Black September

Are you saying that the Jasta diaries don't contain info on German planes lost(by type) to enemy airial activity.

Also are you saying that allied claims don't list plane types downed......

Come on!

[Soderbaum]

Hi

A possible way to find the solution of German aircraft losses split up will perhaps be the Idflieg material...

I dont have these reports unfortunate..

VBR
Gunnar

[rammjaeger]

John,

what are you knowing about the number of surviving Jasta diaries after WWII? What´s the source of your info? Where I can I find these 80+ diaries? I thought always the most burnt down in Görings ministry during British bombings of Berlin.

I am very keen on getting your hints concerning the existing Jasta diaries and their current location.

Regards

Hannes

The cause for the misidentifications is probably that the Pzalx DXII and Fokker DVII are superficially similar, as are the Pfalz DIII and Albatross. This sort of ID problem is common, I know a man who was involved in an alert when Seafires were misidentified as ME 109s. The odd thing about this was that it happened in Hawaii in 1943! The nearest Luftwaffe units were in France! Fortunately for the FAA pilots involved, the Yanks missed.

Many escort pilots in the US 8th Air Force were fired upon by bomber crews, despite the fact that the P47 and P38 were very different from the German fighters they were facing. (From a nose attitud, the P51 was closer to the ME, but not the FW 190).

At sea, this sort of thing hapened all the time too. The US claimed to sink the Japanese BB Kongo several times, and the Germans kept claiming HMS Ark Royal until they got her.

[Barrett]

Tom, thanks for the story about "109s" over Hawaii. I suspect the reason for the panic is that from '42 into '43 "naval intelligence" (an oxymoron that's been replaced by "naval leadership") believed the Japanese Navy was flying Me-109s from carriers. After-action reports from the fall of '42 (Santa Cruz specifically) contain air-air claims for destruction of IJN Messerschmitts.
There were tailhook 109s, of course, the T models intended for use from the German carrier "Graf Zeppelin" along with Ju-87s and some sort of Arado scout/torpedo plane. However, since nothing came of the German CV project, the aircraft were doled out to Luftwaffe land-based units in NOrway, I believe.
It's interesting to contemplate a German carrier program in WW II. Since Goering owned everything that flew or was related to flying (flak and paratroopers were Air Force), it would have been a bureaucratic jumble. However, the Brits operated that way during much of the inter-war years with Royal Nivey ships & crews and RAF planes & pilots.

Typhoon pilots were particularly frustrated when first Spitfires (1942) and then P-51s and P-47s repeatedly "bounced"; one RCAF pilot wrote in his logbook that if the Americans persisted, he was inclined to try shooting back ! Unhappily, Canadians were not immune - No.1 (RCAF) Squadron's first "kills" in the Battle of Britain were a couple of Blenheims. A Canadian "ace" shot down a No.242 Squadron Hurricane in 1941, and in 1942 another Canadian (flying a Typhoon) was killed by an RCAF Spitfire pilot. The saddest case I know of involved a decorated Canadian Mosquito pilot who, in 1944, followed an aircraft one night over France, took great pains to identify it, and finally (after nearly 20 minutes of checking) finally concluded it was an Hs.126 which he promptly shot down. It was an SOE Lysander.

[Barrett]

Hugh:
Thanks for some interesting (and sad) facts. "Tiffy" pilots took an awful pounding; a friend of mine in BC, former Spit CO, says that between the runup to D-Day and the Falaise Gap, 250 Typhoon pilots were KIA--not shot down, but killed. I don't have figures to confirm or deny, but it may be plausible.

"Friendy fire" (according to one study in a professional journal) may account for as much as 15% of combat casualties. It's primarily arty and air (we bombed the four-star commanding US Ground Forces in 1944) but direct-fire weapons also take their toll, including smart bombs, as we tragically saw in D Storm. No matter how smart a weapon is, it still relies on a human brain...