The Little World

I try to find a connection for my models – and this one is going to tie back to my father and a childhood friend of his – Hubert Zemke.

They were kids in Missoula, Montana at a time when a German name and a German family brought insular righteousness down on you. So I guess they both learned to fight back – my father never had much trouble with it after he hit high school and Hubert went on to command a fighter group in WWII in Europe. His initial mount was a P-47 Razorback version of the Republic P-47.

Both my father and Col. Zemke survived the war and got to meet and talk over their experiences. Col. Zemke confided some of the instructions that he had given to the pilots under his command and the effect that had on their effectiveness – and they weren’t the sort of Hollywood pep talks the official press might have wanted. Basically he told them to all gang up on any enemy aircraft they saw and expend all their ammunition on it until it hit the ground. No mercy, no single combat, no “knights of the air”.

As he said: ” Shoot off all you’re carrying and then fly back here – we’ve got plenty of gasoline and machine gun bullets and you get them for free.”.

As a philosophy, it led to a very high kill score for the group and a long list of aces. It also got the attention of the Germans who dubbed the 56th ” Zemke’s Gangsters “. The US authorities thought ” Zemke’s Wolfpack ” sounded better politically but he told my father that he could read what the Germans wrote and it was Gangsters, all right. There was a price on Hubert, but the Gestapo never actually collected it, even though he became a POW later.

Any rate, I noted a $ 15 model of a P-47 Razorback in Hobbytech so guess where some of my birthday money went. I’m delighted to see that it has the same casting structure as the Brewster Buffalo you read about earlier. All the parts are in separate bags, and, even if I suspect that silly looking loop radio aerial behind the cockpit is a figment of someone’s imagination, the basic structure is there to make a plane from Hub’s fighter group.

The basic scheme – olive drab over grey – is easy and the markings are white nose and tail band.

I’ll settle for the kit call letters and registration number as it is a general model. My book on the unit shows plenty of aircraft with later insignia as well.