1/350 Italian battleship Andrea Doria 1943 (SSModel)

    Italy entered World War II in June 1940 with four modernized battleships originally built during World War I (Conti di Cavour, Giulio Cesare, Caio Duilio and Andrea Doria) and four big new ones either recently commissioned (Littorio and Vittorio Veneto), still under construction (Roma) or, for the last one (Impero), never completed.  The first four older battleships were similar but essentially in two distinct classes; Caio Duilio and Andrea Doria represented one of those classes and by the time of Italy’s armistice with the Allies (September 1943) were nearly identical except for some differences in light AA gunning and camouflage schemes.

The Chinese 3D-printed SSGlobal Andrea Doria is available from online auction sites and represents, to me, one of the better such kits (so far) produced in this scale.  All orange resin, the parts comprise the forward and aft hull haves, which fit together very well, the four turrets with 12.6-in. (320 mm) gun barrels attached (with blast bags), the two sizes of secondary guns (triple 5.3-in. and single 3.5-in.), the main bridge and superstructure, funnels, rear bridge, boats, boat cranes, masts, screws, and a plate containing numerous single 37 mm and twin 20 mm light AA guns.  The Doria used only three of those single 37 mm guns, installed on its forecastle, so I needed to find eight twin 37 mm mounts, and the kit’s twin 20 mm guns were fairly well cast but the barrels were too short and side by side, instead of one above the other as they should be.  I thus searched the internet for suitable twin mounts and found excellent 3D-printed examples from another Chinese company, Heavy Hobby, for both AA gun types.  A photo of the casting plate for the twin 37 mm guns is included as my last photo.  The rest of the SSGlobal parts were cleanly cast and fairly easy to work with, though I had to drill out the muzzles of the ten 12.-6-in. guns to obtain better scaled openings (using a 0.9 mm drill bit).  The barrels of the secondary guns were too narrow and fragile to attempt the same thing. The model was completed with Tom’s Modelworks 2-bar railing and ladders (some ladders were built into the 3D-printed superstructure parts).  The most difficult part was the camouflage scheme; I was able to find online illustrations, either diagrams or photographs, of what this looked like by 1943, though some of the photos confused the Andrea Doria with the Caio Duilio.  I used Tamiya acrylics and Testors enamels, after first spraying the entire model with Tamiya light grey primer (which doubled as the light gray color) .  The other difference in their appearance was the presence, only on the Doria, of an additional pair of gun tubs on the front of the second turret, which each hosted a pair of 20 mm AA guns.  Positioning of the remaining 20 mm and 37 mm guns was based on those same online photos and diagrams.  The kit itself supplied a few small assembly diagrams of limited usefulness.

These four ships began their service careers looking markedly different from their appearance in World War II, originally having five turrets (three triple, two single), with one of the triple turrets amidships, and a pair of tall tripod masts, along with the typical WWI-era casemate secondary guns.  Between 1933 and 1940 they were completed rebuilt, losing the center turret and getting completely new secondary guns, superstructures and powerplants, with a corresponding increase in maximum speed to about 26 knots.  Their original 12-in. (305 mm) main guns seem to have been retained but were bored out to 12.6 in. to provide greater offensive power.  The downside to this main battery upgrade was that barrel life was significantly reduced, and scattering of shot was problematic  In any case, none of these ships had especially impressive service careers in World War II, mostly being used as convoy escorts, sparring in the Mediterranean with the Royal Navy (usually at a considerable distance, when the two sides contacted each other at all), and occasionally suffering from aerial attacks (the Dulio and Cavour were sunk by torpedoes at Taranto in November 1940 and the latter was never fully repaired).  By the end of Italy’s involvement as an ally of Nazi Germany in 1943 the three surviving ships were largely sidelined in port due to a severe shortage of fuel.  They did manage to cruise to Malta for internment with the British in September 1943, and the Doria and Dulio were retained in the post-war Italian navy as training ships until their scrapping in 1956.

 

Gallery updated 7/29/2024

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