Truckin' along

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

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.

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

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

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...

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.

Less evidence of Stupidity

So, I got a missing half-page of text online in the OEG ASW in WWII report... nothing like seeing a half page of text missing in the middle of a document to make you feel competent.....