As previously mentioned, I picked up a Skywave Drydock kit that normally came with one Fletcher Class destroyer, but this kit had not one but four inside it! Value for money? Well...kinda...but when you're trying to REDUCE your 700th scale ship stash and someone drops three more on you...well...you get the picture. So what to do? Well, I built two as normal world war two ships and got bored so I decided to do two "what-ifs." The first one was a Cold War tin can and the last would be this actual world war two "what-if." USS Stevans was a standard Fletcher and in the early days of the war when the Atlantic Theatre was hurting for air assets, a plan was drummed up to put as many aircraft at sea as possible. As the Fletchers were more than heavily armed, removing one of the five inchers was suggested.



The Stevens would lose her aft group of torpedo tubes, AA gun position and middle five inch mount. A standard ship's catapult was added. The amount of traverse was sufficient. The Port side depth charge throwers were removed as well and a crane added for the purpose of recovering the float plane following it's mission. The Kingfisher float plane was the chosen bird and she was a good platform for fleet recon. Fit two bombs or depth charges under her wings and she was a capable anti-submarine asset which is what the Atlantic really needed. Three such conversions were done but sadly, they were done at a time when things weren't going too well in the Pacific theater and the US Navy couldn't really spare it's destroyers for the Atlantic theater. So after the third conversion, the US Navy pulled the plug and the three destroyers would re-join the fleet as gun destroyers.



The concept of having aircraft onboard destroyers stuck and post-war, having a helicopter embarked onboard for anti-submarine work or recon was a Cold War staple. The Skywave Fletcher kit comes with all parts to do any version of Fletcher - round bridge or square bridge. Additionally, all weapons are included to do early war or late war. The kit builds very quickly with the only problems being those of deciding which version to do. Early Skywave kits had an exploded build diagram on the back of the box. Later kits have a proper instruction sheet. But be careful as the sheet and/or box art only concerns the ship depicted. So if you bought the USS Callaghan kit, the instructions are concerned with her only. So if you wanted to do any other ship you'd need to do your research. The Skywave parts are well rendered and have lots of detail.



The guns are slightly overscale but in this tiny scale, that's not really a bad thing. The only bugaboos are that Skywave likes their AA guns elevated, and they are one piece so if you wanted normal depression, you'd have to gun the gun off of the mount and re-glue it. The five inch guns are two pieces and sadly the only choice is gun barrels with blast bags ("blooomers") pre-molded to the barrels. So if you wanted a true early war Fletcher, just grab some of the plain barrels from the weapon sprue that are for the other Cold War turrets. Also, the gun turrets do not have blast shields for the gun captain's manual firing hatch. Normally, three of the turrets would have this shield. None of the turrets do. You won't notice it in this small of a scale but I mention it anyway. Photo etch parts are from the scrap box.

Cheers,



Don