Super drawings in 3D: The Battleship “Gneisenau”
Item: 16014
Authors: Mariusz Motyka , Mirosław Skwiot

Review by Aleksander Swoboda

The latest releases of Kagero Publishing from Poland in the series of “Super drawing in 3D” focuses on one of the first German battleships built after breaking of the Versailles Treaty: the “Gneisenau”. “Gneisenau”, together with her sister ship “Scharnhort” were the German most important “players” on the North Atlantic and North Sea in the first years of war, keeping the Royal Navy attention, nerves and muscles tighten for all the time.

History

“GNEISENAU” was the World War 2 battleship was built at Deutsche Werke dockyard in Kiel and commissioned into the Kriegsmarine in 1938. This 31500 tonne ship of the “SCHARNHORST” type was one of the famous big German war ships. During her service “GNEISENAU” was involved in operations Weserübung, Juno, Berlin and Cerberus. On 27th February 1942 the ship was damaged during an air attack in Kiel and sent to Gotenhafen (a Polish occupied city Gdynia) for repair and rebuilding. “GNEISENAU” was decommissioned on 1st July 1942 and spent the rest of her life in the harbor as an accommodation hulk and floating warehouse. On 23rd March 1945 the ship was sunk in the entrance to Gdynia seaport and six years later broken up for scrap.

Book

Fourteenth issue of the “Super drawings in 3D” series is a publication in A4 paper size with a soft cover. It includes short operational history from the lay down of keel to ship bitter end. Technical characteristics and armament details are provided in the form of readable tables. On 81 glossy pages readers can find more than one hundred good quality, colored 3D visualizations for ship details and ship general silhouette. The publication contains 3 inserts. Two of them are black/white and show the ship and her details in 1:350 scale. The third one is a colored visualization on the battleship in the paint scheme at the beginning of 1941 and during the “Berlin” operation. This position enables you to imagine the ship’s beauty.

The technical and historical descriptions are only on a basic level, sufficient only for beginners. Those readers who have some stronger background or technical knowledge may be disappointed as you will not find here any technical drawings, schemes, cutaways or section drawings. In my opinion the book is intended just to provide general imagination of the ship's exterior and layout of particular construction fragments as a reference for the scale modelers of 1:350 to 1:700 scales. The book does not provide any information of how the battleship worked as a tool of war.

Our thanks to Kagero Publishing for providing review sample.