So would I.
On to other business:
Over the years, I have occasionally broached the issue of whether or not Maya retained its external degaussing cable after its reconstruction as an AA cruiser. Off line discussions with colleagues in Japan have been inconclusive to date. Now that I am in the midst of a Maya 1944 build, I thought it best to review all the evidence yet again. My conclusion: she did not.
Even thought the one beam photo of her as reconstructed off Tawi Tawi in May, 1944 is too indistinct to make a determination, I felt there were several indirect indicators. For one, there was the trend among most new major warship construction or reconstruction from 1943 on, for which photos exist, that show no external degaussing cable (i.e. Oyodo, all the Unryus, Isuzu, Ibuki hull, all the Matsu/Tachibana DDs). Of course, that doesn’t explain why other new warship construction, like Yahagi & Sakawa, or the Akizukis, or reconstructions like Kitakami, retained theirs.
There are also interesting hints in 30+ year old references, such as the Maru Special #125 or the Model Art vol #360 Drawings of Imperial Japanese Naval Vessels – Cruisers, in which late war illustrations of all the Takao sisters show no such cabling. Yet, drawings of the other late war heavy cruisers such as the Tones, the Myokos, and Aoba, clearly show theirs. True, these are secondary sourced references, so these illustrations cannot be taken as definitive. But, they don’t seem random, either.
On the other hand, virtually all of the large scale, Japanese builds of Maya, such as the one that graces the pages of several Gakken volumes, show a degaussing cable. One might assume that the builders had access to information or plans that we did not.
So, I turned back to my photo references, and to Lacroix and Welles. One thing that I noticed is that virtually all the illustrations, models and references indicate that the degaussing cable was mounted uniformly along the hull, just under the main deck line. Clear photos of the sisters in this regard were indeterminate, save for Chokai.
In fact, Chokai has the best photographic documentation of this detail and a simple straight line around the hull is not the reality. There are significant separations and steps in her cable, particularly along her midsection, where the hull meets the structure of the High Angle Gun Deck. As the 1942 photo below shows, the degaussing cable rises above the main deck line for the full length of the HAG deck.
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Chokai 1942, degaussing cable, starboard midship,MS #124,small.jpg [ 68.98 KiB | Viewed 1571 times ]
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