by Luciano Lacqua
1/400 Gloire (JSC)
This ship, a La Galissonière class CL refitted in the US with whole new AA and radar arrays, has always interested me firstly for her amazing disruptive scheme, then because she is linked with the history of my hometown. Following Operation Anvil and until the last days of the war, La Gloire and other French warships came many times to shell the cities of the Ligurian Riviera; some elders can still remember them, stopping about a mile offshore - opposition was only a seldom nuisance - to gain a better aim. I even have an uncle who told me that he once had to defuse a dud round fired by one of those ships. The most reasonable way to have a model of La Gloire was, for me, to try the paper model from JSC. This producer has been steadily improving the quality of its products and this one makes no exception; for a 1/400 paper model it's very rich in details and dimensionally accurate, catching almost perfectly the proportions of the real thing.The only drawbacks are the lack of flottanet baskets, then an error in the disruptive scheme on the starboard side of the bow where some stripes should be gray and not white, and the forward funnel cap that's just impossible to mold like the real one in paper because of its complex curving, but this can hardly be ascribed to the producer. I'm also convinced that the wooden deck had been stained on the real ship. I'm used to build those small JSC vessels out of the folder (can't say "out of the box", they come in the form of small folders) but, as this is an important ship for me, I decided that this time I had to go a little further enhancing the detail. Therefore I added some of the deck fittings that were only printed on the surfaces such as the bitts and the anchor chains; I substituted the 2 D Oerlikons' mounts with 3 D ones made with plastic rods; the main guns got paper blast bags; I added the shieldings and the Mk 51s to the quad Bofors and the missing flottanet baskets. Radars are made from bits of railings in various scales. I did a very light weathering with artist's pencils. All in all this has been a very enjoyable build, surely the result isn't up to the level of a traditional model but, considering the effort involved, I'm more than satisfied.
