WAK USS Salt Lake City 1:200

[marco1971]

Wow! The turret base are a lot of piece! Wonderful detail!

Marco

[Michael Mash]

All of that superstructure is looking good.
Mike

[Don Boose]

I second Mike's comments on the beautiful work on the superstructure.

And Marco speaks truth regarding the detail on the turret base. I thought that maybe you built ship models so you wouldn't have to build tank tracks -- but that turret base seems to have just as many repetetive parts. The finished structure really looks impressive!

John Prados Combined Fleet Decoded is a good follow-on to Kaigun. He also has a recent book on the Solomons campaign that is on my shelf but not yet read (Islands of Destiny: The Solomons Campaign and the Eclipse of the Rising Sun (NAL/Caliber). You know he started out a few decades ago as a wargamer and wargame designer working for S&T with Jim Dunnigan before he got his PhD at Columbia.

The Gettysburg trip sounds great. You know where I live.

Don

[RAFleischman]

517 pages of Kaigun boiled down to 2 sentences on page 515:

"More fundamentally, it can be charged that the Japanese navy neither understood nor prepared for war at all. Rather, it believed in and prepared for battle."

Now it's time for some reading about naval intelligence...which, when I was in the USN was considered a "contradiction of terms"!

russ...

[RAFleischman]

Three legs may be great for milking stools, but they are a pain on model ships! I fiddled for a very long time to try to get the legs right...and I'm still not really satisfied with them! Next step is the after fire control radar.

I was thinking about the 5 inch guns on SLC and that there isn't any fire control station for them...I guess they didn't hit much!!??

Reading: Combined Fleet Decoded by John Prados. The jury is still out on this one. The subtitle is: "The Secret History of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II", but most of what I have read so far is general knowledge, not too much on American Intelligence!

russ...

P.S. I'm not really a tracked vehicle kind of guy, but I was intrigued by the Japanese amphib with the torpedoes slung on it's side that was released as a kit a while back!

[Don Boose]

Looks like you conquered the tripod challenge, Russ!

Excellent superstructure.

I think your assessment of the Prados book is accurate. More about what the Combined Fleet and what the U.S. forces knew about it than how they knew about it, although as I recall, there is a fair amount early in the book about U.S. Navy intelligence officers and their education.

For a really detailed account of U.S. intelligence, focusing on ULTRA and the Southwest Pacific Area, but with a lot of good info on Japanese military intelligence, I recommend Ed Drea's MacArthur's ULTRA (MacArthur's ULTRA). Ed is, in my view, the premier American historian of the Imperial Japanese Army alive today (see, for example: Japan’s Imperial Army and Edward J. Drea on Japan's Imperial Army). His Japanese is as good as his English, and he has an enormous range of Japanese contacts, including surviving military officers. He is also a friend of some 35 years, ever since we were both on the faculty at Leavenworth in the late 1970s.

I'm eagerly looking forward to more Swayback Maru construction. It occurs to me (thinking of the Battle of the Komondorskis and the Treaty Navy) it would be neat to see builds of an Omaha class light cruiser (Richmond) and Farragut and Benson class destroyers. Just sayin' in case you haven't already plotted out your future production schedule.

Don

[Hathaway Veteran]

Does the ULTRA book you cite describe the "how" and perhaps provide examples?

Paul

[Hathaway Veteran]

Originally Posted by RAFleischman

Three legs may be great for milking stools, but they are a pain on model ships! I fiddled for a very long time to try to get the legs right...and I'm still not really satisfied with them! Next step is the after fire control radar.

I was thinking about the 5 inch guns on SLC and that there isn't any fire control station for them...I guess they didn't hit much!!??

Reading: Combined Fleet Decoded by John Prados. The jury is still out on this one. The subtitle is: "The Secret History of American Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II", but most of what I have read so far is general knowledge, not too much on American Intelligence!

russ...

P.S. I'm not really a tracked vehicle kind of guy, but I was intrigued by the Japanese amphib with the torpedoes slung on it's side that was released as a kit a while back!

I believe the 5- inch guns were anti-aircraft and probably aimed by the gun captain.

[Don Boose]

Russ - Being a retired Dogface, I am not too tightly wrapped on naval architecture, but according to Norman Friedman (U.S. Cruisers: An Illustrated Design History, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984, pp. 110-125), the 5-inch dual purpose guns were initially controlled by Mk. 19 directors (Naval Weapons of World War Two - John Campbell, N. J. M. Campbell - Google Books p. 110), which were located abaft the second funnel in close proximity to the guns. There was also a rangefinder/spotting glass for the 5-inch guns located directly abaft the tripod mast. Later in the war (and judging from the camouflage, your SLC is circa 1944, radar and later versions of the fire control directors were installed. You will probably get a better and more accurate answer from Nimitzfan if he is guarding this push.

Hathaway Veteran: Ed's book provides considerable info on the how and gives lots of examples, but his primary focus is on the operationalization of intelligence: how MacArthur made use of the information provided by ULTRA sources (he made use of it if it fitted his instincts and ignored it if not).

Don

[Hathaway Veteran]

Hah, good answer on the cruiser. Friedman is in a box here so while I suspected, I did not look. :-). Late war though, 5-inch guns were used for AA defense and I always amazed they hit anything.

As to ULTRA comment, many thanks. I have always been curious as to the actual content of the intel and hand-in-hand how that content was used.