Saturday 8.12. the Finnish virtual pilots organization, Virtuaalilentäjät - Virtual Pilots Finland ry registered society had the "little christmas" meeting.
Location: Finnish Aviation Museum.
Programme: a lecture by Kyösti "Kössi" Karhila, the highest scoring living Finnish ace of WW II.
Mr. Karhila lectured us about the German unit , Gefechtverband Kuhlmey, who assisted Finland in the crucial, hard battles of summer 1944 when Finnish army crushed the Soviet offensive, saving the country from red rule. Kuhlmey's unit was combined from II./JG54 "Grünhertz", I./SG 3 and Ju-87's of I./SG 5, who operated from Immola air base. Armed with Focke-Wulf 190 jabos and Ju-87 dive bombers they alone, averaging about 60 planes, brought more bomb tonnage to Red Army's heads than the whole Finnish Air Force combined could.
After the lecture we talked with mr. Karhila for a long time, both free discussion and arranged interview. Alltogether I got about, maybe even more, four hours of Karhila on tape. We got a lot of interesting information and less well known things from him, and will share everything when we just get the material out of tapes and translated.
Mr. Karhila:
Little 1,4 MB MPEG with mr. Karhila introducing himself:
http://www.byterapers.com/~grendel/scan/aviation/karhila.mpg Interesting information: "Galland and those others claimed the cannonboot 109, G6R6, was unsuitable for fighter combat. That is incorrect. I show down seven fighters with it, including two Mustangs."
Yup, 109 G6/R6 turns better than a Mustang. How? Well, don't use full throttles, chop it down and you can cut into its turn. :-)
About Karhila:
Kyosti Karhila in Dogfight Over Gulf of Finland. Written by Ossi Juntunen.
http://www.elknet.pl/acestory/karhi/karhi.htm Kyosti Karhila in EXCLUSIVE interview for WW2AS! By Ossi Juntunen.
http://www.elknet.pl/acestory/karhi/karhinv.htm
