'Flying Tigers' Curtiss P40B Warhawk

The Flying Tigers were fighting the Japanese before America officially was. The First American Volunteer Group was a band of U.S. pilots recruited — quietly, against the neutrality laws of the day — to fly for Nationalist China, wearing Chinese markings on American-built Curtiss P-40s painted with the snarling shark's mouth that made them famous. Their commander, Claire Chennault, knew the P-40 could not out-turn the nimble Japanese fighters, so he forbade his men to try: they were to use the Warhawk's strengths instead — dive from above, hit hard, and zoom away to climb and do it again, always in pairs. First blooded two weeks after Pearl Harbor, they ran up a lopsided record of kills at the very moment Japan seemed to be winning everywhere.

K&C's model wears the markings of aircraft #45 of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron — the "Hell's Angels" — in the AVG's earth-and-olive camouflage, Chinese sun roundels under the wings and the shark's teeth grinning across the nose. This particular Warhawk had no single owner: it was flown by a rotation of notable pilots including squadron commander Arvid Olson, ace Robert "RT" Smith, and Robert Prescott, who later founded the Flying Tiger Line cargo airline — and between them they downed seven Japanese aircraft in it. It sits among K&C's other showpiece machines: pair it with the European-theater fighter Capt. Don Gentile's P-51B Mustang and the Shermans "Fury" and the "Kraut Killer." On a stand or in a China-Burma diorama, a shark-mouthed P-40 is one of the most recognizable warbirds of them all.

Model: AF058 / King & Country / 1/30 scale / matte finish / model aircraft