Flying for Fun
D.B. Mathews
The Way It Was:
Tom Brokaw's best-selling book The Greatest Generation has created interest in the lives of civilians during WWII. I thought it might be fun for the readers to share a little of modeling and modelers in that same time period.
Building model airplanes during WWII was extremely challenging and fraught with frustrations. Only the most obsessed, who were driven by nearly impossible dreams, found any reason to pursue the activity.
I know, because I was born in 1932, and only by a stroke of good fortune did I have enough success building model airplanes to become addicted.
For Christmas 1942 my mother somehow located a prewar Comet AYA (Air Youth of America) beginner set: a large box containing five models, ranging from a simple hand-launch glider to a stick-and-tissue rubber‑powered Phantom. The concept was step-by-step progression in complexity to acquire building skills.
Included was an illustrated booklet on model building, adhesives, and even corked bottles of dope. Most important of all, the kits contained balsa parts.
Most imported materials—from sugar and coffee to balsa—were in short supply because of the German U-boat threat to merchant ships. In the literature there are hundreds of accounts of people standing on the blacked-out Atlantic coast beaches, from Florida to Maine (no onshore lights were allowed to avoid silhouetting ships), watching merchant ships burn and sink just offshore.
Since there was a severe shortage of many items, ration coupons were used by the civilian population for many "strategic materials," ranging from meat to gasoline. As a child, one of my Saturday "jobs" at my grandfather's grocery was to paste ration stamps onto sheets, then deposit them into a special drawing account at the bank.
I also had a paper route during those war years, and I had to fill out forms at the ration board to get new replacement tires for my bike. Newspaper delivery was considered essential.
Not only was the supply of balsa severely limited by the shipping problems, but what did make it into the country was used in life rafts for the war effort; there was no balsa available for model airplane kits.
Kits substituted poster-board formers and ribs into which one attempted to position strips of roughly cut pine, then adhere them with overnight-drying cellulose cement with very little structure to hold them with pins.
On top of it all, nitrocellulose cement (Ambroid, Testors, Comet, LePages, etc.) provided poor adhesion between paper and pine. However, we did save the tubes for the scrap drives.
The instructions with those kits were notoriously vague, frequently providing no idea where or how the wings attached to the fuselage, how to carve that band‑sawn prop blank, or—heaven forbid—you would have to cover the thing with the wrapping tissue provided and "dope" it with banana oil.
Fly? Not a chance. The available rubber was apparently rejects from before the war (or some synthetic substitute), which, when stretched, would act more like taffy.
This lack of adequate information and materials was compounded by the fact that most fathers, uncles, or older males who might have been able to help were on active duty in the military.
A breakfast cereal manufacturer packaged fold-up paper gliders that resembled the fighters of the day. You creased the edges, then folded the flat parts into a model airplane held together by slots and tabs. The nose weight was a penny Scotch-taped in place. These things actually flew, and provided endless hours of fun.
Also available in limited quantities were Jim Walker's A-J Models A-J Interceptor gliders. These were balsa and featured a spring device that allowed the wing to be folded back along the fuselage sides during launch, then pop open at the apogee of the climb.
These gliders were launched with a catapult and could obtain a great deal of height. When the wings popped open, they glided rather well.
Walker produced the gliders by the thousands as gunnery targets for the military (the trainees fired at them with shotguns), and a few trickled into the civilian sector. They were great fun and a good model‑trimming learning tool, although difficult to keep out of trees.
In fairness, the manufacturers did develop some rather innovative approaches to building with only the materials available to them.
Many GIs built models on top of foot lockers and such, indicating that our youthfulness was as much at fault as the kits.
Control-line flying was in its infancy; model-engine manufacturers were building precision components for the war effort; the only new engines available were leftover junk, and used ones were hopelessly expensive relative to our incomes; and radio control was in its infancy (and illegal).
Modeling in those war years was rubber‑powered stick-and-tissue or solid models carved from chunks of pine. I'd speculate that 99% of those kits became unfinished "in the closet" projects and were eventually trashed.
Why we continued to buy and attempt to build models from those kits is puzzling. Could it be that we were all obsessive/compulsive personalities? Or was it simply the resilience of youthful spirit?
To say that building model aircraft is easier than it was in the 1940s is a massive understatement. That might be a bit difficult to appreciate unless you've tried building with cement, cutting parts out of scrap wood or paper with a used razor blade, sanding and doping pine, covering with Christmas tissue, or figuring out basic braces and planks. However, the U.S. soon won the war, and everything got much better.
This all sounds rather grim and depressing, but everyone was sharing in the experience. As a nation, we had the attitude, "together, we can get this over with and save the world for democracy."
In spite of the obstacles faced in building models, many wonderful hours and days were spent just trying. My magazines and catalogs of that period are worn and dog-eared, indicating countless hours spent looking through them while dreaming of better times to come.
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
