Operation Torch

John Coverley
I often wonder why the "Rodney" has never been produced by the big companies in 1/350, while other ships with a less active service have. My dad was on the "Rodney" and last year got his "Arctic convoy" medal. Good book to read is "HMS Rodney" by Iain Ballantyne.

Steven Van Dyck
Hi John, I am honoured to get into contact with a relative of the crew of the Rodney by this way, so I decided to add a lengthy photo album. The arctic convoys must have put much strain on the crew of the ships, your dad must have been very proud on his medal. For the build of Rodney, I used the large Nelson drawing in the book of Hugh Lyon. You can find the complete build log at modelbrouwers.nl/php...php?t=34745&f=4.

John Coverley
Hi Steven. Unfortunately my dad was unaware he received this medal as he was suffering from dementia and died a few months later. Never really talked about much about the war even though he had a few "Stars" including the African Star.

John Coverley
Hi Steven, just had a look at the build log. Lots of pictures of the real thing that I didn't see when I was doing a bit of research when I built my Rodney quite a few years ago. Interesting story I came across on the internet and in the "Rodney" book was an incident during the D Day invasion. The Rodney was asked to give support fire to the troops near Caen. After numerous rounds of 16" shells the army asked when the Rodney was going to stop its barrage. The officer in charge asked how many rounds did they request and was told 75. The Rodney had fired 69 at that point so the officer sent a signal that they would fire another 6 more rounds to complete the 75 requested.
Unfortunately when the radio operator on the Rodney saw this he just happened to mention that it wasn't 75 rounds but 15! He had written his number 1 like a 7. As 16" shells were not freely available like other rounds this incident was taken very seriously.
I had an uncle who was in the army in that area and he used to joke about the navy constantly shelling the area.

Steven Van Dyck
Sorry about the loss of your father. I remember already having heared from his decoration and his sickness on another site where you had announced it, maybe the Ship's Forum where I have also an account. The story you describe is curious, I wonder how long it would take Rodney to fire sixty rounds extra, but they would have stayed airborne probably long enough to give it a head start. So that's why Caen was in such a mess on those pictures...

Christian Bruer
Nice work and interesting buildIng blog. Good to see some more Shipmates over here!

Steven Van Dyck
Thanks, Christian. This build has been finished for a while, but I currently have three more ships on the workbench, 1/350 Tamiya Bismarck and 1/700 Yorktown and Hammann, so in a couple of months they might show up here.