by Peter May

This photo appeared in Geoffrey Pentland's book, RAAF Camouflage and Markings Vol 2 P.51(5). Photo via Peter May.

Since the book was published there has been some doubt about the true identity of the aircraft in the picture, due perhaps to the errors made in the caption for the photograph. Pentland noted this was A29-435, however this airframe was never operated by 76 Squadron, and was a different model Kittyhawk, a P-40N-5-CU, not the P-40M-10-CU seen in the picture itself. The nose art 'Little Audrey' was well known to have been a feature of aircraft A29-347 coded SV-M. Was this aircraft A29-347 with changed codes of SV-K, or was it another aircraft with the cowls and artwork swapped?

To answer this question requires a fair bit of patience to go through the detail, so bear with me. It will 'click together' at the end of the article.

I have attached the PDF that Peter sent me of his article here click to load the PDF, as this was simpler than converting it to HTML format because of all the indents, attachments etc (Steve - Editor).

Peter also includes detail on each airframe in his PDF and I have drawn profiles of each scheme on the subsequent pages (Steve - Editor).

Hit next to go to the 2nd page on 76 Sqn P-40M colour schemes.