I put this up on the Hawk’s Nest recently as part of some reference for the P-40 GB and thought it would do nicely for today’s POTD…
A P-40E of the 11th FS in Alaska, 1942…
Image source/credit: Aero Pictorials 2 - U.S. Army Air Forces in the Pacific by René Francillon
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Awesome pic Steve. I have that decal option for my AMT/Ertl P-40E, but I want to use my Superscale set I have instead.
The nose art on some of those P-40s was quite ferocious. Neat pic.
Darwin, O.F. [alien]
Sweet Aleutian hawk there Blackwolf.
Great picture Steve. BTW, very nice graphics for the AVG. But I hope you wont mind me mentioning that the Chinese characters for the Flying Tiger in the background may be technically correct as a literal translation, but its not their name in Chinese. In Chinese, the name is more “Flying TIger Team” and consist of 3 characters. The first is Fly, which is the same as the 1st in your graphics, the 2nd is Tiger, which is the last character in your graphic (the 3rd & 4th character in your means tiger also, but its often shorten to only the 4th character), and finally Team. If you type “flying tiger team” into an online translator, use the last character,
On the contrary, I’m glad you said something Waikong. I used an online translator and for all I knew it coulda said ‘Shanghai Ballet Company’…
Your explanation lost me toward the end, though. This is what I got when translating ‘flying tiger team’…
Which characters would I use?
Also, is ’ fei hu dui ’ a proper English phonetic spelling?
For me German is a walk in the park… but Chinese is a walk in the dark… [:P]
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Nice pic Steve. May be helpful for the GB, but the spinner looks like it was OD rather than yellow, leaving me more confused [:(].
Regards, Rick
Rick, the spinner on that particular Hawk is definitely not OD. While it’s darker than the yellow of the bengal tiger, I’d say that it’s yellow.
Here’s the link to the 343rd FG/28th CG page on my P-40 site…
http://hawksnest.1hwy.com/In%20Service/USAAF/343rdFG/343rdFG.html
There’s a color shot on this page which shows two Hawks, one from the 11th FS and the other from the 18th FS. They both have yellow spinners. I have a few other color shots of 343rd ships to put up and all of those with the tiger have yellow spinners.
If you follow the link to the 11th FS page there are a few shots of this particular Hawk I’ve used for today’s POTD.
The second image shows the spinner as being very dark and one could mistake it as being the same color as the upper surfaces of the aircraft, which Cutting Edge obviously did on one of their sheets. The other shots, however, clearly show that the spinner was not OD.
I’d go with yellow…
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I think you are correct on the yellow Steve. Anyhoo, that’s what I’ll go with. Just to confuse things a tad more, I have a reference that says Chennault’s aircraft was # 92. Sometimes, the more you research, the more confused you get [%-)].
Regards, Rick
I have a question. What’s a P-40 doing in Alaska?
Probably what P-40s usually do… [;)]
Hehe…
Seriously, this is one of those ‘forgotten’ theaters of war.
For a very brief and general, yet good, description of military operations in Alaska during WWII, go HERE and read the ‘Historical Background’ section.
Also… many, if not most, of the aircraft ferried from the USA to the Soviet Union went through Alaska.
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let me answer, let me answer… hehe
The Japenese invaded and took part of the elutians early during the war. There were several skirmishes between the Tigers and zeros. Having worked out of Dutch Harbor for several years I have seen some really cool planes out there… a few Tigers… a few zeros (mostly shot up) in no mans land that is really hard to get too.
Steve-O, there is a Museum in Anchorage that has a large portion of it dedicated to this with soem awesome poster size photos for the feast of the eyes. The Anchorage water launch has a few catalinas withering away in it too.
someone with some money needs to go up there and put those birds back into the air.
Actually, there was once a semi-organized movement to recover some of the aircraft that are still out there… this is going back a while. I dunno whatever became of it, probably fizzled out due to lack of financing. (One of the fellas who was championing the movement is also currently in jail…) But there have been a few independant recoveries made.
Here’s a page on the Shemya site which covers the recovery and restoration of a P-38…
Here’s a page on the same site as the link in my previous post which deals with Dutch Harbor. Most of the info is the same with a few additions which are specific to the activities in the Harbor and some photos.
Here’s another site dealing with the Aleutian Campaign…
Aleutian World War II National Historic Area
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Steve, use the first and last 2 characters of the online translator - either traditional or simplified would work. You’ll get “Fei Hu Dui”. “Fei Hu” I believe is the correct official PinYin system, the “Dui” I kinda made up! But now that you’ve changed your signature, a bit late with the info.
Waikong, thanks for the clarification. I had found ‘fei hu dui’ somewhere on the net… don’t recall exactly where, but I wondered if it was a ‘legit’ phrase or not.
As to the sig image, it’s not too late. Those are actually images from my P-40 website and I’m just rotating them in my sig. But I wanna make new images anyway, so your bit of clarification will help muchly… thanks!
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