[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Csaba.

I guess Bauer fired on and claimed all these aircraft in a single pass through the formation, and we will never know.

Seeing from original film footage from Sturm aircraft what some of these guns could do to even a four engine bomber, I am assured it would be possible to make such a claim. On one of the films I have available, a continous scene show the destruction of two B-17's in about 23 seconds (the first one hit between the fuselage and inner port engine, the entire wing seems to burst into flames and the inner port engine is seen falling off the aircraft entirely, the pilot go over this aircraft and fires on the aircraft to its left, you can see that this aircraft also burst into flames after being hit several times in the port wing).

I would thinkt that a minute in that environment would feel quite long.....

However, and this is of course entirely possible, if the pilot in question knew he attacked at a given time and that his engagement was over a very short time after, he might note the same time for these claims even if they were 1 minute 50 seconds apart, or 3 minutes.

I would use the claim times as a pointer as to when the aircraft were engaging the enemy, and try to establish which aircraft were attacked from unit combat reports.

I have the same problem when researching Flugbücher... some pilots seem to have been a bit sloppy, and all researcher should be aware that some Flugbücher were in fact rewritten after the war, because the originals were lost during the war or soon after.

Regards,
Andreas