Mushroom Model Publication has released the second volume of the Finnish Fighter Color series. You can find a review of Volume 1 here on the reviews site.

This book, as Volume 1, is structured by aircraft type. Each aircraft type has two chapters. The first one is devoted to the historical introduction on each type including how it was procured and how it did perform in Finnish service. In many cases there are plenty of historical details on different missions including date, location, number of airplanes involved and mission kills/losses. There are no first-hand narratives of pilots involved in the action, so I suppose the information is coming from squadron records.

The second chapter of each airplane type is devoted to the main topic of this book: camouflage and colors. Typically the first few pages in these chapters would describe the camouflage scheme and colors including wherever possible pictures showing the whole upper surfaces and profiles of representative airframes. If any specific change to the camouflage was applied due to official orders that would be described at this chapter.

Finally the “meat” of the book is full color profiles accompanying B&W images of the same airframe shown in the color profile. If any assumption was made on the color profile due to the pictures being black and white it is clearly indicated.

This volume covers the

• Hawker Hurricane
• Caudron-Renault Cr. 714
• Curtiss Hawk 75A
• Messerschmitt Bf-109G
• The locally designed Myrsky
• Captured examples of I-15bis, I-153, I-16, Lagg-3 and P-40M

Some chapters are more in-depth than others. For instance the Bf-109G chapter is about 50 pages long, while the Myrsky and Hurricane are 12 and 18 pages respectively. I would say that the length of each chapter is proportional to the relevance of the type for the FAF during WWII.

Most of the pictures (over 200 of them) are in Black and White and there are a handful of color ones. There are almost 100 full color profiles and for each one there is an accompanying picture showing the actual aircraft that the profile is based upon.

This book is more than just a research on colors and markings. There is plenty of historical research on the operations of each type within the Finnish Air Force. Reading this book will teach you more than just camouflage patterns, be sure of that!

The last section of this book contains tables that describe the Finnish Air Force structure and all the victories and claims by Finnish pilots during WWII.

Full book trailer available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDU5Ly73PtU

This book is simply excellent. Highly recommended to modelers due to the reference book value (color profiles and pictures) as well for the historical research value of it.

I would like to thank Mushroom Model Publications and IPMS/USA for the review sample.