Scale Military Modeller International 12/2013

The Tiran 5 was a product of the iDF's ability to re-engineer equipment recovered from the battlefield, and during 1967 when they fought battles against their surrounding Arab neighbours in what became known as the 'Six-Day War' many Russian built T-55's were captured. These tanks were later modified with upgraded parts, including the 105mm L5 guns, better diesel engines, additional turret storage and additional machine guns, and these became known as the 'Tiran 5' and were then used in action during the 'Yom Kippur War' of 1973 fighting against their previous owners! They continued to be used well into the 1980s before being retired for training purposes and later sold on to South America and the Lebanese Army where they are still in use today. The Tamiya kit comes in a sand coloured plastic rather the usual green of the original T-55 release, and contains pretty much most of the original sprues plus a couple of additional ones that make up the new parts. So, lets begin. We start with the lower hull by adding the axles and ensuring they are aligned, and we follow this with the front and rear hull plates and details, and some blanking parts are included for the rear hull where the original fuel tank carriers went.

download

Scale Aviation Modeller International 12/2013

The Saab what? Those of you who have bought this magazine for the Mustang on the cover be of good heart. There is indeed an article in here on the A-36 Apache - Mr Dick Clark's excellent rendition of the Italeri issue of the Accurate Miniatures' tooling, a kit as good today as it was when first released round about the time I gave up photographing the sad remnants of the railway network and took up modelling after a lapse of some twenty years or more. This article is a shameless piece of signposting for our excellent new Datafile release, which I can thoroughly recommend, but is also present here as it is a fine out-of-the-box build of an up-to-the-minute kit release by one of the mainstream names you can expect to see on the High Street shelves - if any such still exist in this day and age. Mr Clark's work also appears in sister magazine Model Aircraft this month, where his Do 17/Defiant/Bf 109 trio make for a cracking read, and I am only disappointed that I couldn't feature it in both titles.

download

Model Aircraft 12/2013

In 1911, the Greek Government appointed French specialists to form the Hellenic Aviation Service. Six Greek officers were sent to France for training, while four 'Farman' type aircraft were ordered. All of the six graduated from the Farman school in Étampes near Paris, but only four served subsequently in aviation. The first military flight was made on May 13,1912 by Lieutenant Dimitrios Kamberos and in June he flew 'Daedalus', another Farman aircraft that that had been converted to a seaplane, setting a new world average speed record of 68mph and with it the foundations of Greek Naval Aviation. During September of the same year, the Greek Army also fielded its first squadron - the 'Aviators Company'. On October 5, 1912, Kamberos flew the first Greek combat mission, a recce flight over Thessaly on the first day of the Balkan Wars, and during the same day a similar mission was flown by German mercenaries in Ottoman service in the Thrace front against the Bulgarians. The Greek and the Ottoman missions flown during the same day were the first military aviation combat missions in a conventional war. In 1930, the Greek Aviation Ministry was founded, establishing the Air Force as the third branch of the Armed Forces, and eventually the Hellenic Army Air Service and Hellenic Naval Air Service were amalgamated to form the Hellenic Air Force.

download

Military Illustrated Modeller 12/2013

The Tiger ll's first experience of combat was with the s.H.Pz.Abt. 503 (503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion) 1st Company, during the Battle of Normandy. The King Tigers of the '503 were up against Canadian forces during 'Operation Atlantic', which ran in conjunction with the British 'Operation Goodwood' of July 18th 1944. This sequence of well known photos shows an abandoned Tiger II (Porsche turret) of s.H.Pz. Abt. 503 and the Bergepanther that was towing it, after having broken down on the N816 Trun road (D916 today) near Vimoutiers. In the two very similar images it is being passed by a column of Canadian vehicles that includes a Universal Carrier, Staghound armoured car, Jeeps, trucks and a military motorcycle, possibly a Triumph 3HW. The tank is zimmerited and would have been painted in the standard three-colour camouflage of Dark-Yellow, Olive-Green and Red-Brown. The ladder on the side that distinguishes this particular vehicle might have been used for observation or simply for the crew to climb their Tiger's imposing hull in order to get aboard. The scene is ideal for dioramas as all the vehicles are available in 1:35 kit-form and any combination could be used to recreate the Canadian column and abandoned German AFVs.

download