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Academy #14103 1/350 German Pocket Battleship "Admiral Graf Spee" In 1934, a German pocket battleship was commissioned as Admiral Graf Spee who was a major figure in German naval history for his wide ranging combat operations at sea with a squadon of armored cruisers during World War I before being lost with most of his squadron at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914. The pocket battleship bearing his name was laid down in 1932 as a Deutschland-class cruiser to remain within the bounds of the Treaty of Versailles, but through innovative German engineering, she was armed as a contemporary battleship and later dubbed as a 'pocket battleship'.
The Admiral Graf Spee entered service in 1936 and served as the fleet flagship until assigned to maritime control duties off the coast of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. As World War II started to unfold, the Admiral Graf Spee was dispatched with a support tanker into the South Atlantic to interdict British supply shipping. The battleship's captain conducted his interdiction mission quite effectively had the distinction of destroying his targets without loss of life among the affected crews.
While the Admiral Graf Spee kept the upper hand in the South Atlantic for about a year, the Royal Navy finally caught up to the vessel off the coast of Uruguay and the resulting battle seriously damaged HMS Exeter as well as inflicted hits upon HMS Achilles. Even so, the Exeter's own fire caused extensive damage to the Graf Spee forcing the ship to enter the neutral port of Montevideo, Uruguay. To avoid internment, the ship had to leave before the damage could be adequately repaired, and with the British waiting offshore, the captain sailed out of the harbor and scuttled the damaged battleship offshore to save the lives of his crew. The kit has an Arado Ar 196 floatplane to mount atop the catapult. If you look at that catapult, that is a very short cat stroke to get the aircraft airborne. It must have been a powerful stroke!
