[Larry Hickey]

Larry,

Lots of issues to think about here. Thanx for taking the time to share your thoughts and considerable knowledge of this. It appears likely that our whole understanding of the bases for ZG2 during the Battle of Britain needs some serious re-thinking and investigation. Without a lot of FB or perhaps communications intelligence this may be a tough one to resolve. You'd think that the main base locations for ZG2 would be easy to resolve, with the Absprunghafen only being a complicating factor. In FB entries, you'd expect that a/c to take off from the main unit base, fly to the Absprunghafen, then take off a little later for the combat mission after topping off the fuel tanks. The issue of individual Staffeln being based seperately at times away from the main Gruppe bases definitely needs to be investigated. I've noted this phenomenon with some Bf109 units covered in the Prien et.al. JFV series for the BoB.

I don't know specifically what FB that Gerhard is using, as the large EoE collection that I have assembled here in the office doesn't necessarily include all that he has or has had access to. I'll explore that with him, unless he wants to jump directly into this discussion. It's going to be important to make sure that we cover all the known FB for the components of ZG2 in order to make sure we know what can be known on this subject.