What makes it Worthwhile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.