Bf 110E S9NN, flown by Lt Herbert Kutscha on the Russian front, sometime during mid to late 1942, while his unit was attached to SKG 210. Kutscha was a career military man, fighting in Poland, during the Phoney War, the invasion of the West and Battle of Britain before going to the Eastern Front. In the Bf 110, he scored 22 victories, including 4 RAF fighters over Britain and a Swiss Bf 109E. Included in his score were numerous tanks, rail cars, trucks and artillery pieces destroyed while conducting low level bombing and straffing raids. Transfering to JG3 and retraining on the Bf 109G, Kutscha fought in Italy, before coming home to conduct defence of the Reich operations. He was shot down by a P-47 during 'Big Week' and seriously injured before returning to duty, fighting over France during the battle of Normandy. Transferred to JG 27, he was again shot down over the Ardennes on Christmas Day 1944. Escaping back to German lines, he was transferred to JG 11, where he would fight to the end of the war, scoring a further 25 victories in the Bf 109G. Herbert Kutscha was one of the lucky few to survive fighting from the first, to the last day of WW2 in Europe. He passed away in 2003.
Eduards weekend edition kit looks very nice in the box and builds just as well. It comes with a lot of other parts, including a new fuselage and canopy so I think you could probably make a D model with what is supplied in the box (Iraqi anyone?). As it's a weekend edition kit, only one decal option is included. Detail is is very nice, my only critique there is the way they did the nose, having you insert the guns from the back before you close up. This is frustrating as the wasp decal covers some of the machine gun ports, so you need to finish this part first, or cut the guns away and insert them later. It would also have been nice for Eduard to include the RLM 74/75 upper camouflage pattern to go under the winter white wash as they claim this was patchy on his aircraft. In any case, I found a picture of this machine operating later in 1943 when most of the white wash had been removed, thus I chose not to put it on.
