Davey Chris - Arctic Bf 109 and Bf 110 Aces

Author

John Weals passion for German aircraft makes this work a treat for students of the subject. He has written eight previous volumes in the Aircraft of the Aces series, as well as Combat Aircraft and Aviation Elite Units titles.

Illustrator

Chris Davey has illustrated more than 30 titles for Ospreys Aircraft of the Aces, Combat Aircraft and Aviation Elite Units series since 1994. Based in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, he is one of the last traditional airbrush artists in the business.

Front Cover

During the brief midsummer months of 1943 - a period when the Arctic sun never set - the pilots of II. and III./JG 5 fought numerous actions in defence of their own small, but vitally important, coastal supply convoys. With seeming disregard for the losses they were suffering, the Soviets would throw in wave after wave of attack- and torpedo-bombers against these convoys and, as a result, many of JG 5's Arctic Experten found themselves adding significantly to their already impressive tallies.

One such engagement took place late on the evening of 4 July when the Bf 109s of 7. and 8. Staffeln successfully fought off a mixed force of low-flying Il-2s, Pe-2s, Bostons and Hampdens that were attacking an inbound convoy making its way down the west coast of the Rybachiy Peninsula. In the space of less than 20 minutes no fewer than 19 enemy aircraft had been shot down into the sea, six of them being claimed by Leutnant Theo Weissenberger alone.

Recently appointed as Staffelkapitn of 7./JG 5, Weissenberger had already caught and despatched a single Pe-3 reconnaissance aircraft off the northwestern tip of the peninsula some 45 minutes before the main assault began. In the fierce melee that followed, he quickly accounted for a trio of Il-2s (the second of these was the 100th victory of his career) before going after a gaggle off five Hampden torpedo-bombers. The first of these went down almost immediately, but it then took a five-minute chase at wave-top height before the second cartwheeled into the water from a height of just ten metres. Two minutes after that Weissenberger claimed his seventh, and last, victim of the day - an incident vividly captured in Mark Postlethwaite's specially commissioned cover artwork

Title pages

A variation on the winter theme, this heavily mottled Bf 109G-2/R6 'Kanonenboot' ('gunboat' - note the underwing cannon gondolas) is the 'Yellow 3' that 94-victory ace Oberfeldwebel Rudolf Mller was forced to put down on its belly on a frozen lake a few kilometres to the east of Murmansk on 19 April 1943 (via Eddie Nielinger)

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Osprey Publishing

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This electronic edition published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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2016 Osprey Publishing Ltd.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78200-798-2 (PB)

ISBN: 978-1-78200-800-2 (eBook)

ISBN: 978-1-78200-799-9 (ePDF)

Edited by Tony Holmes

Cover Artwork by Mark Postlethwaite

Aircraft Profiles by Chris Davey

Maps by Bounford.com

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CHAPTER ONE

1941 THE OPENING MONTHS

M uch has been written about Germanys invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941. This is not altogether surprising given the fact that, as Hitler himself had boasted, Operation Barbarossa would be the greatest military operation of all time. The Fhrer of the Third Reich was to hurl very nearly three million men, some 3500 tanks, more than 7000 artillery pieces, 600,000 motor vehicles, almost three-quarters of a million horses and nearly 2000 aircraft into his ultimately ill-fated assault on fellow dictator Josef Stalin, claiming that The world will hold its breath and fall silent when Barbarossa is mounted.