V3 020 – Kubus – 1/35

Mirage-hobby kit. The construction of Kubuś started on 8 August, 1944, one week after the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising, in a car repair shop belonging to Stanisław Kwiatkowski in Warsaw’s borough of Powiśle, at the corner of Tamka Street and Topiel Street. The main engineer of the vehicle was Walerian Bielecki (nom-de-guerre Jan), and with no design prepared on paper, all construction was improvised in situ. Kubuś was based on the chassis of a civilian Chevrolet 157 truck which had been license-built in pre-war Poland by the Lilpop, Rau i Loewenstein company. The chassis was fitted with steel plates for protection of the crew, and were bolted to a steel frame and then welded together. The armoured car could carry between 8 and 12 soldiers, and was armed with a Soviet-built DP-27 machine gun, underground-built K pattern flamethrower and hand grenades, in addition to personal armament of the soldiers. The name Kubuś was taken in honour of the wife of one of the constructors known as Globus, as she was killed in early August and had used the pseudonym Kubuś, Polish for “Little Jacob”, but also the Polish name for Winnie the Pooh.

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