Weird Duck.

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!

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`

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

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

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

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*

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.