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Old 23rd November 2020, 23:13
NickM NickM is online now
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NickM
Re: Gun cameras: who?

Quote:
Originally Posted by rof120 View Post
Adolf Galland was one of them, at least from a certain date on. There is a well-known frame from one of his combat footages shot on November 1, 1940: it clearly shows the shooting down of a "Spitfire", Galland's fiftieth victim. Thanks to the tracers giving continuous (thick) straight lines on the picture you even can see the difference between the flight paths of the missiles fired by the two machine-guns mounted on the engine (close to each other) and by the right wing cannon, the distance between the two being (of course) exactly the right one. The tracers from the left cannon left a trace too but it is much less straightforward: it's undulating behind and below the "Spitfire". You can see this phenomenon on numerous pictures of this kind (the camera jumped or vibrated because of the powerful recoil of the cannon). The German press reported this event profusely and most probably reproduced one or several frames. See "Der Adler", "Signal" and also the German dailies etc.

(Galland was the CO of JG 26.)

Certainly some other German fighter pilots got a gun camera too, especially Mölders, probably Wick, and others.

Off hand can you provide a link to this image of Galland's gun camera? The vid or shot might be well known but it doesn't 'ring any bells' with me. When I was going thru Caldwell's JG 26 materials, the only gun camera still I saw of Gottfried Dietz's gun camera footage of him shooting up a Spitfire...Interestingly enough, not only had I seen Dietz's clip of film before, in various documentaries but He was actually lucky enough to have a GC in his aircraft for this, his very first aerial victory--which kind of goes against my opinion that only 'Tigers' get the camera in their planes.
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