B-25J Mitchell in Combat over Europe (MTO) Book Review

By Michael Benolkin

Review

Kagero is a prolific publisher of great military historical references, especially in World War II military aviation. This latest release is from their SMI library and this comes at a very useful time for the HK Models kits. This title covers the B-25J Mitchell, and while there are numerous titles out there looking at the great nose art of the South Pacific strafers, coverage of Mitchells in European Theater of Operations (ETO) and Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO) service is somewhat overlooked.

This title focuses on the nose art of B-25Js in southern Europe (MTO). There is a brief introduction and then the title dives into photos of specific subject areas. Each photo is captioned in English and in Polish with one or more photos documenting a particular nose art airframe. Coverage includes aircraft of the:

• 340th Bomb Group
• 321st Bomb Group
• 310th Bomb Group
• 319th Bomb Group

All of the photos in the main chapters are black and white, but this title also includes nine pages of period color photos, several pages of color pin-up nose art and unit emblems. The title is rounded out with four nice color profiles. If this were the end of the topic, this would be a very handy reference for finding an interesting MTO raider to build. This isn't the end at all.

Also included with this title is a large sheet of decals for three of those four color profiles with markings in 1/32, 1/48, and 1/72 scale. The subjects include:

• B-25J, 43-27751, 447 BS/321 BG, 50, Corsica, 1944, 'MMR'
• B-25J, 43-27473, 447 BS/321 BG, 73, Corsica, 1944, 'Paper Doll'
• B-25J, 43-27704, 487 BS/340 BG, 7A, Corsica, 1945, 'My Naked Ass'

My sincere thanks to Kagero for this review sample!