[Csaba B. Stenge]

Hello Many,

You posted CR.32 in your first message, but there were no Hungarian CR.32s in Ukraine in July, 1941, those old, worn out planes stationed only at home bases. Only CR.42 and Re.2000 fighters flew combat sorties over Soviet territory.

It was not a classical friendly fire accident, since in a classical friendly fire accident, the attacker misindetify its target. In this case he deliberately attacked a so called allied aircraft. Hungarian pilots let him to approach from behind, since it was a so called allied aircraft, but he opened fire. Because of his inexperience and poor shooting, he was not able to inflict any recorded damage, although he expended all of his ammunition. Not the Hungarian anti-aircraft fire saved the CR.42s. It sounds a bit strange statement - the 1/3. fighter squadron had old hand, experienced and well trained pilots, they had only one novice, who flew just few sorties. Incidentally one of the pilots of the squadron had shot down two Slovak Avias on 24 March, 1939 (Sándor Szoják). In a real combat he would not have any chance against these pilots.

That attack was most probably because the pride of some Slovak aviators was hurt during that border skirmish against Hungary on 24 March, 1939 (on that day there was two engagement between Hungarian CR.32s and Avias and the CR.32s shot down seven Slovak aircraft without own losses).

The linked book was published in 2007 in Hungary and it has no English edition (I doubt ever will have).

Incidentally, if you want to write an objective biography of Ján Reznák, maybe worth a try a question in the neighbour topic ('overclaimers vs. reliable claimers') about his claims - you might get some interesting info from Russian experts, who compared his reported kills with actual Soviet combat activity and losses.