MMP Books continues its series of “Colours of…” Eastern European Air Forces. This time the Yugoslav Air Force before and up to World War 2. The second volume covers the period mainly the mid-1930’s until April 1941. Volume 1 has been reviewed previously.

In particular this book covers the following airframes

• Hawker Yugoslav Fury
• Ikarus Ik-2
• Hawker Hurricane Mk.I
• Rogozarski IK-3
• Messerschmitt Bf 109E-3
• Potez 63
• Rogozarski R-313
• Zmaj R-1
• Ikarus Orkan
• Messerschmitt Bf-110C (captured and pressed into service)

The book has chapters for each aircraft type in detail, including an introduction of how the airframe entered service, its participationg in combat during April 1941 and it finishes each section with a sub-section 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.

There are black and white pictures of all of the above listed airframes, except the sole Bf-110C, of which there are no known pictures. There are descriptions of how it looked like based on witnesses. Another interesting detail are pictures of the Bf-109 in Yugoslavian markings, which had large white circles painted in a rush around the national markings as an easier way to tell them apart from the German Bf-109s.

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=CI9kCjmQWRk

Finally, the book includes a few appendixes covering Yugoslav Air Force ranks, units structure, abbreviations and aero engines

I’ve truly enjoyed reading this book. There are references to the air combat that happened during April 1941, with one or two paragraphs describing specific dogfights, although most of the combat is described based on flight logs or similar sources.

While reading the book there is the occasional abbreviations that might confuse you a bit, but that is why there is an appendix. Also, there is the rare mistranslation, like “the squadron was dislocated to…”, while I think the intention was to write “the squadron was relocated to...”

Despite some very rare mistranslations, 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, MMP Books and IPMS/USA for the review sample.