Airfix 1/72 scale Douglas Boston By Tim Cromartie

The box identifies the plane as a Boston III, the name given the A-20 by the British when the US sold it to them under the Lend-Lease Act. It seems more foreign crews used this aircraft than Americans – in addition to the RAF examples, 3,125 of them were sent to the Soviet Union.

Reportedly the Russians rarely commented on anything provided them by the Allies during WWII, but they liked the A-20 so much they asked for more. Entering service with the British and Soviets in 1941, the A-20 fought in every theater of the war. It was also the plane in which the first American aircrews attacked Occupied Europe on July 4, 1942, raiding Luftwaffe airfields in Holland. Designed as a fast attack bomber capable of 304 mph and able to carry 2,000 pounds of bombs, the A-20 was a departure in twin-engine bomber design in that it had a fairly narrow fuselage and no copilot, with a single pilot in the slender cockpit.

Type:
Three seat attack bomber
Powerplant:
Two 1,600 hp (1193-kW) Double Wright Cyclone R-2600-23 radial piston engines
Maximum Speed: 304 mph at 13,000 ft.
Cruising Speed: 272 mph
Weights:
15,984 lbs Empty
27, 200 lbs Maximum Overload
Dimensions:
Wingspan: 61 ft. 4 in.
Length: 48 ft.
Height: 17 ft. 7 in.
Wing Area: 464 sq. ft.
Armament:
Two (2) .303 Browning machine guns in the nose
Two (2) .303 Vickers machine guns in the rear gunner’s position
2,000 lb. Bomb Load

Airfix first released this kit in 1963 (mine is a 1973 reissue), and surprisingly, it features movable ailerons, tailplanes and rudder.

Ease of construction, long an Airfix hallmark, held for this kit as well. It’s a simple, standard Airfix mold, a relatively easy build. Having said that, it shows its age, from the decals to the not-so-detailed figures.

Before starting it, I scoured every source I could think of in search of an aftermarket detail set, but no go. Apparently no aftermarket goodies exist for the A-20 in 1/72 scale. A friend advised me to give it a pass and build AMT’s 1/48 version instead, but I like a challenge. This kit was built OOB with minor add-ons such as aftermarket decals, metal rod and wire.

With the exception of the clear plastic pieces, construction was simple and uncomplicated, standard Airfix quality. The figures, from 40-year-old molds, were predictably the most disappointing part of the kit, but I went ahead and used them. The cockpit consists of a seat and a joystick; there wasn’t even a decal for the instrument panel. Given that it was 72 scale, and I would not be able to see the instrument panel anyway once the model was finished, I moved on without guilt.

I had an early mishap when I decided to build the kit with the landing gear up, since Airfix provided a stand to give the modeler that option – something today’s modeling companies could take a lesson from. Although you have the option to display the plane in flight, the landing gear doors are a bit too small to glue them in place, closed, without them falling into the fuselage in the case of the nose gear doors, and the engine nacelles in the case of the main gear. I hit upon the bright idea to simply fill the empty nose wheel bay with Squadron putty, rest the cemented doors on top of the green blob protruding from the bay, and sand away the excess. Great plan in theory but I did not account for the plastic-eating qualities of the green putty, which is great filler for small gaps but should not be used in large quantities, either as a nose weight substitute or to fill large, poorly ventilated areas inside a plastic model. By the time I realized this the nose wheel doors were a write-off, and the fuselage beneath the cockpit had suffered some warping, most of which I was able to fix or hide. Picking out the semidried putty, I let the fuselage air out for three days in the open air, and proceeded to scratch-build a replacement nose wheel door from sheet plastic. With careful measurement and the use of Milliput putty, which is kind to plastic, I had the new door in place, sanded and painted in just a few days. Luckily I did not use Squadron putty to fill the space in the engine nacelles, but rather Permaplast. This stuff is great, being harder, moldable and devoid of any solvents - sort of like Play-Doh that never dries out. I was able to fill the nacelles with enough Permaplast to give the landing gear doors something to rest on without falling through until the glue attaching them to the nacelles in the closed position could dry.

Building the nacelles was simple enough, but I had to make extensive use of Squadron putty and liberal sanding to get them to fit flush with the wings, particularly the rear portion of both nacelles.

The cockpit, rear gunner’s position and nose are all covered by clear plastic. With the exception of the piece covering the rear gunner’s position, these pieces fit poorly, even after sanding and soaking in warm water. The clear plastic nose section was slightly warped, which I was only able to partially cure by the aforementioned methods. The cockpit canopy is too small by about a millimeter and some filler was required to close a slight gap just forward of the windshield. But it still was not quite tall enough.

The rear machine guns are a twin .303 Vickers arrangement, having fairly long barrels. Airfix duplicated this but I replaced them with stretched sprue, cut and painted to match the barrel dimensions and appearance.

I painted the A-20 with acrylics and enamel using a small sable brush. For the sand and spinach camouflage, I used Polly Scale acrylics, Chestnut Brown and British Dark Green. These are wonderful paints which I highly recommend – some water-based paints can be difficult to work with, particularly if you’re using a brush. The underside is Model Master enamel, Dark Gull Gray, FS36231, which I use as a standard on Allied warplanes.

With the exception of the roundels on the fuselage, which came with the kit, all decals are from an ESCI 1/72 aftermarket set for A-20’s and Lockheed Hudsons. I have depicted a Boston III of No. 107 Squadron, RAF, based in Norfolk in 1942. Some of the decals did not adhere well and required several coats of Decal Set and in one case a tiny amount of Elmer’s glue to lay flush with the surface of the aircraft.

A sage old modeler opined this was due to the fact that most decals adhere better to glossy paint rather than flat, and that for many military aircraft it may be better to airbrush the kit with Glosscoat or Future floor polish prior to putting on the decals, and following up with Dullcoat afterwards.

The scribe marks on the clear nose section were a bit weak, so I covered them with strips of masking tape to help with painting since I didn’t want to paint out the nose altogether, as was done with some versions of the A-20.

For the .303 caliber nose guns, I drilled holes in the gun port positions with a pin vise and glued in short lengths of brass rod with cyanoacrylate glue, then primed and painted them with Model Master Gunmetal.

I used 1/16-inch wire, the thinnest I could find at my local hobby shop, for the radio aerial.

As I neared completion, the plane looked a bit dull, so I decided to show some battle damage. Originally I didn’t intend the damage to extend to the Plexiglas nose, but after an unfortunate snafu with Testors’s Liquid Cement, the plan changed. This RAF Boston III is returning from a mission over Occupied France, where it had an unfortunate head-on encounter with a German Messerschmitt. The Plexiglas nose and part of the fuselage have been badly shot up, and the bombardier, while still alive, may not be long for this world. To me, this serves as a reminder that there were actual men who flew in these planes, who risked their lives and sometimes didn’t make it back home.

This is a simple kit and requires effort to find, being long out of production. It was a relatively easy build, the main challenge provided by trying to achieve a level of detail on a kit this old. By today’s standards, most of the clear plastic parts of the kit are a poor fit indeed. A smaller, if challenging alternative to AMT’s 1/48 version, but it’d be nice if Hasegawa or Tamiya would provide us with an updated 72nd scale offering.