by Robert Apfelzweig |
The USS Des Moines was commissioned in November 1948 as the first of a class of three that were the last all-gun heavy cruisers of the US Navy.
Designed during World War II to take advantage of the lessons learned in ship-to-ship combat, the Des Moines and her sisterships, USS Salem and USS Newport News, were the first to carry the new automatic Mark 16 8-in./55 caliber guns, which could fire at a rate three times that of earlier guns on the Baltimore-class and treaty heavy cruisers. Gone were the quad 40 mm Bofors of previous cruiser classes, replaced with the new and more powerful semi-automatic Mark 33 twin 3-in./50 caliber mounts that could fire radar-directed shells at the rate of 45-50 per minute. Oerlikon 20 mm cannon were still carried, but fewer were used and only in twin mounts.
Unfortunately, all these improvements in design and construction made these warships perfectly suited for – fighting the previous war. By 1949 the only potential rival to the supremacy of the US Navy was the Soviet Navy, and their heavy (and light) cruisers would have been no match for even a Baltimore-class American cruiser – a combat situation that, fortunately, never arose. The USS Des Moines spent most of her active service in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, was decommissioned in 1961 and languished in mothballs in Boston and then Philadelphia until struck from the reserve list in 1993, though she wasn’t sold for scrapping until 2005, and was towed to Texas in 2006 for that purpose. By then she was badly corroded and with moss growing luxuriantly on her wooden decks.
Very Fire’s model kit is of excellent quality; there are numerous extra parts, including many not used in this kit, so I suspect that some of the others would be used on the same manufacturer’s USS Salem. Their separate extensive detail set includes 8 brass frets (in addition to one in the plastic kit that consists mostly of superstructure railing), brass barrels for the 8-in, 5-in., 3-in. and 20 mm guns, brass masts, yardarms, radars, boat cranes, catapults and crane, ladders, bridge platforms and main deck railing. There are dark grey resin pieces on sprues for the 8-in. gun blast bags, 3-in. gun mounts, Mark 56 fire control radars, life rafts, deck ventilators & hatches, deck winches, Mark 51 gun directors and misc. small pieces such as the tiny pedestals for the numerous whip antennas. For the latter, the detail kit instructions (which, thankfully, are printed in color with high resolution on large, glossy white paper) recommend 0.2 mm wide lengths of copper wire – a very fragile system, supposed to be inserted into microscopic pits in the pedestals, so I simply used painted lengths of stretched sprue. There are also resin pieces for the cockpits and propeller fairings of the two Seahawk floatplanes, and beautifully shaped and fabricated photoetch cockpits (no clear plastic ones in the kits). The instructions are generally very good and I found only a couple of instances of wrong or missing part numbers. Decals are provided in the detail set for the Seahawks and in the plastic kit for the flags, hull numbers, waterline number strips and ship’s name at the stern. Paint was from True North, using 5-H for the upper hull and superstructure and Norfolk Red for the lower hull, with Colourcoats Flight Deck Stain 21 for the steel decks (paint that I had left over from years ago). Rigging (the box artwork proved useful here) is from stretched black sprue.
