklin Damage Report today while doing the "hurry up & wait" routine on a client computer. Up to page 35 out of 45
After that there is still much to be done:

Save out the photographs that were in the booklet

Stitch the two remaining damage plates back together

link everything up (where it says "see photo X," I like to photo X directly

Proofread, proofread, proofread!

I'm going to take a break on this for the rest of the weekend though.

Franklin Damage Report

2008-10-24T16:55:00.000-07:00

One of the first things I posted on Researcher@Large was a damage report I found for CV-13 Franklin's Kamikaze hit in October of 1944. While a great resource, many people get confused with the later, worse bomb hit in March of 1945 and I always wanted to find a report on that to post as well.

I happened to find that report in San Bruno and have began working on it.

What's nice for me is the difference between the two. The original was a copy that did not OCR well and I wound up hand-typing the entire thing over a couple month's time.

This one was a much cleaner copy, and with the newer and better OCR software I have now, goes in like a dream; I can add a page literally in five minutes without proof reading, and even the proof reading reveals only the odd character here and there as opposed to entire sentences that come out as garbage.

Text could be done by next week, images and links afterwards.

Ward Photos Updated.

2008-10-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

Noticing a couple of new photos of the USS Ward on the Navy Historical Center's Website finally got me off my butt enough to update the Ward website I have on another server. They were all photos of her from 1918 and 1920; the 1918 ones I had found at NARA San Francisco back in May and the 1920 ones were from NHC. A couple of them haven't been published before, and I found out for the first time that Ward had a special ship's wheel in the wheel house as well (which I had posted originally here)... all visible in the gallery of Construction to Mothballs.

Dead is Dead

2008-10-13T09:13:00.000-07:00

One of Robert Heinlein's characters once said that you were just as dead if killed in a police action versus an all-out war. Five sailors died on the aircraft carrier Hornet CV-8 during the battle of midway, but they died in an accident, and have been largely forgotten in the overall picture of a crucial battle. The report that I just finished doesn't even mention casualties, but in addition to the five killed, twenty were wounded.

U.S.S. HORNET (CV-8) - Report of Damage to Ship's Structure by Machine Gun Fire.

Hit the highlight & comment for more details about the accident. Photos at the bottom.

Why I like WWII

2008-10-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

So, I brought in a ship model to work on during lunch today, Dragon's 1/350th USS Buchanan DD-484 1942. I haven't had a lot of time to work on it, but I set up the parts that I have assembled on my desk so I've got something fun to look at from time to time, and while staring at the midships superstructure while listening to the news about the stock market (dropped 508 points, like a load of depth charges) I remembered one of the reasons why I spend so much time studying the second world war.

We view it as a simpler time, and it's an escape from the modern day problems to a time when it was an "us & them" fight to the finish. Sure, there were a lot of complications and war-weariness, but the simple matter is that the concept of a simple Allied Versus Axis fight is a nice break from the uncertainty of a fast-paced but troubled global outlook.

Sure, it was a difficult time, and many people died, but it was an essence boiled down; an us-or-them fight. No worries about slow, distant problems; no "your kids may have to live with global warming, no "this generation is putting the next ones into debt," just simple "if we don't win WE WILL DIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!!"

Camouflage...

2008-09-20T11:04:00.000-07:00

Found this last weekend and just got it stitched back together. It's an experimental design of some sort for CVE, but doesn't match any that I know if. It's got some similar elements to some, such as the feathering on Measure 32 4A and some of the shapes on pattern 10A for the Essex class, but also differences. Note that the black shapes "fade" as they move forward... the colors in general start to move towards lighter shades about midships.

In the same folder was a picture of the model... showing the desired affect, although it appears to me they didn't fade out the black towards the bow.

These were part of a letter to the "Engineer Officer" of USS Nassau in July of 1942, and pre-date the Measure 3X series of dazzle schemes... this is not Measure 17, however, and may be an early forerunner or experiment for Measures 31, 32, and 33. The letter said, in part:

As you can see from the enclosed photograph, the model was painted and tried in the theater. It has quite a bit of course distortion as is apparent in the photograph. The model was actually pointed in a south easterly direction, but has the illusion of going due east.