Mehtidis, Alexis - Italian Air Force - Regia Aeronautica 1943 (ebook)

Italian Air Force - Regia Aeronautica

Order of Battle on 8 September 1943

Alexis Mehtidis

On 8 September 1943 at 7.42 p.m., Italian radio interrupted its programmes to transmit a proclamation by Marshal Badoglio which, in the name of the Italian government, confirmed the Cassibile armistice signed with the Anglo-Americans on 3 September 1943.

The Regia Aeronautica is totally unprepared. No instructions are given to it. A few units choose to openly pass into the Allied camp (Sardinia, Puglia, Corsica, the Balkans): 281 Italian aircraft join the Allied airfields, but most of them are no longer fit for combat. They form the Aeronautica Cobelligerante Italiana (ACI).

Another party - mainly in Northern Italy - decides to continue fighting alongside the Luftwaffe, forming the Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana of the Italian Social Republic). The rest are disarmed, interned, dispersed or try to return home.

It is the instantaneous state of the Regia Aeronautica at the time of this split that Alexis Mehtidis undertook to draw up and deliver in this opuscule. Note the great disparity between the number of existing aircraft and those that are usable, as well as the number of units that no longer have any aircraft at all.

24 pages – in english