Finnish Fighter Colours 1939–1945, Vol. 2
by Kari Stenman & Karolina Hołda
For background on the topic the reader is directed to our review of vol. 1. All remarks regarding scope and execution apply to vol. 2 but the list of aircraft it covers can now be more specific: Hawker Hurricane I + IIA, Caudron-Renault CR 714, Curtiss Hawk 75A, Messerschmitt Bf 109 G, Myrsky (Storm, a domestic product built by the State Aircraft Factory), Polikarpov I-15bis, I-153, I-16, Łavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3, and Curtiss P-40M Warhawk.
Both volumes are consecutively numbered, which can’t hurt but is of no specific advantage as there is no Index or cross-referencing. Each book has its own five Appendices and only vol. 2 has a Bibliography. For the reader the division of Appendices across two books is of course not user-friendly (especially as the ones in vol. 1 are not individually named on its Table of Contents) because they obviously pertain to all the aircraft covered jointly by the two books.
The color profiles in vol. 2 have one distinct difference, in fact it would seem new to this whole series: some aircraft have certain markings that are stenciled on the actual airframe called out as a sort of close-up in large type or an enlarged graphic. This could be service instructions such as tire pressure (on a plane with German markings: Reifendruck; on a Finnish one: Rengaspaine) or graphics for, say, octane numbers or where not to step on a wing etc. This sort of detail is easy to get wrong for the modeler working only from photos.
Stenman, who runs his own publishing company in Finland and has written over a dozen books on the subject of the Finnish Air Force in World War II, has certainly turned over a huge amount of material to compile these books, and if this is your area of interest it is safe to say that there’s no point in even looking elsewhere, certainly not in English and definitely not for modelers. As before, many or most photos have not been seen before.
The publisher offers both books as a set at a 16% discount under SKU “Tg 01.”
Copyright 2015, Sabu Advani (speedreaders.info).
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