I knew that Canberras had been used in the 1956 Suez Campaign, the 1990-91 Gulf War, the 1995-96 Bosnia affair and the Operation Telic, the 2003 Iraq war. This book showed me a number of facets of the Canberra’s career as the longest lasting RAF aircraft, from the first production in 1951 to the retirement of the PR.9s in 2006. Yes, 55 years. The Canberra replaced Lancasters, Lincolns and Washingtons (B-29s) and was itself superseded by Jaguars and Tornadoes.

There were actually three Canberra missions; tactical bomber, nuclear bomber and photo-reconnaissance.

This book follows only the RAF Canberras, not the American (B-57), Argentina, Australia, Chile, Ecuador, Ethiopia, France, India, New Zealand, Peru, Rhodesia, South Africa, Sweden, Venezuela, West Germany, or Zimbabwe.

I learned that Canberras had been deployed to protect Kuwait from invasion by Iraq, but this was in 1961.

How many times have you sanded away the detail on a model and then had to rescribe it by hand? Well over the past several months Eduard has released several photo etch templates of different shapes to make your scribing a little easier. This set is one of those and it is used for access panels.

The set comes on one photo etch fret, but then can be cut down into three separate templates that will then conform to the rounded surfaces of your model kit. To get the examples of what the different panels look like, I chucked a needle in my pin vise and just started working around the template lightly at first and increasing pressure to get depth in the scribing. Once this was accomplished I sand the raised edges and then applied a wash to show off the new panel.

Let me first start off by saying this is not my normal scale for figures. I have been building 1/72nd and wargame scale figures for a short time and even some larger Super Hero kits but these are the first guys in 1/35th scale I have completed since a poorly painted 25 lber crew I did some 30 years ago, so please be gentle on any comments about the paint jobs. Thank-you.

OK, what comes in the box? Well, when I read WWII US Truck Crew I am thinking some guys for a Duece and a half but the artwork on the cover shows them sitting in a Jeep (oops, can I say that) and that would be the ideal vehicle for this set.

The first thing that struck me was the really relaxed poses. These guys look like they could be in a vehicle at rest or moving sedately down a nice dirt road, behind the lines.

Set 3 of the Eduard Photo etch set for the Revell U-505 submarine in 1/72 scale consists of detail for the hull. I’m not a “PE guy” but as with Part 2 of the Eduard sets, when asked, I accepted the challenge since I had the opportunity to build the sub.

This set consists of one sheet of brass. Although the instructions do not show any removal of kit parts needed to install this set, I found that they adhere much better is you carefully remove the detail of the kit before gluing on the PE. It mostly consists of removing rivet detail.

I cut the parts from the fret with a sharp #11 blade and sanded them smooth with a sanding stick. The instructions are clear and the parts fit perfectly. This would be a great “first try” at using photo etch if you haven’t done so before.

My thanks to IPMS/USA and to Eduard for the opportunity to review this subject.

For those readers not familiar with this series of publications, they are published by Ampersand Publishing, the firm responsible for the excellent Military Models in Review (MMiR) armor modeling magazine edited by Pat Stansell, one of my favorite magazines. As the title suggests, each issue of Allied-Axis contains a number of photo journal articles covering various aspects of the Second World War. The issue under review today contains three separate articles. For the most part, each page of any given issue is devoted to a single photograph, with an appropriate written caption. Thus the detail contained in each photograph is extremely good, due to its size. For the most part, the clarity of each photograph varies from good to superb, depending on the quality of the original print used. The Journal paper quality utilized is also very good.