Rommel’s Ride

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The German war reporter Fritz Lucke descried the AEC Dorchester as; “An armored box as big as a bus, on a giant balloon tires as big and fat as the undercarriage wheels of a Junkers transport plane.  The walls are windowless and painted in blue-grey camouflage shades.  Only the driver and his co-driver have windshields, protected behind armored visors”.

Based upon the Matador, The AEC “Dorchester”, the name coined by the British, was used by the British armored formation from 1941 onward through the 1950’s as a radio and command vehicle. During the desert campaign of WWII, at least three of these cars were captured by German forces and presented to Rommel’s HQ.  Renamed “Mammoths” by the Germans, the first two vehicles most likely were captured from the British 2nd armored division.  Upon seeing the captured vehicles Rommel is reported to have said; “Booty is permissible I assume, even for a general”. The Germans named one of the vehicles “Moritz” and the other “Max”, after children’s fairy tale figures.  Max is the subject of this article.

 

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Pulling Power – Holt 75 Tractor

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 I recently took a bit of a break from my usual modeling subjects, those being armor, armored cars, and other types of earthly vehicles and instead dabbled in the world of those winged things, specifically a couple of WW1 aircraft.  It was a nice and needed change of pace.  One of the takeaways from that experience was the process of working on the many subassemblies, each as a separate little jewel of a model – from construction through painting and even weathering – and then moving onto the next element until finally it’s brought all together.

This now brings me to this current project, Roden’s release of the Holt 75 tractor.  As with so many early 20th-century war machines, the Holt 75 began its career in civilian service as an agricultural tractor but came into its’ own while being utilized during the construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct system beginning in 1909.  With the outbreak of WW1, there was a need for heavy prime movers to haul around the Queens of the Battlefield, the heavy artillery pieces.  Durable, able to maneuver over uneven terrain, and readily available, the British War Department placed orders for the tractor, of which some 2000 saw service with the British, French and American forces during the course of the war.

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Flying Dutchman : Fokker DVII

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When World War I ended in 1918, the Armistice required, among other things, that Germany turns over 1,700 warplanes, including “all D.VII’s.” Thus did the Allies compliment the boyish Dutchman whose highly maneuverable fighter plane, (the Fokker D.VII) boasted machine guns that could fire through a whirling propeller without hitting it. And thanks to the inventive Anthony Fokker and the Fokker D.VII, German aces terrorized Allied pilots in the closing months of the war; and the victors wanted to monopolize that fearsome technology.

Fokker was surely some kind of genius. He taught himself to fly, then to build flying machines.. This was in 1911, when he was 21, just eight years after the Wright Bros. invented powered flight. His ambition took flight as well.  Upon the onset World War I, he applied for German citizenship because that was a requirement if he was to sell aircraft to the German air force. During the First World War, the Dutchman Anthony Fokker built airplanes first at his factory located at the Johannisthal airfield, near Berlin. In 1913 he moved to Schwerin. During these years, many types were designed and build there, among which was the famous ‘Eindecker’ series, and the Dr.I triplane. At the end of 1917, Fokker was out of the picture as a supplier for fighter aircraft. This is the time where the story of the D.VII starts.

 

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Mono-Wing & a Prayer

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Professor Hugo Junkers was one of the great revolutionaries in the history of aviation development.  Junkers became a professor of mechanical engineering at Aachen University in 1897, where he remained until 1912, after having invented and patented gas engines, heaters, and a calorie meter among other inventions. He went full-time into aeronautical work in 1912 at age 50, when he became convinced that the future of aviation lay in the development of all-metal aircraft of advanced design, such as flying wings.  Unfortunately for Junkers, two years later war broke out and the only way he could obtain the necessary funding for his work was to develop warplanes, a task he personally hated.

In 1915, Junkers created the world’s first practical all-metal aircraft design, the Junkers J.1, known as the “Blechesel” (Sheetmetal Donkey), which first flew in January 1916.  This was eventually developed into an armored ground attack airplane that was virtually impervious to ground fire when it appeared during the great 1918 Offensive.

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God is Great

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God is GoodDispatch Report by John Cantlie (Independent Reporter) – The Telegraph.

The sound of the caterpillar tracks could be felt as much as heard, a deep rumble that sent a rattle through windows and a tremble of fear through the guts. Then we saw them. Huge Soviet-made T72s, accompanied by troop carriers driving slowly into town, extra plates welded onto the sides to deflect rocket-propelled grenades. It was just after 9.30am, and the tanks were coming to Saraqeb.

“Light the tires!

The rebels of the Free Syrian Army in Saraqeb, a farming town of 30,000 in northern Syria, are better organized than many in the surrounding Idlib province. Squaring themselves away into formation around the central marketplace, they poured petrol on to truck tires and lit them sending plumes of thick black smoke into the air, obscuring the sun and – hopefully – the tank gunners’ visibility.

 

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