1/350 Dunkerque 1940 (Hobby Boss)

It's been just over a year since my last submission to modelwarships.com; during most of this period I was searching for a new house, packing, moving (including my extensive collection of model warships in display cases), and then remodeling the new house, but I'm finally able to resume model shipbuilding.

My choice this time is the excellent Hobby Boss French battleship (cuirassé) Dunkerque which, with the very extensive Ship Yard upgrade set (8 photoetch frets + wood deck + 13.4-in. and 5-in. brass barrels) can be portrayed in either 1940 - 1942 appearance or pre-war (the main difference is in one of the bridge platforms -- plastic in the kit for 1940-42 and brass in the upgrade set for 1939 and earlier).  I chose to depict the ship in her later (but pre-scuttled) version.  The Ship Yard set includes very detailed and fragile brass parts for the quad 13.2-mm AA guns; the four mounts for the twin 37 mm AA guns are plastic and brass with the Hobby Boss kit's relatively accurate twin barrels.  The plastic kit includes two clear plastic sprues for the Loire 130 floatplane, though carriages and room on the catapult for just one.  I used the upgrade set's brass triple-bladed propeller; the plastic propeller is twin-bladed and thus inaccurate.  The painting scheme as shown by Hobby Boss seems to be relatively accurate, though looking at online photos of the Dunkerque (pre-war) she seems to have been painted in a lighter grey than the recommended Tamiya Dark Sea Grey.  I used that color and IPP 5-N Navy Blue for the steel decks at the forecastle and amidships.  As in most Trumpeter and Hobby Boss kits, the gun turrets can be engineered with a little effort to be rotatable without being loose, and the main and heavy secondary barrels rotate (though, being of brass, one must add a bit of glue to their axles during assembly to keep them from drooping).

The Dunkerque and her sistership Strasbourg were built in the mid-1930s to country the pocket battleships of Nazi Germany, and indeed the Dunkerque was involved in the search for the Graf Spee before the British tracked it down off the east coast of South America in December 1939.  However, her wartime service history was brief and unfortunate; damaged and subsequently sunk in shallow water by Royal Navy gunfire at Mers-el Kébir in French-held Algeria on July 3, 1940 (four 15-in. shells and the ignition of depth charges on a patrol ship moored alongside her), the ship was raised and repaired and sent to the Vichy French naval base at Toulon in February 1942, only to be subsequently scuttled along with most of the rest of the French navy by her own crew on November 27, 1942 (to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Germans).  Though still upright, she was disarmed and partially dismantled and then scrapped after the war's end. Among the photos I have included of this model, what should be the final one shows it displayed above my earlier build of the Trumpeter battleship Richelieu, the French Navy's logical successor in design and size to the Dunkerque.
 

Gallery updated 1/10/2019

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