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Fighter pilot grouping BoB

Peter U

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Staff member
For the 75th anniversary of the battle of the bulge I thought it was a good idea to show this small grouping I recently acquired.



Karl Hagemann (°1925) who as a teenager had flown gliders saw his childhood dream come true in June 1943 when he started his pilot training.
On July 6 1943 he flew his first solo flight and a year later he started his fighter pilot training in Mackfitz on the famous FW190.
In November 1944 his training time was over and he was assigned to the sixth Staffel of Jagdgeschwader 4, in this unit he got the FW190 with the code number black 13.
In this period the Luftwaffe kept only a minimum of fighters in the air to fight the allied bombers, also the squadron of Karl Hagemann was kept in reserve for the upcoming offensive, on December 12 1944 they moved to their operation base in Babenhausen under command of Jafü Mittelrhein.
When the battle of the bulge started the Luftwaffe had managed to muster 1492 fighters for the operation.
On the second day of the offensive, December 18 1944, the weather was good enough around 11.00 to fly his first operational mission, a cover mission, protecting their advance columns from Jabo attacks in the area of Trier, Mayen (an important railway bridge was located there) and Sankt Vith; the mission lasted 130 minutes and nothing happened.
Already the next day his luck ran out, shortly after they had taken off they were intercepted by allied fighters in the Wisperthal, a dogfight of 45 minutes took place in which his Staffel captain Hauptmann Köpcke was shot down and KIA, also FW190 black 13 was blown out of the sky around 15.30, Karl Hagemann had more luck then his squadron commander, although he was hit in the leg he managed to bail out safely from his burning plane.
It took him months to recover and by then the war was over.



In the grouping is his flight log, pilot license, his ID card (pilots didn’t carry their Soldbuch with them on operation flights but an oil cloth “Ausweis”) and a bunch of pictures; one of the pictures being one his girlfriend sent him in 1944, I included this picture in this thread because I think it was a kind of good luck charm of him.
 

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Great grouping Peter. What's really cool is the amount of research that can be done on pilots, missions, losses, etc., as a result of the log books kept.
 

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