ME-109

I am rarely surprised anymore at the great finds out there on the web. And I can’t take any credit for scooping anything, as they are a product of late night web surfing adventures (instead of sleeping) in history forums. Over at Mark Bando Triggertime web site, a user posted a link to US field manuals from the war, among them this…

 

 

BASIC FIELD MANUAL
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE
IDENTIFICATION OF GERMAN AIRCRAFT
March 11, 1942

The German manual is 50 plus pages long and each aircraft has multiple renderings beyond the one image on the specs page. Much of the same stuff is up on the web in places like wikipedia or over at the ww2db.com aircraft section. That’s all well and good. But this! This! It’s an original and worth seeing in the form that others saw in 1942. The entire manual is here and the link to many more Army Field manuals is here.

Lawrence Beall-Smith

Scrolling through the archives of the Naval Historical Center, I revisited their collection of period artwork this evening. And it is, in a word, awesome. Many paintings of conflict are somberly painted, with good reason. But there are others, like this painting by Lawrence Beall-Smith, that show color in interesting ways. Having grown up watching shows like Victory at Sea, and viewing thousands of images from the period in black and white, I’m conditioned to look with nuances with that narrow color range.

But this! The blues of this painting are striking. Notice, too, the men at various stages of work: one pilot perhaps showing a recent engagement with his hands, the men in blue sitting on the ground talking, others “colors” at work on various aircraft. It’s an interesting mix.

The catalog of Smith’s work at the NHC is here. Be sure to check them out. The text from the page is copied below.

Task Force Hornets
Lawrence Beall-Smith #13
Oil on board, 1943
88-159-KA

The operations island is a grim gray redoubt against the sky as this aircraft carrier steams behind her task force screen with a swarm of fighters ready on the flight deck. Planes of a fighter squadron stand at Fly One, the take-off spot. Behind them, in order, will be the dive-bombers and the torpedo bombers. Meanwhile, as signal pennants snap from the truck, handling crews and pilots await the orders which will send these Grumman fighters snarling into the air.

ww2db.com Featured Image, #1

The ww2file is pleased to announce the ww2db.com Featured Image partnership. The idea behind this post (and the weekly posts to come) is to highlight ww2db.com’s collection of 3500 plus photos, many culled from the National Archives, Library of Congress, the US Naval Historical Center, and other research institutions.

Okay, so here we go. When I first saw this image (Hellcat Diver, Jan 1945) , it was in the middle of a fat picture book, highlighting the work of a naval photography unit. The strength of that book was that there was common thread among the photographs, not only of the equipment (like this aircraft) but also of the closeness of the men on those ships.

The photo itself…wow. Perhaps it was the scale in the book, maybe even the sharp turn the pilots are making, or maybe it’s the angle of decent toward the carrier. There is just something dramatic about it. Very often in war ariel photography, the lines are straight, either looking at other planes or ships in the distance. Here, everything is in one tight frame and the line of sight is bending down.

Back then, I was working at a job where one of my primary functions was to mess with photoshop, so I scanned this baby at the highest res I could get and just studied it. Magnifying the image beyond 100% revealed a good deal about those specs on the carrier’s deck and towers. It’s an exercise I suggest to anyone, if you have the time.

Dogfights

Oh man…I can’t wait for the season premier of Dogfights. To me, this show is the perfect marriage of computer animation and oral history. I read, too, that there is even a video game based on the episodes, though nothing for MAC-type folks.