MODEL ARMY AT IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM DUXFORD

David Jefferis reports:

We recently made an SMN Crew trip to Britain’s largest air museum, near the university city of Cambridge. Imperial War Museum Duxford (just ‘Duxford’ to most of us) is a droolworthy destination for anyone with even the slightest interest in aviation. Apart from the dozens of beautifully preserved aircraft to pore over, there are hangars full of restoration projects - from Mustang to Staggerwing, there’s plenty of choice for all. But IWM Duxford offers more...

Duxford Land Warfare

Housed at the far end of the airfield are the Land Warfare displays, housed in a separate, newish building. It’s packed with fascinating exhibits, with a prime focus on the World War II era. There’s also the British Army Royal Anglian Regiment Museum to inspect. As this writer’s father was a fighting soldier in the Anglian’s forerunner, the Leicesters, the exhibits here were of particular interest.

Model displays

The organizers at IWM Duxford have not forgotten model fans either. There are several shops packed with models and memorabilia, as well as assorted miniatures scattered around the whole of IWM Duxford. The ones we show here were in glass display cases in the Land Warfare section, and depict various forms of action in Northern France in World War II. The models seemed to be 1:76 scale in the main, mainly as we could spot various Airfix kits, assembled for the task. The miniature landscaping was pretty good, and as you can see, detailing of this and the model soldiers was carefully crafted, too. 

iPhone for low light photography

Note the pictures are fairly grainy - my main camera, a Panasonic FZ50, had run out of battery power (it’s since been dropped in the sea, sob) so these were taken with my Apple iPhone 3GS. There’s no flash on the iPhone, so the results are rather better than I expected, as the displays were not very well lit. Top marks to the iPhone for its low-light performance then, and I look forward to the major improvements offered with the newly introduced iPhone 4S.

Visit IWM Duxford here.

  

UNDERSEA ATTACKER - THE GERMAN BIBER MIDGET SUB FROM ITALERI

SMN report
Italeri’s latest 1:35 scale nautical kit is the neatly produced Biber (‘Beaver’) one-man midget submarine from World War II. To this big military-model standard scale, even the Biber works out to a fair size in model form, in this case some 186 mm (7.3 in) long. It comes with two well-sculpted figures, as well as decals for three different subs, and a small etched-metal fret with super-detail parts.

Biber on view at the Imperial War Museum
There are quite a few Bibers on display in military museums across Europe - the one pictured above is on view in the UK’s Imperial War Museum, London. It’s a place well worth visiting, and if you build the Italeri Biber kit, seeing the real thing complete with its quota of lumps, bumps, scrapes, dings and dents, will allow you to add those extra details to take the Italeri sub from smooth-but-a-bit-dull ‘stock’ to knocked-about-and-real ‘superb’.

Biber armament
In service, the Biber could carry two 530 mm (21 in) torpedos or a pair of mines, but the tiny U-boat was introduced late in the war and never became a big threat to its primary target, Allied coastal shipping. It had a limited range of some 185 km (115 miles) and could manage a speed of less than 10 km/h (6.2 mph) underwater. Over 300 Bibers were built, but they met with little success in combat operations, and most were damaged or sunk by Allied forces.

One-man Biber operations
Spare a thought for the man at the Biber’s controls - military operations generally lasted for one or two days, and the pilot-operator had to stay on combat-alert throughout the mission. To help do this, he refuelled on a diet of caffeine-boosted chocolate, or downed tablets of D-IX, a cocaine-based drug brewed up by Nazi scientists to keep him wide-eyed and awake. Apparently, earlier tests with D-IX on full-pack carrying troops had resulted in non-stop marches for anything up to 90 km (55 miles) before total collapse.

SMN note - A couple of the pictures look somewhat squashed, which is a software issue... we'll see what can be done. Meantime, if you click on any pic, the usual enlargement will show it undistorted.

Visit IWM London here.

See the Biber here.

View other Italeri military kits here.

The pictures show, top to bottom:
1  Italeri kit box.
2  Cleanly-pressed injection parts.
3  Italeri supplies details for three different subs.
4  Accurately printed decal sheet.
5  Biber mini-sub in the Imperial War Museum, London.
IWM picture courtesy Conny Liegl.

BORED WITH OLIVE DRAB? GO BRIGHT RED WITH A LIGHTNING CALLED ‘YIPPEE’!

David Jefferis reports
We recently made an SMN Crew trip to Britain’s largest air museum, near the university city of Cambridge. Imperial War Museum Duxford (just ‘Duxford’ to most of us) is a droolworthy destination for anyone with even the slightest interest in aviation. Apart from the dozens of beautifully preserved aircraft to snout around, there are hangars full of restoration projects - from Mustang to Staggerwing, there’s plenty of choice for all.

Duxford’s American Air Museum
There’s also lots to interest model fans, with two decent shops, plus various miniatures on view here and there. Among our favourites was a P-38 Lightning, on display in the three-year old American Air Museum, a high-tech building designed by the famed architects Foster & Partners. Here the P-38 could be seen in front of a real P-47 Thunderbolt - nicknamed ‘the jug’ by World War II pilots.

An aircraft named ‘Yippee’
The shiny polished-metal finish model got us thinking about alternatives to traditional camouflage for warplanes like this. And if you want something really different, the P-38 is a natch for bright vermilion, about as far away from the military look as you can get. The prototype for this paint job is ‘Yippee’, a P-38J that was the 5000th Lightning built, serial number 44-23296. It received the special finish - plus signatures of hundreds of factory workers - to mark the occasion in May 1944. After the publicity pix were taken, Yippee was drafted back into service, and a month or two later was flying combat missions (minus the red paint) with the 475th Fighter Group against Japanese forces in the Pacific Theatre.
      
Visit IWM Duxford here.

See P-38 models here.

The pictures show, top to bottom:
1, 2  Polished-metal P-38 model at Duxford, P-47 behind.
3, 4  Yippee publicity pictures, taken in 1944.
5  Loading a P-38 with fresh ammo.