Airfix 1/72 Henschel HS-123 in Nationaist Chinese colors

 

       I swear this is the last 1930's bird for a while! After the last two kits I needed to fall back on something that I knew would be a simple and pleasant build; as I was out of Revell Polikarpov I-16s I rummaged around in the Heap of Embarassment until I found this oldie but goodie. I have built this kit twice in the last couple of years; once as a Luftwaffe dive-bomber and again as a fighter from the Spanish Civil War.  I knew this would be, as we used to say, a "shake and bake" much unlike the last couple of models I had worked on. Assemble was a breeze, no putty needed at all and just some light sanding on the seams and a mold-line or two to clean up. I had decided to build this one as a Nationalist Chinese aircraft because the paint scheme was simple and my Chinese Air Force needs to buff it's bombing capabilities.

 

I remembered to snap a pic of the box (for once)

 

the kit is from 1970, I had been dragging this one around for quite a while apparently

 

I could have painted it the same way that I had painted the Dewoitine D-501 that I finished a while back in that insane squiggle-pattern, I chose the much simpler green over light blue

 

this aircraft was built as a backstop in case the competition that 

was won by the JU-87 failed to provide a suitable dive-bomber

 

 

production was curtailed when it was clear that the JU-87 was going to meet specs 

 

but the HS-123 was pressed into service on the Russian Front where it's simplicity and ruggedness made it quite popular, so much so that Generalfeldmarschall Wolfram Karl Ludwig Moritz Hermann Freiherr von Richthofen (cousin to the famous Red Baron and an ace is his own right) wanted to have it put back into production in 1942

 

the Chinese bought twelve of these and used them in the Second Sino-Japanese War

 

 

 

 

 

 

brothers from another mother, Ernst Udet bought a Curtiss Goshawk and demonstrated its capabilities as a dive-bomber for Hitler, thus  starting the German craze of making everything into a dive bomber

 

the similarities are striking, 

they flew side-by-side over the skies of China in the early days of WW2