I am modeling a few ships from the us fleet including dragons Arizona in 1/700 scale. I was wondering which ships I should also model, Carriers, cruisers, destroyers and other ships that were in the US fleet prior to Pearl harbor. One from each of the categories is what i wall model (in case you didn’t get it, 1 Cruiser, 1 destroyer, and 1 aircraft carrier).
Thanks, bye
For the cruiser I suggest Trumpeter’s USS San Francisco, a classic treaty heavy cruiser.
As for carriers, theres a few to choose from by Dragon and Trumpeter.
The Lexington CV-2, Saratoga CV-3, and Hornet CV-8 which is easy to convert to her sisters Yorktown CV-5, and Enterprise CV-6.
Any of these would fit right in[t$t]
It’s not really that simple. You probably need a light cruiser, too.
And, for destroyers, in 1941 PacFLT had a half-dozen kinds. Picking one would be like only picking one Panzer from the entire German inventory of 1941.
You probably ought to include a sub, too. Not sure if any S boats are available in 1/700; might could find a Nautilus, though.
Hey Mac, it’s easier than you say; everything the Germans had was a tiger tank, the same way the Japanese only flew the zero! [clwn]
If you’re interested in history, maybe choose one of each type that has a history that speaks to you. I build models of ships that are historically interesting to me.
What about subs?? Who do you think saved America’s @$$ in the Pacific while the surface fleet was being rebuilt after Pearl?
Lexington, Yorktown, and Enterprise. [whstl]
Note: not depreciating submarines part of the TOTAL response. But they were hardly the lone bastion, especially with the torpedo problems they were suffering early on. A lot of sailors and vessels saved America’s @$$
The CA’s gave it everything they had at Guadalcanal in 1942, did a pretty good impression of ships of the line.
You have to be careful, because the Hornet had a different shape to her forward flight deck than her sisters (step-sisters, if you think about it; she was supposed to have been the first Essex, when she was approved in the budget, but the plans weren’t finished, so she was built as a Yorktown), also, some differences to details on her island, and the gun implacements fore of the island. You’ll want to check your resources.
It might be six of one, half-dozen of another, to get the old Hasegawa Yorktown or Enterprise and detail the kit, instead of converting the newer one.
Oh, and the Arizona can be converted to her sister, the Pennsylvania, so get yourself two kits. I’m doing that conversion using the much more basic HobbyBoss kit.
Some of the other Pacific Fleet battleships are available in resin, but the name of the manufacturer escapes me at the moment.
To do Hornet “right” you really need to start with two kits; Gordon Bjorkland has built one of the best I’ve seen
That is a beautiful model!
He used the kits I’m thinking of, I thought they were Hasegawa. Hasegawa, Tamiya and Fujimi all collaborated on the “Waterline Series”, if I’m not mistaken. I have a Hornet and 2 Enterprises in my stash, for my “First Nine Carriers” collection.
Aircraft, and subs.
Midship Models is the company I was thinking of. They kitted the Tennessee and other battlewagons, in resin, in 1/700 .
The USS Enterprise…
Tracy,
However, the U.S. submarine fleet sank or destroyed over 90 percent of the Japanese merchant fleet and over 55 percent of their navy. Sounds like a winner to me!
Bill
Yes, however the original post seemed to be timed around 12/7/41. Wouldn’t that be Saratoga, Lexington, Enterprise or Wasp? New Orleans, Arizona or Pennsylvania, Benson/ Gleaves, St. Louis.
Well sure, if you look over the whole length of the war, yes, they were pretty important, although I think those figures are probably inflated.
If you want to armchair admiral the thing, then mines were even more effective than submarines. My point earlier is that many men on many ships hurt the Japanese - proponents of one style or type tend to elevate their favorites effectiveness and importance. Submarines are good at chipping away at strength, but they can’t hold ground. The US Navy used them effectively as PART of the combined allied effort to take and hold territory.
When talking about 1/700-scale models of *Yorktown-*class carriers, everybody seems to assume that the Tamiya kits are the only ones available. For some reason, the much more recent and far better-detailed Trumpeter Hornet rarely gets mentioned.
In my humble opinion the Tamiya versions (they now have kits allegedly representing all three ships: the Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet), though they represented the state of the art in the early 1970s, are by modern standards extremely mediocre. (The recently-released Yorktown is particularly obnoxious. I’ve ranted about it previously here in the Forum - http://cs.finescale.com/fsm/modeling_subjects/f/7/t/151088.aspx .) All three of them suffer from what is, to my eye at least, a really glaring error: the islands are too skinny. And their 20mm guns consist of plastic rods glued to little integrally-molded pips on the gun galleries. And the Enterprise is shown in a configuration she never had at any point in the war. And…well, never mind.
The Trumpeter Hornet has taken some criticism for the shape of its hull in the bow area. The error will be almost unnoticeable if you build the kit as a waterline model (the kit offers both options). It has excellent detail in general, including a full-length hangar deck. The 20mm guns are nice, sharp moldings. (They don’t have shields, but there are plenty of etched metal ones on the market.) The aircraft (molded in clear plastic, each with separate propeller and landing gear) include not only the 16 B-25s of the Doolittle raid but a generous assortment of Wildcats, Dauntlesses, and Devastators. There’s even a translucent vacuum-formed “sea” base.
Admittedly, the Trumpeter kit is somewhat more expensive than the Tamiya Hornet ($23.79 vs. $16.50 at Freetime Hobbies). On the other hand, the supposedly new Tamiya Yorktown costs more than either of them ($36.00). But given the time it takes to build a decent model of a carrier, this one, in my opinion, is a no-brainer.
Tracy,
I couldn’t agree with you more about the contributions of our men in any of their roles. The numbers given were taken from Theodore Roscoe’s U.S. Submarine Operations in The Second World War. Other sources state that, comprising only 1.6% of all U.S. Naval Personnel, submarines sank over 54% of all Japanese shipping. I fail to see, of the remaining 46% and a very active carrier force, how mines could have exceeded 54%. It’s simple arithmetic.
My point is that, while sinking over half of all Japanese shipping, the carrier war gets the overwhelming majority of credit for winning the war against Japan. That hardly seems fair to the submariners, who suffered a huge casualty rate.
Of the ship models being discussed, we should also mention that Trumpeter is coming out with a 1/350 USS Indianapolis in a few months. She was certainly in service on 12/7/41.
Bill
Be a little leery of Roscoe’s statistics. Generally good material, but not without it’s bias and problems due to records that hadn’t been declassified when he was writing. The stats I see are a little different than what you’ve listed; the Strategic Bombing Survey’s Summary report states the following for merchant shipping:
Of the 8.9 million tons of merchant shipping sunk or damaged, the Bombing Surveys “Summary Report” credits 54.7 percent to submarines, 30.8 percent to air attack, 9.3 percent to mines (largely dropped by B-29s), and the remainder to gunfire and accidents.
Also, the Carriers should get a lot of credit. As I said, subs are important, but they couldn’t take and hold land, and really could only chip away at serious forces.
Now, I do think that the US subs do get credit in some circles. Where they fail to as much is on TV, where there’s less footage and certainly less exciting footage. There’s lots of footage of ships firing, turning, on fire; airplanes moving on carriers, diving, etc. Producers want excitement and engagement, so they’ll give submarines less attention because what do you have? A sub coming in and our of port, maybe some footage shot of tense sailors looking at the overheads… a few blurry periscope shots, but I don’t know that there’s any real video footage through a periscope of something burning and sinking.
Mines are even more ignored - I don’t think you’d ever see a History or Military channel TV show on mining in WWII. A good work to read is Mines Away! - The Significance of US Army Air Forces Minelaying in WWII. Note that it covers more than just USAAF mining, but that is its main focus.
Exceprts:
The PBY-5 Catalinas used by the RAAF were amphibious aircraft that provided good results. Out of
1,130 successful sorties that laid 2,498 mines, the Australians lost nine aircraft, a 0.8 percent loss rate.
Altogether, the postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated these mines sank 90 ships totalling
250,000 tons, or approximately 40 percent of Japanese losses in the Netherlands East Indies.
This is an area that US submarines were operating in as well.
On August 10, 1944, fourteen B-29s laid their first mines on a mission from China Bay, Ceylon to the refineries at Palembang, Sumatra. The mines sank or damaged seven ships and closed the Moesi River entrance to tankers for a month
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Altogether, the British laid 3,450 mines in 697 sorties from July 1944 until July 1945. By mining
the harbor at Penang, Malaya, they closed the submarine base used by both the Germans and Japanese.
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Mining along Southeast Asia/s northern coast began on October 18, 1943 when a lone
Fourteenth Air Force B-24 dropped three mines in Haiphong Harbor. A single bomber repeated the
attack on November 12th. This operation demonstrated the potential of even a small number of mines to destroy and disrupt shipping. The first mines sank a merchant ship, and the second mining another. A
ten ship convoy then refused to enter the port, but as it diverted to Hainan Island, Fourteenth Air Force
planes attacked it and sank six ships. Afterwards, no traffic larger than junks approached Haiphong.
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Aerial photography revealed the extent of Japans unpreparedness and the immediate impact
mining had on ship traffic. Mines closed the Shimonoseki Strait for almost two weeks and so restricted
Japanese naval traffic that the only passable route was through the Bungo Strait–the Inland Seas
southeastern exit. If ships attempted to sortie through this passage, they faced almost certain detection.
Here, on April 6th, a B-29 sighted an Oklnawa-bound task force led by the battleship Yamato. The next
day, carrier-based torpedo and dive bombers intercepted and sank Yamato with most of her escorts.
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Then, summing up:
Of the approximately 13,000 mines laid in Japans “outer zone,” aircraft dropped 9,254 from
3,231 sorties to create 108 minefields. Across this large area, aerial mining sank or damaged as many as 405 ships amounting to 776,260 tons at a cost of 40 Allied aircraft.6 Though difficult to measure, the
Bombing Survey stressed, "Even more important was the fact that vita] shipping was greatly hampered
in its movements and delayed for periods ranging from a day or two to a month."7
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Indeed, “Operation Starvation” sank more ship tonnage in, the last six months of the war than the
concentrated efforts of all other sources combined. The Twentieth Air Force flew 1,529 sorties and laid
12,135 mines in twenty-six fields on forty-six separate missions. Mining demanded only 5.7 percent of
the XXI Bomber Commands total sorties, and fifteen B-29s were lost in the effort–just under a one
percent loss rate.13 In return, mines sank or damaged 670 ships totaling 1,251,256 tons.
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Though mining/s contribution appears small, it primarily represents the four and a half month effort in
1945 compared to the forty-four and a half month submarine campaign.
Actually, both Academy and Trumpeter are releasing a kit (different molds and not reboxing), but both are 1945 fit.