Valiant Wings Publishing Heinkel He.219 ‘Uhu’ Airframe Album #1

[Mike]

Heinkel He.219 ‘Uhu’ Airframe Album #1

A Detailed Guide to the Luftwaffe’s Ultimate Nightfighter

Valiant Wings Publishing

 

 

The He.219 was an attempt by the Germans to turn the tide of war in the air against the Allies, who were devastating the Reich homeland with huge 1,000 bomber raids on a nightly basis courtesy of the RAF, and by day by the USAAF.  The project had been initiated as early as 1940, but due to protracted delays caused in part by the RLM, who considered the designs to be too technically advanced, the project was delayed until 1942 when its progression was delayed again when the engines selected for the type ran into problems.  It first saw service in 1943 with claims of exceptional performance made by the pilots and officials.  Claims that weren’t backed up by losses from the Allies records after the war, which was further confirmed by Eric Brown’s summation of the aircraft as underpowered and slow to get to altitude.

 

Despite instructions to drop the project and stop production of any more airframes, Heinkel carried on regardless but couldn’t manufacture enough to slow down the destruction of their infrastructure, which was a vicious circle that reduced production even further.  Improvements, fixes and engine changes gave the aircraft some additional power, but by the end of the war there were many variants left on the drawing board, and in usual German WWII style, they diluted their effort rather than concentrate on ironing out the basic aircraft’s issues.

 

 

 

This is the second edition of the title written by Richard A Franks, and is a perfect-bound volume in portrait form, which has been expanded from 98 to 144 pages if you ignore the counting of the front cover as two pages.  It is now filled with even more information and photographs, drawings and accompanying explanatory text and captions, broken down into an introduction and four chapters with four short appendices.  After the introduction to the type, it moves on to a technical description of the aircraft, which is broken down into sub-sections, and accompanied by an even larger host of photos and drawings. The second chapter covers the development, both actual and projected from the drawing board, of the aircraft from initial V1 prototype through to production aircraft and proposed versions all to the way up to the He.419, a high-altitude fighter, probably designed with the high-flying B-29 as a potential target. It is easy to see here that the sheer number of variants that were being posited resulted in a division of effort that saw the project delayed even further.

 

 

 

Chapter three deals with painting and markings of the type, with profiles of known airframes, and photos of the sole survivor, which is currently undergoing renovation and restoration at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C. in the USA, as well as the other war prizes that weren't so lucky and ended their days as scrap. Camouflage and Markings are always difficult to resolve categorically due to the rarity of colour photographs of anything in WWII, but deduction, official documents and best guesses from photos are pretty much all we have. There are pages of discussion and example photographs followed by drawings of the markings and stencil locations.

 

 

 

Chapter 4 contains builds of the aircraft in 1:72, 1:48 and 1:32, using the Dragon, Tamiya and Zoukei Mura kits as their base respectively.  The previous build of the Revell 1:32 kit has been omitted, possibly because it isn’t as accurate in shape as the ZM kit in the same scale.  Sadly, the big He.219 is only a short section with photo, advertising the Airframe Constructor #2 volume that was released some while back and covered the build in extreme detail.

 

 

 

The final five pages are taken up with appendices, and cover available kits, aftermarket accessories, decals and finally a bibliography.

 

Conclusion

The extension of this volume has increased its appeal immensely, and the mixture of text, drawings, photos and other information really makes for an interesting read/look.  The 219 is a personal favourite of mine too, even though it didn’t perform as well as its appearance indicated.  Lots of content to keep you coming back for more, even if you don’t have my terrible memory.

 

Highly recommended.

 

 

Review sample courtesy of

[Alan P]

I do like these books, and glad they've continued updating some of the original titles. Thanks for the review 👍

[JohnT]

Good point there in the review Mike. If you could only buy one book to help a build of the ZM 1/32 kit would I be right in thinking the Airframe Constructor book from Valiant Publishing might be the better choice?

 

Wonder if the publisher might do a purchase both at discount for two offer

[Alan P]

4 minutes ago, JohnT said:

Good point there in the review Mike. If you could only buy one book to help a build of the ZM 1/32 kit would I be right in thinking the Airframe Constructor book from Valiant Publishing might be the better choice?

 

Wonder if the publisher might do a purchase both at discount for two offer

There is a current offer on the website offering just this combination John 👍

https://www.valiant-wings.co.uk/he-219-bundle-70-p.asp

[JohnT]

9 minutes ago, Alan P said:

There is a current offer on the website offering just this combination John 👍

https://www.valiant-wings.co.uk/he-219-bundle-70-p.asp

Oh dear. Tempting

[Alan P]

1 minute ago, JohnT said:

Oh dear. Tempting

Yeeeeah.... I've already succumbed 😂