Pink Dumbo: Building Norm Smithell's "Have a Go, Jo" Spitfire Mk. VIII in 1/72 Reviewed by Chris Banyai-Riepl

Overview

By 1945, the Spitfire had been in Australian service for several years, and had proven itself well in combat. Flying out of Morotai, New Guinea, 79 Squadron was equipped with Mk. V and Mk. VIII Spitfires, including the subject of this build, A58-517. This aircraft was the mount of Flight Lieutenant Norman Smithells and featured a non-standard camouflage. What drew me to the subject, though, was the nose art, consisting of the Disney "Dumbo" character, painted pink, with the slogan "Have a Go, Jo." The "Jo" portion was a diminutive of Tojo, the Emperor of Japan, and Smithell was issuing a challenge to Japanese gunners with this phrase. With that kind of interesting background, I had to build a model of this plane.

The Kit

For building a 1/72 Spitfire, there are quite a few choices. As I was looking for a simple build without a lot of hidden problems, I chose the Hasegawa Spitfire Mk. VIII kit. On first glance in the box, I was rewarded with several trees of light gray plastic with finely recessed panel lines. It took me little time to trim the main pieces off the sprues and do a quick test fit. With no fit problems, I turned to the interior.

With all the aftermarket accessory sets out there, it is easy to get into the superdetail mode. I resisted the temptation with this build and decided from the beginning to leave the canopy closed. With that in mind, I surmised that the out of the box cockpit would be more than sufficient in this scale. I assembled all the requisite bits, painted it all Interior Green, then picked out various details with a fine brush. A simple wash, some drybrushing, and the interior was done. While it did not look as good as a crisply detailed resin interior would, under the closed canopy it looked quite fine. Even the decal instrument panel looked good under the canopy.

With that out of the way, the next step was to put all the pieces together. For the most part the construction was straightforward and required no filler. The only exception was the wing-fuselage joint on the underside. The gull wing section on the rear fuselage needed some filler, and in retrospect a bit more time probably would have limited or even eliminated that need. It was not much, though, and the rest of the assembly was trouble-free. This quickly brought me to the painting stage.

I worked from the Aeromaster decal sheet for this aircraft, as it had the decals I needed. It indicated that the plane was finished in dark green and mixed green over medium sea gray. The mixed green shade is unknown, but estimated to be similar to the interior green, but a bit lighter. After reading that, I proceeded to paint the model, and not refer back to those instructions. As such, I made a few mistakes along the way. I started out by painting the white theater markings on the tail and wing leading edges. Once those were dry and masked off, I then put down the dark green, as I was still unsure of the mixed green shade.

Still contemplating that shade, I painted the lower surface gray. Unfortunately I painted that ocean gray instead of medium sea gray, but I did not catch that until later, as my mind was still wrapped around that mixed green shade. Since it was indicated to be a lighter shade of interior green, I grabbed my bottle of that, added a touch of white, and sprayed on the pattern. The two shades of green really looked interesting together, and once it had dried, I clear coated it in preparation of decaling. Unfortunately, what I did not realize at the time was that instead of BRITISH Interior Green, I had used US Interior Green. This all came to painful awareness as I was adding the last roundel to the wings and I re-read the instructions. At this point my choices were clear: either strip it down and build a different Spitfire, or just finish the sucker. I just finished it, as I still liked the markings, even if I did get the colors wrong.

The Aeromaster decals went down flawlessly, and the pink elephant really adds some contrast to the otherwise simple scheme. Once they were on the kit and fully dried, I sprayed on a flat coat and began the weathering process. Since I screwed up the colors, I thought I'd experiment with some different weathering techniques. I started out with a simple oil wash using thinned burnt umber paint. This turned out rather well, giving the panel lines an appearance of being encrusted with New Guinea dirt. I then complemented this with some silver paint for chipping, with particular attention given to the wing roots and nose. At the point I thought I needed to do just a bit more, I stopped (always a good thing), and added the last bits such as the landing gear and propeller.

Conclusion

Although I got the colors a bit off, the model still shows off well, and looks good next to my Revell USAAC Spitfire. One of these days I will have to redo this aircraft in the proper colors, but for now this one will have to do.