Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario
The Re.2005 Sagittario was a single-seat fighter built by Reggiane around the Daimler-Benz DB 605 engine, produced under licence by Fiat as the RA.1050 Tifone. One of Italy's three Serie 5 fighters, it first flew in May 1942 and entered squadron service with the 22nd Group in April 1943, fighting over Naples and Sicily. An order for 750 aircraft came in February 1943, but only twenty-nine pre-production aircraft were complete when the armistice of 8 September 1943 split Italy, and the survivors were divided between the Co-Belligerent Air Force, the fascist air force in the north and the Germans. No complete aircraft survives; the rear fuselage of one is displayed at the Gianni Caproni Museum of Aeronautics in Trento.
Why It Mattered
The Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario was one of the three Serie 5 fighters with which Italy set out to match the best German and Allied fighters of the Second World War, alongside the Macchi C.205 Veltro and the Fiat G.55 Centauro. It was the last of Reggiane's aircraft line to enter service during the war, and it reached its squadrons only in April 1943, five months before Italy's armistice. Group Captain Duncan Smith, a British fighter leader who had fought one in combat, called the Re.2005 "altogether a superb, potent aeroplane". Smith judged it easily the best aircraft Italy produced, but it was a standing the type had little time to prove.
Design Notes
Reggiane's design team was headed by Roberto Longhi, and for the Re.2005 the company concentrated on improving the fuselage and wings of its earlier fighters. The airframe was built largely of light alloys around a Daimler-Benz DB 605, produced by Fiat under licence as the RA.1050 RC.58 Tifone and capable of producing 1,475 hp. Its fuselage was a much cleaner shape than the Re.2001's and about a foot longer, and it had semi-elliptical wings, a lengthy nose and a large tail unit. It was the only Italian fighter of the conflict fitted with hydraulically operated flaps. Armament was far heavier than the Re.2001's: three 20 mm MG 151/20 cannon and two 7.7 mm machine guns, and the aircraft could carry a 1,000 kg bomb or an auxiliary fuel tank under the fuselage. The design's known flaw was a structural weakness in the rear section of the fuselage.
Operational History
The prototype first flew in May 1942, and that July it went to the official test centre at Guidonia, near Rome. In the trials it had to compete with the Macchi C.205 and Fiat G.55, and the production order that eventually followed, for 750 aircraft in February 1943, came too late. The type entered squadron service in April 1943 with the 362nd Squadron of the 22nd Group, based at Napoli-Capodichino for the defence of Naples. Over Naples that spring the Group claimed B-24 Liberators, among them one B-24 and four probables on 28 April, but Wikipedia cautions that such claims seldom matched actual American losses. On 2 July 1943 the squadron was sent to Sicily to face the Allied invasion, where it fought Spitfires and lost two aircraft on 11 July; History of War judges that it fought "in such small numbers as to make no difference". Late in August, after aircraft were lost in steep dives and another was lost on 25 August, all flights were discontinued while the cause, flutter that could damage the fuselage, was investigated. When Italy surrendered on 8 September 1943 only twenty-nine pre-production aircraft were complete, and their fates divided with the country. Three passed to the Co-Belligerent Air Force, the Italian force fighting on the Allied side, where they stayed grounded for want of spare parts. Another three served with the fascist air force in the north, and the Germans took eleven, after which they disappear from the record. Some accounts place Re.2005s in German insignia during the final defence of Berlin in 1945, but other research indicates the aircraft probably never left Italy, and the claim is contested.
Afterlife
No complete Re.2005 survives. What is left is the rear fuselage of MM.09235, on display in Trento at the Gianni Caproni Museum of Aeronautics; the museum shows the fuselage, tail cone and vertical stabiliser of the only known survivor. That aircraft was built in the first half of 1943 and served with the 22ยบ Gruppo at Capodichino, near Naples, until September 1943. It was found near its air base after the war, and the city's university took possession of it for several years. The Caproni Museum purchased the aircraft in the 1970s, and it became part of the permanent exhibition in 2010. One other aircraft is reported to have been shipped to the United States after its capture by the US Army Air Forces; it vanished after the war. The Trento fuselage is the only existing aircraft of its type.