Two Weary Axis Subs to Examine

Excellant work as usual.I got a few subs in the stash I hope to get around to soon.

It looks awesome but what for that plain on the submarine?

Not sure what you mean. If you're referring to the front dive plane on the I-Boat that is the way its supposed to be configured. AFV provides a pieces for inside the hull that represents the sub with the planes folded inward but it was clearly offered as an option. (I think planes folded up on US and German subs.) I just figured that when down the water must have been allowed to go into the ballast through any open space. But I don't know. It would always be nice to understand a subject being modeled but I rarely do.

Eric

There is a possibility that Elena.pe has used some translation software to read here, and meant "plane" as in "aeroplane."

The Pacific being a different sort of expanse of ocean than the Atlantic was a major design factor in all of the ships meant to operate there, submarines are no exception.  The IJN had embraced naval aviation in a big way, too.  With that in mind, the fact that the Imperial Japanese Navy might combine two technologies--scout planes and submarines is not that far fetched.

Japanese torpedoes were of  a stout size as well, meaning the submarine's dimensions  accounted for those in the vessel's size even before including an aircraft hanger, catapult (if I remember correctly) and space for the aviation crew, and aviation stores (fuels, oil, lubricants, ammunition, etc.)

Now, as to how folding dive planes worked--first off, they only needed to fold where they interfered with either cruising or ship-handling near dock, piers, and other similar career-ending features.

It's good to remember that during WWII submarines were surface vessels with the ability to submerge.  About 90% of their patrol time was on the surface, running on diesel powerplants rather than batteries.  A US Gato-class had a range of 11,000nm (20,000km) at a cruise speed of 10kt (only 18kph);  Submerged, top speeds were much lower, and endurance on batteries was only about 45-48 hours at 2-3kt (±3kph).

So, any feature which improved surface cruising performance was "worth" the weight/space/maintenance burdens it imposed. 

If I remember rightly, US dive planes were hydraulic-operation, with the motors "out in the wet"--only the hydraulic lines passed into the inner pressure hull.  There's quite a lot of room in the space between the outer, hydrodynamic hull and the inner pressure hull.

I don't doubt you're right about US boats, however AFV supplied pressure hulls for both the U-boat and I-boat. They were completely invisible and interfered with fit so I left them off. The pressure hull on the I-boat stops well before reaching the front dive planes. As noted, there was a part you could use that fit inside the hull with the dive planes folded on top of each other in lieu of configuring them as deployed. Anyway, they are correctly configured for the kit per AFV instructions.

You're also right about WWII being not true submarines. However, from the modelers point of view, I think we should remember that because they were set so low, that part of the sub above the waterline was often drenched and often pounded by salt water. Almost every good picture of a WWII sub I've seen has shown visible weathering - sometimes a lot of it. (Anyone know if a US sub got a paint job when in at Pearl? My data indicates that U-boats did usually. Obviously they wouldn't get the full treatment if lay over was a tender.

Eirc

They really look good,especially the small scale.I would have questioned all the rust on the I-Boat,but your well written comments explain it all.

Speaking as a retired U.S. Submariner, I know that American boats are well-maintained and are frequently painted.  I suspect that German and Japanese boats were equally so, except that painting probably took a low priority towards the end  of the war.

I, too, question so much rust depicted on the models. However, such things are up to the modeler's perogative.

Bill

Nicely done!

Excellent work!

Weathering is on a continuum. I would argue this without a shred of evidence because I live in a major port and see ships every day. (The tankers noted in my original post are the most valuable because you get a look at what water does below the waterline.) Many are in very tidy shape. Many show signs of fading and oxidation. For World War II subs we have to go farther than 2011 San Francisco Bay, but I think the point is made.

I do want to repeat that I made no attempt to replicate U-99 or I-19: I wanted to model weathered subs and both the vessels modeled by AFV had many sisters. I got much information on U-boats largely from a very nice 50 page article written by Doug Martindale on U-boat paints, markings and weathering. http://www.artitec.nl/downloads/instructions/uboat/uboat_colours.pdf  Martindale thought modelers did too much rust at the expense of other weathering, but discusses where it collected on boats returning from a long voyage. (That could be 10 weeks if supplied at sea even for a Type VII, although 5 was more typical when the war got rolling.) I put rust where he said it would be and tried to be careful not to allow streaking below the waterline. I urge anyone interested to check out this article which includes a number of photos, some in color. To make my point, let me give two quotes from Martindale illustrating the extreme end of the continuum. This is from "Iron Coffins" the famous memoir of Capt. Werner Herbert:

“The boat was weatherbeaten. The conning tower looked like a surrealistic painting.The protective red undercoat showed in streaks through the splintered grey surface paint. Rust had formed everywhere, even around the barrel of the heavily greased 8.8cm gun on the foredeck. There was a light green shine of algae on the wooden deck that covered the steel hull. Her rundown appearance was obviously the result of months of drills in the Baltic, and I found it very appealing.”

The second is a quote from a U-boat POW given to British interrogators:

Kalisch [Second U-boat sailor]: “Strelow's boat [U 435] once came back entirely covered with rust; he had been out for twelve or thirteen weeks. The whole boat was a reddish-brown.”

For a photo evidence I stumbled upon a remarkable source. A French sub-junkie who uses the tag U796 on the web site SubSim tried to collect a photo(s) of as many U-boats as possible and included a brief note of notable deeds and fate of boat: there are about 700 boats pictured one by one. If you go through them you will find many almost pristine. Some were prewar, some were no doubt new, some had perhaps just been scraped and painted in dry dock. More show some sign of wear, especially streaking. (Several pics of boats in dry dock.) Some show significant weathering, much beyond what I portrayed. Check it out at :


http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=149950


For the I-boat we're on shakier ground. The Japanese did not put anything like the effort of the US or Germany to record operations in photo or film. (US and German sources involve millions of miles of film and countless photos.) Indeed, if a major threat on Model Warship is right, we're not really sure exactly what color I-19 wore, although dark grey with a wooden deck painted black was the majority opinion. That said, if you search "Japanese submarine images" with Google, you will get a fair number of photos. You'll also see the problem as most are taken from a distance at profile. The photos that best showed weathering on U-boats were close-ups and group pictures often taken in front of the con. (And as Marindale notes, the con often shows considerable weathering.)


So I went to US sources for the I-boat. I went on a series of assumptions. First, that the process of oxidation described by Martindale was right. Salt would leach anti-fouling elements from paint and begin general fading: paint would eventually begin to peel and oxidation would begin immediately if it wasn't oxidation that caused the peeling. (If you look at rusted painted metal, you can see that rust readily forms under the paint so you'll get a kind of oxidation zone with a light orange surrounding exposed rust which can from reddish-brown to sepia. I tried to do this.) Once this process got going, the peeling would accelerate and you'd be looking at a large hunk of rusty metal.


The best evidence I found for I-boats particularly came from a show called “Japan's Super-Sub” on the PBS series “Secrets of the Dead.” (Available from Amazon for streaming.) The US forces that captured I-400 and its sister took colored films and I-400 shows considerable weathering and rust even though it was captured on its first mission. Some of the I-boat missions were very long and I'd guess that they would have shown signs. Should also note that Japanese shipyards were overwhelmed with the job of repairing damaged vessels ﾖ a key reason why Japanese ship building never matched Tokyo's plans. Should also point out that we have decent records concerning ships logs for several IJN subs, including I-19. (Available at Combinedfleet.com) It appears that sub missions were limited by wear and tear on the crew. Ten weeks was a long outing for any boat from any nation although it did happen. Six weeks was not uncommon. However, when a Japanese boat returned it did not necessarily go into dry dock from the logs I've read. Like the US, Japan had sub tenders that could do minor repairs and completely resupply the boat while the crew was given some time off. (Midway Island served as a kind of permanent tender for the USN.) But a refit at a tender would not mean the kind of overhaul boats could get at proper facilities. (One source quoted by Martindale said U-boats got a stay and repaint in French dry docks after every mission.) So the crews and supplies might have been refreshed, but a boat could go a long time between overhauls and repaint. And salt water would be doing its work every hour.


I was more influenced by American sources. Ironically the American vessels filmed capturing I-400 were clearly rusted. Much better evidence comes from the History Channel's 15 hour “Color of War” series. (Real color: not the computer variety.) In that series there are individual episodes on invasions, engineering (both showing many transports and smaller vessels), surface ships and submarines. American surface warships, especially in late war, sometimes show “over the top” weathering with very evident and very large rust zones. To me this makes sense because as the US developed its supply forces and advanced bases like Manus, warships stayed moving in salt water for unprecedented periods of time. (In the IJN the big ships largely stayed in port. Destroyers and subs did not.) Likewise the numerous subs shown displayed a wide array of weathering but some were nicely beat-up. This show is available to any Netflix customer on streaming video and gets a solid thumbs up. Anyway, if there were American vessels showing the wear of war on the world's largest ocean, it's not a leap to to argue the same was true with the Japanese. I didn't have dry dock photos unfortunately. I did reason that if you could see oxidation above and on the waterline it would exist, probably in larger quantity, below it.


In sum, I think I had very good evidence to portray the U-boat as being actually quite typical of a boat returning from a full patrol. The I-boat is to portray extreme weathering, but from the imperfect evidence available, I think it lies within the continuum of historic reality.

I also urge those interested in ship modeling who haven't done so to register at Model Warship and look at their forums which includes a major thread on weathering done by the moderators. Unless I misunderstand the point, I took it as a gentle nudge to get ship modelers to show more weathering than they do. It's odd that models of machines that spent their service in salt water very often show far less weathering than armor or aircraft that were almost throw away items in the mass production conflict of WWII.

I'm sure elena.pe is referring to the E14 airplane.

You make very interesting points.  The last one you make, though, seems less appropriate.  One cannot compare the weathering of armor or aircraft to ships.  Each operates under unique conditions and is maintained differently.

For example, ships are frequently cleaned and repainted after each deployment. Granted, the Axis nations probably allowed the material conditions of their ships to deteriorate in the last year of the war due to the war situation.  Crewmen pay astute attention to signs of rust; whatever rust is evident is soon cleaned up.  Indeed, officers and crew typically (but not always) take great pride in the appearance of their respective ships, which may have heavy weathering for only limited periods of time.

Armor, on the other hand, exists "in the field," where repair facilities are rare. Should a tank need painting, that paint is often slopped on, depending on the combat conditions, the availabilty of paint, etc. Sometimes, the facilities might not exist even for a washing down.

Aircraft present their own unique issues . . . how would one show weathering on an unpainted P-51?

Anyway, you did a great job!

Bill

warshipguy

For example, ships are frequently cleaned and repainted after each deployment. Granted, the Axis nations probably allowed the material conditions of their ships to deteriorate in the last year of the war due to the war situation.  Crewmen pay astute attention to signs of rust; whatever rust is evident is soon cleaned up.  Indeed, officers and crew typically (but not always) take great pride in the appearance of their respective ships, which may have heavy weathering for only limited periods of time.

Armor, on the other hand, exists "in the field," where repair facilities are rare. Should a tank need painting, that paint is often slopped on, depending on the combat conditions, the availabilty of paint, etc. Sometimes, the facilities might not exist even for a washing down.

Anyway, you did a great job!

Bill

 I can't entirely agree. If you read accounts, or "oral histories" such as a book named "Battleship at War" (the story of the USS Washington told by the crew) you find that the Washington's crew was stunned by the appearance of British battleships when they first saw them early in the war because they looked to be in such bad shape. Later they came to understand that they couldn't keep up the appearance of their own ship under the stresses of war. I would also note that the Japanese subs were deployed from forward bases more often than not, so they often didn't have the facilities for painting etc after each deployment.

 I can agree though that he did a great job on the subs!

All I can say is that the photo record clearly supports my point that there were many warships in operation that looked a total fright. Not all, but, given the right circumstances, many. I've interviewed scores of crewmen of WWII vessels (mostly from the 42-43 period) and the thing they stress is the frantic nature of operations once at sea. Thanks to subs and aircraft, you were on some kind of advanced "watch" the moment you left harbor in the Pacific and ships would be on near full alert very quickly. That's why fatigue was such a serious problem across the board. And I think the amount of care given to wartime versus peacetime ships was very different. Our ships spent a lot of time at sea. The advanced bases didn't have a proper drydock for large ships so there was a lot of "on the spot" mending that normally would have been done in a proper shipyard. I got in pretty well with the Enterprise Association. A couple of guys told me that the E was nearly "falling apart" by January 43 and fully understood why it had to be rebuilt after one season in the big leagues. The class of 44-45 had it worse. I think if you wanted to find a more tidy navy you might have looked to Combined Fleet because they were in port a lot. Their subs, however, were at sea. Look at the log of I-19 on Combinedfleet.com. They were on a series of six week plus missions and "repair" often meant a tender, not a port. (It appears that it got a proper once over in March 42 but not later.) And ships live in salt water. BTW: if you want to see rust on a carrier, come to Alameda and tour the USS Hornet. Ironically except for exhaust, I don't use rust on armor. Loads of dirt, yes, but not rust. Tanks didn't live in salt water. (Lord you should have seen Minnesota cars when I was growing up and before the auto makers pretty well figured out how to protect the underside of a car. The salt just tore them up after three or four years no matter what you did.)

Eric

Eric,

I used to live on the Alameda Naval Air Station back in the 1960's. My father was stationed on the USS Hancock (CVA-19).  Those carriers were emaculate.  Today, I live in Groton, CT, where the Navy deposited me. The USS Massachusetts in Fall River, MA has been allowed to rust away in many places as a result of a lack of funding for maintenance that never would have been tolerated on active service.

I served onboard six submarines throughout my navy career; they, too, were emaculate soon after return to port.  I also served on one surface ship in my career; painters and chippers were frequently over the side when in port keeping the ship pretty.  Granted, wartime service places severe restrictions on maintenance; I will never challenge that fact.

Please don't read my comments as criticism. Modeling is an art, and the interpretation of how to depict a given ship is up to the artist.  You did a terrific job!

Bill

I wasn't expecting much popular approval on this project and certainly didn't take any criticism with any bad feeling. You can experiment with various painting techniques on practice kits, but if you really want to know what a badly rusted (or more specifically a boat whose paint job was going to hades allowing surface rust) boat/ship will look like is to build one. I did and am glad. I wouldn't pound a project that took three months to produce the way I did the I-Boat that took three days. That said, I will use some this these techniques on future projects because there's simply no doubt that a lot of ships in wartime conditions showed some real wear and tear.

We could have crossed paths at Alameda or almost. I moved nearby in 1970 and got a security clearance a few years later. The naval base was a terrific place to fish. I jigged a small striper standing next to Enterprise: the neighboring ship was dumping some kind of garbage which attracted a huge school of smelt and below them were bigger shapes. Neat. (The same pass got me on Norfolk where I was walked around next to a row of boomers and got a quick tour of Coral Sea. Also saw one of the first Tomcats. I was only sight seeing - didn't know a soul. The world has changed since then. Bet civilians aren't fishing next to aircraft carriers anymore.) Sure do miss the Navy. While shore fishing one day an attack sub surfaced in front of us on the way to Mare Island. And the fighter jockies seemed to delight in seeing how close they could get to the Bay Bridge - very close and a real thrill if you were under them.

The war changed just about everything inside the services. In the prewar era even the politically powerful USN had to praise the Lord for any new hull authorized. And with so much work still done by hand, you had a lot of unrated sailors that had to be kept busy and keeping things tidy made for good evaluations. They even painted ships white. War could screw that up. USS Oregon was in Asia at the outbreak of the war the Spain and with no Panama Canal, sailed 14,000 miles to get to battle. If you want to see a study in peacetime/wartime check out the photos of the nice white 1898 Oregon in San Francisco as opposed to the same grey and worn vessel returning from war to New York, and then returning to the Pacific after overhaul. (http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-o/bb3.htm .  I'm going to build the Glencoe version of that ship for a group build here on the next ship cycle. Going to give her Santiago warpaint so weathering will be an interesting challenge.

I think when comparing eras we should remember the degree to which WWII was almost a throw away war of mass production. Our Navy was absolutely huge and most sailors would much rather have been elsewhere. My father told me that "lifers" in the Army used to cry in their beer about how badly standards had fallen. Clausewitz knew that too - he observed that the fastest way to wreck an army is to get it into a war. The men were driven by a sense of duty. But only very few (including officers) thought of the Navy, or any other service, as a career. So the mindset was very different and I'm sure that had very real impact on the way people approached their duty. Nobody was thinking "this carrier is going to be in service for sixty years, just like HMS Victory: we better take good care of it."  Many men certainly had intense pride in their ships or subs. I rather doubt, however, that the WWII submariner gave a dam about what his boat looked like. The inside of the boats were frightful by voyage end and the men looked frightful, so no problem if the boat joined the club. They might have looked at a worn boat as wearing a "scar of honor" as Captain Werner did. The Navy would scrap it after the war anyway. (Most were or put in mothballs - probably in fresh water like the Suisun Bay "mothball fleet" I often look at.) And as you note many museum ships show their age. This is a good reason used by many cities not to take on the responsibility of hosting a major historical vessel. (I saw an Essex class CV being scrapped in Oakland in 1971 or 72. There was a vet watching almost in tears.) And it's a very good reason for the Navy not to get deeply into the museum business. (I'd still like to know what went wrong concerning plans to make CV6, history's most successful warship, a museum.) It would also be interesting to find out whether the Navy used any "lessons learned" about ship design and maintenance during the Cold War when you started getting these mega cruises made possible by nuclear powered CVs especially when the number of ships started to decline steadily in the 60s.

Eric 

Since the 9/11 business the access to US Navy piers is restricted. But a little fishing can still be done next to subs and carriers if you've got the clearance. The fishing is pretty good!

EBergerud

I wasn't expecting much popular approval on this project and certainly didn't take any criticism with any bad feeling. You can experiment with various painting techniques on practice kits, but if you really want to know what a badly rusted (or more specifically a boat whose paint job was going to hades allowing surface rust) boat/ship will look like is to build one. I did and am glad. I wouldn't pound a project that took three months to produce the way I did the I-Boat that took three days. That said, I will use some this these techniques on future projects because there's simply no doubt that a lot of ships in wartime conditions showed some real wear and tear.

Hi Eric, I really like your work there. I enjoy a nicely weathered submarine. I agree that ships definitely showed some where and tear...some worse than others. I don't think that a weathered sub is out of the question. I have a WWII encyclopedia at home that has some nice color photography. Sorry, I don't have a scanner so I took photos with the cell phone. Take a look at the different spectrum of weathering that could be seen back then...

A badly beaten Liberty ship...

A weathered British submarine...the deck is nearly orange and the surrounding hull is discolored.

Here another ship, not sure the type or origin but you can see a lot of staining along the hull...

Some more UK subs with visible oxidation...

Another ship with some rust running all along the water line...

Any, just thought I'd add some visuals. Beauty (or in this case, weathering) is all in the eye of the beholder.