1/350 USS Houston CA-30 (Iron Shipwrights)
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by Robert Apfelzweig |
1/350 USS Houston CA-30 (Iron Shipwrights)
This warship, affectionately known by her crew as the "Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast", was a major part of the ad-hoc ABDA assembly of cruisers and destroyers from the US, British, Dutch and Australian navies that engaged in a desperate, and ultimately futile, attempt to prevent the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy from capturing the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and its vast oil supplies in early 1942. Greatly outnumbered and outgunned, with little or no air support with mostly obsolete or outclassed vessels, nearly every ship in the ABDA group was sunk -- one notable exception being the light cruiser USS Marblehead, which managed, despite severe bomb damage, to escape to Australia and then reach the USA after traversing the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The end of the USS Houston came at the Battle of Sunda Strait on the night of Feb. 28-Mar. 1, 1942, when she (with her stern turret disabled from an early aerial bomb strike) and the Australian light cruiser HMAS Perth attempted to disrupt the Japanese invasion force at Bantam Bay on Java Island. Both cruisers were overwhelmed by gunfire and torpedoes from a squadron of Japanese destroyers and the heavy cruisers Mogami and Mikuma (the US Navy would get its revenge on these two at the Battle of Midway three months later), and when they sank, their crews were machine-gunned by Japanese destroyers as they abandoned ship. Of the 1061 officers and men of the Houston, only 368 survived to be placed into prisoner-of-war camps, where 77 subsequently died before liberation at the end of the Pacific war. It was only then that the full story of the Houston's valiant fight became known to the US Navy; her gallant commanding officer, Captain Albert H. Rooks, who was killed during the battle, was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the ship herself was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation.The wrecks of both the Houston and Perth lay in relatively shallow water, and have been visited by professional and amateur SCUBA divers since the 1970s; the Houston's ship's bell was recovered in 1973 and now rests on display in a public park in Houston, Texas. US Navy and Indonesian Navy divers surveyed the wreck of the Houston in 2014 and 2015, noting that they had undergone illegal salvage (a common occurrence with war wrecks in the Java Sea), and oil still seeps from the ship's broken hull.
Iron Shipwright's resin model is typical of this manufacturer in the precision of its hull casting, with the usual bubbles and irregularities of the keel requiring putty filling and sanding; the two molded-in bilge keels required minimal putty repair. The rudder is either too deep or the lower hull too shallow, with the latter being more likely since placement of the screw shafts with struts in a horizontal position is almost impossible. The decks were quite pristine although I had to fill many of the molded-in block-shaped ammunition lockers with putty due to bubbles in one corner, and ended up replacing most of them, as well as the squat ventilators and anchor capstans, with resin, plastic or photoetch pieces from my spare parts stash. This kit represents what may be a major transitional manufacturing phase for ISW -- I have recently built their USS Tennessee and USS Connecticut kits and all have the usual cream-colored resin pieces for superstructure decks and masts, but are liberally supplemented with much finer 3D-printed parts. On the Houston these include gun mountings, barrels, turrets, motor launches, boat davits, the aircraft crane, propeller guards, 36-in. searchlights, rectangular Carley rafts (by the dozens), 1.1-in. quad machine gun tubs, fire control directors and rangefinders. There are also very finely fashioned 3D-printed SOC Seagull floatplanes, though extreme care must be taken when removing them from their casting spars, especially the fragile floats beneath the lower wing. As is always the case with this manufacturer, they have superb customer service and will quickly send replacement parts (usually in excess of what is asked for) when emailed. The only problem here is that the (still) rather primitive assembly illustrations (photocopies with printed step-by-step text and hand-drawn illustrations) have not been upgraded to show the use of these 3D-printed parts, so the modeler is left to ponder what part goes where. Besides 2D brass photoetch frets (here, although a photocopied page illustrates this fret it does not identify every part) there are strips of brass rods in two sizes -- the thicker one for the six mast struts and the narrower one for boarding booms, yardarms, flagstaffs and fighting top masts, and a set of decals, though not quite enough insignia for all the floatplanes. I used the 3D-printed turrets and 8-in. gun barrels (with hollowed out muzzles) as well as the gun mounts and guns for the eight 5-in. .25 caliber AA guns. I added to these some spare railing sections from my spares stash (those parts were omitted from the ISW photoetch set).
