Luftwaffe im Focus Special #2

[Jim P.]

Not to take anything away from Mr. Urbanke and his 'LW in Focus' series - most of the time he is spot on with his descriptions and he's certainly given us all many wonderful new photos - but his interpretation of those photos are not always accurate. One does what one can with the information available to them.

I know of a couple of photos that he has mislabeled. Certainly no fault to him. We see it all the time in this field. A case in point is his ID of the FW 190A-2 WNr. 5304 - he published a photo of Emil Babenz standing by the rudder of this machine sporting 9 vics (?) and suggested that it was the machine of Hptm. Seiffert, Kdr. of I./JG 26 in mid-summer 1941. However, given that I've built a db of losses that includes this period of time, just the recording of losses from published sources and no great revelation - its in Caldwell's stuff along with the GQM stuff - I can say that the first Fw190A-2 loss occurs in Dec. 41 - Walter Schneider of II./JG 26 flew into high ground on 22-Dec-41 along with 4 other of his pilots. His was the first recorded A-2 loss. There are published photos of Seiffert standing by the rudder of this machine with 20+ vics being displayed. The description of Urbanke's photo should probably be along the lines that Babenz inherited this mascine from Seiffert in the later half of May 1942.

Another photo that is - I wouldn't say mislabeled so much as misinterpretaion based on WNr. - is from LwF #5, p.8. The photo on that page is of 'white 10' from 1./JG 51' the WNr. of which Urbanke interprets as WNr. 196. However, Fw. Erwin Laskowski in his FB records that he flew on numerous occasions between Sept. 42 and Jan. 43 'white 10', WNr. 495. This would seem to be a match with the photo. I take no credit for this probable ID. This is due to the work of my good friend Russ Fahey, a name I'm sure many are familiar with in reading credits for LW titles.