Some impressive JG 54 Eastern Front footage on Youtube

[Mark Steinitz]

Thank you, Nick. Do you think I made a reasonable circumstantial case that the plane in the film belonged to Seiler?

[Nick Hector]

Whereas it would be hard to prove conclusively, I think you have indeed made a good point, Mark

[Sergio Luis dos Santos]

This movie comes from this German archive: http://www.archiv-akh.de/

[Kari Lumppio]

Hallo!

First time I watched this video despite posted already in 2016.

My attention was picked by an estuary with small but still prominent island seen in one part of the film. There was three bigger lakes in the "JG 54 area": Peipus, Ilmen and Ladoga.

Turns out the island is most likely Schlüsselburg / Orekhov / Pähkinäsaari island East of Leningrad on the Lake Ladoga shore.


JG 54 operations on the Ladoga area 1942 revolved most of the time around the German Siebel Ferries and Italian MAS torpedo boats. More for example in this link:
Operation Klabautermann
http://codenames.info/operation/klabautermann/
Googling "siebel ferry ladoga" quickly gives information, even colour photos.

The damaged He 111s could be casualties from the Suho lsland operation which involved quite a lot of bombers. Not usual for the area.

IIRC from this period there are some odd coordinates in Luftwaffe claims. I do remember "0170" (hopefully correctly!) which means nothing in LW grid but is middle of Ladoga in the Finnish Air Observation grid. This discussion was probably on the old TOCH forum.

SA-kuva photo archive has some photos of JG 54 which have similar camo to the double winkel plane of the film.

SA104071 Schwartze Winkel


SA104070 Schwartze 1


SA106584 Schwartze 9 (clip from zoomed image). Edit Forgot to include the original caption: "Saksalainen hävittäjä Messerschmitt 109 suojaa lauttaosastoa.
Käkisalmi 1942.08.31" Means German fighter Messerschmitt 109 covers (the Siebel) ferry force. Käkisalmi is the location.



EFO (Einsatzstab Fähre Ost) Tagesmeldung for the day of the flight above:


JG54 had both fighters (Philipp) and jabos in the Ladoga operations based at Petäjärvi. The photos above are JaBo.
JG54 flew also from Käksalmi. See the SA-kuva picture captions.

Our forum friend Andrus might have his data for the German Ladoga operations more systematically collected and available?

Andery Dikov is the expert for this area, but not active in this forum for eight years or so. Possibly interesting thread related to this thread topic:
JG 54 near Leningrad in August, 1942
http://forum.12oclockhigh.net/showthread.php?t=3757


BTW Estonian-manned Buschmann Staffel had couple of seenot He 60 in Ladoga later Summer and Autumn 1942 for the German operations.


EDIT I added some photos from SA-kuva (http://sa-kuva.fi).
Very useful search phrase is "Saksalainen hävittäjälaivue Petäjärvellä" (Remember to include the quotes if you want see the JG 54 photos. Otherwise you see Siebel ferries in colour etc everything German-saksalainen))

I also remember going through some Finnish Army Ladoga Costal Brigade unit war diaries. Units on the islands and they could confirm some of the German claims. This was ten or so years ago. I might have the data somewhere on the rare backup files. Or then rather not...



Cheers,
Kari