The Revell kit, according to Dr. Graham's fine book, "Remembering Revell Model Kits," appeared for the first time in 1956. It represents a Haskell-class attack transport, and originally appeared with the name U.S.S. Randall. (The Randall may have been picked because she had played the part of the fictitious U.S.S. Belinda in the movie "Away All Boats," which was released the same year. The novel on which that book was based, incidentally, is one that anybody who's at all interested in the subject has GOTTA read.)
It was only about the tenth ship kit Revell ever released. As of 1955 the only ships in the catalog were the battleship Missouri, the Chris Craft Flying Bridge Cruiser, a highly conjectural (and ludicrously inaccurate) submarine Nautilus, the PT-212, the destroyer The Sullivans, the heavy cruiser Los Angeles, the carier Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the liner United States. The year 1956 was a good one for ship enthusiasts; it saw the release of the harbor tug Long Beach, the freighter Hawaiian Pilot, the hospital ship Haven, the tanker J.L. Hanna, and the guided missile ship (ex-seaplane tender) Norton Sound, as well as a modified issue of the Baltimore-class heavy cruiser in the form of the guided missile cruiser Boston, and Revell's first sailing ship, the Constitution.
Nowadays, of course, the APA kit really shows its age. The 20mm guns (or blobs vaguely resembling them) are cast integrally with the decks, as are the "railings." And the hull has the peculiar flat-bottomed configuration that several other fifties-vintage Revell kits did. The hull is sliced off somewhere around the "empty" waterline; there's no propellor, and the rudder is represented by a stub sticking down from the stern. But the model is intended to be mounted on a pair of "trestles." At the time, nobody seems to have commented on how ridiculous a waterline model (or something like one) mounted on stands like that looked.
Revell had an excuse for not reproducing the underwater hulls of some of its early subjects. The hull lines of such ships as the Iowa-class battleships, the Midway-class carriers, and the S.S. United States (which was built under a government subsidy on condition that she be made available to the Navy in wartime for use as a very-high-speed troop transport) were still classified in the mid-fifties. But there surely was nothing secret about the hull form of an attack transport.
That kit was an important one in my family, because my father had served as a junior boat group officer on board a Haskell-class transport (U.S.S. Bollinger, APA-234). When my older brother saw an ad for the Revell kit in Boy's Life magazine, the whole family made a pilgrimage to the hobby shop to buy one. (Price: $1.49.) My brother was entrusted with the task of building it - though in later years I bought and built several myself.
The Revell kit, according to Dr. Graham, was on 1/376 scale. It was reissued under the name Montrose at least four times, in 1960, 1968, 1972, and 1979. (Dr. Graham's coverage stops in 1979, and he doesn't deal with European releases. I remember pretty clearly that the kit, in a reproduction of its original box, was among the Revell/Monogram "Special Subjects" reissues in the early eighties, and I think it's in the current catalog of Revell Germany.)
Renwall's Haskell-class transport, released a few years later, was on 1/500 scale. (All the Renwall warship kits were on that scale. That company was an early advocate of constant-scale ship kit collections.) To my knowledge it only appeared once, with the name U.S.S. Sarasota. (The Renwall attack cargo ship Seminole appeared at about the same time.) In some ways the Renwall kit was better. It had a genuine full hull (complete with propellor), and the 20mm guns, though pretty crude, were individual pieces. (I think Renwall may have been the first company to handle them that way.) I haven't seen it in many years, except for occasional appearances on the web - where, like most of the other Renwall kits, it commands extravagant prices.
Too long as usual. Please forgive the nostalgia of an Olde Phogey.