COBI U-Boat XXVII Seehund Set 4846

COBI's U-Boot Type XXVII Seehund is a 1:72 model built from 181 blocks, 16.3 cm long, made with the Deutsches Marinemuseum and based on the boat displayed there. A brick display stand and a printed nameplate are included.

Why this one is 1:72

COBI builds its submarines at 1:144 or 1:300. This one is 1:72, and the reason is that a Seehund at any of the usual scales would be a few centimetres of nothing.

The real boat is under twelve metres long — shorter than a bus — and carried a crew of two. At 1:144 the model would have been about eight centimetres and no detail would have survived. Doubling the scale is what makes the shape readable.

It is a small point about model-making that says something about the subject: the Seehund was so small that a model of it needs a different scale from every other submarine in the range.

Almost impossible to kill

The Seehund was designed in 1944, when Germany had lost the Atlantic and needed something that could still operate in the shallow, heavily patrolled waters of the Channel and the Thames estuary.

Two men, no torpedo tubes — the two torpedoes hung externally on the hull sides — and a diesel engine for the surface with an electric motor for submerged running. It was slow, cramped, cold, and missions lasted days in a space with no room to stand.

And the Allies never found a reliable way to sink one. It was too small to detect by asdic against a cluttered seabed, too small for a depth charge to be sure of, and it could sit on the bottom and wait. Around 35 Allied ships were sunk or damaged by Seehunds, and a large majority of the boats sent out came back — which was not true of any full-sized U-boat by 1945.

Roughly 285 were completed of over a thousand ordered. Several survive in museums.

Specifications

Pieces: 181 · Scale: 1:72 · With the Deutsches Marinemuseum · Display stand and nameplate
Model dimensions: 16.3 × 7 cm (6.4 × 2.8 in)