Author Topic: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force  (Read 793 times)

Online Vraciu

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And now for something a little different...


P-51C-10-NT (F-6C) R7*N
S/N 44-10889
II/33 Savoie
Colmar France, 1945

Following the Allied landing in Algeria and Morocco, in November 1942, French reconnaissance group II/33 Savoie participated in the Tunisia campaign equipped with the obsolete Bloch 174.   The group was set to be re-equipped with B-26 Marauders, but this was changed to B-25s, before finally settling on F-5 Lightnings beginning in March 1943.  These were augmented with Spitfires (Mks V and IX) sometime later.   Thes F-5s were considered adequate if not weary, but the Spitfires had a rougher time with seven lost in only two weeks during November of 1944.   In January of 1945 the group was designated as a tactical photographic and visual reconnaissance unit.   Due to the inadequacies of the Spitfire for the missions II/33 was now being tasked with the decision was made to equip them with twenty F-6 Mustangs, the reconnaissance  variant of the P-51.

The first French mustang sortie was flown on 19 February 1945 and the unit suffered its first loss on 20 March (Lieutenant Labadie managed to bail out of his aircraft and became a POW, only to escape from a prisoner convoy in April, after which he returned to his unit).   The French Mustangs played a role in the Allied crossing of the Rhine but their low-level missions made them vulnerable to enemy fighters.   On 17 April, Lt. Sainflou and Lt. Delgue were jumped by a dozen Bf 109s. Sainflou narrowly escaped by diving away but Lt. Delègue was never seen again.

Between November 13, 1944 and April 15, 1945, the group had logged 1,052 flight hours during 730 sorties. From April 16, 1945, and May 8, 1945, VE-Day, the P-51s of the Savoie group flew 189 sorties representing 324 hours of flight, most being for long-range reconnaissance missions on the retreating Wermacht's communication lines. Since the reception of its Mustangs, the group flew 13 oblique photo-recon missions, shooting 860 pictures, including 660 during the complete photo coverage of the Rhine's right bank, 136 vertical photo-recon missions, with 4400 pictures shot. This helped the photo-interpretors locate 15 radar stations, 41 heavy AAA guns, 685 medium or light AAA guns, 11 heavy artillery guns and 25 medium ones, 15 mortar guns, 314 automatic weapons, 42 strongpoints, 21 bunkers, 47 road barrages, 10 anti-tank trenches, 42 depots, 5 radio stations, nearly 50 trains, and over 400 railroad and road cuts.

On May 9, 1945, nine Mustangs of the GR II/33 took part in the VE-Day flypast over the Champs-Elysées.

Members of the unit were awarded 17 crosses of the Legion of Honour, 39 army recommendations, 7 air reconnaissance recommendations, 8 division recommendations, 26 brigade recommendations, and 28 group recommendations. In addition, 14 American awards were given, including 4 Distinguished Flying Crosses.

On July 2, 1945, a recommendation signed by General de Gaulle awarded the II/33 the Croix de Guerre avec palme, France highest unit award, with leaf: "Under the orders of Commander Martre, the perfect model of a leader, the reconnaissance group Savoie performed during the winter period a most remarkable work of reconnaissance with minimal equipment which translated into more than a thousand hours of combat flight time and 750 tactical reconnaissance missions for the profit of the French Army."







« Last Edit: March 28, 2023, 11:58:32 PM by Vraciu »
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Offline Devil 505

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #1 on: March 28, 2023, 11:55:54 PM »
Very nice.

Only suggestion I could give is to maybe lighten the metal tone a little. It's a bit too dark and blueish.
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Online Vraciu

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #2 on: March 28, 2023, 11:59:09 PM »
Very nice.

Only suggestion I could give is to maybe lighten the metal tone a little. It's a bit too dark and blueish.

Not exactly sure why as it is the same base metal I've been using for ahwile now...

 :headscratch:
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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #3 on: March 29, 2023, 12:03:50 AM »
Seems a bit gray now....

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Offline lyric1

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #4 on: March 29, 2023, 02:25:19 AM »
 :aok

Offline Arlo

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #5 on: March 29, 2023, 02:51:20 AM »
Very nice.

Only suggestion I could give is to maybe lighten the metal tone a little. It's a bit too dark and blueish.

Funny, he didn't look 'Blueish' to me.  :D

Offline Greebo

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #6 on: March 29, 2023, 03:11:57 AM »
Great job on the skin Vraciu, something a bit different to the norm. I think I prefer the later version of the metal to the earlier.

What I have found with NMF skins is that brown dirt layers can effect the overall look of the metal, turning it a bit purple. So what I do now is to create a desaturation adjustment mask for the metal areas to compensate for this. To make the mask I duplicate all the paint layers of my skin and merge these copies into one layer, which I then turn pure black. Next I make a solid pure white layer, place this below the first one, merge these two layers together and then turn the layer off so it isn't visible. In the weathering folder I click on the "New Adjustment Layer/Hue/Saturation/Lightness" button and turn the saturation slider on this layer down to -100%. Next I paste the data from the merged layers I created earlier into this adjustment layer and name it "NMF Desaturation Mask".

This all sounds harder to do than it actually is, takes me a couple of minutes. The idea is that all the dirt layers in the weathering folder that are below the adjustment layer will be turned grey, but only on the NMF areas, where the layer is white. Where the layer is black (on the painted areas of the skin) the dirt keeps its colour. I usually place layers with specific stains (i.e. exhaust stains) above the layer, so these keep their brown colour. General overall grime layers go below it. If I want to have a little dirt colour retained on these layers I just turn the opacity level of the adjustment layer down a bit.

Online Vraciu

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #7 on: March 29, 2023, 07:18:50 AM »
Interesting.   Let me see if I can do that.

I don't suppose there is really anything we can do to keep the metal from looking like flat gray when not in direct lighting is there?
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Offline oboe

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #8 on: March 29, 2023, 07:36:43 AM »
Great job on the skin Vraciu, something a bit different to the norm. I think I prefer the later version of the metal to the earlier.

What I have found with NMF skins is that brown dirt layers can effect the overall look of the metal, turning it a bit purple. So what I do now is to create a desaturation adjustment mask for the metal areas to compensate for this. To make the mask I duplicate all the paint layers of my skin and merge these copies into one layer, which I then turn pure black. Next I make a solid pure white layer, place this below the first one, merge these two layers together and then turn the layer off so it isn't visible. In the weathering folder I click on the "New Adjustment Layer/Hue/Saturation/Lightness" button and turn the saturation slider on this layer down to -100%. Next I paste the data from the merged layers I created earlier into this adjustment layer and name it "NMF Desaturation Mask".

This all sounds harder to do than it actually is, takes me a couple of minutes. The idea is that all the dirt layers in the weathering folder that are below the adjustment layer will be turned grey, but only on the NMF areas, where the layer is white. Where the layer is black (on the painted areas of the skin) the dirt keeps its colour. I usually place layers with specific stains (i.e. exhaust stains) above the layer, so these keep their brown colour. General overall grime layers go below it. If I want to have a little dirt colour retained on these layers I just turn the opacity level of the adjustment layer down a bit.

Looks great, Vraciu.  No hue problems I can detect on a Macbook, anyway.  In some images, the prop spinner seems dark tho. 

I didn't know the French flew the P-51, even for reconnaissance.  Well done!  I know they had F-5s (P-38 photo recon) versions - there is a famous French author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who was shot down and killed in one.  He wrote "The Little Prince".

Greebo - is this mask part of the diffuse map?  Or one of the others?  Trying to figure out how I could try this method in Photoshop... 

Offline Greebo

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #9 on: March 29, 2023, 10:27:27 AM »
This is something I do in the diffuse map. I probably shouldn't have called the layer a mask either, because in this particular case it is an adjustment layer. I don't use Photoshop but I did a quick search and came up with this web page that seems to relate to something similar. My guess is that is you pasted the data from the merged painted areas layer into that then it would work the same.

There are ways to use this same merged painted areas data with a mask layer though:-

For example you can paste the data into a mask layer placed in the weathering folder. This then deletes all the dirt from any layer below the mask layer in the folder rather than turning it grey. Again you can use the mask layer opacity slider to reduce keep some of the dirt.

Another use for this mask is with the paint chips and chipped rivets layers. I create a paint chips sub folder with these two layers as well as a copy of the painted areas mask in it. In this case I use PSP's "Negative Image" command on the mask to turn the black areas white and vice versa. What this does is delete all the paint chips and chipped rivets from the NMF areas of the skin.

I have a scratches layer on my skins, just a load of tiny half-erased squiggly white lines that are placed around hatches and walked on areas with the layer opacity reduced until the scratches are barely visible. For NMF areas though I like the scratches to be black. To get this effect I put the scratches layer and an inversion adjustment layer in a sub folder and paste the painted areas data into the adjustment layer. What this does is turn the white scratches black on the NMF areas.

The nice thing about using masks and adjustment layers is that it is non destructive. You can just turn the mask off on some future non-NMF skin and get all your dirt back. Or just paste in your new merged painted layers data for a future NMF skin. It saves a lot of time in the long run.
« Last Edit: March 29, 2023, 10:31:18 AM by Greebo »

Online Vraciu

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #10 on: March 29, 2023, 10:48:01 AM »
Thanks Oboe.  Yeah they also flew Ds.   I have one of those in the works as well.    The dark spinner is a game engine thing.  I can try to manually lighten it but I've never managed to get them to match the metal on the rest of the plane.   Usually they're painted so it's not a big deal.

G, thanks for the info.  I'll give this a try.

I'll tweak the metal some more before submitting.
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Offline FTJR

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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #11 on: March 29, 2023, 10:48:37 AM »
Looks really good V.
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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #12 on: March 29, 2023, 10:49:24 AM »
Thanks bud.
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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #13 on: March 29, 2023, 12:50:34 PM »
I haven't had time to do Greebo's full method yet, but I've done a bit of desaturation and lightening.   I'm going to submit it like this and then come back to it later to try the other technique.

Thanks for the help everyone.


« Last Edit: March 29, 2023, 12:53:11 PM by Vraciu »
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Re: P-51C-10-NT /F-6C (R7*N) - II/33 Savoi - Free French Air Force
« Reply #14 on: March 30, 2023, 09:55:16 AM »
Also, I need to note that this unit may not have been FFAF but was actually composed of Vichy pilots in Africa that joined the Allies after Operation Torch.   My guess is they would be designated as a French Liberation Army unit.   I’m unclear as to the proper designation for the French Air Force in 1944-45.
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