Hi,
Can anyone tell me the statis of this kit?
Squadron.com no longer lists as a pre-order and it is not on Trumpeters web site. Thanks
emo07
Steelnavy.com has a really indepth review of the kit. From what I understand it is already in production and for sale.
Thanks Amtrak,
I cant wait to get mine. She looked good in that review!!
emo07
We got our review samples today at FSM. My initial impression is that this will be a very nice kit. It certainly looks good in the box!
Jeff
These Trumpeter guys are amaising, they are serious about 1:350 plastic ships, what will come next? Will we see more WW2 US Navy ships? i hope so, and some japanese would be great too.
Nice try PPVR, but I’m not saying a thing!! [;)]
My crystal ball tells me there’s still lots of exciting stuff to come from Trumpeter.
Jeff
I hope so Jeff, and i’m with you, hope to see more Trumpeter surprises.
My Trumpeter BB-55 North Carolina is awaiting shipment at Great Models.
I already have the IronShipwrights 1/350 resin kit of same.
I have two of WEM’s P/E for the Trumpeter kit on pre-order, asuming some might be useful on the ISW kit also.
I have all but one reference on hand & I’m hoping that last one arrives next month.
I’m scheduled to make a photo run on it in Wilmington, on the way home from the IMPS Nats in Atlanta.
I won’t start work till after the IPMS-Nats.
I’m considering building the two in parallel.
And I’m not even a native Tarheel …
John
Oh man, John, there’s gotta be no kind of inspiration like that kind of inspiration – stand on the deck, look at the naval rifles … imagine them firing …
Hey Jeff … two questions: How soon in FSM and do they have USS Washington conversion parts enclosed?
I’m a wonderful guy, may be I can get a special showing [:D][:D][:D]
John
I’ve spent a fair amount of time stomping around on board the North Carolina; she’s about two and a half hours from where I live. A couple of my students have done internships on board her. I used to be fairly well acquainted with some of the staff, but I suspect the folks I knew have long gone.
In some ways a visit to the great ship is a little disappointing. She’s moored to a pier in a rather out-of-the-way area, across the river from Wilmington. Looking out from the captain’s bridge one sees, not the thundering swells of the Pacific, but a dreary-looking swamp stretching off toward an industrial area in the distance. Some years ago it was established that the battleship was firmly stuck in the Cape Fear River mud. (I don’t know whether anything has been done about that situation or not.) The water in the slip alongside her is reputed to be inhabited by several alligators - though I have yet to see one myself.
Many areas of the ship are not open to the public, and of course quite a bit of her World War II-vintage equipment isn’t there any more. The last time I saw her she didn’t have any catapults, for instance, and many of the 20 mm guns were missing. (I imagine most of those she does have are relatively recent replacements. I believe all the originals were removed shortly after the war ended - as were the catapults, when she started operating helicopters.) She does have a Kingfisher sitting on her fantail, though it’s painted in a hokey color scheme (or was the last time I saw it).
On the other hand, she’s in considerably better shape, and has retained much more of her World War II character, than most other “museum ships.” By comparison with the Iowa-class battleships and the Essex-class carriers, the North Carolina and Washington underwent few major changes in their careers. The NC never got updated for Korea, Vietnam, or Desert Storm. To crawl around inside one of those 16" turrets is a real experience. So is a visit to the engine spaces - even the relatively small portions of them that are accessible to the public. And although finding money to maintain her is a constant battle, she is, generally speaking, in remarkably good condition. A few years ago her maindeck planking got replaced with some beautiful teak that was donated by the government of Burma. And at about the same time she got repainted with an authentic WWII-vintage “dazzle” scheme. If I’m not mistaken, that makes her the only surviving battleship painted in an authentic WWII camouflage measure.
I strongly recommend a visit to the North Carolina for anybody who’s even faintly interested in warships. This isn’t a bad time of the year for such a pilgrimage. During the next couple of weeks she’s likely to be swarming with school kids on spring field trips, but after the first week of June, when school ends, there should be a partial lull in tourism before the big vacation rush starts. The best time for a visit is in the middle of the week. On a Wednesday or Thursday some parts of her may be practically deserted. The best way to appreciate her, in my opinion, is in near-silence, so you can really think about what you’re seeing.
When you get finished on board the ship (or when you get thrown off, at 5:00), you may want to cross the bridge and take a look at the Wilmington waterfront. The old Cotton Exchange has been made into an interesting shopping mall (a great place to occupy non-nautically-oriented spouses), and there are quite a few good restaurants along the river. I recommend the seafood at Elijah’s. My wife and I got engaged there - following an afternoon prowling around the North Carolina.
MBT,
It won’t be until in FSM until the latter part of the year, because it has to be built, and of course, we work 3-4 issues out.
The kit does not have the Washington parts included, as the superstructure areas are different. The kit’s deck section comes in three parts, forward (common) midship, and aft (common). All Trumpeter needs to do is include the new center section and some additional parts, and they’ve got Washington. If you can’t wait, it’s not too difficult to convert her.
Jeff
Thanks for the interesting review. It’s true that it would be better to see the ship as she was as an active combattant, but then again the people who served on her might disagree – my uncle served on a DD at the end of WWII in the Pacific, and he never wanted to go within a mile of a museum ship. It was a time he wanted to completely forget.
Veterans seem to have widely varying reactions to their experiences - and that’s completely understandable. My father was a junior officer on board an attack transport during the latter part of the Pacific war, and never got tired of talking about it. Those six months of sea duty were a big feature in his life. (I remember the terrifying period, in the late sixties, when he was teaching me to drive. At one point I started to back out of a parking place into traffic. Dad yelled, “You can’t do that! You’re the burdened vessel!” He’d been out of the Navy for more than twenty years, but the International Rules of the Road stuck with him.) My father-in-law was in the Army during the last months of the war in Europe. A couple of years ago he and my mother-in-law took bus trip around Europe. One of the tour stops was a former concentration camp which, as it happened, my father-in-law’s unit had liberated. He refused to get off the bus. He’d seen that place once; that was enough.
It probably isn’t reasonable for us to expect those old ships to be restored to, and maintained in, their World War II configurations. Almost without exception, they got modified in some significant way right after the war. (The Navy almost immediately gave up on the Oerlikon 20 mm anti-aircraft gun; the number of those things that got taken off American warships and junked in 1946 and 1947 must have been in the thousands.) The modifications cost millions of dollars. Changing the ships back to their pre-1945 state would cost more than that - and, from the standpoint of preservation theory, they wouldn’t be the real ships any more.
Imagine, for instance, what it would take to make the U.S.S. Yorktown look like she did in 1944. That would entail tearing off the flight deck and replacing it with one made of wood, in addition to all sorts of changes to the island and other parts of the ship. Then you’d have to find - or make - about a hundred full-size Hellcats, Helldivers, and Avengers. The cost would be utterly prohibitive - and even if the money could be raised, the result would be not the real Yorktown but a replica of her.
People who complain about the condition of any museum ship need to remember that when that vessel was in active service, several hundred people had full-time jobs maintaining her. Museum-type organizations just can’t do that, and they never will be able to. They have to rely on fund-raising drives (assisted, in the case of the North Carolina, by a modest appropriation from the state every year), in-kind donations, and generous, energetic volunteers. For a long time the WWII museum ships have been relying on retired WWII veterans to do much of their volunteer work, from polishing brightwork to guiding tours. The day is rapidly approaching when that won’t work. According to the last statistic I saw, American WWII veterans are dying at the rate of about 1500 per day.
I’m afraid that in coming years it may get harder for museum ships to sustain themselves. That’s one reason why I always get a little nervous when somebody suggests “saving” another big warship. There’s only so much money and generosity out there.
In the mean time, we should be extremely grateful for what we have. A visitor to the North Carolina needs to squint a bit and use his or her imagination. The 20 mm guns and the catapults are missing, and I suspect they always will be. But she provides the opportunity for a memorable experience.
I visited the North Carolina maybe 20 years ago. (I saw crocs in the water next to the ship.) That visit is one of the highlights of my youth. My parents bought the Revell model of the ship in the ship’s store, and I had a great time putting it together.
Recently, my wife’s aunt, uncle, and their kids visited and did the same thing. They’re working on the Revell kit now.
I’m glad to read that the ship is still in good condition and still provides a great experience for visitors.
Regards,
Sure, experiences will vary, and responses to service will too, though the men I’ve known who saw combat in WWII have generally not talked about it, and those who were not active combattants generally talk about it a lot. My uncle is one example – he was a target for kamikazes countless times. My other uncle, a B-17 bombardier/navigator having flown numerous missions and then was in the midst of rotating over to Pacific duty to train on the B-29 when the war finally ended, is another example. He hated documentaries about WWII. I built the big Monogram B-17 when I was a kid, and he politely looked at it and praised me, but then quickly left the room.
He had some truly hair-raising experiences, but I learned them from my mother, not my uncle.
My father on the other hand did not see any combat, and he could talk about it for hours, and often did. (He was in a heavy AA battery, 90mm guns, in Europe.)
Would’nt it have been wonderful if the WWII era USS Enterprise had been preserved instead of scrapped like junk . We should appreciate and support the North Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Yorktown, and the rest of the preserved ships, no matter there condition or location. I read an artical in National Geographic that says America is loosing most of the Cival War battlefields to commercial and residential developement at an alarming rate. It would seem greed wins out over history every time. Thanks,
emo07
Another big factor for these folks is time. It does different things to the memories of different people.
In my modern U.S. military history class every year I send the students out to do oral history interviews with people who can remember important events in military history. I’ve noticed in recent years that the Vietnam veterans are, in many cases at least, more willing to talk about their experiences than they were before. And the World War II veterans (generally speaking, with plenty of exceptions) are downright anxious to get their recollections recorded while they still can.
Historians have noted a pattern in the behavior of military veterans. For a few years after the American Civil War scarcely any books or articles about it were published, and the veterans on both sides tended to be extremely quiet about their experiences. Many of them formed small, local organizations in which they reminisced with their friends (and, in the case of the Southerners, debated who was to blame for what had happened), but that was about it. Then, in about the late 1870s, a big wave of Civil War commemorations started. Generals published their memoirs, The Century magazine published its “Battles and Leaders” series, Union and Confederate Memorial Day celebrations became major events, and there was a great boom in monument building. Something similar happened, on a smaller scale, in the 1920s and 1930s. That’s when many of the big statues and other monuments got built at places like Gettysburg. The vets were getting old, and watching each other die in huge numbers. The survivors wanted to be sure the country didn’t forget what they’d done.
In my lifetime the same thing has happened to at least two generations of veterans. In the mid-seventies little was said or written in this country about Vietnam. The veterans withdrew into themselves, or among their fellow veterans. (Huge numbers of them, when they got out of the military, settled in places like Jacksonville and Fayetteville, North Carolina, because the only people with whom they felt comfortable were other vets.) Then in the early eighties there was a boom in Vietnam-related books, movies, and TV shows. The veterans’ organizations got bigger and more active. And the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington was opened - to the accompaniment of far more public interest than the government had expected.
At the moment we’re seeing a burst of interest in World War II commemorations. Every time I go to the Air Force Museum, in Dayton, several new monuments to WWII squadrons have been erected in the memorial park. And it’s no coincidence that the World War II Memorial in Washington just got built.
I find all this quite interesting and poignant. The reactions of military veterans to their experiences seem to be, at least to some extent, predictable. Historians, sociologists, and psychologists need to study all this a great deal more. If we can understand how the experience of combat affects people, maybe we can do a better job of appreciating and caring for the veterans.
There’s no rhyme or reason about vets, because each one dealt with his experiences differently. I know dozens of vets from my time as an air museum director, and some that experienced combat (fighter pilots, gunners, infantrymen) will talk about it for hours because they’re thrilled that someone actually cares about what they did.
Others won’t talk about it at all. I had a museum volunteer that passed away just before I left the museum, and it wasn’t until I attended his memorial service that I learned he was a highly decorated infantryman with the 44th Div. during WW2. Two Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, three Purple Hearts, and a DSC, yet in all the years I knew him, he never even mentioned he was in the Army. And he died with his experiences.
To most sailors, their ships are a part of their very being, since it was their home, their protector, and their universe for sometimes years on end. There’s also a sense of pride in sailors that you won’t find in most other branches.
As a sidebar, there are a few vessels that remain in their WW2 configurations. The USS Kidd in Baton Rouge is a late-war Fletcher in her 1945 Emergency AA fit, and still retains her 20mm. The USS Slater in Albany, NY, is a Cannon-Class Destroyer escort, and is still in her original configuration. There are also several Gato and Balao class subs that are in their WW2 rigs, I know of Ling (NJ), Pampinito (San Fran, CA), Cobia (WI), Cod (OH), and Bowfin (HI).
Jeff