MMP Books continues its series of “Colours of…” Smaller European Air Forces. This time, the Bombers of the Swedish Air Force in the 1924-1058 period are covered. This period cover the critical years of World War II when these aircraft performed a critical job of protecting Swedish neutrality.

Don’t let the word “Colours… “ in the title fool you. This book is not just about color profiles and camouflages - a topic which is certainly covered extensively.

This book also has plenty of historical facts, operational details, plus some stories like when a Ca.313 was being tested as a dive-bomber by the Swedish pilots and an Italian engineer came up crawling to the pilot to say: “Please, signor - I have a wife and ten children to provide for!”

In particular this book covers the following airframes

• Fiat BR
• Fiat BR1
• Junkers Ju86K
• Hawker Hart
• Northrop 8A-1
• Seversky/Republic Guardsman
• Fokker G.1B (never delivered)
• Caproni Ca.313
• Saab 17
• Saab 18

The book has chapters for each aircraft type in detail, including an introduction of how the airframe entered service. It finishes each section with a sub-chapter devoted to the camouflage colors, patterns and gorgeous color profiles (sometime even 3-view) of different aircrafts, next to a historical picture of the airplane.

In addition to the scans included in this review, the following short video is available that briefly shows each page in the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve_cTVOKPlU

Finally the book includes a few appendixes listing aircrafts in Swedish service that could carry bombs, but were not used as bombers.

I’ve truly enjoyed reading this book. It is a great historical read; it has very good quality black and white pictures and amazing color profiles.

This book is highly recommended to historians, modelers and aviation aficionados.

I would like to thank Casemate Publishers and IPMS/USA for the review sample.