1/350 French battleship Danton (Combrig)

The Danton was the first of a class of six “semidreadnought” battleships built by France between 1907 and 1911, but their leisurely construction rate and mixed main and heavy secondary gun battery (four 12-in. and twelve 9.4-in. guns) made them instantly obsolete when commissioned, as the HMS Dreadnought and several improved successors had already been introduced into service by the British Navy, and the Dantons were outclassed by their contemporary potential German adversaries as well.  Although, like the Dreadnought, they had steam turbines, their top speed of 19 knots was still two knots slower than the British battleships.  These ships all served in the Mediterranean in World War I, mostly on convoy duties, and all but the Danton herself survived the war, ultimately being relegated to the status of target or depot ships before being scrapped in the late 1920’s and 1930’s.  The Danton was sunk by a German submarine off the southern coast of Sardinia in March 1917, and its wreck was discovered during a seafloor survey in December 2007, lying upright, with most of its turrets still attached, at a depth of about 1000 meters.

Combrig’s kit of the Danton in some ways illustrates the problems that this Russian manufacturer still presents, decades after the fall of Soviet communism – they can sell this kit because there is no competition, and perhaps consequently, have made it a very frustrating build (had this happened in an earlier decade, I might have called it a Communist plot!).  For some reason, Combrig sells the 1:350 Danton in a waterline-only version, so with the help of some online diagrams and photos I built a lower hull from two ¼-in. sheets of balsa wood glued together, cut to the outline of the upper hull’s waterline, then sanded and filled to give what I hope is a reasonably accurate shape.  Although easy to work with, the balsa is probably too soft and I will not attempt such a method again. Combrig’s upper hull is well-cast and so are the turrets and resin gun barrels (all quite straight, though I had to drill out the muzzles for the 12- and 9.4-in. barrels); since the upper hull is hollow, it was easy to engineer all eight turrets so that they rotate. As usual, Combrig does not include any masts (except for the lower foremast), yardarms or railings.  Indeed, the photoetch fret that comes with the kit is sparse and mediocre, and includes several parts that appear nowhere in the laughably incomplete assembly instructions (just two sides of one page, with parts unnumbered), while several parts illustrated in those pages (e.g., the braces beneath the bridge wings) are not included at all in the kit and must be scratch-built or, as in my somewhat unsatisfactory fix, substituted with Flyhawk perforated gussets.  Indeed, many details of the model must be scratch-built or culled from spare parts boxes, such as the four booms along the hull, the flagstaffs, small cranes at fore and aft bridges, coal scuttle hatches, porthole covers, flags and several ladders.  One must be careful with the smaller parts, as Combrig provides few, if any, spares and any that are lost or broken must be replaced with scratch-built or other parts.  As usual with my builds, I used stretched black plastic sprue for the rigging.  The rudder and bilge keels were made from Evergreen sheet plastic.

Combrig includes no painting instructions, but I was fortunate in having access to Nick Dogger’s superb and much more detailed build of this ship (as a diorama) on this website, as well as several online high-resolution photos of some of Danton’s sisterships.  These battleships had steel, rather than wooden, decks, with steel on the forecastle deck up to about the first barbette, and the rest of the decks covered in a grayish-pink linoleum. The dark grey of the forecastle deck was painted with WEM KM12 Blaugrau, the dark green of the lower hull with WEM Royal Navy Deck Green, the light grey of the upper hull and superstructure with ModelMaster Flat Gull Grey mixed with a small amount of ModelMaster Light Grey, and the linoleum of the decks with a mixture of Tamiya flat red, white, medium grey and brown.
 

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