Winning the War on a Tide of American Oil

Whatever your politics or the state of your scientific literacy it's fairly easy to see WWII as an "oil" war. Suddenly everything was mechanized and everywhere you went everyone wanted a little slice of the oil-pie. It was a war about burning gas: tanks, airplanes, trucks, diesels, ships with bunkers full of unrefined sweet Java crude . . .

Somewhere someone once said that the Allies "floated to victory on a tide of American oil." I've heard it attributed to Churchill, but googling about isn't really helping much here, so I won't worry so much about who said it. The truth of the matter  is, I think, more or less self-evident.

But getting that Texas, Pennsylvania, or California distilate to the fronts where it was needed was a a complex matter, and that's where tankers and oilers come in. Some of the first merchant ships I bought were oilers: a pair of German tankers repurposed to serve as Cimarrons and two Shiretokos, one of which was apparently converted into a seaplane tender (the subject for a future conversion, no doubt.) But these early efforts were remarkably crude and unsophisticated. (And the "Cimarrons" were later rebuilt into civilian tankers.) I've gotten a little better at the game since.

Like most naval developments of the twentieth century, fleet oilers found their genesis in the Royal Navy and matured rapidly in the U.S. Navy. One of the earliest U.S. offerings was a class of oilers named after rivers (as would become standard practice) called the Kanawha class. I've chosen to depict USS Maumee, AO-2.

AO-2 differs identifiably from AO-1 in engineering plant, among other things. Where Kanawha was a conventional steamship of her age, AO-2 Maumee was one of the first U.S. ships of her size fitted with diesels. Not surprisingly, the funnel arrangements of the two ships are visibly different. Maumee carries hers farther aft. More about Maumee later.

Next up we have a trio of Cimarron class oilers from as many sculptors. The farthest, Kaskaskia, is from Viking Forge, though with considerable interference by yours truly. This is an older model that I include only for comparison. Second from the front is Platte, from a casting of a Seabattles original. In front is the GHQ model I used for Cimarron herself. The front two are a little closer to manufacturer's original, but both have aftermarket booms and radars, and the GHQ ship also has new masts. 

If you've spent much time studying auxiliaries, you'll no doubt have noticed that the armament was both inconsistent across classes and quite flexible over time. The Cimarron class is a nice example. Encyclopedia articles will tell you the "class" sported four 5"/38 DP rifles and a Mk 33 FC director. On paper the US Navy wished this to be true. In reality the armament varied considerably and tended to consist of whatever was available and more or less appropriate at the yard when the ships were taken over. (Though I suspect they all did have the FC set.) The careful viewer will note that all four of these are different. The REALLY careful viewer will say that this is quite appropriate. The EXTREMELY careful viewer will tell me where I have screwed up and exactly what each ship ACTUALLY sported in mid-1942. I hope that this viewer is an ordinance officer from the USN in 1942, which means, sadly, that he probably can't correct me anymore. (Which isn't to say I don't make mistakes, just that I hope they're pretty small.) If corrected I will GLADLY fix my mistakes. (Very gladly for vets of the ships depicted.) In the meantime, I'm doing my best. Please forgive any mistakes you see and feel free to offer corrections (with footnotes please). I want them to be right, but I will accept "close enough." (And I confess to certain artistic liberties to make them look better from a scale mile away.)

Anyway, in spite of their varried and colorful origins, I think they make a fairly convincing class. The forward two are beamier and more detailed, but not beyond comparison with the other (after appropriate refitting).

Of course in reality, much more crude traveled in civilian bottoms. Below are two that flew the red ensign.

Well, more or less. To starboard (from the ships' perspective, of course) is a ship I'm calling Inverarder. In reality this was a demilitarized version of an oiler ordered by the RN and intended to be War Hagara that British Mexican Petroleum was using as a tanker. Trouble is, while the model is about the right size and apparent age (it was a Viking Forge collier Mars) the arrangement of the War class oilers appears to have been quite unusual: engines amidships in a three island structure, much like a conventional freighter and not at all like an engines aft tanker. (Or collier.) Oops. Well, ignore that. I was having a devil of a time finding a tanker of about the right size and age still in service in Britain by 1941 (searching the 1942 E. B. Talbot-Booth, Roger Jordan's The World's Merchant Ships: 1939, and sundry places online), so let's just play pretend and ignore the defects on that one.

The ship to port is perhaps closer, but also rather fanciful. She's meant to depict (approximately) a British coastal tanker called Lunula operated by Moss and Co. I was able to find one picture of her online . . . afire and sinking after striking a mine in the Thames. The ship was already awash amidships and going down by the bow, so everything forward of the mainmast is pure speculation. (Given that there was no foremast sticking out of the water I assume she had none, but even that is far from a safe bet.) Still, the funnel colors are correct, and the hull was at the least dark. (Though many things look dark when below clouds of roiling black smoke.)

Where the two ladies above both sank, both the girls below took torpedoes and lived to tell the tale. These are somewhat better depictions of two tankers from one piece of the grandly dismembered Standard Oil, Standard Oil of New Jersey or Esso.

The rear ship, a C in C T-2, depicts a ship called Esso Bolivar operated by an offshore subsidiary called the Panama Transport Company. That in the foreground approximates John Worthington, which served Esso directly. Esso Bolivar took a torpedo in the early days of the war while carrying a shipment of water, which may well have saved her from a firey death. After being hit she apparently soldiered on towards Guantanamo, suffering the indignity of continued shelling until the captain ordered her abandoned. Fortunately, the cavalry had heard her distress signal before the radio was shot out. A minesweeper found the U-boat still shelling the abandoned ship and scared her off before picking up the crew. The next day a rescue party went aboard, restored power, and sailed the ship to Gitmo.

John Worthington was slightly less lucky. She survived the attack, off the coast of Brazil, put in to Trinidad for temporary repairs, and ultimately made Galveston for overhaul, but the damage was deemed to great for economic repair. She was ultimately abandoned and sank in shallow water where she lies to this day.

Thus concludes the present edition of the NIFTI miniature naval gazette. We'll talk more about building Maumee, transporting dry(ish) goods, and escorting these large floating targets through sub-infested waters in the next issue. As always, thank you for your indulgence.

5th Annual NIFTI Fleet Review

Well, it's that time again. Actually, it's well past that time. In point of fact the fleet review has been ongoing now for more than a month, and I'm only now getting around to writing about it. While this is no excuse, life has been busy in NIFTI. Still, without further ado, the Review . . . 

Reviewing the Imperial Japanese section of the fleet.

New Cai Lay Harbor looking south from Bean Hill

Three Flowers steam around the North side of Soeur Trois in the West Bay

A pair of Secrataries patrol the East Bay

I won't spend a lot of time belaboring it, because I want to get down to reviews of new models in the near future, but I want to at least mention it and point you to the new review video:

I tried some new animation tricks in there. All very quick work. Haven't gotten so elaborate as smoke, wakes, or shell splashes yet. These will come another time. But I'm reasonably pleased with the results as experiments go. The animation begins about halfway in. Lots of slow pans of the fleet first. If you are curious, the pieces are my own "Fanfare and Fugue" and "March of the Robot Monster" as performed by some friends and acquaintances of mine. I anxiously await your thoughts.

Sincerely,

The Composer.

Commissions for a New War

A while back I painted several WWI ships for Sabryin Owlfeather: British battlecruisers HMS Invincible and Inflexible, and the German armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.

When Owlfeather bought his WWI ships he also bought some later combatants, including one named after the CO of the German squadron: Admiral Maximilian von Spee.

The German Panzerschiff, or armored cruiser, (which looks very much like a battleship you could put in your shirt pocket in this case) . . . 

Graf Spee

Von Spee's squadron encountered a superior British squadron and met its end in the Battle of the Falkland Islands. The captain of the German cruiser Graf Spee scuttled his command after it took serious but non-fatal damage in the Battle of the River Plate. (And in his defense, had he not scuttled his ship the Royal Navy would have been happy to scuttle it for him in short order.) Along with the "pocket battleship" Owlfeather acquired the several British cruisers that crippled her: 

HMS Exeter, Ajax . . . 

and Achilles.

The reader can be forgiven for thinking that Exeter seems to be wearing the white rose, as she's secretly a York mumming as her younger brother, thus I have proposed the nickname "Ersatz Exeter" for this lovely ship. (And she is a fine ship, whatever you chose to call her.)

The takeaway here might be that commerce raiding against a superior foe is rarely the recipe for a long life. But hopefully the models look acceptable. I don't know that I'll ever do much work on commission, as I get far too attached to models I build or paint, but there you have it. I do hope you will be pleased, Owlfeather. And if you want to fight the River Plate, bring em by. If you have the ships I have the ocean.

Industrial Scale

In preparation for the Grand Imperial Fleet Review that's, as usual, overdue I have been working on harbor improvements for the industrial sector of New Cai Lay. This has amounted to building a few new factories and warehouses, painting up some extant ones, and building a new wharf. I've described the painting in plenty of detail elsewhere, so I won't belabor that, but I experimented with some different ways to build the new structures.

Those readers who have been banging around this blog for a while might remember that I scratch built Long Island a few years back. (In this case the escort carrier and not the land-form.) To some appreciable extent I reprised the same techniques for my new factories. (And to a lesser extent also for the wharf.) All are built of balsa, though not all in quite the same ways.

First off, let's talk about the wharf.

This one was pretty simple. At  essence I took a plank, glued some stuff to it, and painted it.

The fun comes in what I glued to it, some of which is itself manufactured. The hawser in the upper left corner is a tight spiral of .01" styrene on top of a cookie cut from a larger diameter styrene rod. Other pieces include small rectangles cut from stock, a pair of LCIs, a stack leftover from some model or other, a boat, and some styrene rod stacked up to look like . . . well . . . rod or pipe maybe. Or even telephone poles. Who knows? Something round and long. 

The tiny factories were a little more creative. For the first one I assembled several pieces of balsa into a rough structural shell. I didn't take any pictures of this on "in progress", but the shell is nevertheless obvious from underneath.

The single biggest problem with my earlier structural project, an administration building, was the lack of roof treatment. 

This I have corrected by adding small plastic cookies from a larger plastic rod as ventilators. The chimney is a piece of square balsa stock.

Of course, a simpler method for building a basic background structure is to cut out a building shape and just paint the thing. This isn't the most elegant, but if you don't put the buildings in the middle of the picture (as below) it works fine.

I'm interspersing my new buildings into the middle of a variety of Davco buildings that are technically the wrong scale, but which seem . . . more or less adequate given the lack of identifiable detail and the wide array of building types and sizes in your average city. So one of my goals is to mix in as wide a variety of shapes, sizes, styles, and apparent ages as practical. The next two buildings are of a more "medium" size, and are meant to be from the same complex. The body of the buildings is a simple balsa block. I added a strip to the top to create a clerestory roof, for interior lighting in the middle of a cavernous factory building, gooped CA onto the things to fill the wood grain, sanded them down, and made some roof details out of styrene: ventilators and chimneys, perhaps from a forge. (These remind me a little of a foundry that was near my childhood home.)

I'd been planning to add all other details, windows and doors, with paint, but I decided I wanted a little more variation, and added am exterior loading dock with awning to the building below. The dock and awning are simple styrene strips cut from a larger sheet.

Here's a couple of pictures of the buildings added to the harbor scene. I plan to keep this all separate in order to make it "modular." The next step is to weather the roads and maybe add some stripes and perhaps find a way to create foundations that hide the gaps between building and ground. (And generally create a more cluttered urban landscape to surround the structures.) This is all pretty quick and dirty, but if you squint a little it works all right.

Work, websites, and piano concerti

My most loyal followers might note that I am, as usual, overdue for the annual fleet review. I am sad to say that this will continue for a little while longer, but do not fear, ships will assemble in the harbor very soon. But first, a bit as to why this has not yet occurred. (After all, the Grand Empress just had her first jubilee. It is that time.)

Ships have lately taken a back seat to music . . . or at least thoughts about thinking about music. Or perhaps more accurately fury at a website lost. For somewhat over twenty years I, your humble composer, have been a minor functionary at the local ShowMe University Inc. I was mostly retained for the sake of hanging heavy things in the air once or twice a year. Well, said University has revamped their HR procedures. They used to purge the rolls of employees who had not worked for one calendar year. Now they do it every six months. One rigger who works twice, or maybe once a year never got the memo.

So I found myself without benefit of the free (though less than completely convenient) web-hosting services I'd enjo . . . excuse me, used for the last eight years or so. I have been reconstructing my website in the wilds of the internet, away from sheltered academic surrounds. In short, I am back. It took some real effort to get here, and there will no doubt be one or two bugs to work out, but I'm back. I may not be completely finished with my U career, since they do still need to hang heavy things twice (or once) a year, but the terms of any engagement will henceforward be different, more interesting. Indeed, more rewarding. And I will maintain my website elsewhere. More fun anyway. I pay a little for the privilege, but I have more freedom and better access. It's hard to complain now that the work is more or less done.

So if you can stand a little music, take a poke around my new demesne. I had long meant to talk about music on this blog and do so only rarely. I even have good reason to do so presently. I'm releasing the first elements of a Piano Concerto into the world on my new works page. This is yet another piece whose thematic material came to me in the shower one day. I like to think of it as Rachmaninov meets minimalism. Sort of. With luck it's one of my more approachable pieces. In any case, I hope that you might enjoy it.

Sincerely,
The Composer

Battle of Sangiang

December 7, 1941: After the Dutch refusal to accept the Japanese ultimatum Japanese forces land at Tarakan and Balikpapan in Dutch Borneo.  Admiral Karl Doorman, unable to oppose the Japanese with sufficient force falls back to Batavia.

December 8: England declares war on Japan in support of their Dutch allies and the oil embargo.

December 9: In the absence of sufficient air support Admiral Thomas Phillips realizes his force is exposed and his position is untenable. He falls back to Batavia and links up with Karl Doorman and the Dutch forces. He reports his position to the admiralty, but regrets that he cannot defend Singapore and orders it’s evacuation. Together Phillips and Doorman form a joint Australian, British, and Dutch command: ABDCOM.

December 14: Batavia comes under air attack from newly captured airfields on Borneo. ABDCOM falls back to Tanjungkarang on the south coast of Sumatra, just west of the Sunda Strait.

December 16: Dutch defenders in Batavia warn of Japanese landings and beg for assistance. Doorman and Phillips formulate a plan to force the strait and fall on Japanese forces in a night engagement.

This was the situation in the NIFTI command center, where Admiral Sabryin Owlfeather played the part of the Japanese and our friends Kurtis and Chris were obliged to be the British assailants.

I know, you’re thinking this will go well. ABDCOM has several key advantages: a larger force with a modern battleship in the vanguard. And of course inter-radio communications with VanGhoogle Translate should make communication a snap. Besides, Japan would never do anything sneaky to keep the foxes out of the henhouse, would they?

The scene opens with two Japanese "pickets" fleeing from the north side of Sangiang Island. These two small and unremarkable boats are Nasami and Natsushima and they've just spent the evening the naval equivalent of gumballs off their sterns. They belong to a category of ships one might call "minelayers." The Japanese force, hastily dispatched though it is, rests comfortable in the fact that they only need to defend one side of the strait. The mines will take care of the other. Quite reasonably, Sabryin deploys his forces on the northwest side of the strait, leaving the east side unguarded.

Sabryin deployed his destroyers in line abreast with his cruisers and capital ships immediately behind them. Kurtis and Chris deployed in four much more conventional columns, one of capital ships, the second of cruisers, and third and fourth of Dutch and British destroyers. The two forces initially closed blindly towards rumors of one another at flank speed. The British were counting on the surface search set aboard Prince of Wales to find . . . something. The first contact emerged from the noise of the island at around 0015, or rather I should say the radar watch officer picked it out, since it was a stationary contact. Twitchy gunners aboard the lead Dutch destroyer, Piet Hien, immediately opened fire on the very hostile (and surprisingly alert) AFW trawler (anti-fish warfare) that proceeded to flee at best possible speed towards the Japanese cavalry. (Odd, since the trawler was surely Dutch.)

It probably isn't a great shock that the Japanese sighted the Dutch first. Before even firing a shot, the unfortunate Piet Hien was introduced to the Emperor's new oxygen torpedoes. Two 24" torpedoes at the edge of gun range sent the offending destroyer to the bottom.

But it wasn't long before a flurry of British Quick Firing rifles sent Samidare to join Piet Hien. The battle slowly developed along this line. The ABDCOM force executed a simutaneous turn to starboard and away from the Japanese, making to run the east side of the strait in a slightly ragged right echelon. The Japanese destroyer force, in order to give chase, executed a simultaneous turn to port, leaving them in a fairly tidy line ahead.

The Japanese set a few torpedoes to 18 ft. and ran them under the destroyers and right at Tromp. Not only did the torpedoes open half a dozen compartments to the sea, the concussion wreaked havoc in engineering rupturing steam lines and salt water in one of the tanks put out fires in several boilers. Tromp immediately lost speed, dropping to about seven knots. Barely able to maneuver and with electrical failures disabling her A and B turrets she nevertheless bravely soldiered on as she trailed an oil slick and fired the occasional nuisance shot from her C turret at the column of Japanese death that now steamed quickly past her.

Meanwhile the Japanese battleships and cruisers turned hard to port to cut around the north side of the island in order to cut off any British stragglers that might clear the minefield.

The Dutch entered the minefield first, but De Ruyter was surprisingly lucky and struck only one mine, that detonated prematurely and did only very superficial damage. Prince of Wales was somewhat less fortunate, finding herself surrounded by waterspouts that holed her in the bow and on both beams. Her torpedo protection proved sufficient to prevent the worst of the mischief, but the damage slowed her down considerably. Best speed she was able to make was fifteen knots. Several destroyers cleared the minefield after her without striking anything. Java struck a mine, but again luck held and the damage was fairly superficial. Repulse struck several that slowed her down a bit between shock damage to her aging powerplant and increased drag from bent and torn hull plating, but her fighting ability was largely unharmed. Finally the last destroyer through the minefield, HMS Encounter, struck a mine which tore her in half. She sank with all hands in rather less than three minutes. Apparently the minefield wasn't completely toothless.

Still, this was unexpected. ABDCOM emerged into the north end of the strait largely intact, if two destroyers and a cruiser short. De Ruyter immediately called for flank speed while the remainder of the force screened her to keep the Japanese heavies at a distance. Admiral Sabryin, still coming about with his capital ships, met a particularly well timed torpedo volley from the gallant British and Dutch destroyers. Ise was struck first, losing all headway as the concussion apparently put out all her fires. She and Kirishima fired a volley at PoW that started a fire on the boat deck, but it was quickly extinguished. The two Japanese cruisers concentrated on Java, who was simply unable to withstand such a volume of fire. The first hit started fires in a berthing compartment forward, the following two penetrated into her engineering spaces, wrecking boilers in the forward fire room and leaving her dead in the water. With no power to counter-flood or operate pumps she took on water at an alarming rate and rolled over to port before plunging by the bow and taking most of her crew with her.

At this point a second volley of torpedoes caught Kirishima leaving her in straits quite similar to her squadron mate, if a few hundred yards closer to the enemy. With the two battlewagons dead in the water and afire the British heavies chose to shift their fire to the Japanese cruisers. The empire built her cruisers very well, but no cruiser of any nation could take the massive pounding that ten 14" and eight 15" Vickers rifles can dispense. Nachi fell first, wracked by massive explosions as PoW started fires from one end of the ship to the other and Repulse simply blew her bottoms out. Nachi survived slightly longer than Java, and she settled on an even keel, but the general effect was quite similar.

At this point we must speculate, because the hour had grown late and we needed to call the exercise. With no further torpedoes the British were probably out of miracles, and a squadron of Japanese destroyers was clawing up their wakes, but it's not unlikely that they could have finished at least one of the Japanese heavies before the Destroyers drove them off or sank them. The damage to the Japanese ships was more spectacular, but in reality all four battleships were serviceable once fires were extinguished and boiler pressure was restored. The biggest problem the Japanese faced was running down and stopping DeRuyter, who would probably have been more than capable of destroying the Imperial Army's still embarked supplies.

As to ship losses, I would guess that the British would have been best served by running. There wasn't much to be gained by staying in the fight. With all torpedoes expended and the bulk of the Japanese fleet still above water (and capable of firing both shells and 24" oxygen torpedoes) the British would have been hard pressed to finish the Japanese heavy ships before the destroyers caught up and put ABDCOM in a quite uncomfortable position. I'd guess that in reality all sides would have broken off action in order to regroup and lick their wounds.

In retrospect, I am not satisfied with the way I ran the minefield. I feel it was too weak and provided no credible disincentive to ABDCOM. (Not withstanding Admiral Kurtis's well known propensity to charge headfirst at any brick wall between him and dinner. And I wouldn't bet on the wall.) This left the Japanese commander in an unanticipated position, which was a little unfair since I gave the other side a more substantial force. The Empire of Japan would never have risked major fleet units so needlessly. But it was still a fun little scenario for all its flaws and it was nice to see some action on the masonite sea. With luck we can do this again sometime in the future. With real luck we can refight a substantial part of a longer campaign. Find out what might have happened if . . .

Ah yes, I do like a good what if.

Until next time, gentle readers. May your lives be more gentle than our imaginations, but twice as fruitful.

Sincerely,
The Composer

A brief poetic distraction . . .

Several years ago I wrote a poem while in transit between one place and another. At least, I believe that's when I wrote it. You see, I got home, edited it some, and promptly lost it. Well, I finally found it, edited it some more and appended the date when I think I wrote it. I hope the date doesn't make it fiction, but even if it does I still think it's one of my better travel poems. Without further ado I bring you:

Information Dance

Sound.

Color. The

Air is a confusion of

Information.

Esters bunch in pressure waves as

Frequencies collide. One

Wave transmits another, permits

Passage, but

Not

Without

Interference.

Photons skim past the

Rarefied stuff of

Matter.

In the same

Space other ideas find

Transmission

Above us

Grand algebraic

Dragons bound among fluid clouds of chaos

Transposing genes through

Non-Euclidian space,

Fermenting synaptic construction and

Mixing,

Matching, giving

Passage while

Changing like

Two particles in a

Vacuum.

In this vast cosmic

Radiation of information

Our own attachments

Are both

Distinct and

Infinitesimal.

Next to unity

Beethoven measures the same as

I.

9 December 2011