I’ve been eyeball deep in several Marine Corps related modeling projects lately, from Iwo Jima Shermans to OIF LAVs, my workbench is covered. But recently I’ve been doing a lot of digging into M67A2 flame tank operations in Vietnam and as a result, I had to build one. I’d heard that there were issues with the Dragon M67A2 release, so I went with the Takom M48A3 Mod B kit and member Jay Cruz helped me out with a spare Dragon gun tube he had.
When I set out to build this tank, I fully intended on building it as the sole surviving example of the M67A2 down at the Armor & Cavalry Collection at Fort Benning. I already hear a few people going “why are you using the Mod B kit, M67A2s weren’t Mod Bs”. In 72 out of 73 cases (as far as I can tell), you’d be correct. M67A2 flame tanks did not get the Mod B upgrades.
Except this one did. It is very likely that this was the only M67A2 to receive those upgrades, but it has the armored boxes around the taillights, reinforced fenders and the G305 cupola riser. So I’m building it as it currently sits.
Grafting the gun on to the Takom turret was a challenge. I took a lot of the kit mantlet cover parts and cut them to fit the smaller mantlet and fill in the space between gun shield and turret. Then tissue paper and white glue filled in the rest of the gaps and voila!
This kit was a lot of fun to build. I’ve got her in primer now and will be painting over the weekend. More to come!
Already have the M4A3(105) HVSS CB-H5 complete and on the shelf in my office. There is an M3A1 Satan on my workbench as well. One of my main projects here is a 1:1 M4A3 CB-H5 VVSS tank, which is what prompted all of this flamey stuff. POA-CWS-H5 was the Army designation. Navy and Marines called them CB-H5s or just flame tanks.
George Carlin: Think for a moment about the concept of the flamethrower. Okay? The flamethrower. Because we have them. Well, we don’t have them, the army has them. That’s right. We don’t have any flamethrowers. I’d say we’re [bleep] if we have to go up against the army, wouldn’t you? But we have flamethrowers. And what this indicates to me, it means that at some point, some person said to himself, “Gee, I sure would like to set those people on fire over there. But I’m way too far away to get the job done. If only I had something that would throw flame on them.” Well, it might have ended right there, but he mentioned it to his friend. His friend who was good with tools. And about a month later, he was back. “Hey, quite a concept!” WHHOOOOOOOOSSHHH! And of course the army heard about it, and they came around. “We’d like to buy about five hundred-thousand of them please. We have some people we’d like to throw flame on. Give us five hundred thousand and paint them dark brown. We don’t want anyone to see them.”
Glad to see the tube put to use! It was just collecting dust in my spares box (well, one of the many spares boxes), so now I can at least tell my wife that I don’t just hoard parts, but they actually have some use.
The flame tube also has vent holes about halfway down the length to help airflow and also for any backflow of flame to dissipate. There’s some really good footage of them demonstrating at Quantico in 1970 in our film archive which is held at the University of South Carolina.
