PANAMA CANAL DEFENDERS , Vol.1

Warplane Color Gallery #4

PANAMA CANAL DEFENDERS

Camouflage and Markings of US Sixth Air Force

and Antilles Air Command 1941-1945

Volume 1: Single-engined Fighters

Author(s): Dan Hagedorn

Illustrator: A.Wróbel

ISBN: 978-83-60672-34-1

Date: 2022-01

Catalogue Number : PROWCG04

CategoryAvailable Format : A4

Pages : 66 ( 10 in colour )

Volume 1: Single-engined Fighters

This first volume in a multi-volume set describes in detail the extraordinary array of classic aircraft that deployed to defend the vital Panama Canal and its approaches during W.W.II. While primarily charged with defending the vital Canal, the tropical warriors were also plunged into the shooting war that soon saw German and Italian submarines rampaging through the Caribbean. During the first 18 months following Pearl Harbor, the submarine offensive nearly severed the vital oil lifeline from the Maracaibo, Venezuela fields. The aircraft and units of the Sixth Air Force and a regional offshoot, the Antilles Air Command, created to deal specifically with the submarine menace.

The defenders of the Canal soon realized that this vast and largely over-water operating area demanded camouflage for its aircraft that the standard, prescribed USAAF mix did not provide. As a result, for the first two full years of the war, Sixth Air Force leaders evolved markings unique within the Army Air Forces and, for the first time, a coherent description of these often-exotic schemes are detailed in this ground-breaking series. But besides the overall schemes applied, Sixth Air Force and Antilles Air Command crews, nearly always operating in squadron-size elements or smaller, saw no utility in the unit code identifiers applied to USAAF aircraft in Europe and the Pacific, where large formations required a means of identifying members of individual operating units. Instead, they relied upon a system of so-called “unit numbers” and color coding of easily recognizable aircraft com