1/72 “Doolittle Raider” B-25B Mitchell

Third time's the charm.
I started on a model of a B-25 Mitchell medium bomber - the plane used by the Doolittle Raiders in April 1942 - over 30 years ago, but never finished it. While at King's Hobby in Austin in the summer of 2015, I realized that the 1965 Revell "Pacific Raiders" kit that I was working on was so old that it was a "box scale" kit – released in 1954 before kits standardized into certain scales. The kit itself was actually 1/64. Well, I certainly didn't want a B-25 in an odd scale, so I gladly abandoned it for a new (1978) Italieri kit.
On September 5, 2015 I opened up the new kit and started work, but my interest in the subject petered out, and it wasn't until April 2017, when I realized that it was the 75th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid, that I went back and finished it - the first model I'd completed in 24 years.

Unfortunately, several years later one of the main landing gear on the Italieri broke, and no combination of glue and a semi-hidden crutch would work as a replacement. So I reluctantly trashed the kit, and waited for another good kit to come along.
In 2018 Airfix released a “new tool” B-25, and the 2019 release included parts and markings for a Doolittle Raid aircraft. The kit sat in my stash for several years as I accumulated the right paints, and I started it earlier this month.

The Subject

As noted, this is one of the "Doolittle Raider" aircraft. Although the Airfix kit comes with decals for the Hari Kari-er, I used leftover decals from the DKdecals 72006 set I got for the Italieri kit to build at as Lt. Col. Doolittle's aircraft 40-2344. The raiders had a couple of unique modifications to the standard B-25B. For one thing, Doolittle wanted new props and specified that they not be "shiny" so they had black hub and no yellow prop tips. Also, to give the impression of tail guns the aircraft had a pair of wooden poles painted black mounted into the tail. Finally, the aircraft dispensed with the ultra-secret Norden bombsights in favor of jerry-rigged bombsights which would be sufficient for the low-level bombing they intended to do.

The Kit

The new-tool Airfix kit is a magnificent kit, until you get to the fit of the fuselage and especially the engine nacelles. The former has prominent lines, and the engine nacelles leave major gaps. Similarly, the clear canopy sections don't fit together precisely. But the interior detailing is terrific, the instructions excellent, and aside from a couple of missing (possibly mislabeled) parts, it went together well. The biggest challenge for the kit is that it requires significant weight to make the nose wheel stay down. I tried Liquid Gravity without much luck, and it was only by loading in many, many fishing weights that I could get it to sit nose-down.

My biggest mistake on the kit was not priming and painting the exterior parts prior to assembly. Once it's put together, the nacelles in particular are difficult to paint.
I used Scalecolors SCM018 US Army Olive Drab #9 1941-43, and Vallejo 71.051 Neutral Gray FS 36173 for exterior colors and finished it off with Scalecolors flat finish. I then went over the top with flat finish applied roughly with a brush to get the scuffed, weathered look the B-25s upper surfaces showed on the Hornet.

I built the kit essentially out of the box, and followed the painting directions. These may have been wrong for the bombs, as photos on Hornet strongly indicate that the bombs were gray, not the later war olive drab.

While the kit has a number of Doolittle-specific parts - it has the sticks for the tail guns and the jerry-rigged bombsight, the figures are generic bomber crew, not the leather jacket, khakis and peak caps that the Raiders wore.

Regardless of the kit's deficiencies, and my deficiencies in building it, it's good to finally have a Doolittle Raider B-25 back on the shelves!

4 additional images. Click to enlarge.