Collect ’em, trade ’em with your friends—but don’t try to float them in your bathtub, they’re too valuable for that. This boxed set of 14 U.S. Navy ship miniatures (at 1:1200 scale) was produced in 1944 by H. A. Framburg & Company of Chicago. The outfit was one of four—Besserabis, Comet Metal Products Company, and South Salem Studios being the others—the U.S. Navy hired to produce model collections as identification aids during World War II. The Navy’s interest in such modeling dates to 1905 when, taking a page from the Royal Navy’s playbook, it started using the miniatures both for wargaming and for learning ship identification. The H. E. Boucher Manufacturing Company produced identification models for the War Department, the Shipping Board, and other entities in addition to the Navy well into the 1920s. In World War II, the Navy really ramped up production of the ship-identification models—they were a handy augmentation to the know-your-ships field manuals then in use, and the miniatures were used by the armed forces and merchant marine alike.
This particular set, from the collection of Captain Ward R. Anderson, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired), and on display at Annapolis Maritime Antiques, hails from Framburg’s last contract with the U.S. Navy. (Framburg also did British and French ship-model sets for the Navy.) The four ships arrayed below from the set are, from front to back, an Iowa-class battleship, a Northampton-class cruiser, a Porter-class destroyer, and a Rudderow-class destroyer escort. With the end of World War II, the company quit producing the models, selling off any surplus inventory to the buying public. Oh, to have picked up a set of them at late-1940s prices!