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With Veterans Day just having passed, I thought some images commemorating them was in order. During WWII the U.S. Navy commissioned a number of artists to illustrate facets of their operations. These are a sample of the work they produced. They are from the Naval History and Heritage Command's Artists archive.
This video is a tour of the HMS Victory using 3D modeling. It's nice in that it doesn't fixate on the rigging of the ship, rather it gives a tour of the decks. It gives a good idea of how complex yet still functional the design and layout of the ship was.
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My earlier post Paintings of battles focused on land battles. This post features naval battles. While the land combat pictures focused on the men involved, with few exceptions the naval battle paintings focus on the ships. The drama is in the ships themselves: smoke billowing as they shoot broadsides, flames, the wreckage of their rigging all upon the swells of the rolling sea. If men are seen at all, for the most part they are tiny figures struggling in the water after they abandoned a sinking ship.
As in the land battle paintings, the naval battle paintings often commemorate a particular engagement. The battles shown range from antiquity to WWII.
These little boats sure packed a lot of fire power. The layout of the interior spaces was of interest to me (at 78 feet it is a little under 3 times as long as my little 30ft sailboat). PT-658 was built by Higgins and commissioned in 1945, so it represents the culmination of PT boat design based on WWII experience.
