I decided to pose for the camera and have my sister take pictures front and back so it'll be easier to modify all these figures. I put on my cammies, Dad's H-harness, and my  helmet to make it look as similar as I could and used my pellet gun so I wouldn't get the cops called on me. I made a mistake on one of them, didn't see the gun, but I've put a note on that so it'll be OK. I won't put up all the pictures because it's unnecessary, I will put up some though so you can get a feel for what I'm talking about. Also to make sure that I didn't mix any up or forget what guy went where, I numbered them.



I'll show you Marines number 1-3.

#1





#2





#3





I've never modified figures, and figured it'd be easier to get them to look like the photo if I new what they'd look like in the front and back and could see it, rather than just guessing.

I started work on the LCVP a couple months ago...

First the box art



Next up the screws and rudder





Here's the wooden plank type things, at least I'm pretty sure they're wood...



There's 20 per side of the LCVP, here's the first 10



And here's all 20

I finished the starboard side which includes the cable holding the ramp up, I'll take some more pics after I finish the next step or two.

Thanks for looking,

Josiah

Hi Josiah,

Your preperations look good so far. That's a good idea taking photos of pre-modelled poses for reference, it's some what like storyboarding before shooting a commercial.

Also you've chosen a good action scene that'll honour Lt Lopez and his team.

Will be dropping by now and then to view your progress. Keep up the good work.

Cheers,

Richard

nice work enjoy your build and keep us posted!

Josiah

Looks great so far and it looks like your research is good. Since you have chosen to use the Italeri kit and included the box art, as an old LCVP hand let me offer some advice.

First these boats were entirely made of wood with the exception of some sheet steel on the sides for protection and the bow ramp. There may also have been some plating where vehicle wheels run on the deck.

The machine gun positions were eliminated shortly after WWII but you may need to check to see if they were still there at the time of the Inchon landing.

Each LCVP carried the number of the mother ship so you should try to find out what APAs or AKAs were at Inchon. The number should look like this: PA228-14

The Vee shaped wave breaker on the ramp disappeared sometime after WWII and may not have been there at Inchon.

The Italeri box art suggests running rust on the sides of the boat. That would not have been tolerated on any ship I was on. The boat would have a presentable paint job the morning of the landing. At a later date that paint scheme would have included black below the water line, haze gray for the vertical surfaces, and dark deck gray for the horizontal surfaces. The ship and boat number would be white. You will need to try to find out what the paint scheme was the date of the landing.

Hope this helps. Looking good so far.

Ted

Thanks for taking a look Richard and Dave.

Ted, thanks so much for this information, I'll see what I can dig up.

Ted, just did a quick search, came up with a couple images,

Both of these look like they have the black below the waterlines and around the top edge of the . A question about the numbers, the top one has the KA and the second has PA, I'm guessing that if the mothership is an AKA it has the KA in the number and if it's an APA it has the PA?

So for example, the top photo the main LCVP is KA-106-11 ; so that means that the mother ship is AKA-106 and that this is the 11th LCVP of said mother ship?

Yupp, the first picture is of boats from AKA 106 - USS Union. If you go to navsource.org you will find pictures of that ship and one showing an LCVP being off loaded that shows very clearly the bottom paint. Yes that would be the 11th boat from AKA-106. If the mother ship were an APA the boat number would start with PA. Also note that the machine gun wells appear to be gone.

Now the big question for you to solve. Generally an AKA carried heavy weapons and equipment and the troops to operate them. An APA would carry the assault troops and lighter weapons. So are the guys in your diorama first or second wave assault troops? If so your LCVP would probably have a APA mother ship.  Your second photo says the boats are from the USS Noble and they appear to have PA before the number. Shouldn't be too hard to determine the mother ship hull number and assume your guys are coming from the Noble.

Ted

Good call on the lack of machine guns, I forgot to look at that! The writing with the picture said it was the second assault wave, but they don't seem to be carrying any heavy weapons?

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-n/apa218.htm

USS Noble APA-218, with knowing that they were second assault wave, it would still be safe to assume that they still could've launched froman APA right?

The picture you have shown are assault troops, The 5th Marines spearheaded the attack at Red Beach, 3/5 (3rd Bn) landed first followed closely by 1/5 (1st Bn). Lt. Lopez's platoon is a standard rifle platoon in a rifle company, pure infantry. Whether 1/5 was on the APA, APD or LSD, I am not sure.

The second wave was not hours after the first, but more like minutes.

As a 5th Marine Regiment alumni (long after Inchon though!!) it was part of our heritage.

This should be a challenging dio and a lot of fun.

You should check out the Korean War Group Build,,it just started and this would be a great addition to it.

Look forward to seeing the WIP!

Good luck on it!

One more point,, dependent upon the level of detail you want or desire, whatever figure kits you use, they would have the same weapons as WW2 with the exception of the M1 carbines, there were differences between Korean vintage and WW2 vintage carbines...subtle and may be difficult to model. But it sounds like you are really into the details.

Have fun!!

The idea was to get the troops and equipment to the beach as quickly as possible while still avoiding beach congestion. The various waves of assault troops would come in minutes apart. An APA would carry 19 or 20 LCVPs. Generally they would have been divided into waves of 4 to 5 but these would have been added to boats from other ships for the run to the beach. Depending on beach conditions - and Inchon was unique due to the extreme tides - the first wave might have been amphibious tractors filled with assault troops and launched from either LSTs or LSDs at anchor. These would have been followed by the LCVPs also carrying assault troops. As soon as possible heavy weapons would come in. Light ones on jeep size vehicles in LCVPs, heavier ones on LCMs, and finally the really heavy equipment on LCUs and LSTs assuming beach conditions will allow the bigger boats and ships to come up to the beach. At a later date LSTs carried causeway sections to allow them to stand off and still have their load reach the beach. An LCM could have carried anything up to a Sherman Tank. In addition to the assault troops the APA I was on carried Marine engineers and we off loaded bulldozers and 2 1/2 ton trucks into the LCMs. As I stated before jeeps and small vehicles, especially those needed immediately by the assault troops, would be off loaded into LCVPs.

Your LCVP should have a crew of three. The coxswain, an engineer, and a guy called the bowhook who handled lines and took care of incidental chores. These guys would be dressed in normal Navy work clothes -blue jeans and a chambray shirts. Life jackets would be a dull dark gray and helmets would be haze gray.  They might have been given weapons but probably not, they weren't expected to fight - just get the boat in and back to the ship for another load. In one boat in each wave would be a fourth person, an officer called the wave guide commander, whose job was to see that all boats in his wave got to the beach on time. He would be dressed similar to the boat crew except his shirt and pants would be washed khaki - a sort of light tan. He probably would have a Colt 45 side arm and if he was lucky maybe a pair of binoculars. There would be no radios - all signalling would be by flags and shouted commands.

Sounds like you are having fun and maybe learning a little history. Keep at it.

Ted

Thanks for the extra information guys! This is pretty fun so far!

I went to the research center/library on Quantico today, could only stay an hour and a half so I could get off base before all the traffic kicked up. Here's what I found though, some of it not entirely useful for my build but all of it I found interesting.

From the CSI Battlebook: Operation Chromite (Inchon) I found a detailed schedule of the Red Beach Landing page 65:

"RED Beach
(5 Regimental Combat Team (-))

D-Day
[...]
1724 hours: Signal given to land. Eight (8) LCVPs move to RED Beach troops consist of 2 platoons from Company A, 1/5, and all of Company E, 2/5 Marines.

1733 hours: 3 of 4 leading LCVPs strike seawall. Assault of Southern RED Beach begins. On Northern RED Beach, the remaining force reach shore -1 LCVP breaks down. There is heavy causualties and fighting before breaking out from RED. First Medal of Honor won here by Lt. Baldomers Lopez.
[...]"

There was one other book I looked at, I can't for the life of me remember and I can't believe I forgot to write the title down. I believe it was something like Marine Corps Operations in the Korean War: Volume II or something to that degree. Anyways, it gave an entire list of the joint task force that was at Inchon, including the transport group for the advanced attack group. This was on page 314.

George Clymer
Cavalier
Pickaway
Henrico
Noble                                    5 APA
Union
Alshair
Achernar
Oglethorpe
Seminole
Thuban
Whiteride
Washburn                           8 AKA

Earlier in the book (page 98) it said, "Aboard Henrico  and Cavalier in Inchon narrows on 15 September were the 1st and 2d battalions, 5th Marines." 4 pages later it said the assault troops of the 5th Marines boarded LCVPs from the Henrico and Cavalier.

So in summary of today's research, the most valuable information I learned directly regarding to my dio, is that the LCVP that Lt. Lopez was on was from either the USS Henrico APA-45 or the USS Cavalier APA-37.

Sounds like your off to a great start. According to navsource Henrico and Cavalier were Bayfield class APAs. They carried only 12 LCVPs each but more LCMs. Anyway when you get around to boat number the highest you should use is 12.

Thanks Ted!

Did some more work tonight. On the starboard side, the thread that goes back to aft of the LCVP came untied, kinda mad about that since there's no way I can put it back on. Here's some pics of what I've got so far.

...And a test fit.

Next step involves assembling the machine gun tubs, I've just got to find a clear picture of an LCVP without the machine guns.

Thanks for looking,

Josiah

Looks like your coming along great. Can't wait tosee more.

Josiah

If you google USS Rankin on navsource there is a picture showing the after deck of one of the lcvps. At the point in time when the picture was taken it looks like they cut off the tub at deck level and put a piece of plate over it.

Thanks for looking in jetmodeler and thanks for referring me to that site, I found the ones you were talking about.

Sorry it's been awhile, been getting called in to work and class is going on hyper-drive since the professor is trying to cram all the things we need to learn (4 chapters) in the next 5 classes.

Did some work on it this morning, thought I'd update yall before I go to work so here we go.

Since the pictures seemed to be level with the aft deck like Ted said, I had to cut down the tube sides so they'd be even with the deck.

Before:

After:

I then had to fill in those tubes, so I put some styrene under them and used a pencil to trace where I'd need to cut.

I then cut them out using my Dremel (First time I've used it), I cut away from the lines and opted to sand the rest with the dremel since it'd be more accurate (word choice?)

Here's the sanded down fill in's

Then I put em' in. They were nice and snug, no putty need to hold them in there, so I just stuck them in, got them as level as I could and superglued from the bottom so that the gap's would be automatically filled.

I still need to put some putty on it and do quite a bit of sanding to make it look not gross.

Thanks for looking, I'll try not to take as long as a break in between posts like last time.

Josiah

Josiah

Looks like you are making progress and found the Rankin photo.

If you look closely at that photo there are a couple of things that you will need to include that Italeri probably hasn't included. That is the means to hoist the boat back on ship. I can see the eye between the machine gun tubs but I bet they didn't include another in the well of the boat. These were used to connect to the hooks on the Welin davits. Check the Rankin photo you'll see the aft eye in use. The other means of lifting these boats was a hook from a cargo boom. There was a three legged bridal with a big eye to go over the hook. Two short legs of the bridal came down to eyes on either side of the engine a longer leg went forward probably to the same eve as was used for the welin davit. You can see the bridal in the boat in the Rankin photo. This bridal would be stowed in the boat at all times as you never knew whether the booms or the davits would pick up the boat next time back.

Happy modelling

Ted

Josiah,

Looking good!  Sorry school and work is getting in way of your modeling!!

Look forward to more progress!

Great work!

I love the idea of duplicating the poses in your photos to make sure they come out right. And really sharp work on the landing craft.

Thanks for the info and comments guys, I'll try and get some more work done this weekend.

My apologies about not updating this in awhile, been swamped with work and class.

Work and school are more important! But can't wait to see how you are progressing!!

Well my summer class is over, would've gotten a B+ but my college doesn't give out + or - 's which actually annoys me very much so. So I ended up with a B. Have one week off then next week my fall classes start, hopefully I'll be able to squeeze in some modeling between work.

Josiah,

Congrats on the grades! Take a break model when you can, aftere all its supposed to be a hobby! Not a job

By the way last time I was stationed in Quantico, probably before you were born, I lived off of Salem Church Road..off of Rt 3. Big Red house,

Love that little town!

I know its supposed to be fun, but I really wanna get some modeling in before classes start up next week. Taking 14 credits and working, gonna be a dousy

I know where Salem Church is, but I don't really go out that way unless I'm going out west. Maybe I'll take a drive over there and take see if I can find that house? I live in Stafford County in Falmouth. We used to live off of 610 when my dad just got stationed at Quantico then moved farther south a couple years later. I've lived at Cherry Point, Kailua,  Aurora (just outside Denver), and here in VA.