Fabulous late-war Luftwaffe photos

[Marc-André Haldimann]

Christian,

thanks for your thoughts and the link to this extraordinary aerial recce picture! Looking at the layout of Köthen, I notice the location of the burnt out Ju 88 G
http://www.stories.windmillpro.com/ww217debris3.htm
can be pinpointed: it is precisely to the left of the right main hangar looking towards the bottom of the recce picture. This is corroborated by:

- the tree line boarding the left lateral hangar wall
- the unmistakable shape of the central building standing amidst the four main hangars.

I think we have now a positive ID of the location.

I checked also the date issue. We know from the narrative told by Ken Cashion, that GI Fred Stockum was in the 3d US Army spearhead which arrived around noon on April 14 at the southern airfield boundary.
He remembers German personal being seen through binoculars running to burn the parked planes (whcih they obviously partly succeeded doing...). The night was spent hearing gun fight and his unit moved the next morning to take over the airfield. There he found an abandoned Leica loaded with a film; he took all told 15 snapshots with the German defenders bodies still where they fell the previous day. According to the known battle chronology, we can thus pinpoint the time too: the pics were taken April 15, 1945.

Reference:
http://www.weissandt-goelzau.de/spur...ie-region.html

Philippe,

I dont mind for the D-9;-)) As for "Weisse 12", you will notice the odd RV band we're looking at: the central band is much larger then the lateral ones. I believe this central band is yellow, the hue being similar to the yellow tail of the wrecked Ju 87 D behind. As for the "lateral bands" they are certainly not 450 mm wide. and seem dark colored too.

Given that no dark/yellow/dark RV band did exist, I surmise that the yellow band was painted over a one color previous RV band, possibly a black JG 53 band, though a green JG 27 can't be totally excluded.

Thanks for attiring my attention on this feature which I didn't see at first.

Cheers
Marc