Curtiss P-40B Warhawk by Asat- Airfix- 1/48

[CDW]

The paint came out great on your P-40 Lou. Very smooth finish.

[lmagna]

19 minutes ago, Egilman said:

They were more concerned with the capabilities of German aircraft, rather than what those cross-eyed little buggers were doing in China...... They just plain could't believe that the Japanese were capable of fighting on the level they were actually capable of or that their equipment was any good

The British and Dutch did pretty much the same thing. They felt the Brewster Buffalo was good enough The British realized their mistake and brought in the Hurricane that had done so well in the Battle of Britain but it fared only slightly better than the Buffalo. The British then threw in the Spitfire feeling that it would be more than a match, but in only two engagement the Japanese took out 17 of 27 Spitfires while only loosing two Zeros. 

 

The P-40 also served quite well in other countries against the Zero, primarily Australia and New Zealand. Although their numbers never matched the AVG or the followup P-40s of the 23rd Fighter Group, also under Chennault, that was able to claim 594 confirmed kills!

 

Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the two aircraft is how history remembers them. Today the Zero is thought of as one of the great fighters of the Second World War, despite its flaws and its ineffectiveness when those flaws were exploited. The P-40 is denounced as being one of the worst fighters of the war even though it achieved a 70 to 1 kill ratio with the AVG, was used by the most successful U.S. squadron of WW II (the 23rd FG), was essential in the defense of China, Australia, North Africa, New Zealand, and the South-West Pacific, and even with all of it's flaws proved to be a better fighter then the Zero time and again. Hopefully someday people will be able to see it a little differently.

 

  

[lmagna]

2 hours ago, Egilman said:

AS far as the F8U against an F4F? ... {chuckle} you really want me to answer that? (you would first have to find out how to get a J-57 into an F4F)

Got my numbers confused.............. Got the name right though!

[lmagna]

Thanks Mark for all the extra reading on what is probably my favorite underdog aircraft of WWII. I need to get more modeling done rather than more reading! But I have not read much on P-40s in  years. My first book was "God Is My Co-pilot" by Robert L. Scott when I was in my teens.

[CDW]

The P-40 was extremely effective as a boom and zoom fighter. When it utilized it's strengths, it was superior. The Zero did not climb nor dive well.

[Egilman]

29 minutes ago, lmagna said:

Perhaps the most dramatic difference between the two aircraft is how history remembers them.

Yeah kinda, it's more about how certain people like to categorize the equipment we started the war with as inadequate....... If the war (or our involvement in it) had waited another year, the enemy wouldn't have known what hit them.... Our equipment was at least equal to what they had and given even a little more time would have been so much better.....

 

There were six Essex class carriers laid down prior to our start of the war with orders for 12 more, two fast battleships were in the fleet with nine more on the way. The B-29 was already in pre-production and the B-36 was on the drawing board.... 

When we entered the war, the axis lost right there, we had to actually do it yes, but it was a fact, and Churchill knew it...

 

But then,  they like to ignore reality also.....

[ASAT]

Wow! You guys are a veritable WWII aircraft history repository! That is some fascinating info on a warbird that up till now I just liked the sleek lines of.... now get on over to my P-51 build and throw down some in depth discussion on that bird so I can gain more appreciation for it as well.... I guess I’m going to have to do some reading in between model building.  BTW..... thanks for the advise and compliment CDW..... !! 😀

[mtaylor]

14 hours ago, lmagna said:

The British and Dutch did pretty much the same thing. They felt the Brewster Buffalo was good enough The British realized their mistake and brought in the Hurricane that had done so well in the Battle of Britain but it fared only slightly better than the Buffalo. The British then threw in the Spitfire feeling that it would be more than a match, but in only two engagement the Japanese took out 17 of 27 Spitfires while only loosing two Zeros. 

 

 

I suspect the biggest problem with the Spitfire against the Zero was armament.  The Spit had only a few .30 cal. machine guns.  The Zero had to cannon and several larger caliber MG's.  I'm only "suspecting" this as I'm not full in on the details of the adversaries at the time.

[Old Collingwood]

4 minutes ago, mtaylor said:

 

I suspect the biggest problem with the Spitfire against the Zero was armament.  The Spit had only a few .30 cal. machine guns.  The Zero had to cannon and several larger caliber MG's.  I'm only "suspecting" this as I'm not full in on the details of the adversaries at the time.

I know in the European theater  the Spit IX  was introduced  with the more poweful engine, this made it a match for the rather excellent FW190  of the Germans,   I assume more poweful spits  were shiped out over seas  but not sure.

 

OC.

[ccoyle]

Forgive me for jumping late into the discussion, but this has been good reading!

 

14 hours ago, Egilman said:

When we entered the war, the axis lost right there

Actually, historian Stephen Bungay made a very compelling argument in his book The Most Dangerous Enemy that Germany effectively lost the war with the conclusion of the Battle of Britain. Having failed to eliminate Britain from the conflict and afterwards turning eastward, Germany was left with a two-front war with an enemy whose industrial and economic advantages Hitler could not hope to match.

 

I love the discussions about relative capabilities of aircraft. I think most of us would agree that the early prevailing narratives about P-40s vs Zeros, etc., were based on early combat results, which in turn, as others have pointed out, were in large part the result of not using the equipment at hand to its best advantages, e.g. skilled pilots in P-40s and F4Fs were more than capable of holding their own against the Zero when using zoom-and-climb tactics. The P-40 also performed very capably against the Luftwaffe in North Africa (where low altitude performance was at a premium), and the RAF mostly maintained air superiority in that theater thanks in no small measure to the P-40's capabilities in the ground attack role.

 

It's also very interesting to see how aircraft that are denigrated by many historians, of both the professional and armchair varieties, performed in the service of foreign nations. Soviet pilots (again in another theater where combat operations were mostly at low altitude and thus where superchargers were less critical) loved the P-39. Likewise, Finnish pilots loved the Brewster B-239, the export version of the Buffalo, and ran up fantastic kill records against Soviet types. Admittedly, their Soviet counterparts were flying mostly second-tier stuff, but the Japanese were still flying some A5Ms and Ki-27s in SE Asia early in the Pacific war, along with a variety of not particularly overwhelming light and medium bombers, so one suspects that if the British and Dutch had employed zoom-and-climb against the Japanese instead of trying to turn with them (which, after all, had worked against the Germans), they might have had more success with the Buff.

 

As I think Lou pointed out earlier, the Zero's range and maneuverability were purchased at the expense of survivability and high-speed performance; the Japanese put all of their eggs into one style of air combat basket, with disastrous (for them) results. Once their initial corps of highly skilled airmen was depleted, they had no chance of competing with the manpower and production capacities of the Allies, no matter how good some of their late-war designs turned out to be.

 

Speaking of highly-skilled airmen (I can't resist tossing this last tidbit out there), there's a reason why 303 (Polish) Squadron of the RAF scored the most kills during the Battle of Britain. Our fondness for Polish jokes in the West has perhaps obscured for many the fact that pre-war Poland had a very rigorous pilot training program -- one of the most demanding in all of Europe. Few also remember that Poland had one of the most advanced indigenous aircraft design industries of the 1930s. Rigorous evaluation of the records has put paid to the notion that the Luftwaffe rolled the Poles up on the first day or two of the war. Poland's most advanced fighter then in service, the P.11c, had a better than 1:1 kill ratio versus the Luftwaffe, despite being slower and less heavily armed than its German counterparts (the Luftwaffe fared even worse against the Curtiss Hawk in the Battle of France). These are facts that tend to be more generally known among card modelers because of the foremost position of Polish publishers in the card portion of the modeling world.

 

Okay, enough fun and games (and thread hijacking)!

[Egilman]

29 minutes ago, ccoyle said:

Actually, historian Stephen Bungay made a very compelling argument in his book The Most Dangerous Enemy that Germany effectively lost the war with the conclusion of the Battle of Britain.

That is one rational, but actually the british couldn't do anything of real effect against Germany once France was lost and it would have taken years for them to recover sufficiently....

Germany was well on the way to beating Russia in both '40 and '41, until Hitler became directly involved....... I'm a firm believer that if Hitler had left it to his generals we would have stood alone against Germany after we had dispatched Japan.... Long about the '45-46 time frame...

 

But that, like Stephen above, is nothing but an opinion from a monday morning QB....

[lmagna]

I have for some reason never been attracted P-51 that much, (Other than LOVING the engine sound of the Rolls Royce Merlin). So I have never really followed it's history as much as some other WWII aircraft. I have never built one as a model either. So the history part of the Mustang should be left to the more than adequate numbers of followers that I am certain are out there.  

 

On the part about entering the war, one has to remember that the US did not declare war on Germany. We had an agreement with England to help them with Germany and if worst came to worst that Germany would be the first to be dealt with over Japan, but at the time I do not believe we had an alliance with England to go to war with Germany in defense of England. Even though it is probably inevitable that we would have declared war against Germany, and certain that we would have continued to help her in a number of active and material ways, declaring war was not necessarily a given. In any case declaring war was not necessary, as Hitler declared war against the US first. While it is true that starting a two front war was not one of Hitler's better ideas and possibly cost him the war over all, the massive destruction of Germany and rolling their war effort back to defending the gates of Berlin would not have happened without America becoming a full participant in the Allied cause.

 

 

Edited April 28, 2020 by lmagna

[lmagna]

2 hours ago, Old Collingwood said:

I know in the European theater  the Spit IX  was introduced  with the more poweful engine, this made it a match for the rather excellent FW190  of the Germans,   I assume more poweful spits  were shiped out over seas  but not sure.

I don't think any Spitfires above the MK VIII were sent to the Pacific theater and as far as I know they were only used by the British and Australian forces in the defense of Australian interests. In this role, and later in the reclaiming of the Malay Peninsula, they did pretty well, after they learned just like everyone else NOT to dogfight with the Zero's. Part of the reason for their limited use was because of the limited range of the Spitfire and partly because they fell under the command of  MacArthur, (Who I will not say much about here but is NOT on my list of competent generals of WWII) who denied them access to front line combat positions in his advance back to the Philippines. As far as I can determine this was not because of any shortcomings of the Spitfire's but pretty much strictly political. MacArthur wanted his return to be 100% American.   

[Egilman]

As far as MacArthur, tactically, he was the closest thing we had to a classic field marshall..... pure genius, the only general we had more tactically capable was Patton. that being said, MacArthur was political and that was both good and bad.... with how he handled the allied forces yes, with how he handled Japan after the fighting was over, pure genius......

 

One thing he couldn't handle? Was Ike becoming president... He always thought he was smarter than Eisenhower.... (thought he was smarter than Truman also and disobeyed both him and Ike in Korea to all our dismay) That was the political side of MacArthur.....

 

Strange guy that General Mac......

[Louie da fly]

I came late to this build - it's looking fantastic! The detail is far and away better than the old Airfix 1:72 models I made when I was a kid.

 

I've always loved the P-40; it just seems such a beautiful aircraft. I made a 1:72 Airfix model of it back in the day.

 

 I read a book a while ago- unfortunately I can't remember its name and the library I borrowed it from has closed for the duration - can't even access the catalogue online - about the Australian pilots in the New Guinea campaign, who were fitted with P-40s. They independently evolved the tactic of attacking in a dive and built up a respectable score against the zeros. Then along comes one of the high brass straight from his comfortable office in Melbourne, several thousand miles from the front, who accused them of cowardice for not dogfighting with the zeros. So the CO went up to dogfight with them and was shot down and killed. Good one. They fought under terrible conditions, always short of equipment and replacements, and under continual pressure under attacks that never seemed to let up, they performed magnificently. The book is well worth a read, if I can figure out what it was called.

 

Steven

 

[edit: The book is called "Storm Over Kokoda" and is by Peter Ewer. The book review says

 

"Most of us have heard of the battered and muddy troops who 'saved' Australia on the Kokoda Track during the darkest hours of the Pacific war. Far fewer know of the Australian pilots and aircrew of 75 Squadron who first checked the Japanese advance into the South West Pacific, in desperate air fighting that swirled over the jungles of New Guinea and the base at Port Moresby, fully six months before the land campaign began. Storm Over Kokoda tells how Australian crews, in a handful of Hudson bombers and Catalina flying boats, took the fight to the Japanese. Peter Ewer draws on eyewitness accounts and combat reports to shed new and exciting light on a neglected episode in Australian military history. This is not merely an 'aviation' story, but a compelling tale of men at war - on both sides - in a harsh physical environment. This was a time when every flight proved an epic, and every man a hero."]

 

Strange that it doesn't mention the P-40s, which was what 75 squadron was equipped with.

 

Edited April 29, 2020 by Louie da fly

[lmagna]

13 minutes ago, Louie da fly said:

The book is well worth a read, if I can figure out what it was called.

Pleas let me know when you figure it out Steven. That is the period that I like reading about the most. I already have a minor Library that is just about the Pacific theater in WWII especially the early years.  

[Louie da fly]

Lou, the cheapest one (reportedly in good condition) is on ebay though there are several out there at similar prices. Just google Book Storm Over Kokoda

 

Steven

 

Edited April 29, 2020 by Louie da fly

[ASAT]

5 hours ago, lmagna said:

I have for some reason never been attracted P-51 that much

I have to agree with you on that one Lou, i like the side view, but I am not enamored with the wing shape - I bought it because it is a great value when you use the 40% coupon at hobby lobby and I am using it as a learning platform. I really am attracted to the British and German designs, the Brits seem to have the smooth flowing lines and the German stuff is just brute force functionality - it’s purely a visual preference for me for now, I really need to get educated on the engineering and technical aspects of the machines of WWII - Armor as well, as I am developing an interest in modeling that as well.  Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this discussion- you amaze me with your expertise and alert me to my woeful lack of knowledge 

[lmagna]

Thanks for the title Steven. 

You are right eBay seems to be cheapest. If it wasn't for the killer shipping cost from OZ it would be a good price. This is one of the times I wished it was available through Kindle or as an E-book!

 

Be careful Lou. If you start getting into the history part of all this you will find that it is more addicting than crack! One book leads to another and they lead to books with different views. then there are books with new insights based on new information, or books written at the time of the event. One book I have about navel battles of WWI was written and published in 1918! Then after you have read about the general events you find there are personal accounts or small events that only affected a few people. How about escaping the fall of the Philippines and driving a 35 foot motor whaler all of the way to Australia through Japanese occupied islands! Makes William Bligh's little yachting adventure look tame. For me these stories I have been reading since childhood are what cause me to want to build the model in almost every case.

 

But, yes I also just like the looks of some models also.

Edited April 29, 2020 by lmagna

[Edwardkenway]

57 minutes ago, lmagna said:

But, yes I also just like the looks of some models also.

To be brutally honest that's the way I choose my models 😏

[Canute]

Quite interesting to read your explanations of P-40s versus Zeroes. We had similar issues in Viet Nam, because the "old Heads" said you turned and burned with your opponent. Worked very well in F-86 versus MiG-15 fights in Korea. Different jets in Nam.The Soviets kept up their small, good turning a/c designs MiG-17/19/21. We went bigger and mostly poor turning fighters - F-105/F-4. The Thud (105) was really a small bomber(it had a bomb bay). The F-4 was just brute force. The Air Force did some minimal air combat training; the Navy guys did a lot better. Yeah, they had Top Gun, AF had the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis, but it was more interested in ground attack tactics.  As Nam was ending, the AF got into more Air Combat Tactics and really hit dissimilar training hard. Finally, we were training how we expected to fight the next war. But I digress. We Phantom drivers figured out we had to use those P-40 style tactics to use what the F-4 had in bushel baskets, speed. Pass thru this mass of turning a/c , taking your shots, run away for a ways, zoom up in altitude for your quickest, tightest turn, using God's G to make it so and then slam back into the fight. Do this a few times and it's time to go home and refuel/rearm for another go. As a Weapons School instructor, I taught all my guys to fight the Phantom that way.

[ASAT]

God’s G? Ken?  Grace? Cool that you were a Phantom pilot, I worked on them for a long time as an electrician doing the ARN-101 mod on the E and RF’s before ending up in flight test at Hill AFB

[lmagna]

That is interesting Ken.

I never thought of comparing strengths and tactics between the P-40 and F-4. I was more aware of the F-86s legend as a dogfighter and using your example I suppose the F-22 would be the modern example of the F-86 but still maintaining the speed/power advantage of the F-4.  

Edited April 29, 2020 by lmagna

[marktiedens]

All nice looking aircraft - to me,the most menacing looking one I can think of is the F4 Phantom.  It just looks so mean & nasty.  Built one long ago & it was in a display cabinet at my local hobby shop,but it`s gone now - don`t know where it went.

 

Mark

[CDW]

Just now, lmagna said:

That is interesting Ken.

I never thought of comparing strengths and tactics between the P-40 and F-4. I was more aware of the F-86s legend as a dogfighter and using your example I suppose the F-22 would be the modern example of the F-86 but still maintaining the speed/power advantage of the F-4.  

The F-22 has it all...in spades. There's a good reason it's not exported. 🙂

[CDW]

2 hours ago, Canute said:

We Phantom drivers figured out we had to use those P-40 style tactics to use what the F-4 had in bushel baskets, speed. Pass thru this mass of turning a/c , taking your shots, run away for a ways, zoom up in altitude for your quickest, tightest turn, using God's G to make it so and then slam back into the fight. Do this a few times and it's time to go home and refuel/rearm for another go. As a Weapons School instructor, I taught all my guys to fight the Phantom that way.

Boom and zoom is what it's all about baby. Boom and zoom. 

The P-51 could boom and zoom as well. Don't know whether it's an accurate comparison for 1:1 aircraft, but with scale flying models, the P-51 is just amazing. It's handling characteristics is what makes it a favorite. Handles and tracks like a dream, no ill habits at all.

[ASAT]

3 minutes ago, CDW said:

The F-22 has it all...in spades. There's a good reason it's not exported. 🙂

Yeah, light years ahead of the F-16 let alone the F-4 - it’s also the reason the USA maintains World Air Superiority- much less the battlefield, I don’t think anyone wants to spend the money to compete with that technology. But it’s not really where the next wars are going to be fought... unless the Chinese change their tactics

[mtaylor]

12 hours ago, lmagna said:

Be careful Lou. If you start getting into the history part of all this you will find that it is more addicting than crack! One book leads to another and they lead to books with different views. then there are books with new insights based on new information, or books written at the time of the event. One book I have about navel battles of WWI was written and published in 1918! Then after you have read about the general events you find there are personal accounts or small events that only affected a few people. How about escaping the fall of the Philippines and driving a 35 foot motor whaler all of the way to Australia through Japanese occupied islands! Makes William Bligh's little yachting adventure look tame. For me these stories I have been reading since childhood are what cause me to want to build the model in almost every case.

 

I think that's my problem. Sometime back, followed a couple links to Civil War battles and then Civil War sea and river battles which led to nation Wars sea battles and land battles.  Now I kind of hooked on the Warfare History Network.  I think I need to go into a detox center and break the habit.  Or not.

[Canute]

Lou, I flew the ARN-101 birds at Seymour Johnson a tiny bit. I was a flight inspector down at Shaw AFB, doing a penance tour after spending the previous 2 years flying nothing but daily air to air training missions.

 

Real easy to fall into multiple rabbit holes researching various historical issues. 🤫

[lmagna]

1 hour ago, mtaylor said:

I think I need to go into a detox center and break the habit.

There is no cure Mark. One of the reasons I have so little room for models is that I have so many books, and I have no intention of getting rid of the books!