OK, I'm in with an Airfix 1/48 P-40B. It will carry the colors and markings of a Tomahawk IIA or IIB. (The P-40B and P40C were almost identical physically: the C had self-sealing tanks and connections for a drop tank. When in British service they were called Tomahawks - later P40s were Kittyhawks and substantially different aircraft. The official USAAF name was "Warhawk" but I interviewed several US P-40 pilots and never heard anyone use the term - ever - the plane was a "P-40." We favored numbers - it was the Brits that named airplanes - including several of ours like Mustang or Lightning.) As you can see, I bought the Airfix P-40B which has US or Flying Tiger markings. Fortunately I have some decals that will serve well for Desert Air Force. Had I waited a couple of months, I could have bought the Airfix Tomahawk and saved myself a little bother. Here's the kit:
kit by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr
I bought a Polish made mask that's visible - hope it works. The complex Desert Scheme is Dark Earth, Middle Stone, and Azure (or light blue - I'm going to see how common that was) so I've got some serious color mixing to do. That's fun for me and a task made for Golden High Flow with their heavy duty mixing colors. This model cries for black basing and very heavy fading and it will get it.
One thing I do promise - there will be no shark's teeth. The Germans invented the scheme for the BF110 and it's ugly there and ugly on a P-40. (I'm going to shift the Chinese decals that comes with the kit to an Eduard P I-16 which was used by China in large numbers in the late 30s. The AFG was actually in service for a very short time. So maybe the US P-40B was the better kit for my purposes.) Many squadrons in Desert Air Force used the teeth too - but not all.
Desert Air Force was the Commonwealth war effort in action. I think there were pilots from every country - especially from Oz. The pic below is a Kittyhawk flown by Clive "Killer" Caldwell who was the Top Gun from Oz with 28 kills - most in a P-40 - including a couple of LW "Experten." So, we're thinking of something along this line (unfortunately I don't have Caldwell's exact markings):
Eric
Tomhwk2b by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr