Thanks to Casemate Publishing & IPMSUSA for the review copy!

Kagero Publishing, from Poland, extends their Top Drawings Series with No. 116, the French Marine Nationale aircraft carrier Clemenceau (le Clem). She was placed into service in 1961, incorporating the latest advances in aircraft carrier technology. She and her sister ship, Foch, were active for more than 40 years, forming the backbone of French military power projection. The TopDrawings series is designed for modelers to have a reference for detailed appearances of individual ships and aircraft. TopDrawings consist of color covers with black & white (B&W) line drawings of the ship, particular features, and equipment, especially armament (including aircraft). But the main attraction is the separate, large foldout of B&W scale drawings – 1/400 in this book, to match existing model kits.

Casemate Publishers presents ShipCraft 27, British Sloops and Frigates of WW2 by Les Brown from Seaforth Publishing. This long-awaited book is a ship modeler’s dream come true as a reference work on the large numbers obscure but important Royal Navy antisubmarine warships that helped turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic. This easy-to-digest book details each of the 17 classes of sloops and frigates used by the Royal Navy in WW2. These mostly forgotten, smaller warships focused on convoy escort duties and helped revolutionize antisubmarine warfare tactics. This book lists class history, available model kits, model accessories, many photographs, camouflage examples, line drawings and color plates of finished models – a superb reference for these plentiful ships with many possibilities for modelers.

Helion & Company continues to expand its series “Latin America @ War”, with its 23^rd installment devoted to the Argentine Navy operations during the Falklands/Malvinas War.

The author is the son of an Argentine Navy officer, and himself was a cadet of the Argentinean Navy. As such, he can speak to the Argentine Navy culture like an “insider”, which provides insights often lost by regular historians.

The book is divided in 4 sections:

• Culture and the Argentinean Navy (12 pages)
• Culture, Strategy and the Falklands/Malvinas War (15 pages)
• Culture and Operations in the South Atlantic (31 pages)
• Conclusion (5 pages)

The first section is about the history of the Argentinean navy (the book goes all the way back to the mid-1850s) and mainly describes it’s tradition and the skills desired in their officers.

This is another in Kagero’s series of books that focus on one particular ship, in this case the HMS Invincible. The book consists of one column of text about the ship that is like what you would read on a kit’s instruction sheet and 28 pages of line drawings of just about every aspect of the ship from the island down to the various aircraft that served aboard and the individual defense weapons systems.

The Kit

Atlantis continues to re-release some of the kits a lot of us grew up with. This example is the 1954 Revell U.S.S. Pittsburgh. The kit was re-released many times over the years as the Pittsburgh, the Helena and with new parts updating it with Terrier missies as the Boston and Canberra. This release is in its WW II guise. You get decals for every ship in its class (Baltimore heavy cruisers), but you run short of bow numbers for some, like the one I did, the U.S.S. Toledo. The model is a member of Revell’s “Flat Bottom Navy” and has no hull detail and a flat bottom. Better for scooting across the floor by young budding captains I suppose.