Captured Eagles: Secrets of the Luftwaffe (General Aviation) by Frederick A. Johnsen

Author:Frederick A. Johnsen [Johnsen, Frederick A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Captured Eagles: Secrets of the Luftwaffe
ISBN: 9781782009740
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2014-10-21T07:00:00+00:00

FREEMAN FIELD, INDIANA

Freeman Field, at the time of writing, is a civilian airport serving the town of Seymour, Indiana, in the sometimes-humid, bucolic, friendly heartland of the midwestern United States. It bears evidence of its military past in the shape of some of its hangars and buildings. Home to a museum dedicated to preserving its history, this airfield has become legendary in the literature of captured German aircraft. Photos in the museum show a surfeit of German airplanes and rockets at Freeman Field in 1945 and 1946. Six decades later, only some arcane aluminum remnants of German wreckage remain, in the museum’s holdings.

As enigmatic as Freeman Field’s story is, a letter sent to the director of the Air Force Museum back in 1968 is intriguing for the Freeman information it contains, even though the sender’s identity has been lost in the loops of the cursive-only signature at the bottom. The excerpted text of that letter is presented here:

Dear Mr. Frey …

I occupied the job you indicated for about six months, at Seymour, Indiana, the latter part of 1945. The original purpose of reconstructing some of these airplanes was to check their flight performance. Although one Me-262 was flight checked, it was not one of the Seymour, Indiana, airplanes. A rocket powered Me-163 which we had under reconstruction at Seymour was eventually completed at Edwards and some flight testing was done … The work at Seymour was under the Technical Intelligence Division at Wright Field, headed by then-Col. Don Putt. A Col. Hal Watson headed up the Collection Subdivision to which Seymour was assigned.

The organization at Seymour was never built up to the technical capability that was needed to accomplish the original objective. We lacked completely a flight test instrumentation capability, for example. Because of these shortcomings we concentrated on putting some of the airplanes in the best mechanical shape possible. Primarily the Air Force used Seymour to get as much publicity value as possible out of the possession of these foreign airplanes, and for this purpose some were kept on flight status (Me-262, long-nose Fw-190) while the others were dressed up for static display. There were some bomber flights but these were rare …

There was little in the way of Technical Literature with these airplanes, and no combat record at all, to my knowledge. At Seymour we depended on an engineering test pilot, Karl Bauer [Baur] … and a Messerschmidt [sic] inspector, who went back to Germany, to keep us straightened out on various details, and the German way of doing things. Their information was excellent, by the way, and freely given.

I have perhaps a dozen photos of the airplanes given to me by these two former Messerschmidt employees and some photos taken at Seymour which I would [be] glad to make available to you for copying.40

Freeman Field’s moment in the spotlight as a repository for foreign aircraft happened quickly. An April 4, 1945 letter from Maj Gen Oliver P. Echols, who was Gen Arnold’s Assistant Chief of Air Staff

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