by Robert Apfelzweig |
The Zara was one of a class of three heavy cruisers built by the Italian Navy in the late 1920s, ostensibly adhering to the London Naval Treaty's 10,000 ton limit but in fact being considerably over that limit at about 12,000 tons standard displacement. The Zara was well-armed and armored, and with a top speed of 32 knots. Its main battery of eight 8-in. guns, however, mounted in four twin turrets, were centered on trunnions in which the barrels were quite close together; this, combined with variable quality projectiles, apparently gave them relatively poor fire control in battle. Late on the night of March 28, 1941 the Zara, along with sistership Fiume, near-sistership Pola (damaged by a British torpedo earlier that day) and four destroyers, were caught in the Battle of Cape Matapan off the southern coast of Greece by a battle squadron under the command of Admiral Andrew Cunningham. The latter's force was led by the battleships Valiant, Warspite and Barham, several destroyers and the aircraft carrier Indomitable. In the darkness the British ships detected and tracked the Italian ships by radar, which the Italians lacked, and were able to approach and open fire on them at near point-blank range with full 15-in. gun broadsides, plus torpedo attacks from the British destroyers. All three Italian cruisers and two of their four accompanying destroyers were sunk in just a matter of minutes, a debacle from which the fascist Italian Navy never really recovered.Years ago I built the Hobbyboss 1/350 Pola, an inexpensive and rather barren kit with several major faults, and for which no specific photoetch set was ever available. Trumpeter's Zara is a major improvement and, coupled with the Shipyard detail set (which includes wood deck, brass gun barrels and anchor chain), builds into a beautiful display piece, although their otherwise detailed assembly instructions left a number of parts on the brass frets unused and unidentified. One limitation of the Shipyard set is that it includes no brass rods for the mainmast, yardarms and bow or stern flagpoles, providing only a description (mostly) of what diameters to obtain and what lengths they should be. This is an inconvenience that should have easily been preventable (you'll need 0.5 mm and 0.3 mm diameter rods). Trumpeter's color scheme is somewhat confusing, since the light gray color of the upper hull and superstructure is supposed to be made by mixing two different colors of paint, but the ratio is not given! I just mixed some ModelMaster dark ghost grey enamel with white to come up with what seemed a reasonable facsimile of the box illustration (which was quite helpful in rigging the ship). The Shipyard set includes multiple brass parts for the twin 37 mm AA guns, but the barrels provided were just 2-dimensional, so I ordered a set of proper 37 mm barrels from MasterModel. Also, while templates are provided for installing the individual brass ladder rungs on the hull and secondary gun housings, the Shipyard set also provided these rungs for the mainmast tripod struts, but I found no practical way to install them (they numbered in the dozens), so I just substituted flat ladders from my spares stash.
