Here's my Swiss Bf109D built from the Classic Airframes kit. The bit of research i did for this one was very interesting and i learnt a few things about the Swiss airforce during WW2. Neutral Switzerland may have been, non-combatant they were not! The Swiss took a forceful approach to protecting their neutrality, resulting in them often shooting down aircraft of both sides- usually when the German/Allied aircraft mistakenly fired upon the Swiss aircraft that would intercept the intrusion of their airspace.
The Bf109D's were not much different than the standard German aircraft- the MG's were replaced with slightly smaller 7.45mm MG29's instead of the standard 7.62mm guns. 10 Bf109D's were purchased from Germany initially- so the type was only used in small numbers compared to the later Bf109E. However the surviving D's served until 1949.
In 1944, after a series of incidents when US Mustangs mistakenly shot down a pair of Swiss Bf109's, the Swiss tried painting huge red and white stripes over the wings and fuselage in an attempt to make their identity more obvious. Unfortunately this then led to a number of incidents with German aircraft that thought the stripes looked like allied invasion stripes. So the scheme was done away with eventually.
My subject has the stripes, as given in the CA kit and the pic below. Classic Airframes did a good job- the only thing i did differently was the spinner, their colour notes say to use white but the pic shows that at least at some time it was darker- i'm guessing the original RLM 70, but maybe it's red. Anyway it doesn't mean CA made a mistake as spinners can be changed easily and often were. It could have been white at some point- i went with the pic.
I'll put some construction pics with notes in a seperate post for anyone interesting in building the CA kits.
Andrew
