A while back I did a bit of a build log on the Royal Navy CVE HMS Pretoria Castle. It had always been my intention to build the US built CVE at some point- they were far more numerous and carried a wide variety of camo and aircraft, and served in all theatres from their introduction in early/mid 1943 until wars end. A number were converted back into merchant ships after,and served well into the 70's.
At first glance the sheer number built can be a bit daunting, and it requires a little sorting out to understand how the class system worked and settle on "a" ship or block of ships to concentrate on. I wanted an early RN unit, but in many respects these ships shared features with their USN counterparts of the same time frame-that is the early Bogues (USN)and the early Attacker class(RN) . This still leaves quite a bit of sorting out to do, as they did change over time,reflecting lessons learned and updating the early units, in both navies, to match the later ships. This involves bridges, close AA and sensors for the most part.
As usual the model will be entirely scratchbuilt, using plastic card, Evergreen, glue etc and not much else. I had already decided to draw up a set of etch covering these ships for the fiddly biits-masts and radar mostly, but many of the close range weapons as well. I have most of the aircraft after doing the work for the Pretoria Castle build-.
Initially I'll be concentrating on HMS Attacker/HMS Battler and show below just a few of the references I used-in addition many photos collected or bought and the usual trawl of the internet,though there is surprisingly not that much out there.
books by plastichacker, on Flickr