by Marty Shay
Schlactschiff H-39 Classe 1/570th Scale Revell Bismarck Kitbash
A few months ago I built a mod of a “never built” 15” rebuild of the DKM Scharnhorst class using a Revell Scharnhorst kit and parts from a Bismarck kit. I ended up with most of the Bismarck kit left over. A few days ago I stumbled over another copy of the Revell Bismarck kit and decided to combine the two to try to build one of the “H” class designs.
The follow on designs to the Bismarck are not well documented. Various proposals were made, design studies “H-39 to H-44” were undertaken. Kind of like a German version of the “Tillman” design studies, they were “big, bigger and ridiculous”.
The dimensions of ships built in German yards were limited by shallow narrow canals which the ships had to traverse to get to the sea.. A Bismarck sized hull was pretty much the largest which could be built using the existing facilities pre-war. Tirpitz was the largest built at 253.5 meters long and a beam of 36 meters. It is unlikely that Germany could have actually completed another large battleship during the war due to industrial resource limitations, inadequate steel production and skilled labor shortages.
A third large battleship was laid down though. 1500 tons of steel was assembled, another 12,000 tons was ordered. New design 16” naval cannon were fabricated. Twin turrets similar to Bismarck’s were built. It is unclear whether the ship was to be a modified Bismarck with 16” guns or an “H” design. It has been suggested that this ship would have been named “Hindenburg”. In any event large surface ship construction was halted.
The available references include two line drawings of a four turret 16” battleship, somewhat longer than Bismarck with twin funnels, some superstructure changes and revised aircraft handling facilities. The drawing shows essentially the same secondary and AA layout and additional armor. The aircraft facilities shown are IMHO “unlikely”, the gun blast of “D” turret would destroy them. A large increase in machinery was planned, the shaft horsepower produced would have gone from 111,000 to over 150,000. The three screw, twin rudder layout was retained. One document refers to a third rudder.
For this model what I did was to lengthen the hull by one inch and widen it by 1/8” bringing it in scale to 268meters and 36.5 meters beam which was the smallest of the proposed designs. (The largest proposed design was larger than a Nimitz class carrier and in the realm of 150,000 tons). I added some armor belts, built up the main turrets and revised the boat deck layout. I added a second funnel and made some secondary armament changes consistent with what was done on Tirpitz. I chose to trunk the second funnel, the line drawings are unclear on this feature.
The model is an approximation of what a follow on to Bismarck might have looked like if built in the 1939-1942 period it is absolutely NOT historically accurate!!
Thank you to Harold Winkel, Eric Mante and Geoff “Thorvic” for valuable input and encouragement!!!!
A special thank you to Richard Worth “Tiornu” for correcting some errors in my original write up!!!!!
