"The Spitfire Eyeball": Modeling Now and Then
By Scott Kruize
I'm indebted to all the people who won the Second World War for the Allies -- as we all are. Among the many warriors for Our Side was my father, Henry Kruize, Jr. He joined right out of the Illinois Institute of Technology and became a radio operator in the United States Army Air Force. He was sent to the remote 14th Air Force base near Kunming in China. He survived flying over 'The Hump' and being bombed by the Japanese... to return home safely again to the good ol' U.S. of A. Witness my existence; thanks, Dad!
But it seems now I owe a particular debt of gratitude to a Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot and his eye doctor. I still remember the first Spitfire kit I built: Aurora's 1/48th version, molded in light metallic blue. I didn't question the authenticity of colors the kit manufacturers used in making their 'gems' at age 12,. It was just assumed kit manufacturer picked a more or less authentic plastic color. All we kid modelers had to do was put a little black on the tires, some brown and tan on the pilot figure. And maybe add some red trim around the tips of the flying surfaces. I only got into painting a plane all over much later when I encountered the new Airfix-72® series in the late 60s, all uniformly molded in dull silver plastic. I learned much later that some Spitfires, employed for high-speed reconnaissance, were finished and so-called 'PRU Blue'. The fighters in Royal Air Force front-line service wore subdued camouflage: low visibility greens and browns. And Royal Navy Seafires, subdued shades of gray.
By then, I was already resentful of an unspoken -- but obviously powerful -- Rule in the Karma of the Universe: namely, "The Spitfire Gets All The Glory!" The Hawker Hurricane -- three-fifths of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, later serving around the world, often two years before the arrival of any Spitfire -- gets brief mention as a peripheral, also-ran -- if it is described at all!
See: in 6th Grade, via the Tab Book Club, I got Paul Gallico's The Hurricane Story. Weak perhaps, as a technical and historical reference, it inspired my choice of favorite WWII fighter -- a stance I maintain to this day.
Long after those early-to-late 60s kit builds, I learned the odd but essential role the two fighters played in the development of modern plastic surgery. The Hurricane and Spitfire both had header tanks, forward of the cockpit just above the Merlin engine. Attacking a Luftwaffe bomber drew return fire from desperate gunners. Hitting that header tank with even one machine-gun bullet would set the cockpit alight. British pilots suffered horrendous burns to both face and hands.
Doctor McEnroe from Australia, determined to help them, developed new techniques to repair their faces and hands. It was all very painful, with lots of surgical sessions, and the men took to calling themselves "The Guinea Pigs". But the Doctor's teams' efforts made substantial progress on their patients... if not back to like-new condition, at least to have workable hands again, and faces that wouldn't terrify any happenstance observer. We now take for granted how capable modern plastic surgery can be... but it all started with those poor "hotshots"!
I know I'm taking a long and circuitous route to explain the first sentence in the second paragraph, but here it is: besides whatever else was wrong with him, a Spitfire pilot had some fragments in his eyes. His doctor identified them as shards of acrylic -- a.k.a. 'bulletproof glass'! -- from the canopy or a goggle lens. The odd thing? The body was not reacting in the usual frantic ways of rejecting foreign intrusion: there was no reddening, swelling, weeping or fever. That doctor realized that acrylic did not set off a biological reaction...which led him to thinking that acrylic lenses could be substitutes for eyes with cataracts -- which doctors had been trying to cure for at least two millennia.
So last month, after my ophthalmologist told me that my cataracts were serious enough to make everything look dimmer, and worsen my nearsightedness, he cut out my right graying natural lens and put in an off-the-shelf acrylic one. The surgery was surprisingly painless, leaving my mind clear to ponder what would happen after the six hours, when I could take off all the heavy bandaging.
I was astounded to find everything bright and clear, even at a distance! What a change since late high school, when I kept sitting closer and closer to the front of the classroom to read the blackboard, lacking any presence of mind to realize why. I expect many readers are Aging Baby Boomers like me, able to remember what "blackboards" are. Likely also experiencing the degradation of vision in aging eyeballs with their cataracts. Well, thanks to that Spitfire pilot's doctor and all his hard working colleagues since, 'aftermarket replacements parts' are readily available. They cost $$, but not "Guinea Pigs" suffering.
Again, I'm indebted to all the people who won the Second World War, and now I have a new reason. My animosity for that Karmic Law has been ameliorated, if not eliminated. I'll gladly talk further about this to any readers I might meet, whom I can see from quite a distance!
About the same time as I started modeling, I started reading Science Fiction novels. I enjoyed the authors' speculations on advancing technology. Father was contemptuous: he regarded all paperback SF novels and Hollywood movies as "The Goop Meets The Slop!" It never occurred to me that -- as they predicted -- someday there'd be cyborgs, and I'd be one -- and Father, too! He had lens replacements for cataracts long before I did. Life's unpredictable; we must endure hardships, but also can enjoy pleasures, old and new. Modeling's such, right?
Build what you want, the way you want to -- and above all, have fun!