Czechoslovakian Hurricane
Revell-Germany 1/72 Hurricane IIB

By Chris Bucholtz

The Hurricane

The Hawker Hurricane, although viewed to this day as second-rate compared to the Spitfire, holds a record that's hard to dispute. Hurricanes - although already a five-year-old design when the war began - accounted for more enemy aircraft than any other RAF type, including 80 percent of the kills scored in the Battle of Britain!

First conceived in 1934 by Sydney Camm as the RAF's first monoplane fighter, the Hurricane was the culmination of 25 years of steady British aircraft evolution. The Hawker design team had been working on a fighter project known as the Fury Monoplane, which had been designed around the 660-horsepower. Rolls-Royce Goshawk steam-cooled engine. In what turned out to be a lucky accident, Camm learned of Rolls-Royce's efforts to develop a new engine, known initially as the PV-12 but soon to become known as the Merlin.

The Hurricane was a clean aircraft, but it had features that harkened back to earlier years. Its tubular metal construction and fabric covering were similar to those of the Fury biplane, and its contours, particularly the tail surfaces, had Camm's unmistakable stamp. These old-fashioned features were combined with new technology for the day, including a fully retractable undercarriage and an enclosed cockpit. Not only was the Hurricane the first RAF monoplane, but it was the first RAF fighter capable of more than 300 mph. Truly, this was a revolutionary aircraft.

The plane entered service in December 1937, and saw extensive action over France, but it achieved eternal fame in the summer and fall of 1940. The RAF opposed the Luftwaffe in the skies of southern England with 19 squadrons of the nimble Spitfire - and 32 squadrons of Hurricanes! The rugged, reliable Hurricanes paired with the Spitfires to present a one-two punch that took a grievous toll on the Germans, eventually forcing the Luftwaffe to turn from bombing British airfields to bombing its cities. While this decision took the war directly to the inhabitants of London, Coventry and scores of other British cities, it also effectively lost the war in the west for Germany. Hitler was admitting that he could not defeat the RAF, Operation Seelowe was cancelled, and the tide began to turn.

The Few who saved Britain were comprised of a core of crack pre-war RAF pilots supplemented by a host of hastily-trained newcomers, some of whom were sent into combat with less than 30 hours of total flight time. Training was compressed to cope with mounting losses, which only compounded problems as these inexperienced pilots were cut down while trying to learn combat air tactics in the face of a massive German onslaught. To plug these gaps, the RAF somewhat reluctantly turned to pilots from outside of the Commonwealth. Three Americans flew in the Battle of Britain, but the primary sources of foreign-born pilots were Poland and Czechoslovakia. The RAF initially viewed these men with a jaundiced eye, but ultimately they may have proven the deciding factor in the battle; the Polish 312 Squadron was the highest-scoring unit of the battle.

These men took circuitous routes from their home countries to fight the Germans; typical of their journey was the one undertaken by Otmar Kucera.

Otmar Kucera

Kucera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia on July 13, 1914. At the age of 19, he joined the Czech Air Force, and showed sufficient proficiency to graduate into fighters, flying with the 36th Fighter Flight of Air Regiment 3. When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, Kucera fled, traveling through Hungary and Yugoslavia before hopping a freighter from Lebanon across the Mediterranean to France. Kucera arrived and immediately volunteered for the Armee de l'Air, but he was too late to see any action as by now France was in the throes of collapse under the weight of the Blitzkreig.

Kucera escaped across the channel and joined his third air force, the RAF. At 26, he was old for a fighter pilot, but he brought seven years of badly-needed experience. Flying with 111 Squadron, he finally saw combat against the Germans just after the close of the Battle of Britain. On Nov. 13, Kucera shot down an He 111 and damaged three more. Two days later, he downed a second He 111 and damaged two more. In 1941, Kucera was posted to 312 Squadron, and again tallied two kills within a week. On July 3, he flamed a Bf 109F, and six days later a Bf 109E fell to his Hurricaneís guns.

In 1942, now flying Spitfire Vbs, Kucera became an ace with a kill over a Ju 88 on February 16, and a posting to 313 Squadron was followed by an Fw 190 on May 5 and another Focke-Wulf on September 27 of 1943. He was posted to a staff job with the Czech Air Ministry Inspectorate, but returned as the commanding officer of 312 Squadron and led the unit back to Czechoslovakia after the war - where he was promptly jailed for opposing the Communist party. He was released after six months, but was demoted to private after a stellar career. He lived out the rest of his days in his hometown of Brno.

The Model

This was the kind of pilot whose Hurricane I wanted to model, and if you're looking to build a Hurricane in 1:72, these are good times. Hasegawa and Academy both put out Hurricanes that are very nice, although they have minor problems, and the Airfix and Heller kits they superceded were not bad in their own right. Now, Revell of Germany has issued a new Hurricane IIb, and it is perhaps the best of the bunch. Featuring lightly scribed and, in places, raised panel line details and a restrained but well-done fabric rear fuselage section, the kit shows great attention to detail. It has the 12-gun 'b' wing, and the outboard two guns on each wing are correctly depicted above the centerline, something most kits completely miss. The cockpit is very nice straight from the box, and the two-part canopy is box clear and very thin. The option of the fishtail-style exhausts or the ejector-type exhausts is provided, the wheel well is sufficiently detailed right out of the box, and the landing gear is the best-detailed in the scale.

Most exciting of all is the parts breakdown, which points strongly toward a Hurricane IIc and Sea Hurricane somewhere down the road. I'm loathe to break out the drawings, rulers and calculator, but my friend Roy Sutherland is not and he gave the model a general thumbs up, an endorsement I have no trouble trusting. And the kit decals are very nice - for a peek at a model with one of these decal options, look at Drewe Manto's Hurricane IIb.

The kit has some weak points, too. The breakdown to allow these future variants introduces some additional complexity to the build. The cockpit opening is a few millimeters too long. The sliding canopy fits like a dream in the closed position, but it is impossible to pose in the open position. The propeller is a piece of pure fabrication.

When Chris Banyai-Riepl offered to send me a review sample to build up, he teased me about my average build time, which he said could be measured best using geological terms. He wanted the model built quickly, and despite my past pace I said I could do it. What he did not know was that I had been scheming to build a Hurricane for a while. I had a Jaguar detail set for the Hasegawa kit, mastered by the same Roy Sutherland who vouched for the new kit, decals from Eduard for the Hurricane IIb in the older dark green-over dark earth that Kucera used to score his two Bf109 kills, and references at the ready. When the kit arrived in the mail, I was off!

As nice as the kit interior is, it couldn't touch the Jaguar set. The interior parts include a new control panel, a rear bulkhead with seat and harnesses, sidewalls, floor section, compass, rudder bar, gunsight and control column, plus two V-shaped lengths of tubing holding the trim wheel, landing gear selector switch and other controls. The kit also includes new wheels and a spinner. I paid $14 for this set, and it was worth every penny.

I first sanded the sidewalls to make sure they would fit into the fuselage along with all the other parts and then painted all the interior parts with AeroMaster tire black. This served almost like a 'pre-wash', establishing the shadows without the risk of darkening the RAF interior gray-green that would follow. When I applied the gray-green, I did so with an airbrush and sprayed the paint so that a hint of black remained on the bottoms of the tubes and boxes. This worked very well on the floor section, which is perhaps the single most beautiful pieces of resin Iíve ever seen. A little silver was drybrushed onto the kickboards and the edges of the seat, and the switches and storage boxes were picked out in black and brown. The instrument panel was painted black and then the instrument detail was picked out with white and red pencils. Tiny beads of 5-minute epoxy were applied over these to form instrument lenses. The rudder bar was painted silver with burnt sienna to represent the leather straps and it was added to the floor section.

All of this went very smoothly and very quickly. Soon, I had added the rear bulkhead and seat and sidewalls to the kit fuselage halves and had the instrument panel in place. The addition of the rear bulkhead fixed the size of the cockpit opening, although it took a small bit of shimming to even up the bulkhead with the aircraft's spine. The sidewalls have notches into which the floor section fits into precisely. With the floor in place, I joined the fuselage halves, which went together with only the most minor of gaps.

At about this time, while admiring my handiwork, I started to wonder where they put the trim wheel in this beastie. After a few minutes of puzzlement, I realized that the trim wheel was housed on one of the two V-shaped tubing sections I had forgotten to install! Luckily, I was able to pop the floor off through the opening for the lower wing center section and I added these two parts. Happy to have dodged such a bullet, I replaced the floor and merrily added the lower wing center section. The rear end of this piece floated precariously over a large, open gap and its thin trailing edge was supposed to butt-join the lower fuselage. Borrowing a vacuform builder's trick, I added a styrene strip reinforcement.

The inner parts of the upper wings are molded integrally with the fuselage. The outer wings come in upper and lower halves. These went together without fuss. However, butt-joining these thick outer wings to their corresponding inner wings was a real test. It was very easy to flex the wing, meaning that a good join at the top might result in a poor one on the bottom. The first time I superglued the wings into place, I noticed to my horror that I had them on at a noticeable angle! I gingerly yet forcefully tore them off and then used another vacuform builder's trick - three styrene strips, two top and one bottom, into each wing root. These guides allowed me to slide the wings into place with no flexing and gave the joint strength enough to stand up to sanding, which was very necessary on the lower surfaces. The Hurricane's wing had no dihedral; it looks weird if you've been building P-47s, P-40s or Bf-109s, but flat is where it's at for this plane.

The lower rear fuselage plate went into place next. This had a bit of a gap around it, but in reality there was a gap around this removable panel. The tailplanes suffered from sink marks and required a lot of filling to eliminate V-shaped notches at the leading edge root.

Now that the basic airframe was together, I again took a break to admire my work. My, what a nice cockpit! But, I wondered, how did the pilot navigate with no compass? Again, after a few seconds of grinding, my brain provided me with another frustrating answer: I had forgotten the compass! This unit is mounted on a shelf from the bottom of the instrument panel, and if you follow the instructions, it is very easy to slip the peg on the back of the panel into the notch on the compass for a perfect fit - before you put the panel into place. I had set myself up for a frustrating, hours-long attempt to lower the compass into the cockpit with tweezers, then guide it up onto the notch on the instrument panel. This usually resulted in the compass rattling around the inside of the fuselage. Eventually, I caught a break - specifically, the instrument panel broke off and fell out! This at least allowed me to secure the compass in place on the back of the panel, but while putting these back, I managed to knock off the rudder bar. After the steam stopped shooting from my ears, I tried to repair the damage I had done. The rudder bar went into place on the first try. Then, the instrument panel went in on the first try. I'm not sure how this suddenly came together for me, but I was grateful to be able to move on!

My next step was to improve the instrument coaming. The Hurricane had a large opening in the coaming, with a bar across it to support the gunsight. With some trepidation, I cut back the coaming using photos from the Squadron/Signal 'Walkaround' as a guide. Once this modification had been made, I added two bits of stiff wire to represent the mounting bar. After these were painted gray-green, I added the Jaguar gunsight.

The kit's windscreen went neatly into place, with no clean-up needed. This part has one major problem: the canopy frames are molded on the inside, making masking a real pain. I used Parafilm to mask off the windscreen and closed off the cockpit with masking tape to prepare the model for paint.

Painting

I first gave the model a coat over its upper surfaces with Floquil dark earth. This revealed a few spots that needed additional clean-up - the horizontal stabilizer roots, the nose, the spine. Once these were fixed, a second coat of dark earth was applied. Then, using the Osprey Hurricane Aces 1939-1940 book as a source, I cut masks from Tamiya tape to simulate the precise camouflage pattern worn by RAF Hurricanes. Floquil dark green was applied next, and the tape was removed. Next, Floquil Sky Type S was airbrushed over the lower surfaces, using tape to protect appropriate areas from overspray. Very quickly, I had a camouflaged fighter on my bench.

Decals

To prepare the model for decals, I sprayed a coat of Varathane thinned with water, leaving the model exceptionally glossy. The decals for Kucera's aircraft were snipped from Eduard's sheet for Czech aces and placed into water. As it turned out, these decals were very thin but quite brittle; one roundel exploded, another snapped in half, and another curled up and refused to uncurl. I realized that I would need to save Kucera's personal markings - his side codes of DU*K, the Czech emblems below the cockpit, the skull and crossbones and single kill mark, and the aircraft serial. These were applied with great care, using SuperSet and SuperSol to get them to settle down. One of the K's had its tail break off, but I was able to steal the top of an 'F' from the markings for Josef Frantisek's Hurricane off the same sheet. All of these decals initially showed signs of silvering, which had me very frustrated, but the next morning the silvering was gone and the decals looked painted on! The Eduard fin flash - which was uncharacteristically narrow for RAF Hurricanes - were put in place, but all six roundels were taken from SuperScale sheets. Once all decals were dry, I shot a protective coat of Varathane over the model.

Undercarriage

The Jaguar wheels were painted using tire black for the tires and Model Master Metallizer magnesium for the hubs. A wash really popped out the detail on these wheels. The landing gear wells were painted medium gray and the gear was installed and painted. This all went remarkably smoothly and looked great - a tribute to Revell's designers.

Propellor

The propeller, on the other hand, looked horrendous. I had spent a lot of time looking at the Dowty-Rotol on the Museum of Flight's Hurricane Mk XII while on a vacation to Southern California last year, and so the misshapen blob in this kit would not do. Ultimately, after looking at various British propellers in my collection, I ended up cutting down and re-shaping the propeller from an Academy F6F Hellcat, with the twin goal of having both the correct profile of the blade and the proper curves as the blades exited the spinner. I managed to wreck the kit spinner and backing plate, and the Jaguar spinner was too small to work with the fuselage of the Revell kit, so I stole one from my now-orphaned Academy Hurricane!

Final Finishing

A shot of thinned Testors Dullcote gave the model the proper flat sheen. Again, I admired my handiwork - what a lovely plane! And that fin flash looks so great on the right side! And on the left side - Hey! Why is it on the rudder?!? Once again, I took remedial action as the price for rushing. I painted over the rudder in dark earth, masked and re-painted the green pattern underneath, shot Varathane to give a gloss finish, and then cut down a fin flash to get the proper narrow profile. This was Varathaned and flat-coated once again. The fact that the first decal is completely invisible under the paint is a tribute to how thin the Eduard decals are. While I was at it, I added strips and squares of red decal trim film over the machine gun openings to simulate tape.

Earlier in the build, I drilled out the landing light areas to accept MV lenses and filed notched in the wingtips for the navigation lights. The MV lenses were added now, as were red and green lengths of wire into pre-drilled holes in the wingtips. I used 5-minute epoxy to provide 'glass' covers for these lights. A red MV lens was added to a pre-drilled hole below the fuselage as a signal light, and a drop of 5-minute epoxy was added to the rudder-mounted formation light. On a flat-finished model, shiny small details like these can be a real eye-catcher.

The final touches included a Squadron sliding canopy and a thread taken from ladies' smoke-colored panty hose for an aerial. In all, it took just 12 days to get this Hurricane combat-ready. Despite the frustrations I encountered - caused by my own haste - I have nothing but a hearty well done for Revell, Jaguar and Eduard!

This model is dedicated to my friend Jan Adamek and the rest of our faithful readers in the Czech Republic!