The Warpaint series should be remarkably familiar to most modelers. This is #147 in the series and covers the Nakajima Ki-43. The book covers the development of and the service history of the type. The most numerous and famous of the Japanese Army Air Force aircraft, it was comparable to the Japanese Navy’s A6M Zero. One of the interesting facts is that to Japanese people, the Ki-43 is more famous and revered than its counterpart, the Zero! So much so that it is often the aircraft of choice for anime producers.

The book is filled with many wartime and immediate postwar photographs. One of the best features is the substantial number of color profiles covering Japanese, Republic of China, Manchuko, US captured examples, Royal Thai, French, Communist China, and Indonesian examples. Nice color photos of the4 surviving examples are also included.

The period between 1920 and 1939 saw a rapid evolution in flight technology, not least in the field of fighter aircraft. The RAF ended WWI with a mix of fighters but by 1920 had standardized on the two-gun rotary-engine Sopwith Snipe, one of the most advanced fighters of the War. In the Twenties, aircraft development hardly evolved – mainly due to Government parsimony, the period ending with the Hawker Woodcock and Gloster Gamecock, which were still two-gun, fabric-covered biplanes with top speeds barely in advance of the Snipe. In the Thirties, the purse strings opened as the realization that another war could be on the horizon, and the development of the Hawker Fury – still a biplane, but with many advanced features – opened the door for even more advanced types, and to the monoplane Hurricane and Spitfire that began to equip the RAF in the late Thirties.

This book does a lot to dispel some of the myths of the “easy” German invasion of Poland. While it does so, it is also not the focus of the book, but rather the nascent Waffen-SS evolving into a military arm of the Nazi war machine. Author Massimiliano Afiero writes,

In September 1939, the Waffen-SS was effectively only three regiments plus several hodgepodge units. Poland would be its baptism of fire: during the campaign, SS combat units participated in operations attached to formations of the Heer. Still considered more parade troops than frontline soldiers, they did not prove a decisive factor in the fighting, but the campaign was important for their transformation into real fighting units.