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Re: italian aircraft production
dear Anthony,
data I-m giving you came from the books of DIMENSIONE CIELO series, published in the early seventies by the roman editor EDIZIONI BIZZARRI and written by the team of historians EMILIO BROTZU, MICHELE CASO and GHERARDO COSOLO. The authors made a terrible effort to prepeare this series that covers all the Italian types of the second world war (and after) and produced a kind of small classic on the subject, that is still one of the most reliable sources on Italian aircraft.
Regarding production numbers the sources generally differ because sometimes they considered machines ordered sometimes those actually produced and this gives different totals -particularly for those models built well into 1943 when the war came to an abrupt end for Italy and many production orders were not completely fulfilled, another problem is the loss of original documents, so it is possible that complete production batches were not recorded.
Back to the production numbers we have
Fiat CR 42 (Regia Aeronautica)
two prototypes
February-December 1939 200
December 1939-March 1940 101
March 1940-August 1940 200
August 1940-September 1940 39
September 1940-October 1940 40
October 1940 20
October 1940-November 1940 50
December 1940 45
February 1941-March 1941 100
March 1941-September 1941 200
September 1941-January 1942 94
February 1942-July 1942 152
July 1942-October 1942 160
November 1942-June 1943 150
That makes a grandtotal of 1553 Italian CR42s
According to other sources there were also
60 additional CR 42 in 1940 and 40 additional CR 42 in 1942.
To these its necessary to add
40 planes for Belgium, 68 planes for Hungary in three batches, 72 planes for Finland/Sweden, 112 planes for the Luftwaffe in 1943.
Hope this helps
Ludovico
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