Military Model Scene

Title: British Light Cruisers
Author: Les Brown
Publisher: Pen & Sword
ISBN: 978-1-3990-3056-4

ShipCraft 31 covers the Leander, Amphion and Arethusa Classes of WW2 era Light Cruisers. A 64-page soft-cover book, and another in this series from author Les Brown.
This cover 12 vessels across the three classes, 3 of which served with the Australian Navy and the rest with the Royal Navy. While for many of us the class names may not be familiar, I would suspect that Achilles and Ajax, 2 of the Leander class ships will be well known to those who've read of the chase of the Graf Spee, which led to it being scuttled in Montevideo in December 1939. The first 16 pages provide the basic details of each vessel in each class, and their development story. Then their wartime careers, including those which were lost in action. As with all of the book, this is well illustrated with archive photos. Next comes 13-pages detailing a large number of model products and accessories that are on the market before getting to another 16-page section of Modelling Showcase, with 10 expertly built models in a wide variety of scales including 1/700, 1/600, 1/350 and even larger scratchbuilt 1/96 scale models. That in turn is followed by another useful reference for modellers, with 8-pages devoted to camouflage schemes, with archive images, nots and lovely colour profile artwork. The last part of the book had more notes on the real ships, with details of the various modifications made to them over their service life and some line drawing profiles.
Marvellous reference on this set of light cruisers, geared heavily towards the ship modeller, with plenty of inspiration to found in here which I am sure will tempt more to have a go at some of these. I continue to enjoy the ShipCraft series.
Thanks to Pen & Sword for our review copy.

Robin