1/350 SMS Schleswig-Holstein (Trumpeter)

The *SMS Schleswig-Holstein* was the last of five *Deutschland*-class battleships built for the Imperial German Navy; commissioned in 1908, the ship and her sisters had already been made obsolete by Great Britain’s newer, larger, faster and more powerful *Dreadnought*-type battleships.  The *Schleswig-Holstein* saw limited action at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, receiving a single large-caliber shell hit, but otherwise was little used during World War I because of her obsolescence and the general blockade of Germany’s coast by the Royal Navy and its allies.  The Treaty of Versailles allowed defeated Germany to keep a number of its predreadnought battleships, and the *Schleswig-Holstein* was retained in service and partially modernized in the 1930s, receiving a heavier foremast, trunking of the two forwardmost funnels and having her secondary battery of fourteen 17 cm (6.7-in.) guns replaced by ten 15-cm (5.9-in.) guns; the main armament remained at four 11-in. (28 cm) guns.  The ship was used primarily for cadet training purposes, but gained notoriety for firing the first shots of World War II early on the morning of September 1, 1939 when, in the guise of a “friendly” visit to the free port of Danzig, it opened fire on a Polish military depot on the Westerplatte Peninsula.  Once again resuming cadet training duties, the ship saw little further combat in the war and was disabled by Royal Air Force bombers in December 1944 at Gotenhafen (Gdynia), and its crew later detonated scuttling charges to further render the ship useless to the advancing Red Army.  The Russians raised the ship in 1945-46 and towed her into shallow water off the island of Osmussaar in the Gulf of Finland for use as a stationary target, where her sunken remains still lie.

Trumpeter’s model kit of the *SMS Schleswig-Holstein* in its 1908 appearance was issued after they had first released a 1935 - 1939 version; some parts of the newer kit are intended for that later version.  The fit is excellent and the hull’s interior (it is in two halves, port and starboard) is well cross-braced.  I added a Chuanyu wooden deck and 11-in. and 88-mm brass gun barrels from Master Model (intended for the later version); no one (yet) seems to make metal gun barrels for the 6.7-in. heavy secondary battery, but Trumpeter’s plastic barrels are reasonably sized and only need a little drilling-out of the muzzles for a realistic appearance.   I also added North Star scuttles with weather doors for the bridge and side superstructure portholes and scratch-built the four small booms on the bridge and forecastle (not included by Trumpeter, they all can clearly be seen in the box cover art and in high-resolution photos available online).  Impressive for Trumpeter, the main guns are intended to both elevate (slightly) and their turrets rotate, as do the casemated 6.7-in guns as well.  The included photoetch frets are mostly the railings (all of them) and ladders, with the former especially impressive by being pre-hinged for easy installation and fit.  The topmasts are quite delicate and will, if not replaced by brass ones, require careful rigging tension to avoid bending.  A colored painting diagram of the completed ship is included – mostly helpful, though the brown color (presumably linoleum) of the boat deck has no commercial supplier listed.   I used stretched black sprue for rigging, ModelMaster enamels and acrylics and Tamiya acrylics for painting, made my own black stripe decals for the boot topping, and also made my own decal of the Imperial German flag –a curious omission from the small decal sheet that Trumpeter provides.  That sheet has the port and starboard name plates, the bow emblems, and two red stripes for the first two funnels – but the stripes are too short to fully reach around the funnels (a silly error on Trumpeter’s part) and must be augmented with red paint to complete the bands, which were used by the German Navy to identify its capital ships when they were cruising in fighting formations.