Allow me to start by thanking Pavla Models for their most generous contribution of numerous models for review by IPMS/USA.

Background

The Gloster G.40 Pioneer was the first British jet -- it is also known as the Gloster Whittle or the Gloster E.28/39. There were two aircraft built but the second crashed so this one, W4041/G, did all the testing from its first flight on 15 May 1941 until it was put on display in the London Science Museum in 1946.

I asked for this not because I am particularly interested in the aircraft but because I had just done the FROG version for the Classic British Kits SIG display at Scale Model World (Telford) in 2009. That kit is so bad that I felt I should have a better representation on my shelf. For those of you not familiar with the FROG kit, the wings and fuselage are two different scales and the two figures -- one sitting, one standing -- are also.

In the last several years, Kagero Publishing of Lublin, Poland has rapidly expanded, providing a host of publications for modelers. Its newest series is War Camera Photobooks. As the series suggests, it uses photographs from World War Two to illustrate, in this case, German Heavy Cruisers. With the recent release by Trumpeter of the Prinz Eugen and Admiral Hipper in 1/350 and 1/700 scales, this book is a timely release.

The lead article of this issue, and the cover feature, focuses on a spectacular diorama by Frank Bazin, which he calls Hill 112. It’s a historical vignette of a moment in time. It depicts the British thrust of July 10, 1944 in their vain attempt to break the German hold on Caen, a month after the Allies landed in France. Bazin’s diorama captures the intensity of the immediate aftermath of the British bombardment and is what all modelers should strive for in a diorama. His article focuses on three components of the diorama - the enhancements and weathering of the Tamiya Tiger I, the exquisite scratch built figures which populate the scene, and the foliage that dominates the hill top.