At the time of writing this I am a 53-year-old retired British infantry soldier, military missionary and Baptist pastor with a million different body problems making life difficult but not impossible. I have lived in Hungary for the last nine years at the time of writing and my life has been as varied as the Ju 88 sub-types I wrote about in the book!
Like many of my generation I grew up with model kits. My first Ju 88 was the venerable 1/72 Airfix kit bought from the “Naafi” (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) in 1980 whilst quartered in Hildersheim, Germany. My next contact with the Ju 88 would be in 1982 when my school used the former Luftwaffe barrack buildings at what was then RAF Gütersloh – although at the time I had no idea that this had been a Luftwaffe base let alone a base from which the Ju 88 G-6 operated with elements of Nachtjagdgeschwader (NJG) 2 and 3.
Skip forward twelve years and I am a military missionary working alongside the military chaplaincy and based at Aldershot, Hampshire, UK, where I was quartered just 100 metres from the model shop. This re-kindled my love of aircraft models as well as introducing me to the Farnborough branch of the International Plastic Modelling Society (IPMS). At this model shop I discovered two important things. First, that the Ju 88 was multi-role aircraft as I could see in the shop that a company called Italeri had more than one kind of 1/72 Ju 88 kit, including a day-fighter, and that a company called AMT had a 1/72 night-fighter in their collection. And second, I found in the same shop that you could get them in a bigger size from a company called Dragon and that there were even nice photos of the model on the sides of the box to tempt you, but alas they were too expensive for me!
A few years later I started my AIMS hobby business with my first attempt at a multi-media set being of all things a Ju 88 G-6 based on the AMT kit with better engines and cockpit parts and with the Falcon vacuform canopy, Eduard photo-etch and my second ever 1/72 decal sheet: AIMS 72-002 ‘Ju 88 G-6 Night Fighter Collection 1/72’. I remember my first ever model show as a trader in Belgium shortly afterwards and not selling a single one but I was not put off. When Revell released their amazing 1/32 Ju 88 A-1 kit in 2008 the next year saw me release my first 1/32 multi-media 1/32 conversion set—yes you guessed it—the Ju 88 G-6! Although far from what the set looks like now—being limited at the time by the information available to me and the equipment that I had—it was nevertheless a massive leap forward for me and the beginning of what would be nearly the entire Ju 88 family represented in 1/32 scale. It seems incredible to me now that only two years later did I purchase my first ever 1/48 Dragon Ju 88 kit—yes a G-6—you get the picture, a pattern has emerged! This purchase led in turn to both my first ever AIMS 1/48 photo-etch set (48PE001) for this kit and also my first ever 1/48 decal sheet (48D001) for the Ju 88 G-6. Photo-etch set 48PE002 quickly followed as a scribing template to answer the problem of the Ju 88 G-6 hatches that the Dragon 1/48 kit lacked. In the same vein 48D005 appeared as a decal alternative to scribing these hatches. So, there you have it. The Ju 88 G-6 has basically been synonymous with my AIMS hobby company and even became part of my logo from as soon as I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator for the decals and PE (photo-etch) designing. Years on I am still besotted with this Ju 88 sub-type and continue to both re-create good examples of it and gather additional information to elevate my understanding of this amazing and influential aircraft, never realising that moving to Hungary would open up doors that few have been able to walk through.
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