Tomorrow is the 25th of October, the 80th anniversary of the battle of Samar. To me this is one of the most astonishing actions at sea ever with destroyer escorts and “jeep carriers” driving a battlefleet away.
Is there a better time to start a build of some of their vessels?
I will start with Black Cat’s “Sammy B.”, maybe continue with the “Gambier Bay” and “Johnston”
I find it surprising that not more models of the USS “Samuel B. Roberts” are made. She is not only famous and had been found on the seabed recently as one of the deepest wrecks ever but she is actually also an elegant little vessel.
The Black Cat kit contains a very nice resin hull and aft superstructure and many 3-d printed parts
Nor inflicted so much damage on a vastly more powerful fleet. But honourable mention must be made of an action near the Keeling/Cocos Islands (the place surface raiders go to die) on 11 November 1942 when the Royal Indian Navy minesweeper/corvette HMIS Bengal (1 x 4 inch Mk XIX gun, 3 x 20mm Oerlikon, 650 Tons, 15kts) escorting the Dutch tanker MV Ondina (1 x 102mm QF gun, 6,341 GRT, 12kt) were intercepted by the Japanese Armed Merchant Cruisers Hōkoku Maru and Aikoku Maru (each: 8 x 5.5 inch guns, 2 x 12pdr QF, 3 x twin 25mm, 2 x twin 21 inch torpedo tubes, 10,438 GRT, 20.9kt). The Hōkoku Maru lead the attack which continued until both Allied vessels exhausted their ammunition and HMIS Bengal withdrew, but before Aikoku Maru could engage effectively the Allied bombardment hit one of Hōkoku Maru’s torpedo mounts which exploded starting a fire which spread to her aft magazine and she went down about two hours after the engagement commenced. Aikoku Maru missed MV Ondina with her torpedoes but added six main gun hits to the tanker’s damage and the mortally wounded captain gave the order to abandon ship. Aikoku Maru, satisfied the MV Ondina was sinking, machine-gunned the Dutch lifeboats and then picked up survivors from Hōkoku Maru and departed the scene. The Dutch survivors re-boarded the MV Ondina, extinguished fires and patched up the damage sufficiently to reach Freemantle and later was used as a fuel hulk at Exmouth U.S. Submarine & Seaplane Base until 1943 when she departed for proper repairs in Tampa, U.S.A. HMIS Bengal also reached safety, and was eventually decommissioned and scrapped in 1960, a year after MV Ondina met the same fate.
The willingness of vessels of most participants in WW2 to sacrifice themselves when escorting convoys is remarkable. You may wish to check out the near-suicidal actions of the Italian Spica class Torpedo Boats (light destroyers or DE equivalents) Lupo (on the night of 21/22 May 1941) and Sagittario (separately, the next morning) when in both cases they encountered (different) Royal Navy forces which each comprised three light cruisers and four destroyers: remarkably both of those gallant little vessels survived albeit much battered.
Those destroyers and escorts are small ships in 1/350. I wish the Roberts and Johnson were made in something like 1/144th scale. Something about 18 inches long.
Thank you all for the great feedback to my small blog! I think one of the most heroic battles of WW2 is not forgotten.
Back to my build:
One of the advantages of a resin or 3-d kit is that there are not so many components to assemble. On the other side masking is a bit more difficult.
The quality of the kit is amazing. I found 2 tiny pinholes in the hull only after prepainting which were easy to fix. The shafts and brackets (totally 8 pieces were fitting without any sanding or correction and are perfectly straight. I not used any sandpaper yet, just scrapped the small pins from the printing process off. The only thing which worries me is the size of some of the small parts.
Some more photos of the progress. She is coming together well.
The kit is incredible. I think I used sandpaper only once to smoothen the hull and for the aft deckhouse, which are both resin parts. but nothing took me more than 10 minutes.
The biggest difficulty is to remove the sometimes incredibly small and soft parts from the wafer (the chocks have openings!).
Mostly I use a small scissor, sometimes a knife. The parts are from my feeling not so “jumpy” like PE and can be glued easily when broken. Cleaning is easy with the scraping of a knive.
I bought a used copy of Last Stand. It fell apart while I was reading it, so I read it in chunks of a book. Fantastic book and a great loss to history authors with Mr. Hornfisher’s passing.
With Armistice Day coming up a “must-read” should be “11th Month,11th day, 11h Hour” by Persico. Reads like a novel. Focuses on the grunts ,of all nations,on the last day. Generals/politicians only mentioned to give context. (his “My Enemy ,My Brother” on Gettysburg is great too. ) Have lost him too. Shelby Foote,Stephen Ambrose… all great losses.
Very quick update today, will be out for the week for business.
Fitted the mast (brass! ) and yards with most of ladders and antennas. I think there are more than 20 small pieces.
I do this quite early and install also some of the rigging, because I do not want to interfere with railings or small parts when I do this later. Broke off too many things in other builds. thats also why I install guns and other small parts at the end.
very busy before Christmas as probably everybody. Nothing really remarkable to report. The kit is so well designed, the only things I had to rework were the holes for the pivots of the guns.
And of course the parts are slightly flexible but very fragile.
) and yards with most of ladders and antennas. I think there are more than 20 small pieces.
