The Last Bf 109

Text: Jan Bobek

Illustration: Piotr Forkasiewicz

Cat. No. 2155 

Eduard’s March release introduces a 1/72 scale new tool kit of the Bf 109 K-4. This particular variant holds a special fascination for enthusiasts of aviation history. It is probably because of close ties to grim final months of the Second World War in Europe and to the complex subject of late-war Luftwaffe camouflage.

Discussions within the German high command as early as 1942–1943 acknowledged that production of the Bf 109 would one day have to end. However, proposed successors emerging from Messerschmitt’s design office failed to develop as planned.

As the war progressed and pressure on the German industry intensified, production plans were revised with increasing frequency, sometimes as often as every two weeks during the final months. This situation is difficult for aviation historians to untangle today, but it was hardly clearer to those directly responsible for organizing production at the time.

For example, in September 1944 there was a plan for the Erla plant to begin producing the Bf 109 K-6/R6 from January 1945, while the WNF factory in Austria was to launch K-6 production in February 1945. Erla was scheduled to deliver 2,070 aircraft by September 1945, and WNF was tasked with producing 2,585 examples by March 1946. The K-6 was to be armed with a 30 mm MK 108 cannon firing through the engine, two 13 mm MG 131 machine guns mounted above the engine, and two additional 30 mm MK 108 cannon installed in the wings.

The K-6 variant was expected, thanks to improved high-altitude performance, to replace the Fw 190 fighters of the Sturmgruppen specialized in attacking four-engined bombers. In the end, however, this version never entered production. The WNF plant was overrun by the Red Army in the spring of 1945, and Erla managed to complete only a small number of Bf 109 K-4 aircraft.

The majority of Bf 109 K-4s were produced at facilities operating under Messerschmitt’s Regensburg organization. The parent factory itself was no longer capable of manufacturing aircraft due to the consequences of Allied bombing. Production was therefore dispersed among a large number of independent workshops and subcontractors. The process was fragmented into so many intermediate steps that, for example, certain firms produced fuselage shells, while other facilities were responsible for outfitting them.

Logistics within this highly atomized industrial structure were hampered by transport shortages and by the need to relocate facilities in response to advancing front lines or Allied bombing. Shortages of basic raw materials also intensified. As a result, for instance, two official versions of the RLM 81 color were introduced: in one case a dark brown, in the other a dark green. Each formula relied on different raw materials, and the leadership was indifferent to the fact that two distinct colors were being produced under the same RLM code, even if their differing shades were verbally distinguished. When this is combined with the large number of paint manufacturers, fluctuating material quality, and the multitude of dispersed production sites, the camouflage of Luftwaffe aircraft built in the final months of the war becomes an endless subject of research, discovery, interpretation, and debate. The current state of knowledge, consulted with colleagues from JaPo, is reflected in the color instructions accompanying the kit.

German wartime production used slave labor from concentration camps and the forced deployment of young people from selected age groups in occupied territories. Of the many hundreds of thousands of concentration camp prisoners involved in aircraft production, up to 75 percent perished under the brutal program known as “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” (“extermination through labor”). Among forced civilian laborers, mortality reached as high as 25 percent.

Final assembly also took place at camouflaged forest sites known as Waldwerke, where aircraft were completed, test-flown, and then immediately transferred to another location or delivered directly to operational units. All of this production was carried out under the constant threat of bomber raids and fighter attacks.

In 1945, German leadership repeatedly revised its priorities. Before the end of hostilities, emphasis shifted to jet aircraft such as the Me 262 and He 162, the four-engined Ar 234 C, the rocket-powered Me 163 and its projected successors, as well as the piston-engined Focke-Wulf Ta 152. Heavy fighter production of the Dornier Do 335 was to continue on a smaller scale. In April 1945, one Staffel of JG 400 was withdrawn from the front to prepare for experimental operations with the Horten brothers’ twin-engine jet flying wing. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 was no longer included in future plans, thus the K-4 remained the final production variant of this legendary aircraft.