Number designations

[Celtic]

Hey all, quick question,
Been looking through some old photographs. One of them showed a 109 wearing 'red 13' circa Battle of Britain. Caption was Staffel kommandeur (don't have photo on me can't remember which JG).
Didn't regular fighter staffels have 9-12 aircraft so number 13...? Is that a spare? And my presumption is the staffel kapitan didn't have to take the number 1 aircraft? I know Galland didn't late in the war.
Thanks,
Sean

[Jim P.]

The numbers don't really mean anything as far they being assign 1 thru 12 or anything like that. More problematic to me are statements that a code is red rather than black for a particular unit when there is no evidence to support such a claim in actual loss data. That happens way to frequently for fighter units - JG 51 being a particularly egregious example.

[John Beaman]

To add to what Jim said, numbers mean little as pilots, especially "leaders" or experten often chose their favorite numbers. There are lots of 13s as it would seem they wanted to defy a perceived "bad luck" number. The same is true of "7".