[Nick Beale]

An interesting read (although my grasp of Italian is far too limited to do it justice) with a couple of questionable points, perhaps. First there is the account of Werner Hahn, said to be a 2.(F)/122 pilot. He doesn’t appear in Andy Mitchell’s list of the Gruppe’s personnel, nor in the 2. Staffel’s 1944–45 flight log in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv. Instead the story seems to be taken from Glenn Infield’s book “Disaster at Bari” where Hahn is said to have flown an Me 210 but with no unit mentioned. Although Infield’s acknowledgements name a number pilots he interviewed, there is no Hahn and no other source is given. The Italian article changes the Me 210 to a 410 (understandable as none of the former was operating in Italy in December 1943) and makes the reasonable inference that 2.(F)/122 was the unit concerned in daylight reconnaissance.

Second, the article talks of LT 350 torpedoes being used (as does Siegfried Radtke’s KG 54 history) but none of the units involved had Ju 88s equipped for torpedo-bombing, did they?

P.S. the article could well be right that 6./KG 54 provided the pathfinders but does anyone have a source for this information?