USS Enterprise CV-6

Completed as she was on the morning of 4 June, 1942.

The entire air group is present on (or in) the model - 77 planes, totalling 27 Wildcat fighters, 36 Dauntless dive bombers, and 14 Devastator torpedo bombers, arranged in the order they were on the morning of June 4.

Eight Wildcats of the ship’s combat air patrol lead the group at the front of the deck, followed by all 36 dive bombers (McClusky’s Dauntless is first in that group). Below the flight deck in the hangar are the remaining Wildcats and all the torpedo planes. Some nice details are rendered, including bombs and torpedoes on the lower fuselages of every relevant aircraft, and attending crew in the bright variety of colours traditionally worn by aircraft carrier deck personnel. Some planes have had their canopies opened, with pilots put in place to show scale. I scratch-built the internal walls of the hangar deck using what few photos of the ship’s interior I could find as reference, and a curious eye will see plenty of detail inside those open doors (which themselves, are matched to the ones that were open in the photos of the ship at Midway). She is painted in Measure 12 camouflage, with Sea Blue on all vertical surfaces, and 20-B Deck Blue on the horizontal surfaces.

Note that the Sea Blue is lightened for scale and might also be appropriate for the rumoured possibility that she was already wearing 5N navy blue. Ultimately I decided against weathering her too much, as my understanding is that Enterprise had only just been overhauled in the weeks before sailing to Midway.

It is a 1:700 scale kit by Academy, with additional photo-etch details by White Ensign Models, planes by Flyhawk, AA Guns by FineMolds, and MicroMaster New Zealand, and deck figures by Eduard and Flyhawk. The air wing was by far the most time-consuming and morale-crushing part of the build (462 decals…), and once the planes were done the ship itself was built up reasonably quickly.