And here she is in all her technicolor glory. Sunglasses might be useful under certain conditions.
The French ordered 100 Curtiss P-40’s on 5th October 1939 and the order was subsequently increased to 230. The first aircraft was completed on 6th June 1940, but by then it was far too late and the order was subsequently transferred to the RAF.
However in my France Fights On scenario a slight tweaking of this actual completion date means that the first of these aircraft could have been available to the Armée de l'Air in time for the battles of late summer and autumn 1940 around the Somme Line and then in central and southern France before the survivors were evacuated to French North Africa in order to continue the fight.
So here we have Curtiss Hawk A81 A-1 flown by L/C Marcel Haegelen in actions around Bourges in Central France during the autumn of 1940. By this time Haegelen had been credited with 4 ½ confirmed German and 1 Italian “kill” so had achieved ace status.
The sharp eyed amongst you will have noticed two oddities in the markings of this aircraft. The first is that the type number is shown as P-81 rather than H-81. This has been put down to the Curtiss factory miss-interpreting the French instructions although why this should be the case when they had manage to get the type markings of several hundred H-75’s correct is a mystery ? (in reality my eyesight and hand/eye co-ordination has as much chance getting individual digits of this size in place as a snowflake does of surviving in hell, and I happened to have P-81 handy from the XP-81 I built). The second oddity is that the stork marking on the port fuselage appears to be looking backwards ? Haegelen explained this by saying that as he was always looking over his shoulder and that is why he survived so long then one of the storks should reflect this (in reality it folded over whilst I was putting a clear coat on and I didn’t notice).
The other possible oddity is in the green colour I’ve used for the upper camouflage. Initially this looked way too bright to me, but after looking at some profiles in my copies of French Aircraft in the Planes and Pilots series Hataka may well be correct. There were various official variants of French camouflage colours and a fair few unofficial ones. Hataka include both Vert (which I have used) and Kaki Francais in their French Air Force set and it would appear that most models you see on tables are completed in the Kaki colour. So whilst I still think it’s a little too bright it is still a good match for some of the types in the aforementioned books.
It’s the first time I’ve used Hataka’s “Blue Line” series of paints which are specifically made for brushing and I must say I’m impressed by them.
Markings came from the AZ boxing of the Curtiss Mohawk Mk III/H-75C-1 and the spares box and despite the kits foibles which I’ve mentioned above and my cack handedness at times I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Finished shots
