Western victories of Assi Hahn

[Jan Gazda]

Petr Kacha's site www.luftwaffe.cz/hahn.html divides his 108 victories into 66 in the west and 42 in the east while Toliver and Constable as well as John Weal in his Osprey books have it 68 + 40. It would seem that the two excessive western victories represent a pair of Spitfires shot down over Dieppe which are mentioned in both Weal titles and Norman Franks' Dieppe book but do not appear in other German claim list for that day.

To make things even more complicated there is a well-known picture of his FW190 A-3 WNr.223 with 61 victory bars. However, Hahn scored his victories No 61-62 in the same fight on May 6,1942 and it was in BF 109 (at least that is what www.thescale.info/news/publish/iiijg2.shtml indicates) so there should be 62 victory bars on the rudder.

Can anyone clear these issues for me? I suppose that Jerry Crandall's book about Hahn has the answers but I do not have it in my possession.

TIA

Jan

[Tom Semenza]

Jan,

Crandell's book on Hahn lists his first 66 claims with JG 2 in the West. However it gets a little more confusing when you look at the claims listed in Prien's Jagdfliegerverbände der Luftwaffe series. In Teil 4/I the claim for 6.11.40 is incorrectly listed as his 21st, however this is corrected in the appendix of Teil 4/II to claim number 22. Yet in Teil 7, his next claim on 24.06.41 is again listed as number 22 with subsequent claims being numbered from that in sequence, so that the last claim with III./JG 2 on 16.09.42 is numbered 65. So by this numbering Hahn claimed nos. 60 and 61 on 6.05.42, which fits nicely with the 61 victory bars on his Fw 190A. However that leaves us with two claims listed as no. 22 and no explanation for the numbering irregularity. Perhaps Dr. Prien can enlighten us here.

Regards,
Tom

[Jan Gazda]

Tom,

thanks for the info, this clears at least some of the questions although it leaves us with some new ones..

Jan