Slipping the Bonds
by George Paterson

Fw 190 D-9 – screen

Introduction

Recently I stumbled across a site that had a number of low-grade grab frames from a flight simulator type game involving Doras; although the degree of modelling was not detailed enough to be sure of the types involved, I had the feeling that some of the images were of D-11 and/or D-13 subtypes – at least one definitely showed wing-mounted cannon outboard of the landing gear wells. I’ve tackled jobs like this successfully in the past (my Kovaleski F-4B for example), so I wasn’t deterred by the large work input that would be needed to upgrade these images to the standard I want.

The attraction for me is that the fundamental geometry of the airframes is correct, and the airframes are viewed with very little perspective (i.e. they’re basically telephoto shots).

The Initial Image

The trouble is that the image I liked best was the fuzziest of all, only 290x200 pixels – nor much to go on there! When I looked at it closely, I realized that it’s Hans Dortenmann’s machine, portrayed as it was up to around February/March 1945. At that time the aircraft had an all-yellow fin and rudder, and the numeral was "red 1" – later it became "black 1", and had the black/white RV bands added, along with the rather snazzy Gruppe bar, the ‘Welle". In that later finish, with the yellow area reduced to the rudder only, it formed the central airframe in Jerry Crandall’s cover art for Axel Urbanke’s book on JG 54, "Green Hearts – First in combat with the Dora 9".

That cover picture is all I need to support my claim that Crandall is a genius!

Treatment of the Image

I resized the download to 5600x3500 pixels, only a twenty-fold linear increase in the image size – area-wise, I suppose that means a 400-fold increase!

When I started selection work, I found that I couldn’t go in too close, but had to lasso the shapes from a bit of a distance – when you’re right in close to such an image, all boundaries are just too fuzzy to permit selection! But eventually I got the various bits in the bag, in a slightly simplified form; for instance, the wing trailing edge at that stage was a single straight, missing the small kick-out for the trim-tab, and the further kick-out of the aileron T/E profile, outboard of the tab; I could only amend the T/E outline when I decided where the aileron/flap junction lay, and that would only be decided much later on.

One change I did make to the basic geometry; on this, as on a lot of other grab frames of Doras that I’ve seen on the Web, the radiator cowling and the spinner seem to me to be too big. It is as if the guys who programmed the 3-D model thought they could adapt an Fw 190 A airframe by just pulling the front end forward a half meter or so; well, they have overlooked the fact that the diameter of the Dora rad cowl (about 110 cm.) is around 15% smaller than on the A/G versions.

I filled in all the details now, working methodically along the fuselage from nose to tail, then doing the wings and tailplane; I selected the canopy as the earlier type, although Jerry shows the later blown canopy in his image – I think the machine did start off with the early type, and a new one was switched at some stage, probably during the refit that accompanied the repainting of the aircraft. Many pilots remarked that the new canopy type was a big improvement, not only in terms of visibility, but also because it made them feel a lot less cramped in the cockpit.

However, I have in my archive a download of a 3-D generated image by Claes Sundin, whose research is normally impeccable, and it shows the early colour scheme along with the later canopy type.

A minor detail, but one which we Dora fanatics worry about, is the fact that, as an Fw-produced machine, this aircraft would have had the 5-piece cover to the fuselage cannon bay; these covers had a small blister near their after ends. Unfortunately I forgot about this, and so the detail I’ve got is not properly authentic. Jerry Crandall didn’t make this mistake; on the other hand, he has left the area around the exhausts in soffit colour – Fw-manufactured aircraft had a black-painted area there, so I did a bit of delving about to help me decide how to treat this. My conclusion is that, for some reason, this black area was not done on this airframe.

One thing did bother me about the download; It is clear that the camo is a 75/83/76 job, as you would expect from an airframe so early in the production sequence. But Jerry shows a scheme that doesn’t look quite like that. A characteristic of RLM75 is that you can usually detect a pink or violet tinge in it, and that is very much the case with this download – when you are close in to the job, you often seem to be in a sea of pink, even though, when you zoom out again, it looks grey, RLM75 in fact! Now to me, Jerry’s image doesn’t have that violet caste, so I read his intention as being an 82/83/76 finish, even though his greens are very subdued. To my rescue came Aeromaster 48-721, which has a profile that is definitely 75/83/76 at that early stage. So that is how I left it. Could the refit in 1945 have involved some respray of the basic camo?

I achieved the fin/rudder colouring not by brushing in yellow, but by selecting the area and doing a "reduce blue" on it; by this method, I got the impression of yellow, but close examination shows patches of greenish and bluish colours, as if the coverage of the paint was pretty thin. I also worked it that the rudder is not shifted towards yellow as much as the fin.

Now I extended the frame and smoothed out the rather lumpy blue and white areas somewhat; finally I selected the lower quarter of the background with the lasso feathered to 100 pixels, and shifted that bottom area towards green. The result was a vivid turquoise, which I toned down merely by two zaps of the "darken" command.

Next I re-tagged the image and changed the décor minimally; the fin was shifted back towards green and blue, and the code number was changed to "red 4". I revised the W.Nr. from Dortenmann’s 210003 to 210023, and this machine could now be pasted back onto the previous image, at 30% full size.

I decided to portray a scenario that was depressingly common with the D-9, and led to many fatalities – engine problems that necessitated a rapid return to base, where deadstick landings often turned nasty. If you read Urbanke’s book, you will be impressed by how often pilots were lost without any "Feindberührung" (contact with the enemy) at all! Not that this was unique to the Dora – recently I read a book on the service of the F-86 with the RAF, and, even in peacetime, and with a relatively mature aircraft design, a considerable number of fatal incidents happened.

Conclusions

This job took about 16 hours all told, because everything had to be done from scratch; but I’m pleased with the result, and reckon the effort was worth it.

The serial number of Dortenmann’s machine tells us that this was only the third Dora to be constructed, out of a total of some 700. It was, I think, the only D-9 of that first dozen or so to be used in action, all the rest being assigned to test and trial programmes. So it is a historic machine. Amazingly, Dortenmann used it continuously from its delivery in October or November 1944, until the last day of hostilities. Whereupon, he set a match to it, and walked away into captivity. W.Nr 210003 was totally destroyed.

As a P.S., I’ve just finished re-reading Pierre Clostermann’s book "the Big Show", and in it there is a wonderful description of an encounter he had with a Dora in March/April 1945, which ended up with Clostermann’s aircraft being so badly hit that he had to make a forced landing. Comparing notes with ex-Luftwaffe pilots after the War, Clostermann concludes that his adversary had been Dortenmann. He describes how he could tell he was dealing with an Expert – Dortenmann came in fast, shot down two of the Tempests in as many seconds, then made off at top speed, continually waggling his wings and weaving slightly, both of these intended to maximize his field of view. Clostermann’s mistake was to pursue the Dora.

The book is full of errors and miss-spellings, some of them quite hilarious; my favourite is the award he got from the King of Denmark – the Order of the Dannebröd; this translates as the Order of Danish Bread, which may indeed exist as far as I know, but is probably for Master Bakers. I think he means Dannebrog, which is the name applied to the Danish flag, probably one of the most ancient of all national flags.