Modeling Now and Then Red Menace By Scott Kruize

My Russian models outlived the Cold War.

I'm a child of the Korean War. My father had helped defeat the Axis by serving in China during the Second World War, and of course with that war won, and all of America's enemies prostrate in ruins, he saw no reason not to get all the great benefits of being in the Reserves. Imagine his surprise after only five years of peace, when that friendly letter from Uncle Sam arrived, “inviting” him back to active duty!

Fortunately, he was married by that time, and was sent from Chicago not again all the way East to Asia, but only to McChord Air Force Base in the Pacific Northwest. I arrived sometime after his duty here began, making my debut at Madigan Army Hospital. In that way, I suppose my origins are all tied up with facing the dreaded Red Menace, and I'm sure that like many other aging Baby Boomers, the Red Menace has shaped my life ever since.

Confronting the Red Menace was tied up with the Pledge of Allegiance we recited at school every day, and with what we learned about civil defense drills. (Although I have no memory of watching the infamous movie “Duck and Cover”). It was tied up with the prayers we said in church “for the conversion of Russia”, and with my joining the Cub Scouts and then the Boy Scouts of America. It was tied in with the strange Congressional hearings on television during the Red scare. And it produced a shadow of thermonuclear warfare over all our heads, even as small children. I distinctly remember having a worldly conversation with my buddy Robert, in which we agreed that open warfare was certain to break out between United States and Russia (we never used the phrase “Soviet Union”) at any time. This was while standing at the school bus stop on a morning when we can’t have been more than eight years old.

After graduating from high school, I was presented with the opportunity to confront the Red Menace personally. That is: I had to register for the selective Service, and could easily have gone off to fight the communists in Vietnam. Even back then, however, I couldn't make much sense out of what was going on over there, and did not volunteer, but just quietly sweated out the draft lottery for a couple of years, while I finished college. To this day, I feel bad for those contemporaries who worked and suffered so hard in that strange war, but everything I've read since indicates there was never any hope by anyone of actually achieving any sort of victory there… nor did the confused fighting seem to have much to do with stopping the Russians from taking over the world. All that blood and treasure were wasted. But our leaders seem to have been as ‘weirded out’ by the Red Menace as anyone, and none of them dared be perceived as being “soft on Communism”…!

The very first model I built, at age 11, was Monogram’s “box scale” B-58 Hustler, a fabulous plane which would certainly never have existed if not for the need to confront the Red Menace. I held it tightly while reading an atomic doom story. I didn’t have to go searching for such in the lurid adventure magazines at Thunderbird Drug Store, either. Atomic doom stories were everywhere, and the one I read was in my mother's Post magazine, delivered by subscription right into our respectable living room. The B-58s were illustrated on a full tabloid-sized page, already starting to shred from the defenses as they hurled themselves at supersonic speed through the fiery skies over Moscow, but the story made clear they would continue on to utterly obliterate the enemy!

So encouraged, I had to concentrate my first few years of modeling in the frontline jets of our Navy and Air Force jet arsenals. It was only much later that my attentions turned mostly to World War Two fighters.

I don't remember ever actually going out and purchasing models of Russian jets, yet I wound up with three. All must have been gifts. The first was the Aurora MiG-19 aka Yak-25, which I’ve described in this column before. The second was the Monogram box-scale Tupelov Tu-16 ‘Badger’ bomber, received just as I was about to leave for my most favorite summer vacation activity: a visit to my paternal grandparents’ house in Grapeview. This had all kinds of charms for young boys, including deep woods in which to play Explorer and Army and Robin Hood. Too young to know that the waters of Puget Sound were too cold to swim in, swim I did, wearing my mask and snorkel set just like my hero, Lloyd Bridges, of Sea Hunt. Then there was grandfather’s workshop, where he made all kinds of great things for my brother Chris and me, including some working crossbows to venture out with against dragons and Saracens infesting the surrounding woods, in our new game of Knights in Shining Armor.

I can't remember what circumstances put the Monogram ‘Badger’ kit in my hands the day before I was to leave, but it was quite impossible for me to imagine leaving it unbuilt for a whole week. In those days, no kit—and I only had one at a time—ever sat for even a day before I started tearing its parts off the spruces and gluing them together. (“Tearing parts off sprues” is not a rhetorical turn of phrase for effect; it’s a straightforward description of my approach to plastic modeling!)

So there was no question but that the kit would go with me, along with my few bottles of Testors’ Enamels, Father’s borrowed #11 X-Acto knife, and a tube of glue. Mother objected. She was constantly urging me to “go out and play!” in any weather short of a downpour, and didn’t like me sitting and building plastic model airplane kits when I could be running around outside. She relished the idea that for a whole week, at my grandparents’ place, I could do essentially nothing but “go out and play!” But formidable though her influence was over me, she couldn’t stop me from bringing the kit along—and that very first day, after the long drive there, lunch with the whole family, waving goodbye to my parents, a quick tour around my favorite woodsy haunts, and a walk with Grandma and Grandpa, I found a little time in the late afternoon, just before supper. An hour or so saw the Badger essentially completed. The rest of the week then took place without my being distracted by an unbuilt kit.

Lastly, there was a Hawk Models MiG-15. I built this in an evening in my brothers’ bedroom, which they often permitted me to share. My own bedroom was so small its desk was just adequate for reading and homework. But in my brothers’, Father had made a large, practical work table, dividing their room in half. It was an old door covered with plastic laminate, and was the place of choice for artwork, board games, comic book reading marathons, or any similar activity. My brothers were supportive of my modeling hobby, though they never built models themselves. They’d clear part of the table of their crayons, papers, and toys, and thought my models, as they went together, were “pretty cool”. Especially the MiG-15.

It was pretty cool. I'm not dependent here solely on my memory; I have it, and the Badger, before me right now. I’d have the Aurora MiG-19, too, except that it became so precious I couldn’t resist selling it on eBay. But that was only recently, years after—much to my astonishment—I watched the news on TV as the Iron Curtain just kind of melted away and vanished. Since childhood, I’d been quite unable to imagine a world in which the West was not always confronted with the Red Menace.

If you think I’m a bit weird about all this, I won't dispute it. But weren’t we all a bit weird over the whole Cold War? More artifacts than my models have survived, as has some literature. I don’t have that Post magazine, but something stranger: a book about the day a B-47 dropped a nuclear bomb on a village in Tennessee. No: they weren’t a Fifth Column of the Red Menace, but it seems we used to fly jet bombers around, carrying real nuclear weapons, all the time, around the clock. Some accidents were bound to occur. Fortunately, adequate safety precautions prevented the thing from going off, but it's still weird.

I've rambled on long enough, so I’ll cite just one more weirdness related to our hobby. It is, in fact, closely related to the Monogram ‘Badger’. Those of you who've been with this hobby a long time know Monogram used have small line of box-scale models called the ‘Forty-Niners’, after the price. I'd built the P-40 Warhawk in the series, after those same grandparents gifted me with a copy of God Is My Co-Pilot, by Robert Scott. Another plane in the same series was the McDonnell F-101B Voodoo interceptor. I distinctly remember gluing the Genie air-to-air missiles to the underside of the kit’s fuselage. Tiny though they were in my fingers, they were enormous compared to the size of the aircraft. At the time, I hadn’t seen a Voodoo up close, but I had seen, on a tour of McChord with the Scouts, a Convair F-102 Delta Dagger. This fighter looked enormous to me, but I already knew from library books that the Voodoo was even larger. So those Genie missiles must have been gigantic. As well they ought: they were nuclear missiles! Even as a child of the Cold War, when I read of the Genies, and how they were supposed to be deployed in action, I was astonished. Firing an atomic bomb from your fighter plane, I thought, wouldn't that be like tossing a hand grenade at somebody in the same room?

I don't have that particular model anymore. Like most of the other early models, it’s been lost the intervening years between my childhood Then, and Now. I can’t account for how these Russian planes survived.

Some things are different. I have more than one kit at a time. In fact, I’ve got nearly four hundred in my stash. Kits can stand to sit more than a day, unbuilt. Heaven help me; they sit for years Now.

Other things are the same. Like Then, I again have a Monogram F-101B kit. It’s the modern 1/48th scale release. The other evening, I opened the box to examine its parts. I didn’t tear the parts off the sprues, but I could see that—compared to the size of the fuselage—the Genie rocket missiles were still gigantic. There’s nothing wrong with my memory; such weapons really existed. I’ll build this kit soon. In that way, I suppose, I'm still confronting the Red Menace. I just hope I'm not quite as weird about it after all, if I could do so with the threat of thermonuclear war hanging over our heads Then, then certainly I can Now, even with all our current problems.

Build what you want, the way you want to land above all, have fun!