War Weary - Time Expired Aircraft

[Marcel Hogenhuis]

Hello,

Long time ago I started to put all available Bf110's (Werkenummer, unit, crash and loss dates, locations, % damage, source references, subtype etc.) in a database in order to iron out doublures and obvious typo's AND to get an idea which and how many Bf110's were produced.

Starting with Luftwaffe loss reports (Abt.6 Gen. Qm. ObdL) and personel loss reports (Namentliche Verlustmeldungen) and many publications, it soon became obvious that several Bf110's seen 2-3 times with combat units, were later seen at second line units. But the large blanks in the Werkenummer ranks also suggested that there must have been more, so far unnoticed Werkenummer.

Thanks to a very generous air war historian, I was able to get the so called Verlusten bei Schulen und sonstige Verbände (losses at schools and other units) which contained many of the previous unknown Werkenummer.

From all this it becomes clear that a lot of first line combat units did sent their war weary birds to second line units after a while, not because they were not air worthy of course, but simply because newer subtypes entered service.

I never came across 'a system' behind this, but the existence of so called Lebenslaufakten for each Luftwaffe aircraft strongly suggests that they kept record of the life and career of each plane in order to start maintainance in time or to dispose the aircraft to other units.

All the best, Marcel