Here is a document that may be of interest to some of you grin. Robert
Allied military model making during World War II.
"Introduction
Use of terrain models to support military operations has a long history and is by no means purely an artifact of the twentieth century. According to Isabell Warmoes (1999), the production of scale models of fortified towns is a European tradition dating from the early sixteenth century. The Musee des plans-reliefs in Paris holds a collection of one hundred models of fortified towns situated along former French frontiers or subject to French rule that represent "portraits in relief" of towns and their surrounding countryside within range of artillery fire and enemy approach works, such as trenches, in case of siege. The levels of craftsmanship and attention to detail have seldom been exceeded.
During the twentieth century the three-dimensional terrain model played a significant role in many theatres of both world wars. According to Archibald Clough (1952), the static nature of World War I (1914-1918) demanded relief models of enemy defense positions for planning offensive assault operations. Campaign maps at a scale of 1:20,000 were made of the Western Front by a new model-making subdivision of the Ordnance Survey for General Headquarters in France. Layers of cardboard were cut to the shape of the contour, then pasted together and covered by a map sheet of the area printed on special paper, with the latest positions of the trenches marked. According to Peter Chasseaud (1999), models were sent to France between December 1916 and April 1917 at a rate of 36 per week. Indeed, by the end of the war, the Ordnance Survey had produced approximately one thousand of these models (War Office 1920).
A model of Zeebrugge, Belgium, at a scale of 1: 2,500, made in 1918 by the Royal Navy, marked both a change in the nature of warfare and, as a consequence, a change in the requirements for terrain models. The famous Zeebrugge Raid of April 23, 1918, a daring attempt to destroy a U-boat base (Keegan 1998), required careful planning and briefing. Use of the terrain model during the preparation and planning stages of the Zeebrugge raid pointed to the future role of models during World War II for combined operations.
Between the wars, however, the utility of models to aid in terrain visualization was not entirely forgotten and was alive immediately prior to World War II. In the second edition of A Key to Maps (1939), Harold Winterbotham added an entire chapter on model making to his earlier edition of 1937. Winterbotham, a brigadier and ex-Director General of the Ordnance Survey, had extensive combat experience in the Boer War and World War I, and had made models himself. Similarly, Frank Debenham's Exercises in Cartography, published in 1937, devotes a chapter to the subject."
link
paints up some WWII Soviet aircraft.
. Robert