1/350 USS Tennessee BB-43 (Iron Shipwrights)
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by Robert Apfelzweig |
1/350 USS Tennessee BB-43 (Iron Shipwrights)
The USS Tennessee was the lead ship of a two-battleship class, her sistership being the USS California; she was commissioned in June 1920 and was little changed since then when, moored alongside and inboard of the USS West Virginia (BB-48), she was attacked, along with most of the rest of the US Pacific fleet, on December 7, 1941 at Pearl Harbor. While the West Virginia took the brunt of the attack on the pair, including all of the torpedoes, the Tennessee was hit by just two bombs and suffered only minor damage; more damage was incurred when flaming oil from the nearby wreck of the USS Arizona engulfed her stern. Wedged in between the sunken West Virginia and her mooring quay, she ran her engines and screws to push the Arizona's burning oil (as well as that from the West Virginia) away from her stern. That quay (and the one that similarly boxed in the USS Maryland) was demolished and by December 16 the Tennessee was coaxed away from the ruins of Battleship Row and into drydock for repairs to her heat-damaged stern. This done, she set out on December 20 for the Puget Sound Navy Yard, in company with the other slightly damaged battleships USS Maryland and USS Pennsylvania. There she received further repairs to her stern and her cage mainmast was removed and replaced with a pole mast, and she was given a smattering of newer light AA weapons. Based in San Francisco, she was held in reserve during the Battle of Midway and the Guadalcanal campaign due largely to a shortage of oilers to provide fuel for older US battleships. The Tennessee would be the first of the "Big Five" battleships (Tennessee and Colorado classes) to be fully rebuilt and modernized, a task that took nearly a year. When the USS Tennessee emerged in May1943 she was radically changed, and rather resembled the new USS South Dakota class battleships. All that remained of her previous armament was her main battery of twelve 14-in guns; the eight 5-in./25 cal. AA guns and ten 5-in./.51 cal. casemate guns were replaced with eight twin 5-in. .38 cal. mounts, and ten quad 40mm Bofors and 43 20mm Oerlikons left her bristling with AA protection. Her two narrow funnels were trunked together into one, she had a tower bridge replacing her old cage foremast, and also sported new radars and Mark 37 radar-directed fire control systems. She also received extensive new torpedo blisters that widened her beam from 97 ft. to 114 ft., making her too wide to traverse the Panama Canal. She was deployed to the Alaska campaign for shore bombardment. At this point in her career she seems to have been painted overall in a dark gray or blue-gray; after a minor refit in early January 1944 she was given the camouflage pattern seen in this model (black and 5L light gray vertical surfaces with 20B dark blue and 5-O ocean gray decks, and this scheme lasted for the rest of 1944. After more shore bombardment assignments in the Gilbert and Marshall Island campaign, she participated in the Battle of Surigao Strait in October 1944 and, with other Pearl Harbor survivor battleships, helped to sink the Japanese battleship Yamashiro. Her appearance changed again in early 1945 with a new, more standard painting scheme and newer and more extensive search radars. She returned to duty just in time to provide valuable fire support for the Iwo Jima and Okinawa invasions, and was struck by a kamikaze Val divebomber in April; the damage incurred and casualties that resulted did not keep her from her shore bombardment duties. As the war ended the ship was patrolling the East China Sea, and soon made her way to Singapore and then across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to home in the Philadelphia Navy Yard, where she was mothballed in 1946 and ultimately sold for scrap in 1959. Her ship's bell, along with a large model of her appearance late in the war, is preserved at a Huntsville, TN museum.Iron Shipwright's solid resin model had a generally good cast, but there were numerous bubbles in keel and the various deck ventilators and bitts, nearly all of which I replaced, often with extra plastic parts saved from my recent US Navy cruiser builds. Many of the molded-in deck ventilators were improperly located (based on period photos and online images of well-researched large-scale models of this ship) and so their plastic or resin replacements were relocated to their proper positions. The keel was very uneven (the port half was not as deep as the starboard half) and this required so much putty to correct that I ended up using mostly wood putty applied with a spatula and much sanding to correct the situation as best I could. There were markings on the hull for bilge keels but none were provided, so I scratch-built these from Evergreen plastic strips. The lower hull seems to be several mm too shallow, and the rudder thus protrudes somewhat below the existing keel. I used L'Arsenal bitts and chocks (there were no chocks provided by ISW) and the same vendor to replace the ten Mk. 51 Bofors directors. ISW provided two identical sets of brass photoetch frets, and these provided railings and the two fire control radars on the fore and aft bridges, but their ladders and Mark 37 radars were too overscaled and I replaced the latter with WEM photoetch and the former with spares. This kit has a mixture of regular cast resin decks and bridge structures which required the usual clean-up and occasional flattening (I used a candle flame to soften them for this purpose), and also new 3D-printed parts such as 40 mm Bofors, 14-in. and 5-in. gun barrels with bored out muzzles, the aircraft crane and the two Kingfisher floatplanes. It should be noted that, whereas it is easy to drill small holes in regular resin, the 3D resin is harder and more brittle, making this quite difficult. I felt that the 3D Carley floats (provided in great abundance) were too small except to place on the sides of the 5-in. gun mounts, and used larger spares from my previous USS Cleveland build for the rafts on the main turrets. The numerous 3D printed 20 mm Oerlikons were generally too fragile and somewhat incomplete, and required a very careful and even more fragile attachment of the photoetch shields, so I mostly used Master Model brass Oerlikons. Period photos show that the two motor launches for the port quarterdeck were stored on a raised box girder structure rather than the set of molded-in boat cradles ISW provided, so I scratch-built this with stretched plastic sprue and mounted the launches on that; I also scratch-built the small crane adjacent to them. I used True-Color and Testors paints, both brushed and airbrushed. Finally, I dressed the model up with a variety of small spare parts such as optical equipment, cable reels and compressed gas cylinders.
