1:32 P61 Black Widow Night Fighter

The Widow over the Marianas in 1944

The 6th Night Fighter Squadron was the first unit in the Pacific to exchange provisionally converted twin engine machines for a real night fighter, the Northrop P-61. It flew from airfields in the Mariana Islands and in the second half of 1944 patrolled over newly captured bases, from which raids against the Japanese archipelago soon took off.

This sheet in 1:32 scale offers a pair of its aircraft. The first, serial number 42-5526, was known by the name Nightie Mission, the second, 42-5527, bore the name Moonhappy. Both numbers fall into neighboring items of the same production series, which with sets of this kind tends to be a rarity; a modeler can build two machines that stood side by side on the airfield.

A procedure that has proved itself

Lukewarm water releases the film from the paper after roughly ten to twenty seconds of soaking; a longer bath washes the binder out and the motif then does not hold on the model. The decal is slid onto a dampened spot and the position is adjusted with a soft brush, never with tweezers, which easily tear the thin film. Excess water is soaked up with the corner of a paper towel pressed lightly to the edge.

Night fighters carried a minimum of colored elements, and their names and nose art matter all the more for it. In the large scale every brush stroke of the original painter is legible, and a finished model therefore takes the form of one particular aircraft from the end of 1944. Anyone building a diorama will appreciate that the pair of machines comes from one unit and can be set up side by side without mixing periods.