Yet more plastic models

I wrote a couple weeks ago about naval ship models I built and included some photos of the ships.

When I outed myself in having such a strange hobby, a couple old friends from college chimed in that they built similar models when they were kids, including a several who raved about models they built produced by a Japanese company called Tamiya.  Well I built some of them myself as well, both as a kid and as an adult, mostly about 10 years ago when I was working part-time while taking care of my folks.  Building models was a good distraction from watching them decline.  Here are some I built by Tamiya and other companies.

A vehicle invented for the US Army during the Second World War was the Jeep, a vehicle which has endured in modified forms to this day.  It was used by all of the Allies of the US, including the United Kingdom.  During the campaign fought in the North African deserts of Libya and Egypt, a new British Army organization, the Special Air Service, used Jeeps to raid German and Italian airfields and supply convoys. 

I have seen photos of jubilant crowds in the towns and cities liberated by the Allies in Western Europe during 1944 and 1945.  The soldiers of the Canadian Army were the principal liberators of the Netherlands.  I bought an old built jeep model as well as a couple set of figures, one of relaxing soldiers and one of female civilians and built a diorama of a celebration with Dutch women and Canadian soldiers.  To this day a special relationship exists between Canada and the Netherlands thanks to the gratitude of the Dutch for the Canadian Army's sacrifice fighting for their freedom and to the personal connection between the countries:  close to 2000 Dutch women married their Canadian liberators and moved to Canada after the war.

The Battle of the Bulge began with an overwhelming German attack on American positions in Belgium in December 1944.  The Americans were caught by surprise and retreated.  Eventually the US Army rallied and defeated the German attackers.  The diorama below shows Americans running away from an early German attack.  I call it "Get the Hell Outa' Here!"  

The United States entered the Second World War barely prepared to fight a major war.  The US Army was partially equipped with equipment from the First World War (like the helmets below) and with already ineffective weapons (the small anti-tank gun with its crew).  The soldiers below are either on maneuvers before the US entered the war or perhaps fighting the Japanese in late 1941 in the Philippines.

I have built a couple other similar models, shown below (clockwise from lower right: US M3 light tank, UK Bren Gun Carrier, German Panzer II, German Panzer I command tank).  I have plans for creating dioramas featuring them in scenarios in North Africa and Europe. 

As mentioned earlier, I've been drawn to ship models.  Below are a few ship models that caught my interest in addition to those I've posted earlier.  

This year is the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, a campaign fought between the air forces of Nazi Germany and the United Kingdom to secure air superiority over Great Britain for an invasion by Germany. The best fighter plane of the British Royal Air Force was the Submarine Spitfire.   One factor in the eventual British victory was the recovery of experienced fighter pilots when shot down over the English Channel by Air Sea Rescue launches.  Airfix models of a Spitfire and a rescue launch are shown below.

The British TV Presenter James May of Top Gear fame did a series of programs featuring toys of his youth and efforts to make them relevant today by, for example, building a set of toy train tracks between two towns several miles apart and having a race between two toy trains,  having a slot car race on an actual race car track, and building an actual house out of Lego.).  The first episode featured Airfix models, with the central focus being making a life size Airfix model of the Spitfire.  It's worth a watch.  Parts of it are pretty funny and others can make one sniffly, and not just from sniffing model airplane glue.

On the eve of the twentieth century, the United States liberated the Philippines from colonial rule of Spain and then became the new colonial rulers of the country. The fight in the Philippines began with the American fleet in East Asia led by the cruiser USS Olympia bombarding the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay.  The ship would later carry the body of the Unknown Soldier from France to Washington DC in 1921.  The ship is preserved in Philadelphia because of its place in US naval history.

In 1940, the United States transferred 50 destroyers constructed during the First World War to the United Kingdom in exchange for use of British bases.  The destroyers replaced ships lost in the first year of the war.  One of them was the USS Buchanan, renamed the HMS Campbeltown.  The ship is famous for being filled with explosives and crashing into a dry dock in German-occupied France.  The ship exploded and made the dry dock useless for the German Navy.  I've written about the ship and model before, and it is shown below as it appeared when it was transferred to the Royal Navy.

Two of the more famous ships of the Second World War were the German battleship Bismarck and the British Battle Cruiser HMS Hood.  Both sank in 1941 with great loss of life.  When the last of the three survivors of the Hood died a dozen years ago, his obituary was featured in The Economist.  These are two Airfix 1/1200 models of the two ships, Bismarck in front, Hood in rear.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s and thus was witness to the most amazing human technological achievement in history, apart from the medical revolution of the 19th century, the effort to land on the moon.  I followed the Apollo missions, read what I could about the moon, and even built models of the Apollo rockets and spaceships.  Ten years ago I bought models of the Apollo lunar module and the command model as well as the Apollo launch vehicle (shown with the third stage open to display the LEM) and the launch vehicles of the Gemini and Mercury missions, all built in the same scale, 1/200 to compare sizes (from left: Saturn V Apollo, Titan II Gemini, Atlas Mercury, and Redstone Mercury).

The National Air and Space Museum sponsored a celebration of the landing on the moon last year.  It included a projection show on the Washington Monument that was stunning.

Part of my interest in these models is in the history they represent.  Apart from the rocket models, all of the above as well as most of the ships described in my previous post are of World War II subjects, my interest kindled as a kid because my father was a disabled veteran of the war.  I enjoyed studying world history in high school and college.  My first job after I graduated from college was a civilian engineer for the US Navy, so my curiosity in the naval history has ebbed and flowed for most of my life.  When I went back to school to study music, I studied music history extensively in addition to performing.  

I still enjoy reading history in general.  And building the models creates more connections with the history portrayed.  To be honest, my adult model building efforts are much better those I completed as a kid, as I hardly painted anything back then, as models were sold as toys for kids and made in more or less the right colors: grey for ships, brownish for vehicles, white for planes.  I still find it fun to build and especially finish a model, as the closure is like finishing reading a book or singing a piece of music.

So who wants to build some models?