Now all marked up:
That wasn’t all that much work, as there are only four markings (but five
decals) on each side of the plane: the big serial number on the side, the unit emblem on the forward fuselage, the pilot’s name right behind it and the serial (minus the “B-”) repeated much smaller on the front edge of the wing. All of these came straight from the kit’s decal sheet, and work very well. Thinner than many
Tamiya decals I’ve seen, and they stuck down well with Micro Set and Sol. (Oh yeah, five
decals for four markings? The unit emblem is in two parts: a white backing and the coloured emblem that you need to apply one on top of the other. I’m guessing they did it like this because the yellow would else be very transparent.)
The model is marked as that of
luitenant (lieutenant, duh
)
August Deibel, who flew with 2-VLG-V (
2e Afdeeling, 5e Vliegtuiggroep, approx. “2nd Unit, 5th Aeroplane Group”; in British terms, I suppose this would be 2nd Squadron, 5th Wing) of the ML-KNIL (
Militaire Luchtvaart van het Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger, “Military Aviation of the Royal Netherlands-Indian Army”), whose emblem was a Javanese rhinoceros:
(
Wikipedia)
On 7 March 1942, he was part of the very last flight of KNIL Brewsters that took off from Andir airfield on a mission against the Japanese, near Lembang, but was forced to turn back when a Japanese aircraft put bullets through his oil tank. He did manage to shoot down a Ki-43 on his way back (putting him on three kills) but crashed on landing due to his undercarriage failing to deploy properly. After the war, he was awarded the
Military Order of William for this mission.