Yes, it’s unconventional. As previously stated, HG wanted to do it to give me a glimpse of what the finished A/C will look like.
I trust his judgment. He’s already done so many things that I consider daring – such as drilling out the fuselage windows and installing form-fitting, self-made vacuform substitutes, and scratch-building major components of the landing gear – that I’m in “no worries” territory about this.
Gotta keep the client happy if you want the checks coming in…
MORE TAIL DETAIL
These two small shots merit a separate post because they show decals with re-scribed rivets.
Remarkable, and still not done.
GREY STARS AND WHITE BARS
Well, the plan to use this decal sheet
and to place the grey stars over the national insignia decals with the white bars and red borders
didn’t work. The grey star tips extended onto the red borders. They were simply too big. So, HG had to spray the stars grey after some carefully applied masking over the already applied insignia. This was done after a clear coat of “varnish” was applied to them.
The grey paint was hand mixed. Yeah, it’s “close enough.”
It turned out well on the stbd. side
But HG experienced some problems on the port side when a part of the decal lifted through the varnish.
However, it won’t surprise you at this point to see that he fixed the problem.
“Not as easy as it looks,” and it didn’t look easy to begin with!
I’ve seen many, many B-17 models on the internet, but none that have this exquisite added touch. The model is a first on that basis alone, I think (though I could be wrong).
The 427th Squadron of the 303rd Bomb Group had “GN” as the squadron code, followed by the letter “V” on this aircraft for Luscious Lady’s ID. On this build, the final letters will have to await completion of the forward fuselage, now masked off as you can see on the above photo. But at least we have “an idea how the final model will look.”
It’s a true pleasure seeing what I’ve dreamed about for decades come to fruition on a 1/48 3D surface!
HG will have to tell us what “the next exciting chapter” is going to be.
HG, what kind of masking tape did you use on the star and bar? Would be intersting for me to know, because sometimes I also have to spray paint over a decal and cover some parts (but for the guys of the other army postal service number … ). I have used Parafilm for that.
REMEMBER THESE?
HG will be painting the cowling interiors and cowl flap interiors a dark aluminum per specs. As for the engines, he and I will "go through all the fine details one by one. Stem to Stern."
But that will be after he returns to the fuselage to complete the paint job there.
Following that, the custom wing attachment sections in the above picture serve as a reminder that it won’t be too long before he actually puts the wings on!
I am beginning to think he actually will get this done by end of the year. It’ll be time for LL’s coming-out party.
I figure I’ve worked, watched, and waited long enough.
Now you’ve done it! You don’t want me to hold forth on the first time I saw this and why it had such an impact on me, do you? 
Share brother, share
1:40 time mark as used in your book
Interesting read about the actual USAAF bomb group Twelve O’Clock High was modeled after.
Ok, I will try to be brief, but I know I won’t succeed.
Twelve O’Clock High – the book but especially the film – has been a major influence on my life. The movie came out in 1949, the same year I was born.
To understand the film’s significance for me you have to know that I am the son of an Air Force pilot. My Dad went into the Army Air Forces at the very end of WWII, too late to get involved in the shooting part, but not too late to serve as a flight engineer with a C-47 troop carrier unit in Korea and China as part of the occupation forces there.
After his discharge, he went to college on the G.I. Bill and decided to apply for a reserve commission in the USAF. He was accepted and called up for active duty during the Korean War. Not one content with half measures, he applied for flight training and was accepted. My earliest years were spent at MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa, Florida; Bainbridge Air Base in South Georgia, where he had initial flight training in T-6s (Class 53-C); and Vance Air Force Base in Enid, Oklahoma, where he underwent multi-engine training in B-25s.
His first operational flying unit assignment was at Turner Air Force Base, Albany, Georgia, where he flew KB-29s as a rookie aircraft commander.
While there he rubbed shoulders with many still-serving Eighth Air Force veterans, and at one point he met General Frank Armstrong, “who was the inspiration for the main character in the novel and subsequent film, Twelve O’Clock High.” So, I know Dad greatly admired and respected the 8AF combat veterans he encountered there.
And it was there, at the Base Theater, where he took me to see the film. I must have been all of six years old. I remember him “briefing me” about the film and what it was about before we went, and I was absolutely enthralled watching it. But when he asked me what I thought about it afterward, I drew all the wrong lessons, saying something perfectly jejune like, “Boy, that showed how we really beat the Germans, didn’t it?”
It was then that I experienced a true father-son teaching moment, an event that leaves an indelible mark on a small boy. Dad got serious and said something like, “Actually Son, the movie was about how hard the war was. The Germans were very tough enemies, and very good at fighting. The Germans could have won. The movie was about how rough it was on the Americans flying those B-17s, how many people we lost, and what it cost to win. You should always remember how brave the young men were flying those B-17s, and respect them for the sacrifices they made.”
This was sobering stuff for a six-year-old! Even at that age, it opened my eyes to some of the realities of war. More than that, it permanently shaped my perception of the Eighth Air Force and the men who flew the long, hard, unescorted missions into Germany in 1943, for Dad mentioned that the last mission in the film was really about Second Schweinfurt, “Black Thursday” on October 14, 1943, and the ball bearing factories there.
In simple terms, my father was my hero: how much greater in stature then were his heroes, the mythic men who flew Flying Fortresses over Germany?
As I grew older, a great desire to learn more about these men grew within me. I became an avid reader of everything I could get my hands on about the air war over Europe, and especially the strategic bombing campaigns of the Eighth, Ninth, and Fifteenth Air Forces and RAF Bomber Command. But the Eighth’s B-17 war was the one that captured my interest the most, especially First Schweinfurt (and Regensburg) on August 17, 1943, and Second Schweinfurt two months later, raids with all the reckless courage and carnage of Picketts’ Charge at Gettysburg. Inevitably, I wondered about the issue that lies at the heart of Twelve O’Clock High: the Group Flight Surgeon, “Doc” Kaiser’s search for an answer to the question, “How much can a man take?”
Inevitably, a parallel question emerged. How much could I have taken as a B-17 crewman in England in 1943? Would I have “measured up?”
It’s the old St Crispin’s Day conundrum in Shakespeare’s Henry V (Act 4, Scene 3):
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
How could I ever know? No one is a time traveler, yet we do know that this question of “manhood” bedevils generations of males. How else to explain re-enactors who pick a period of military conflict that has captured their imagination, so much so that they dress up in period uniforms and pose as Roman legionnaires, soldiers of the Napoleonic wars, combatants in the American Civil War, and of course those in WWII itself, to name just a few? And, you know, how else does one explain why men in their fifties, sixties, and seventies still make model airplanes and strive to get every single detail just right?
Of course, the question stayed with me in my teens, twenties, and early thirties as well, long past the age of the average Eighth Air Force airman. But then, just when I had given up on any hope of answering the question for myself, Providence intervened and gave me the opportunity to meet many of the veteran airmen who were there, and who were at an age where they were finally willing to speak frankly about their experiences, heroic and otherwise.
Half A Wing was the result, and I must have done something right because it has gone through two editions and is still in print 32 years after its initial publication in 1989. And in writing it I realized that not everyone is fated to fight at a critical point in history (nor should want to!) Ironically, I found a role for myself taken from right from the reels of Twelve O’Clock High: there was an older character in the film, a lawyer like me who served as a witness to the events and an advocate for the Bomb Group he was with.
Fellow Aeroscale member Stuart Gillespie knows exactly who I’m talking about. Scroll up two posts and click on the link he posted and you will see my favorite scene in Twelve O’Clock High!
Right there…jeez I don’t know where to start. Firstly you are one gifted writer, second I think you’ve probably got to the core of why we’re all here. Third I was really moved by some of the things you said particularly about you/your Dad, they chimed loudly with me too. He was groundcrew Lancasters, probably the only reason I’m here is he flunked the eyesight test despite being a Flt. Lt. (edit - I should add despite requesting two further tests) – he self-published his memoirs before he died & it’s both uplifting & horrifying what he saw inside tattered returned aircraft. We often used to talk about whether his generation was “special” or whether my/any other generation would have stepped up as well. Interestingly he firmly believed they were not special, they just had no other choice, and that any other generation would have done the same. I’m not altogether convinced… 
Thank you for sharing Brian D. O’Neill. It is a real honor to witness your passion and work. Now I return back to rereading your book… “This was as it should be, for all men and women should take note whenever old enemies reconcile with the wish that there be no more war.” B.D.O. page 419
And thank you. I am touched.
Thanks for the kind words, Tim. I really liked
Firstly you are one gifted writer, second I think you’ve probably got to the core of why we’re all here.
Re the writer compliment, the emphasis should be on “gifted,” as in something I inherited rather than something I’m responsible for on my own. Some people have natural athletic talent, which they can develop and improve through practice. But if you didn’t inherit the ability, no amount of practice will “make you a star.” And in our hobby, there is no way I could ever equal what HG is doing on this build. He has a talent for this that I can only admire.
Few modelers actually comment on “the core of why we’re all here,” but I think you hit the nail on the head. IMO a passion for modeling has to be rooted in a passion for the subjects one builds. And that comes from respect and admiration for the people who used the things we reproduce in miniature. It’s the desire for a tangible reminder of these objects (and people) one so respects.
Strange to say, but the books I’ve written about the 303rd Bomb Group aren’t “tangible” enough for me to have a sense of completeness about this lifelong interest. That will only happen, I think, when this model is done, coupled with knowing that I had some physical role in getting it done. We modelers are weird like that, I think.
Much respect to your late father. What a helluva job he had, cleaning out body parts from the aircraft he serviced. One universal element in all the interviews I did for the books was the praise the aircrew heaped on the ground crews. It was remarkable to me how many went out of their way to remark on this, and how emphatic they were about it.
My respect for the personnel of Bomber Command is equal to that of The Eighth. Here are perhaps my favorite works about Bomber Command.
The Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAztJVoBTKE&ab_channel=BarryWilkins I read somewhere that this contemporary color photographic account of a mission against Berlin was taken by the Station Commander, who knew the history had to be recorded. His footage formed the heart of the later documentary film. The title on YouTube says “1945” but I believe the mission took place either in late 1943 or early 1944.
I think the best history of BC is Max Hastings’s “Bomber Command.”
My two favorite novels from the period are Len Deighton’s “Bomber”
and the obscure but extraordinary “The Pitcher and the Well,” out of New Zealand,
which many thought was a work of non-fiction, but which is actually a novel.
Finally, the best Bomber Command memoir, IMO, is “A Thousand Shall Fall,” by Canadian Murray Peden. It’s a true classic.
Well, I wanna switch back to “the tangible reminder” that HG is laboring on now.
I can’t thank him enough.
Thanks Brian, but just before you get back to the build my Dad’s (very self-deprecating) memoir is indeed a rare insight into the sweat & heroics of ground-crew, although he was always quick to make no comparison with what aircrew went through. He first served with 57 Squadron at Scampton, alongside 617 Dambusters (shared maintenance facilities), witnessed the survivors’ return in the early morning, and participated in the all-in beer-fuelled Mess party before breakfast (Gibson atop a pile of chairs atop a table singing obscene songs) until it became clearer how many would never return.
But ground crew lived in danger too. By Feb 1945 he was with 504 Squadron at Waterbeach, their Lancs were powered by Bristol Hercules radial engines - I don’t think any kit manufacturer has or probably ever will replicate one. Anyhow, officers were allowed one day’s leave per month and by chance he swapped his with one of his equivalents on another flight of 6 aircraft, because they both had girlfriends and their respective schedules worked better with the swap on the 23rd. In his own (abridged) words;
“I returned to base around 22.00, at the gate immediately sensing an eerie & unnatural quiet. (On the way to the Mess) I approached the Squadron Leader (who was shocked to see him and said) “There was a roll-call this afternoon, you were recorded missing presumed killed.” At around 11.15 the whole base had been rocked by a tremendous explosion during bombing-up. Six Lancasters were totally destroyed and several others “Cat E write-offs”. No-one who survived knew what happened but the enormous crater where V Victor had stood indicated that either its 12,000lb Talllboy had dropped while being winched into the bay, or an electrician in the cockpit may have inadvertently released one of the 500lb bombs already in its clamps…It was deduced from the roll call that some 82 NCOs and airmen had perished, with only two injured in hospital…according to the Medical Officer over half the coffins contained (only) bricks, and smaller body parts in outlying areas of the airfield would be left ‘to let nature take its course’.”
Dad’s equivalent was one of the 82 – one chance out of the 28 days in the month that Dad happened to be absent. Although the swap was the other guy’s proposal Dad always felt guilty he’d agreed to it. He said this kind of event wasn’t unique by any means but they were never publicised, in fact he semi-seriously believed he’d breached the Official Secrets Act when he published in 1998. At that time Air Commodore Probert (who had asked him to write the book) said he’d stand bail if necessary. Dad was never 100% sure if he was joking.
I imagine the USAAF had their share of similar tragedies & perhaps they also were not/never reported?
Thank you, Tim. Is your Dad’s Memoir still available? Sounds interesting.
It must be very rare, I can’t recall exactly but the print run was only a few hundred & possibly only distributed in the UK – NB I mis-typed the publishing date above, now corrected:
War Memoirs of an Engineering Officer in Bomber Command
Bernard W. Martin
J & KH Publishing (1998)
ISBN: 1 900511 88 6
I tried to suggest a snappier title & use his own as a sub-title but he wouldn’t have it. It doesn’t show up anywhere on (my) Google search. He used to show me draft chapters for comment, I remember the passage where he described his first harrowing experience of seeing what flak did to aircraft & crew in a returned Lanc. He even remembered the name of what was left of the deceased tail-gunner and his turret. Two weeks after reading that, I happened to be in a bookshop and noticed a new book on Bomber Command. Dad had mentioned he was a bit light on illustrations…I swear, the book literally fell open on the page where there was a photograph of the shattered tail turret, captioned (correctly) as Sgt. Haynes’, just as Dad had remembered. Permission was granted to reproduce it.
