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That would do it, except ONI-226 is an official US Navy publication. So maybe it is DIHT?If the media of the day got hold of the details it may explain the ‘error/misprint’.
Thanks
Landing Craft, Assault — Operation Infatuate I, 1 November 1944 (1:35 Gecko kit)
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Early on 1 November 1944, the LCA fleet left Breskens harbour for Vlissingen, about 5 km away across the West Scheldt. In all, they were carrying some 555 troops: the actual assault force was 400 men (6 troops) from No. 4 (Army) Commando, augmented by a dozen men from the Dutch troop of No. 10 (Inter-Allied) Commando to act as local liaison and interpreters, as well as engineers, pioneers and others plus about 40 men from the Royal Navy beyond the landing craft crews.
This is what Vlissingen was like ca. 1944:
Well, actually, this is a map from 1925, but there doesn’t seem to be a more recent one. In any case, the outer parts of the town were inundated, but the old town was still mostly dry. However, Vlissingen has some claim to being the most-bombed town or city in the Netherlands during the entire war, due to its important port and shipyard, which, as you can see, were right in the heart of the town.
The blue rectangle on the map indicates the area covered by this one:
And here, the arrow is the landing zone. Officially, this was the Oosterhaven (“Eastern Harbour”) or Dokhaven (“Dock Harbour”, referring to the dock beyond it) but it was commonly known as ’t Slikhaventje, literally “the Little Mud(dy) Harbour”. The British had given it the codename of “Uncle Beach”; the rest of Vlissingen had been divided into sectors that had also been assigned codenames. Those codenames are often used in accounts of the fighting, but are hard to relate to modern locations; unfortunately, I couldn’t find a map online just now that does that.
BTW, here is the source of these maps — you can scroll through the timeline on the left to see how the city (or other parts of the Netherlands) change over time. You can also directly compare two time periods by clicking on Vergelijken at the top left and using the timelines on both sides of the screen to show maps from different years.
Here’s what all of that looked like from the water:
(source)
Remember I said there was a shipyard?
Or, if you would like to see the military situation on 28 October 1944:
(This is a scan from an original British map owned by my father, which my grandfather took out of one of the tanks left behind at Westkapelle.)
Uncle Beach is where it says “5 Rows stakes” near the bottom. Each of the arrows is a machine gun, an arrow coming from a square box is a machine gun in a pillbox.
Today, this whole area has changed quite a lot, mainly because the sea defences have been strengthened, especially in the 1980s–90s. It now looks like this:
Its official name since a number of years is Uncle Beach, as you can see on the wall in the background, though you can’t really find the old harbour in the landscape anymore. Nearby is the Commando Memorial:
But back to 1 November 1944 … A small reconnaissance unit known as Keepforce, after its commander, Royal Navy Captain R.W. Keep, was first ashore in order to guide the actual assault force in. First to land was part of No. 1 Troop of 4 Commando, coming from an LCA at approximately 05:45 hours to establish a bridgehead. They cut barbed wire and clear other obstacles for the following troops, and soon, the next five LCAs come in — but by now the Germans are alert and open fire. However, their aim is too high and nobody is hit.
Meanwhile, the Navy’s Beach Signal Party is trying to set up its gear, but finds that the radio isn’t working. The spare radio, carried for just this happening, is unfortunately in a second LCA that got hit and sank … A third set from yet another LCA is finally brought ashore in working order — but that’s not the end of the problems, because the supplies they need, including generators for the radios, are carried in LCAs that hit underwater obstacles and begin to flood, making the equipment unusable. It will take until later in the day for fresh batteries to be brought in from Breskens.
By 06:10, two full Commando troops are ashore and begin pushing into the town. Within an hour and a half, there are some 550 men ashore from 22 LCAs. They not only reinforce the attack into the town but also help clear the beach for the follow-on troops from 155 Infantry Brigade, mainly the 5th Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. These are also mostly ferried across in LCAs, but 20 LVTs (Buffalos) are also used to carry materials and troops from Breskens to Vlissingen, as well as taking casualties back the other way.
Not just wounded soldiers, but also civilians:
The men carrying the stretcher are locals. The rear one is wearing a pre-war Dutch Army helmet, the front one seems to have a fireman’s helmet (going by the neck flap).
All this, of course, under German fire — not just machine guns but artillery and initially even a 20 mm Flakvierling 38, though that soon got overrun by the Commandos who rapidly turned it the other way and put it to use against its former owners.
Here’s an interesting photo of LCAs lying on the beach at what looks like low tide, while an LVT carrying an M29C Weasel in its hold, makes its way towards the town:
And a look the other way, from the opposite side of the harbour towards the windmill:
Later on, German prisoners were collected in the area, waiting transportation to the other side:
After the war, some LCA wrecks remained for some time:
This is what Vlissingen was like ca. 1944:
Well, actually, this is a map from 1925, but there doesn’t seem to be a more recent one. In any case, the outer parts of the town were inundated, but the old town was still mostly dry. However, Vlissingen has some claim to being the most-bombed town or city in the Netherlands during the entire war, due to its important port and shipyard, which, as you can see, were right in the heart of the town.
The blue rectangle on the map indicates the area covered by this one:
And here, the arrow is the landing zone. Officially, this was the Oosterhaven (“Eastern Harbour”) or Dokhaven (“Dock Harbour”, referring to the dock beyond it) but it was commonly known as ’t Slikhaventje, literally “the Little Mud(dy) Harbour”. The British had given it the codename of “Uncle Beach”; the rest of Vlissingen had been divided into sectors that had also been assigned codenames. Those codenames are often used in accounts of the fighting, but are hard to relate to modern locations; unfortunately, I couldn’t find a map online just now that does that.
BTW, here is the source of these maps — you can scroll through the timeline on the left to see how the city (or other parts of the Netherlands) change over time. You can also directly compare two time periods by clicking on Vergelijken at the top left and using the timelines on both sides of the screen to show maps from different years.
Here’s what all of that looked like from the water:
(source)
Remember I said there was a shipyard?
Or, if you would like to see the military situation on 28 October 1944:
(This is a scan from an original British map owned by my father, which my grandfather took out of one of the tanks left behind at Westkapelle.)
Uncle Beach is where it says “5 Rows stakes” near the bottom. Each of the arrows is a machine gun, an arrow coming from a square box is a machine gun in a pillbox.
Today, this whole area has changed quite a lot, mainly because the sea defences have been strengthened, especially in the 1980s–90s. It now looks like this:
Its official name since a number of years is Uncle Beach, as you can see on the wall in the background, though you can’t really find the old harbour in the landscape anymore. Nearby is the Commando Memorial:
But back to 1 November 1944 … A small reconnaissance unit known as Keepforce, after its commander, Royal Navy Captain R.W. Keep, was first ashore in order to guide the actual assault force in. First to land was part of No. 1 Troop of 4 Commando, coming from an LCA at approximately 05:45 hours to establish a bridgehead. They cut barbed wire and clear other obstacles for the following troops, and soon, the next five LCAs come in — but by now the Germans are alert and open fire. However, their aim is too high and nobody is hit.
Meanwhile, the Navy’s Beach Signal Party is trying to set up its gear, but finds that the radio isn’t working. The spare radio, carried for just this happening, is unfortunately in a second LCA that got hit and sank … A third set from yet another LCA is finally brought ashore in working order — but that’s not the end of the problems, because the supplies they need, including generators for the radios, are carried in LCAs that hit underwater obstacles and begin to flood, making the equipment unusable. It will take until later in the day for fresh batteries to be brought in from Breskens.
By 06:10, two full Commando troops are ashore and begin pushing into the town. Within an hour and a half, there are some 550 men ashore from 22 LCAs. They not only reinforce the attack into the town but also help clear the beach for the follow-on troops from 155 Infantry Brigade, mainly the 5th Battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. These are also mostly ferried across in LCAs, but 20 LVTs (Buffalos) are also used to carry materials and troops from Breskens to Vlissingen, as well as taking casualties back the other way.
Not just wounded soldiers, but also civilians:
The men carrying the stretcher are locals. The rear one is wearing a pre-war Dutch Army helmet, the front one seems to have a fireman’s helmet (going by the neck flap).
All this, of course, under German fire — not just machine guns but artillery and initially even a 20 mm Flakvierling 38, though that soon got overrun by the Commandos who rapidly turned it the other way and put it to use against its former owners.
Here’s an interesting photo of LCAs lying on the beach at what looks like low tide, while an LVT carrying an M29C Weasel in its hold, makes its way towards the town:
And a look the other way, from the opposite side of the harbour towards the windmill:
Later on, German prisoners were collected in the area, waiting transportation to the other side:
After the war, some LCA wrecks remained for some time:
Yes, I think it's clearly DIHT, but based on D1 steel. That's another can of worms though, as D1 steel is a stainless steel with a high Chomium content, whereas the Hadfield's Resista mentioned earlier is a high manganese steel.
Anyone know a metallurgist?
Pete
Sorry, I meant to add this: https://www.tool-die-steels.com/grades/Tool-Die-Steels/4/7355/D1-steel.html
Pete
Pete
Jim R
SMF Supporter
Very interesting Jakko.
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I see that I forgot to mention, in case any of you ever find yourself in Vlissingen, that a German observation bunker remains at the foot of the windmill. It was dug out about fifteen years ago and can be visited (inside, that is) every Saturday afternoon from April through October, or apparently also by appointment at pretty much any time you like.
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Well, this is getting off to a good start now that I’ve actually begun to build this model … First of all, ignore the assembly order entirely: the instructions would have you build subassemblies that will be very hard to get lined up correctly. Second, look at this:
That’s the part for the forward wall of the engine compartment. The pencilled lines indicate the actual size and position of the door, as I calculated it from measuring in a photograph of a real LCA under construction. The door as moulded is 21 mm high, 13 mm wide and 9 mm below the upper edge of the part. According to my calculations, it should be 29 mm high, 15.5 mm wide and 4.5 mm under the upper edge …
And it gets better! This part has diagonal planking moulded in, which is how the LCA was constructed: two layers of diagonal planks, at 90 degrees to each other. However … the same photo I took the measurements from, show that it was covered in armour plate. I think I may as well make this part entirely from scratch.
That’s the part for the forward wall of the engine compartment. The pencilled lines indicate the actual size and position of the door, as I calculated it from measuring in a photograph of a real LCA under construction. The door as moulded is 21 mm high, 13 mm wide and 9 mm below the upper edge of the part. According to my calculations, it should be 29 mm high, 15.5 mm wide and 4.5 mm under the upper edge …
And it gets better! This part has diagonal planking moulded in, which is how the LCA was constructed: two layers of diagonal planks, at 90 degrees to each other. However … the same photo I took the measurements from, show that it was covered in armour plate. I think I may as well make this part entirely from scratch.
Jim R
SMF Supporter
They certainly got the door rather more than a little wrong!
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It turns out to be not as simple as that … Somebody supplied me with scans of original construction drawings for the LCA, and consulting those, they say the door was to be 30 inches by 18 inches, or 21.8 mm × 13.1 mm in 1:35 — which is what Gecko gives you. Those same drawings say the wall was made of “doubleskin double diagonal plank mahogany” which fits with how it’s moulded. However:
That doesn’t look like a diagonally planked wall to me, and the door is clearly larger than the kit’s — that’s what got me measuring in the first place. I think this represents a later evolution of the LCA than the drawings (and the kit).
For those interested, here are the drawings of the LCA (4.5 MB zip). I can’t attach zip files or PDFs to messages on this forum, and it would resize the image files to be so small as to be useless, so I had to post it somewhere else. I also threw in what I think is an original, official drawing of the camouflage pattern.
Superb bit of Historical background there Jakko,a really great read.....those photos are real gems 
.
Interesting to see the locals prepared to help carry the injured,nice touch that
.
.Interesting to see the locals prepared to help carry the injured,nice touch that
.
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I think it’s a wounded civilian, and one of the men carrying the stretcher looks like he has a fireman’s helmet on, with that neck flap, so I guess he at least was in the fire brigade. None of them are wearing OD or BS¹ armbands, though, so they’re probably not resistance fighters. First aid courses and training continued through the war, I know that, probably exactly for things like this. It surprised me a bit more to find one or two other photos like this, of civilians on LCAs, to be carried to the other side,² but that’s what I intend to do with this model: a few British crew and a number of civilians going aboard to be evacuated.
¹ OD = Orde Dienst (“Order Service”, as in a service to keep order after the liberation would come), one of the largest resistance organisations; BS = Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (“Internal Armed Forces”), the umbrella organisation set up by the Dutch government to coordinate all resistance organisations.
² Some local colour: to us on the north bank of the Western Scheldt, “the other side” is implicitly understood by everyone to mean Zeelandic Flanders; to everyone from there, though, we’re “the other side” — confusion ensues when talking to someone from the opposite bank
The model itself is proving more problematic than I expected, though
I haven’t used a single drop of glue on this model yet, and I’m already correcting mistakes. A simple thing Gecko got wrong is the rear deck: this has diagonal lines moulded on to represent diagonal planking, but the construction drawings clearly say the decks were “double skin mahogany” without mentioning diagonal planking, so I think it means plywood. In photos, I’ve not seen any sign of diagonal planking on the rear deck, and in any case, the engine room has an armoured steel deck — only the part aft of that was wood. So, I removed the lines with sandpaper and a curved knife blade:
This is the part that is easy to fix. The next bit is a little harder … Here is part of the construction drawings, of the front of the craft:
Now compare the floor as drawn in this to Gecko’s:
On the real craft, the floor sloped down slightly from the bow ramp to frame No. 3, then more steeply to meet the main floor at frame 6. The kit part, though, has it slope down to between frames 1 and 2, then turn horizontal to just behind frame 3, and slope to halfway between frames 6 and 7. Clearly, this is not per the drawing. The few photos I have that show this area, seem to agree more with the drawing than with the kit part, like this one:
Yes, the boards are curved a little, but they don’t have the clear kinks that the Gecko part does.
And noticing that caused me to notice something even more significant, best illustrated by assembling the main parts for the steering position with some Blu-Tack:
They’re in the wrong place! In the drawings, the armour plates very clearly line up with frames 3 and 5, but here, the front plate is behind frame 3 and the rear one is even further behind frame 5 — meaning that the side armour plate is also too long Also, you can see in the photo of the real LCA above, the armour plate runs down to the main floor of the vessel and the steering position’s floor is inside the armour plate, whereas Gecko has the armour as standing on top of that floor rather than behind it. And, of course, that also means the deck just behind the position needs to be extended forward a little as well.
I’m decidedly not pleased with this. For me, it’s too major a thing to want to leave as it is because it’s so noticeable once you know, but it will be such a lot of work to correct this that I don’t look forward to correcting it either …
¹ OD = Orde Dienst (“Order Service”, as in a service to keep order after the liberation would come), one of the largest resistance organisations; BS = Binnenlandse Strijdkrachten (“Internal Armed Forces”), the umbrella organisation set up by the Dutch government to coordinate all resistance organisations.
² Some local colour: to us on the north bank of the Western Scheldt, “the other side” is implicitly understood by everyone to mean Zeelandic Flanders; to everyone from there, though, we’re “the other side” — confusion ensues when talking to someone from the opposite bank
The model itself is proving more problematic than I expected, though
I haven’t used a single drop of glue on this model yet, and I’m already correcting mistakes. A simple thing Gecko got wrong is the rear deck: this has diagonal lines moulded on to represent diagonal planking, but the construction drawings clearly say the decks were “double skin mahogany” without mentioning diagonal planking, so I think it means plywood. In photos, I’ve not seen any sign of diagonal planking on the rear deck, and in any case, the engine room has an armoured steel deck — only the part aft of that was wood. So, I removed the lines with sandpaper and a curved knife blade:This is the part that is easy to fix. The next bit is a little harder … Here is part of the construction drawings, of the front of the craft:
Now compare the floor as drawn in this to Gecko’s:
On the real craft, the floor sloped down slightly from the bow ramp to frame No. 3, then more steeply to meet the main floor at frame 6. The kit part, though, has it slope down to between frames 1 and 2, then turn horizontal to just behind frame 3, and slope to halfway between frames 6 and 7. Clearly, this is not per the drawing. The few photos I have that show this area, seem to agree more with the drawing than with the kit part, like this one:
Yes, the boards are curved a little, but they don’t have the clear kinks that the Gecko part does.
And noticing that caused me to notice something even more significant, best illustrated by assembling the main parts for the steering position with some Blu-Tack:
They’re in the wrong place! In the drawings, the armour plates very clearly line up with frames 3 and 5, but here, the front plate is behind frame 3 and the rear one is even further behind frame 5 — meaning that the side armour plate is also too long
Also, you can see in the photo of the real LCA above, the armour plate runs down to the main floor of the vessel and the steering position’s floor is inside the armour plate, whereas Gecko has the armour as standing on top of that floor rather than behind it. And, of course, that also means the deck just behind the position needs to be extended forward a little as well.I’m decidedly not pleased with this. For me, it’s too major a thing to want to leave as it is because it’s so noticeable once you know, but it will be such a lot of work to correct this that I don’t look forward to correcting it either …
Neil Merryweather
SMF Supporter
Surely the flat part of the floor is correct ,looking at the photo the bottoms of the doors are flush with the flat floor? if the floor sloped upwards the outward opening doors would foul
scottie3158
SMF Supporter
Jakko,
A really interesting introduction as always. I will follow along if I may.
A really interesting introduction as always. I will follow along if I may.
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There is that, yes. Maybe I’ve misjudged the angles in the photo, but regardless, a lot of things are in the wrong places, and I also don’t think the lower part of the ramp should be full-width because the drawing says it runs “between wing seats”.
If you insist
They did, yes. Gecko has a separate kit of an LCA with grappling hook launchers as was used by them.
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OK, slightly more investigation, and once more, it looks like there may have been design changes:
This is a section through the bow, and it clearly shows the bottom edge of the doors to be raised above the floor so they can clear the sloping forward floor. However, the photo of the real LCA shows the planks to go up to the bottom edge of the doors, so the floor there must run differently than in the drawing.
This is a section through the bow, and it clearly shows the bottom edge of the doors to be raised above the floor so they can clear the sloping forward floor. However, the photo of the real LCA shows the planks to go up to the bottom edge of the doors, so the floor there must run differently than in the drawing.
Neil Merryweather
SMF Supporter
you're clearly having a lot of fun Jakko!