Panama Canal Defenders: Camouflage and Markings of US Sixth Air Force and Antilles Air Command 1941-1945: Volume 1 - Single-engined Fighters [Paperback]

For those interested in US aircraft of the Second World War, but from lesser-known theaters, this is a must-have book. The author clearly knows the subject and it shows.  Internet ModelerThe culmination of more than 50-years of research, this first volume in a multi-volume set describes in detail, for the first time, the extraordinary array of classic aircraft that deployed to defend the vital Panama Canal and its approaches during World War II. Unlike their combat brethren in the European and Pacific theaters, the units, aircraft, and airmen of the Sixth Air Force  often cited as the Forgotten Air Force  have been all but ignored in the vast body of literature that has been published since the war.While primarily charged with defending the vital Canal which, during the first year of Americas war was viewed as almost certainly the next obvious target of Axis aggression from both the Atlantic and Pacific approaches, the tropical warriors were also plunged into the shooting war that soon saw German and Italian submarines rampaging through the Caribbean. During the first 18 months following Pearl Harbor, unbeknownst to the average Allied citizen on the home front, the submarine offensive nearly severed the vital oil lifeline from the Maracaibo, Venezuela fields, and the equally priority bauxite mines in Surinam, a mineral needed to make aluminum. More than 330 surface vessels were sunk in the Caribbean and its approaches during that period, and the aircraft and units of the Sixth Air Force and a regional offshoot, the Antilles Air Command, created to deal specifically with the submarine menace, saw hitherto undocumented combat in one-on-one actions that have eluded historians.Faced with defending a huge geographic region, stretching from Atkinson Field, British Guyana on the east, up through the entire Antilles chain to Cuba, west through the Caribbean to the Canal itself, and then up and down the Central American and mainland South American landmass from Guateml3“