1:72 Grumman F6F Hellcat (wet decals)

The fighter that decided the fighting over the Pacific

The Grumman F6F was a direct answer to the experience of the first months of the war in the Pacific. It was given a powerful radial engine, a roomy wing and such a reserve of strength that it took hits that would have brought a lighter machine down. It was no agile acrobat, it was a reliable working tool with which a war could be fought from the deck day after day, and that is exactly why most of the American naval aces flew it.

The sheet leads the modeler across the decks of a whole series of ships. There are machines from the Cabot, the Intrepid, the Lexington, the Essex, the Belleau Wood and the Tulagi, aircraft with personal names painted under the cockpit, the machine of a pilot who became famous for a run of victories in 1944, and the aircraft of an air group commander. The last subject turns elsewhere: a French naval aviation aircraft from the Indochina theater of 1952, when the type was seeing out its service far from its original ground.

Notes on colors and surface:

• early machines carry a three-tone finish, late ones a uniform dark blue
• the numbers on the nose and on the fin differ in shape between the subjects
• shipboard service calls for salt traces, exhaust streaks and worn walkways

Eleven subjects mean a stock for several models. The package does not hold a kit in the matching scale; the sheet carries printed markings only.

The order of the subjects is a guide in itself: the first numbers belong to machines from 1943, when the lighter combinations were still in use, and the last ones to the close of the war and to postwar service. Anyone who builds two models from opposite ends of the list will show on them how the naval finish changed in only two years.