War Weary - Time Expired Aircraft
 

I was reading American Eagles Vol. 4 last night and the book makes reference to 'WW' marked P-51's. At some flight hour count, these 'war weary' aircraft were pulled out of combat and transfered to operational training units. Did the Luftwaffe employ a similar system? Did the Luftwaffe have the resources to transfer high time combat aircraft to operational training units? If not, at a certain time were Fw-190's and Bf-109's rotated off the line and sent to a rebuild factory for overhaul? I've seen photos of aircraft in rebuild factories, but I always assumed that they had been in a landing accident or suffered battle damage.

I'm really interested in this aspect of Luftwaffe logistics, so if anyone has any insight to this please post!!

Thanks!

Bronc

Re: War Weary - Time Expired Aircraft
 

Hello,

Long time ago I started to put all available Bf110's (Werkenummer, unit, crash and loss dates, locations, % damage, source references, subtype etc.) in a database in order to iron out doublures and obvious typo's AND to get an idea which and how many Bf110's were produced.

Starting with Luftwaffe loss reports (Abt.6 Gen. Qm. ObdL) and personel loss reports (Namentliche Verlustmeldungen) and many publications, it soon became obvious that several Bf110's seen 2-3 times with combat units, were later seen at second line units. But the large blanks in the Werkenummer ranks also suggested that there must have been more, so far unnoticed Werkenummer.

Thanks to a very generous air war historian, I was able to get the so called Verlusten bei Schulen und sonstige Verbände (losses at schools and other units) which contained many of the previous unknown Werkenummer.

From all this it becomes clear that a lot of first line combat units did sent their war weary birds to second line units after a while, not because they were not air worthy of course, but simply because newer subtypes entered service.

I never came across 'a system' behind this, but the existence of so called Lebenslaufakten for each Luftwaffe aircraft strongly suggests that they kept record of the life and career of each plane in order to start maintainance in time or to dispose the aircraft to other units.

All the best, Marcel

Re: War Weary - Time Expired Aircraft
 

Most US "War Weary" aircraft were relegated to second line units because of newer sub-types being issued. It wasn't a case of too many hours on the airframe, just newer and better being available.

The Luftwaffe aircraft going back to the factory for overhual were most likely damaged airframes due to accidents or combat. You probably wouldn't see a perfectly good (but older) flyable aircraft being sent back to the factory, they would go to second line units.

Re: War Weary - Time Expired Aircraft
 

I've always wondered about this: what happened to the Bf-109 E variants when the F versions came on line and what happened to the F variants when the G's came on line?

Also, when the Fw-190 made the jump from the A-3's to the A-4/5, what happened to the A-3's? (The ones without the firewall forward extension?)

The training units were starving for aircraft, flying all kinds of weird stuff, why didn't they get the E's and F's and the A-3's?

Bronc

Re: War Weary - Time Expired Aircraft
 

Hi Broncazonk,

Regarding the Bf 109 F versus introduction of the Bf 109 G, quite a few of the former were recycled in the Mistel program, like for example Bf 109 F "CI+MX" or Bf 109 F-4 W.Nr. 7083 "KF+WG", a former JG 77 machine. That those were not isolated cases is exemplified by the 30+ Mistel 1 of 6./KG 200 lined up at Burg bei Magdeburg in June 1944, many of the control planes being older Bf 109 F and early G's.

Source: Dabrowksi 1994.

Cheers
Marc