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Showing results for tags 'Crashed Meads Eastbourne 16/8/40'.
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I can understand to some extent why Hermann Goering was so infatuated with this heavy fighter whose shortcomings were ably demonstrated during the BoB. A graceful design, good top speed, and really heavy armament for its time. These didn't offset the problems of manoueverability and poor acceleration in combat with modern single seat fighters like the Spitfire and Hurricane. Throughout the BoB, this often produced clutches of Bf 110s that came to grief from the east coast, all over the southeast, as well as down in the west country where the Bf 109s were more challenged by fuel problems, leaving the Zerstoerers as the only practical escorts that could accompany German bombers to more distant targets. Around my home town of Eastbourne during August and September, no less than 3 of these heavy fighters were brought down over land and probably many others were lost off the coast, unable to regain comparative safety in north France. Intent on modelling most of the local BoB casualties, I soon discovered that the only 1:48 scale Bf 110 C/D kit came from Fujimi whose pedigree I had little idea about as I ventured into my second modelling childhood some 10 years ago. Today there are much better renditions from Eduard mainly, but also Dragon. I have one of the Eduard kits to do and I suspect OOB it'll kick the Fujimi offering into touch, but the Japanese kit was the only one I could find back in 2005. I ended up building 3 of these, the first of which is the subject of this post. Late afternoon on the 16th of August 1940 saw a formation of Heinkel He 111 bombers attempting to penetrate through to the RAF airfields around London and Heathrow. Their escort on this mission seems to have been made up mainly of heavy fighters from various of the Zerstoerer Geshwarden flying Bf 110s, although there must have been some 109s about as well. The RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires intercepted the attacking formations around the Surrey/Sussex borders and the Luftwaffe force turned back towards France. Hauptmann Ernst Hollekamp was part of the 6th Staffel/II ZG 2 flying a Bf 110 C identified as A2+GL. It was shot down over Eastbourne by a Hurricane pilot from No. 1 Squadron based at Northolt and the a/c broke up above clouds over the Meads area of Eastbourne sometime in the early evening. The gunner baled out but drowned off Eastbourne seafront, while Hollekamp's parachute appears to have failed to deploy fully and he was killed when he crashed into one of the houses in the Meads area. The remains of the aircraft ended up in the grounds of a school in Meads, now part of Brighton University. I'd wanted to have a go at the later Jagdwaffe BoB scheme for Bf 110s and had seen numerous pictures that made the a/c much more attractive than the earlier 70/71 splinter scheme. Some heavy fighter units like ZG 76 persisted with the older scheme through most of 1940 until the 110s were withdrawn from daylight operations and mostly switched to the night fighter role to combat British bomber attacks against targets in Europe. So this is one of my early and therefore less accomplished attempts, with a few bits of Eduard etched parts, but basically OOB. I did replace the kit's glasshouse with a Squadron Vac mould, since the kit came with the armoured windscreen moulded in which wasn't apparent on any of the ZG 2 a/c I saw pictured in b&w. I wasn't confident enough to work on the panel lines and operational staining that probably typified these a/c as they became more heavily used. I console myself with the thought that the newer 71/02 paintwork was perhaps still unblemished. As you can see, I did try my hand at some exhaust discolouration which didn't end up too bad. I was quite pleased when the whole thing eventually came together, but I suspect the Eduard kit will look a bit better when I get around to it. My one disappointment was allowing the cyano acrylate glue to fog parts of the glasshouse, since I wasn't happy with ordinary white glue or polystyrene cement. You live and learn by such mistakes.