A Collection Of 1:1250 Scale World War II Ships, Over 40 Years In The Making
A Collection Over 40 Years In The Making
Charles began in the 1950’s but his collection grew very slowly due to his $1.50 per week allowance. His parents enforced a rule that the money he made mowing yards had to go into his savings account for college, except for 10%. The few models and kits that Charles could find were more like toys than replicas and he didn’t think they were worth my time and limited funds and as a result, the collection languished.
By the 1980’s Charles began to be a serious collector. At the time, he didn’t realize it was the “golden age” of 1:1250 scale models. Then the range of either warships or merchantmen was vast, and the quality of the models ranged from crude identification models to highly detailed replicas of the real thing. Prices depended on the quality of the model. Top quality replicas were quite expensive and were all made in Europe by artisans who were very detail oriented. These replicas became the core of his collection. Fortunately, my beloved wife rationalized that my buying maritime reference books and 1:1250 models was probably better for our checkbook than my owning a classy sports car.
Charles was determined to be a collector, not just a guy with a mélange of model ships. To be a collector, he had to develop a plan and adhere to the plan. A choice had to be made: Warships or Merchantmen? One Navy or several? After giving the matter a lot of thought, Charles’ path forward was clear; the collection would be all about the World War II warships and their auxiliaries of 18 different countries. He also included ships that had been fully designed and laid down but never finished because they accelerated new construction in other navies.
The goal was to have at least one replica for each class of ship in a country’s navy. For example, in WWII the USN developed thirteen classes of destroyers. If no-one made the model Charles sought; he would remodel a ship from another class to fill the gap in my collection or build his own model. Sub-types within a class also had to be considered. Germany built 703 Type VII submarines with Sub-Types of A/B/C/D. In the last few years, Charles has been adding additional replicas to flesh out important classes of ships (e.g., all four of the Iowa Battleships and all the cruisers of the Imperial Navy) that would be essential to depicting actual battles. He hoped that with these judicious purchases, his collection could offer an accurate presentation of any WWII battle.
Every other year 1250 Collectors and the Artisans that make the best quality models gather in Kassel Germany. Charles attended twelve of these Kassel Meetings spanning 24 years. At each one he had a shopping list to add both new models and used models that were no longer in production. Charles also got to know the model makers and eventually received invitations to visit their workshops. He was able to persuade several makers to produce a model that had not yet been available. Charles gave the model maker pictures and deck plans he had obtained, and they added the ship to their line. Eventually, Charles was able to complete his collection with all the classes that he needed. Three of the model makers let Charles visit and taught him how to make a model from scratch using plastic and brass and how to upgrade the masts, radars, secondary AA guns, and ship’s boats as well as accurate camouflage that made these ships his.
The Significance And Rarity Of The Collection:
There is no other collection like this among American collectors and it cannot be duplicated, as all but 3 or 4 of the artisans who made the models have passed away.
This collection needs to be seen by the public, as it is a great visual learning tool with many beneficial applications.
Educating both Naval personnel and the public by informing them of the importance of past actions of our Navy. The collection can help people understand the importance of securing equal access to the Maritime commons; a future that can only be guaranteed by the strength of our Navy.
Today’s public no longer reads to learn, and our youth now learns when information is presented visually. Charles’ collection offers the very essence of education by visual learning. He believes that by presenting his ships in a fleet or task force at sea, visitors can more readily absorb a visual history lesson.
Museum’s the world over all seem to be full; making efficient space utilization quite valuable. The collection can be stored in space-efficient cabinets along a wall. To present a subset of the collection on a small surface painted to resemble ocean swells or a port or a beach makes quite a visual statement. Adding a video presentation and a voice-over story can amplify the information quotient of the lesson for the visitor.
About Charles Jones
Charles’ interest in military history began in his elementary school library. He would complete his homework as fast as he could and would immediately start looking for a new book to read about ship battles from Actium to Midway which fascinated him. Ever since, he has continued to read and tried to broaden his understanding of why these battles occurred, and he began to grasp that victory could come from either better leadership or better technology. A few years later in Charles’ last year before getting his BS in engineering, he used his two free electives to take history courses that had a profound impact on him. The course in the History Department advanced the thesis that history was shaped by the leadership of “Great Men” (with apologies to the great women). The other course taught in the Engineering Department posited that a culture with superior technology would usually carry the day.
In all that he has read about Maritime History over almost 40 years, it seems that these competing forces are always in play. Charles believes that if you dig below the superficial facts of names and dates, you learn how decisive Maritime battles are in determining the outcome of wars that determined the history we all study.
The Maritime dimension of World War Two captured his interest because changing the outcomes of even a few naval battles would have dramatically altered the outcome of the world we now know. This fascination with the history of WWII led Charles to collect replica warships that fed his imagination of what the tension of the reality on the bridge or in the CIC as the combatants closed on each other. His imagination is fired every time he holds a replica of a battleship or cruiser, guns trained ready to fire a torrent of shells at the enemy or when he gathers the exact ships so that he could compose a Task Force and deploy them with prescient hindsight to change the battle’s outcome.