Martin, before you correct me again....

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...

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

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

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.....