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If you haven’t visited the Imperial War Museum in London before, I’d strongly recommend going. It probably contains one of the most varied military collections to be found anywhere in the world. And its free to enter!!!


 

For the Panzer enthusiast there’s a good Jadgpanther (see JadgPanther section) there’s also a M3A3 Grant, Churchill Mk VIIl, T-34/85, M4A4 Sherman V and a few others. Suspended from the ceiling of the main hall is a Focke Wolf FW190, a Spitfire Mk1A, Mustang P51D as well as a few bi-planes and  V1 & V2 rockets.

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Apart from the main hardware exhibits, there are plenty of other items to keep you interested. The new Holocaust Exhibition is truly quite remarkable – some of the photographs & videos are quite harrowing (as you’d expect) – so it may not be suitable for sensitive young children. Of special interest to me was the scale model of the site at Auschwitz/Birkenau . Its about 1:70th scale and must be at least 35ft long. It's made of plaster, wood & plastic – and painted white, with literally thousands of figures representing the victims & their murderers. If you ever wanted to comprehend the enormity of the killing process carried out at the death camps, this will indelibly describe to you the full horror of what happened at that place. From a purely modelling aspect, its one of the most impressive models I’ve ever seen.

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There are also a number of well built models in the WWI & II permanent exhibits. The warships are by far the best. There are a couple of well done 1:16 to 1:20th scale aircraft. There’s also a number of similar scaled tanks, including the ubiquitous Tiger. I didn’t study these too long (there’s so much to see) but I suspect some of the model tanks were scratch built. They also appear to be quite old, so I feel most experienced AFV modellers today would produce work at least as good, if not better.

If you do plan to visit – give yourself enough time – I spent about three hours there, and I didn’t come close to studying every exhibit as much as I'd have liked.

photos courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London

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