I've just finished reading "The blonde knight of Germany.. Erich Hartman" in which there are some answers to some of the questions which are floating around here:
- Hartman talks in two places about zooming in from above, and then having the enemy aircrafts losing him and his katschmarek due to looking from above for camouflage painted 109's against terrain (one case is in winter, another is in summer)
-> pilots were really losing sight of an airplane against the ground
- he also talks about flashes in the sky: due to german aircrafts being camouflage painted, he indentifies some flashes he saw in the sky as Mustangs (ie probably the russian couldn't have been indentified as flashes neither), which had bare metal parts
-> camouflage painted aircrafts were not flashing in the sky
- he also talks a few times about his mechanical chief starting to clean his canopy as soon as he landed, in order to prepare the 109 for the next mission
-> canopy was constantly cleaned up before each flight
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