Arado Ar234 B2 /C2 / C3 Blitz bomber & V1 from Matchbox, kindly loaned by Jon Bevan. Thanks Jon! Please Comment, Like, Share & Subscribe! If you liked this video, please see similar content @Peter Oxley
Hi Peter. I bought this kit when I was a kid. As one of the previous comments says this is an old Frog kit and that was what it was when I bought it. The funny looking bags as you call them are actually parachutes so that they could re-use the Rato motors and the tank as you call it is actually the lower half of the V1. The two cockpits are for a single seat or twin seat version. I have an old box of aircraft spare parts somewhere and I am sure that there are still parts of this kit that I never used still in it. Those twin engine nacelles are in that box, possibly also the twin cockpit too. The original Frog box didn,t look anything like the Matchbox one but hey it was a long time ago. Good video, and some old memories to. Thanks Peter.
I remember buying it at Hobby House in Decatur, Georgia, in 1976. It was in a Frog box at the time and was brand new. Revell of Germany got the molds after Frog closed in 1977..
I built this as a Revell kit (ex-FROG) about 40 years ago. Shape wise it's not too bad. The one area where it really needs fixing is the strut arrangement for attaching the Walther rocket packs. FROG moulded these as solid when they are, in fact, an open truss arrangement. If I was building it today I'd scratch build the struts using plastic strut material.
I had a FROG kit back in the day that was exactly the same as this. So not originally a Revell or a Matchbox kit. My brother tells me that the things you jokingly referred to as packet of spuds were actually parachutes so that the rocket boosters could be jettisoned once airborne and parachuted safely to the ground and reclaimed for another flight.
Got a few of these in the stash (both the FROG and Revell of Germany boxings). Though completely eclipsed by the Dragon? toolings, this is still one of my favorites. Along with the Do-335, Ta-152, Fiat G.55 and the Spitfire Mk XIV with Buzz bomb, this was the FROG "late war" homage. Love it!
A jet to launch a buzz bomb made sense because a V-1 piggybacked to a Heinkel, slowed the 111 below 200 knots with the extra drag. This made them easy picking for night fighters, and losses were considerable.
The RATO rockets where designed to be dropped straight after take off , they had about 20 sec of burn , once used they would be ejected by the pilot and float down on there parachutes to be collected and reused.
I have the frog version too. It was never operational but a "what if". It's not the best quality. You could probably make an improved model by mixing a decent twin engined like Dragon with the quad engines from this.
The problem with the V-1 was that it had a range of 150 miles. Various aircraft (notably the He III) were used to launch V-1s in an attempt to increase this range. While not very accurate, a city or a moving enemy division was a big enough target to offset this. It's an SC 1000, (1000 Kg) not an SC 100 as printed. The recovery parachutes on the RATO packs were actually quite useful, but I'd bet that even with RATO, 2 tons of bombs AND a V-1 would be an excessive load. It's interesting that the fixed, rear-firing 20mm cannon (the only defensive armament fitted to these aircraft) are present in all versions, bur there are two different periscope sights.
As V-rocket launch sites began to be overrun by the allies following D-Day, the German high command adopted a policy of launching V-1s from aircraft. This was even less accurate than the original deployment efforts, and an attack on Manchester at Christmas Eve 1944, saw rockets land as far north as Spennymoor in County Durham to Newport in Shropshire. One even fell at Woodford in Northamptonshire, while 14 dropped into the North Sea. Sadly, the size of the intended target was sufficiently large than Manchester and the Lancashire towns saw considerable civilian casualties. In one case a row of terraced houses in Oldham saw 27 killed and 49 injured from a Heinkel launched V-1.
Hello Peter, Pulse jets need to reach a certain speed before they function. If their ramps and rocket sleds were not available then they could be launched from aircraft
What a weird set up, are those things attached to the wings some sort of cluster bombs? They look like they have parachutes attached, the mind boggles at what the Germans came up with in those days! Looking forward to your vid.
