[David E. Brown]

Hi Jim,

My previous brief missive was from a church hall and thus not accessible to my files (and memory for that matter...). Thanks for the reminder. I have lots of projects and files on the go (Luftwaffe and Panzerwaffe) keeping track becomes a challenge.

For some background, I have been studying this aircraft for 30 years and came back to it from time to time. Bit by bit more information and insights were revealed as photos appear, though none crisp and sharp. And documentary material, well, scraps at best. Radtke (1990) mentions four aircraft II./KG(J) 54 (Reds 1-4) and that they were lost, one to a crash landing at Prag-Rusin (ro.1), and the remaining three destroyed by Allied fighter-bomber attacks at Fürstenfeldbuck (ro.3), and Erding (ro.2 and ro.4). Three unidentified machines appear in the listing on page 271 dated 4 April but assigned to I. Gruppe. and two at Innsbruck on 8 May. No source documents are noted but there must have been some source.

The document in the JaPo book (2012) has much greater detail on these machines. Suffice to say that there remains some data gaps. And as I have written in the past (prior to the book's writing and publication), its physical attributes put "10 / 3" as an A-2a in the mid-1105xx to 1106xx production group. This document identifies that aircraft as 110662. Yet it took some time to get a clear view to confirm without a doubt the presence of the '10', whereas the '3' was visible in the four o'clock view in Jim Crow's photo from the mid 1980s (its first known image, and incorrectly identified as being at Herzogenaurach).

For the record, until the document's discovery, I had it narrowed down to 110662, 110665, and 110668 per Dan O'Connell's and Radtke's listings. The first werknummer was the most promising, but still... A colleague of mine and I recently had access to the original of the recent side view photo and except for the last digit, the remainder were just readable. But most importantly, the '10' was at last clearly seen - that clinched it for certain.

So, while hedging my interpretation over the years, based on all these data and the new image, the machine can be identified as 110662.

Cheers,

David