Described as the Asian Pacific Stalingrad, the Battle of Manila was the largest urban clash of the Pacific war and resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties and the almost complete destruction of the Philippine city.
Although Japanese Army forces largely withdrew from the city in the face of American advances, the IJN commander determined to fight to the death there - leading to a nightmarish street fight with horrific consequences for the local population at the hands of Japanese reprisals and American aerial and artillery bombardements.
Under attack from B-29s, the IJN aerial forces used Dewey Boulevard in the centre of Manila as a temporary runway for interceptors until the city fell.
After a quiet start to the New Year's modelling, I started this project as nothing more than a quick standalone plane build to play with the paint peel weathering effects. But the Osprey Aces book on the J2M had a tantalising photo of a Raiden in Manila that spawed this vignette.
The plane itself is a Platz boxing of what was presumably the F-Toys Gashapon model based on their particular sprue layout, but it was supplied with fictional Anime decals.
The kit itself was very good with lovely details and one of the best injection cockpits I have ever seen in this scale.
For some reason I had trouble with the chipping fluid on this project - the paint over the top simply wouldn't set. So instead I repainted the metal then used Maskol to paint small wear patches before applying the IJN Green. The result was, I think, quite effective. I touched up the decals (liberally aquired from other kits) with a little of the base metallic too - in the last days of battle even the Hinomaru couldn't be kept clean.
To add to the flavour I added an M18 Hellcat which were used extensively in the campaign and some US Troops - probably rather overdressed for battle, but no-one makes PTO US Troops in scale sadly.
These were all blended onto a 10x10cm canvas with a liberal amount of mud.
