HK Models B-17G Flying Fortress Late Production 1/32 Scale Model Aircraft

Quick look inside the box

[DavidRLentz-bi]

A nice look! Thanks!

As you might infer, I enjoy researching topics I find important, and exploring the issues behind my interests (e.g., military combat).

[DavidRLentz-bi]

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(Continued)

David R Lentz, Columbus, Ohio, USA (Monday, 8 July, 2024)

This, it seems to me (looking from afar, in both time and place), was Mr. Bush’s concern: the global economy writ large, and for an extended span of time. He might not have been able to untie that mad, chaotic snarl that dictator—in his early years had he known of but a handful: Hitler, Tojo, and shortly after their end, Stalin; years on, Pol Pot, Idi Amin. Now this one, resorting even to the horrors of war selfishly, avariciously to acquire his ends!—had drawn upon the world. He meant soon to have in hand a report of a closer assessment this creature (what could have brought this man to this place?), that he might learn further of his state of mind . . . .
At the sudden and increasing swirl of geopolitics clamouring against this Saddam Hussein and his deranged, blood-thirsty course of action, this despot surely ought to have recognised that he had bitten off more than he could chew. That gave Mr. Bush a glimmer of hope: that all this perhaps might resolve with no more fuss and bother, aside from the shouting and the posturing.
He new firsthand the twofold scourge of war: 1) seeing one’s comrades suffer horribly of grievous wounds or even the stark dread of death so soon, especially as a consequence of the senior figure’s actions or instructions, 2) or enduring the heart-stopping spectre of facing that very fate himself. At quite a young age had he come to know firsthand the chillingly close prospect in a direct encounter with war: twice, as a Navy aviator age 20 had he abruptly needed to ditch at sea his Grumman TBF-1 Avenger torpedo bomber somewhere in the unfathomable vastness of the South Pacific; accompanying him on those missions had been his two closest shipmates, their very lives his most solemn responsibility, where they together, soaked to the skin and adrift, waited in keenest apprehension: enemy aircraft might strafe them, sharks could prey upon them, Japanese warships might discover them to take them prisoner; or just thirst and hunger, for days and weeks. Even more, much of it unknown—for other vessels in the fleet to find and rescue them.
Yes, at the prospects of young folk meeting in battle the unspeakable peril of excruciating agony or worse, a cruelly truncated existence, for their comrades or themselves, his heart pounded in his chest in his palpable reluctance to send far from home into a real chance for young folk to face those horrid risks circumstances had required of him to endure, for the machinations and actions of Hitler and Tojo.
President Bush’s mentor in governance and leadership, and his predecessor in office, had earned an unsavoury reputation as a war monger, which the current commander in chief in his quieter manner readily would have disdained out of hand. Of far greater impact upon him, to his forlorn sorrow and painful shock, was his having to send into the fight anyone—though he had known none of them—to their risk of serious injury or painful death.
This is the background of Mr. Bush, some characterising his reluctance for assertive military intervention in Kuwait as feckless dubiety. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom advocated for a more robust approach, even to quietly admonishing him not to “get all wobbly on me.”
Saddam Hussein’s manner and rhetoric showed his retrenching his stance. Mrs. Thatcher took this to show Mr. Bush that it was less a matter of aiding one small country as it was to stabilise world markets, which had become jittery over the prospects of petroleum costs rising, stirring inflation, and availability declining, reducing productivity even as it increased pricing through scarcity, perceived and actual. Some even thought that the dictator soon would send his invaders deep into Saudi Arabia, to occupy that desert kingdom’s oilfields. A number of Muslim leaders and thinkers, especially in Iran, quietly had begun to doubt the faithfulness (despite his seeming piety) of this worldly schemer, this transactional operative.
Mr. Hussein evidently saw that he had begun an invasion that with this new status quo he would not be able to sustain for long. Even his neighbours objected. Endeavouring to forestall the west’s increasing outrage (the Arab world he for a time could discount, at least militarily) curling up all round to burning-scarlet animus, turned to temporising and playing for time, anticipating that the hawks in the legislatures of the various countries, after a few months would tire of it all, and quietly let the matter fade; by default would he have his prize, as well as avoid a catastrophically expensive war, all without firing a shot (if but metaphorically).
Mrs. Thatcher evidently convinced Mr. Bush that a strong defensive posture encompassing the Arab regions immediately peripheral to Kuwait would forestall any further rashness of this proven tyrant, nestled amongst bureaucratic totalitarians and theocracies—no democracy here! The USA in August 1990 implemented Operation: Desert Shield, with the participation of the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, etc., to create a barrier of well over 600, 000 service personnel (with hundreds of tanks and artillery, strike aircraft and bombers, warships and landing craft, etc.), under the overall command of the brawny, brilliant, pugnacious Gen. Norman H. Schwarzkopf, U.S. Army (even then had I seen that 190-cm, 120-kg [6’3”, 240 lb.] personage as “formidability personified”). He expressed in general terms his objective, if necessary, would be to “eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait”, making no pronouncements as to method.
Still, a truculent, boastful Saddam Hussein obstinately would not budge, apparently content to wait out the west and their allies of convenience of the region. To him, this new gambit of theirs was not so much a warning as a bluff: he knew well his people, and Arabs would not make war upon Arabs. The ostensible master of brinksmanship, however, so ludicrously miscalculated. No, not with President George H.W. Bush, but with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom. Already had the Iron Lady, as many on the international stage had thought of her, persuaded a cautious Mr. Bush to a more assertive posture. Now, with her patient erudition—she must have drawn from a wartime Sir Winston Churchill, the grand-master of leadership during such hostilities—the President now saw her view, that this bullying. plotting grasper ever seeking to enrich himself, was no true leader of the desert lands, but a self-styled warlord; and when challenged, revealed as a common gangland thug roiling in the mud with his own kind; in the final analysis, force and manipulation with the implied threat—the spectre—of ever-greater force, were all he knew. And the solution to such a mind set was the reluctant necessity of balancing the equation.
This gave us Operation: Desert Storm. (For poetic justice ought it to have been “Operation: Desert Sword”; however, someone must have recalled Gen. Schwarzkopf’s reputation during his service in the late 1960s as a major in the Vietnam War, from which he had acquired—earned?—the nickname of “Stormin’ Norman”.)
War is the most difficult undertaking of the human condition. Too often, though, its wagers bring their ambitions—glory and renown; or just avarice and power—not their hopes to end intolerable tyranny, their aspirations for a better international community of sovereign nations engaged in mutual trade, common growth, shared learning. Our leaders and thinkers have far better activities and purposes that we cooperatively, collaboratively could be doing with our citizens’ tax dollars.
Even so, the methods and the technology of war, especially at the level of combat in small units—platoon and battalion; squadron and wing; task force and mission group—where we can see troop movements into new territory encountering enemy occupiers; tanks engaging tanks; fighters confronting fighters; strike aircraft interdicting sneak attacks upon a platoon’s flank; a destroyer, a frigate, and a corvette depth charging a wolf-pack of elusive submarines, and so much more, fascinates me as little else . . . .
I express this keen interest through the better model kits we have today. My focus chiefly is on combat aircraft of the Second World War, ideally in 1:32nd-scale. Actually, I aspire to creating forced perspective aerial dioramas, where I place replicas of warbirds in different scales in a manner dramatising a dogfight among fighters, or a convoy of heavy bombers over a sprawling manufacturing complex . . . .