Please forgive an Olde Phogey's lapse into nostalgia for a few minutes. This kit really brings back memories.
My father was a junior boat group officer on board the U.S.S.
Bollinger (APA-234) during the last few months of the Pacific war. The ship never got into action (she arrived in the transport area off Okinawa the day after the last kamikaze attack), but the experience stuck with Dad for the rest of his life. I vividly remember the day in 1956 when the announcement of the brand new Revell U.S.S.
Randall (APA-224) appeared in
Boy's Life magazine. The whole family made a pilgrimage to the local hobby shop to buy one. The task of building it was entrusted to my brother (he was thirteen at the time; I was six, and had only recently started building models).
Over the next twenty years or thereabouts I built that kit several times. The last was when I was in college; I modified the kit quite a bit, adding rigging from nylon monofilament and replacing the 20mm guns with some I'd cannibalized from the Revell
Mission Capistrano. (This was still long before the days of aftermarket parts and photo-etching.) I mounted it (without trestles) on a walnut base and gave it to Dad for Christmas. It sat on a shelf in his office till he retired; I have no idea what happened to it after that.
According to the bible on the subject, Thomas Graham's
Remembering Revell Model Kits, the original kit was in the Revell catalog from 1956 through 1959. It was reissued under the name
Montrose in 1960, 1968, 1972, and 1979. Mr. Graham's coverage stops in that year, but I remember it showing up with the original
Randall box art as one of Revell's "Special Subjects" reissues in the eighties. And now it's in the Revell Germany catalog.
It was about the fourteenth or fifteenth ship kit Revell made, and it really shows its age. One oddity of it is the hull configuration. It's sliced off at about the level of the empty waterline. There's no propeller, and the rudder is a stump representing the part of it that would be above water when the ship was empty. But the kit contains a pair of girder-like stands. Putting a waterline model on stands like that makes no sense - but several Revell kits of the period were done that way. (I think the practice may have started when the company decided to do an S.S.
United States, in 1955. That ship was subsidized by the Navy, and her underwater hull lines were classified.)
The basic shapes of the Revell attack transport appear to be pretty accurate, but the moldings are vintage 1956. I especially like the 20mm guns, which are cast integrally with the decks. And how about those cargo nets molded on the outside of the hull!
In 1956 attack transports were rather prominent in the public eye. A couple of years earlier a superb novel,
Away All Boats, by Kenneth Dodson, had appeared. It told the story of a fictitious APA's adventures throughout the island-hopping campaign, and, since Dodson was a former APA officer, was extremely accurate. (The book was required reading in our household. I strongly recommend it; cheap used copies can be found on the web.) The book was made into a movie, starring Jeff Chandler, George Nader, and Richard Boone. It's available on VHS - and much worth watching by warship enthusiasts. According to Mr. Graham, one reason why Revell picked the
Randall for its APA kit was that she had starred in the role of the fictitious U.S.S.
Belinda in the movie, which also featured some Revell models in long shots. (The movie is of minor interest to film buffs for another reason. In the last reel the ship has been hit by a kamikaze off Okinawa and the captain has been wounded. The executive officer leans over him to see what shape he's in, and a medical corpsman who's crouching next to the captain says "they're waiting for him in sickbay, sir." The corpsman - who has no other line in the movie - is an incredibly young Clint Eastwood.)
Actually there were two other plastic APA kist. Renwall issued one in its small 1/500 scale series, later in the fifties. (I can't recall the name of the ship.) This one had quite a bit more detail than the Revell one: individual 20mm guns and a full hull, complete with propeller. I haven't seen it for decades; I suspect it's a collector's item. Shortly thereafter Renwall issued a set of 1/1200 warships, complete with a phony-looking vac-formed "sea" base in which to display them. One of those kits was a highly simplified attack transport.
End of silly ramble. The kit is a grand old museum piece. It could be made into an accurate model of an attack transport, but that would take a great deal of work. The modern enthusiast probably would be better off with a resin kit; a couple are available.