These are photos of a large 1/700 diorama that I built. The ships are the Japanese battleship Kongo (old Fujimi kit), and the Urakaze, (converted from the Aoshima Amatsukaze). Kongo was built pretty much out of the box, except for better AA guns which came from my Tamiya spares boxes, along with Tamiya's seaplanes, and I scratchbuilt the aerial towers on turrets 3 and 4 out of plastic rod. The Urakaze was made at its point of explosion, when struck by a torpedo by the USS Sealion on November 21, 1944. I cut the ship in two right behind the #1 turret, and then planed the hull forward and a little on the port side to give a look of being down by the bow with a slight port list. The bow section I planed off to give it a much lower in the water look, plus a sharp list to port. In the void between the bow and the ship I put in a "blast" of painted and stretched cotton. As for the Kongo, it has two water geysers from the torpedoes where it was struck by the Sealion.

The story is, on Nov 21, 1944, the Sealion fired a spread of torpedoes, two caught the Kongo, which sank a few hours later, with a loss of 1,250 officers and men, and the Urakaze sank immediately, taking down with it the whole crew of 307 officers and men. The Kongo remains as the only battleship ever sunk by a US submarine.