by Anthony Polychroniadis
1/350 MV Hellenic Star (L'Arsenal)
By the end of World War II, 75% of the Greek merchant fleet had been sunk, with the loss of more than 2000 seamen.
Soon after the end of the war, 100 Liberty ships were registered under the Greek flag. They were responsible for the successful re-launch of the Greek shipping industry, which nowadays numbers over 3000 vessels with atotal displacement of over 7 million tons.
I decided I wanted to represent one of them.
This is the MV Hellenic Star, built from the L’Arsenal 1/350 Civil Liberty Ship resin kit.
The ship was built in November 1943 by Permanente Metals Corporation, Yard Number 2, and was originally named “Keith Vawter”. She was managed by the Interocean Steamship Company of San Francisco until 1946. She was delivered to her new owner Pericles G. Callimanopoulos in February 1947, renamed “Hellenic Star” and registered in Piraeus. In 1953 she was transferred to Hellenic Lines Ltd. She was scrapped in Istanbul in 1972.
What you see is the end result of a 6 month project. When I bought the L’Arsenal kit, I did not realize a basic fact: as their years of service piled up, no two Liberties remained exactly the same. The kit, which is one of the cleanest resin castings I have seen, provides a generic template. It is then up to the modeller to identify the characteristics of a specific ship through photographic evidence and attempt to reproduce it.
Among the changes/additions I made are the following:
I am very much obliged to my friend Jim Botaitis, owner of JBOT DECALS in Canada, who produced custom decals to my specifications, including the funnel band, company logos, ship name, and flags. Obviously, this project could not have been completed without them.
I am also grateful to Jacques Druel of L’Arsenal for all his help, and to the fellow members of the ModelWarships forums, especially those who participated in the threads about the location of ship’s bells and the rigging of Liberty Ships and cargo vessels in general.
References:
100 & 7: Restructuring Greek Shipping After WW II, by Georgios M. Foustanos (ISBN 978-960-89400-3-1)
Cargo Handling (Navy Training Courses, 1948 edition), US Government Printing Office 1948
Websites such as www.shipspotting.com, that have a lot of period colour merchant ship pictures
