Developed in the years following World War 2 to fulfill Naval Aviation’s “Heavy Attack” capability, the Douglas Aircraft design team under the legendary Ed Heinemann created the jet powered, swept winged A-3 (originally designated A3D-1) Skywarrior to carry nuclear destruction to the Soviet Union from the decks of the Navy’s new Midway class carriers. Replacing the little loved North American AJ Savage, what started out as a single purpose “heavy” bomber soon became one of the Navy’s most “multi-purpose” aircraft in its inventory. When its nuclear delivery mission was taken over by the A-5 Vigilante, the A-3 found itself with a new mission list that eventually included, “iron” bombing, aerial refueling, photo reconnaissance, electronic jamming and counter-measurers, electronic surveillance, high speed COD and VIP transport, and navigation training.

Thanks to Plus Model for sending this excellent and very unique diorama accessory from the Easy Line product series for review and thank you IPMS Reviewer Corps for letting me review it! I am very appreciative of the chance to contribute back to the scale-modeling community. I had a great time building a very well done “micro” kit that was nothing short of pure fun.

Osprey is a publishing house in the United Kingdom that should be familiar to most modelers, historians, and military history buffs. They have several ongoing series that tackle a variety of topics, including famous campaigns in military history. The 278th volume of their campaign series tackles the capture of the French port city of Cherbourg in June, 1944. The author of the volume is one of Osprey’s most prolific, Steven J. Zaloga. The illustrator of the color plates is Steve Noon. At 93 pages of text, this is a fairly standard length for this series.