USN Blimp K-6, NAS Weeksville c.1942

Goodyear K-Class Blimp K-6, NAS Weeksville (LTA), c. 1942
(Mark 1 Models K-type Blimp in 1/720, MKM720-09, ©2020)

A year before Pearl Harbor, the Navy had one Eastern blimp base — New Jersey’s Lakehurst Naval Air Station, where the Hindenburg burned in 1936. With war looking unavoidable, the service launched a massive expansion of its lighter-than-air fleet: It planned new East Coast stations in or near Boston, Massachusetts; Cape May, New Jersey; Cape Hatteras; and southern Florida, along with a necklace of hangars along the Pacific and others along the Gulf.

Blimps, the Navy hoped, would guard American ships against German submarines, which wreaked havoc during the First World War: U-boats claimed 11 million tons of Allied shipping and tens of thousands of lives, most of them civilian.

Construction began on the Weeksville Naval Air Station in 1941 and it was formally commissioned on April 1, 1942. The station spanned 822 acres along the Pasquotank River in North Carolina, but the crown jewel was a steel hangar with enough room for 12 K-class airships. From end to end, these blimps measured more than 250 feet long, and were capable of carrying their 18-member crews from the base to the ocean in half an hour, and could stay in the air for as long as two days without a refueling.

Airship crews had the advantage of perspective: From the air, they could easily spot a submarine at shallow depth. If a sub dived deep, blimp crews could sniff it out with an array of tools the Navy perfected — sensors that detected the vibrations of turning screws and the magnetism of a hidden boat’s steel hull. Once found, a U-boat was in trouble. Blimp crews could summon warships to the scene or tangle with the marauder themselves: Harmless and soft and quiet though they seemed, Navy blimps were armed with depth charges and machine guns.

The airships began patrols in 1942 off the NC Outer Banks. The blimps rarely mounted an attack, but their presence was an effective deterrent and helped turn the Battle of the Atlantic. Allied shipping losses off the coast fell to three in 1943, to zero in 1944, to two the following year. Aiming to clear U-boats from the Mediterranean, a Weeksville squadron made the first blimp flights across the Atlantic: in 1944, ZP-14 sent a detachment on the first transatlantic crossing by non-rigid airships to Port Lyautey, French Morocco. From there they operated throughout the Mediterranean until the end of the war.

K-6 represents one of the first K ships that were transferred from Lakehurst to form the core of Airship Patrol Squadron 14 (ZP-14) at NAS Weeksville. She survived the war.

The kit comes with a cardboard base and portable docking tower, but I prefer an in-flight display so you’ll see both a suspension ring and a socket for a pedestal. The kit was primed in rattlecan grey primer and topcoated with Humbrol MetalCote Polished Alumium, also from a rattlecan. Details in Vallejo acrylics. The decals were excellent and bedded well atop a floor wax varnish coat with no need for setting solution.

The kit is a humble tribute to the brave airship crews who helped win the Battle of the Atlantic.