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Du mußt herrschen und gewinnen Oder dienen und verlieren, Leiden oder triumphieren, Amboß oder Hammer sein. [you must rule and win or serve and lose, suffer or triumph, be the anvil or the hammer.] -- Goethe, "Geh! Gehorche meinen Winken" "...Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about[.]" -- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" Having delayed a planned Blenheim build with an errant foot, I have decided to take upon myself an unpleasant task; I'm going to build not one, but two kits of my second-least favorite aircraft of World War II, exceeded in my dislike only by the ugly and brutish Fw190. I'm going to build two 109Fs by Fine Molds, arguably the best kit of this unpleasant-looking aircraft, the F model being probably the apex of its development. I'm going to be building a 109F-2 Trop of Hauptmann Eduard Neumann, Gruppenkommandeur of I/JG27, and a 109F-4 of Hauptmann Karl-Heinz Krahl, Gruppenkommandeur of II/JG3, both c. 1942. Eduard Neumann was born in 1914 and fought with the Condor Legion alongside Franco's Fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War, where he claimed two victories, before becoming Adjutant of JG27 shortly before the Battle of Britain. He was promoted to command of I/JG27 when his predecessor in that post was dispatched by RAF fighters over the Channel. Neumann was apparently an early sponsor of Marseille -- and I suppose there are two kinds of people who know about Marseille, those who think he was an amazing pilot with a propensity for overclaiming, and those who think he was a stupendous liar with a propensity for intermittently shooting down aircraft -- and by the time of Marseille's death, Neumann had risen to command the whole of JG27. Wikipedia diplomatically notes that "Neumann was a believer in leading his squadron from the ground", not quite the stuff of Wagnerian legend, perhaps. In any case, during Neumann's tenure in the Western Desert, JG27 went from victory after victory to being broken on the wheel of Allied airpower: Canadian ace J F Edwards killed 40-claim ace Gunter Steinhausen on 6 September 1942, and John H Curry, an American Spitfire pilot with the RCAF eliminated 59-claim ace Hans-Arnold Stahlschmidt on 7 September; Marseille himself was killed in a flying accident on 30 September. These three pilots accounted for almost half of JG27's claims between April 1941 and September 1942, and the unit never really recovered from the blow. Additionally, during Neumann's tenure, there appear to have been some problems with false claims and a near total failure of the much-vaunted German claim verification system. Neumann survived the war and lived to be 93, dying in 2004. Karl-Heinz Krahl was also born in 1914, and also served with the Condor Legion, albeit as a bomber pilot. He retrained as a fighter pilot after the conclusion of the SCW, serving with JG2 in the Battles of France and then Britain, rising to command I/JG2 at the very end of the latter. He then became Gruppenkommandeur of II/JG3, flying out of Sicily against Malta, where he was killed by ground fire from the Royal Artillery on 14 April 1942 while strafing Luqa. (Krahl was the second Luftwaffe ace to be shot down over Malta within a week's time; Hermann Neuhoff was shot down either by a 185 Squadron Hurricane or a 249 Squadron Spitfire on 10 April.) I will be building both of their aircraft; I've never built a Fine Molds kit before, so this should be interesting.