The Little World

Part of the appeal of the Grigorovich is the seasonal one…the fact that it’s a winter fighter with skis for landing in the snow. I am not an Australian fan-boy for snow…I passed my childhood in Alberta and I got all the show I needed, thank you.

The skis are a novelty, but so is the white winter colour scheme. I like white aircraft – Coastal Command and such – and the two other Soviet winter ones in the collection look very good. I cannot decide the exact Soviet light blue for the underside…and the internet is no help with this either. So I have a small variation in the collection, figuring this is as accurate as it would have been anyway.

But it is odd to consider…I have rarely seen any of the aircraft of other Allied combatants of the time in a winter camouflage. The CC colours excepted, I can’t think of any other whitened fighters or bombers. Yet they all flew in winter over Europe. You’d think that the spray guns would have been out come the first snows and the scrubbing brushes later when Spring broke.

Perhaps the British airfields were far enough away that they felt safe in regular green/grey – and then later after the invasion they felt they had enough air superiority over theatre battlefields that it did not matter.

The keen observers will see the reaction guns slung under the wings of this fighter – firing large calibre shells, they were poor in accuracy and low in effectiveness – and eventually the VVS realised this and had the courage to remove them. This also involved jailing their designer, but then that is one of the traditional man-management techniques that the Russians use for their industrial, political, and military organisations.

It must be a tough decision to make on the part of the dictators or committees – whether to jail the designer until they come up with a better idea or shoot them outright to encourage other designers to try harder in the first place. I mean, you can only purge the intelligentsia so much before it disappears and you have the non-intelligentsia operating the dangerous machinery. But of course that would never happen these days…