Pemberton restoration project. Fieseler Storch. Members of JSU lend a hand.
(This is supposedly the very same one that snatched Mussolini off the mountaintop so we're told)
The
Storch could be found on every front throughout the war. It will probably always
be most famous for its role in the rescue of deposed Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini from a boulder-strewn mountaintop, surrounded by Italian troops.
German commando Otto Skorzeny dropped with 90 paratroopers onto the peak and
quickly captured it, but the problem remained of how to get back off. A Focke
Achgelis Fa 223 helicopter was sent, but it broke down en route. Instead, pilot
Walter Gerlach flew in a Storch, landed in 30 m (100 ft), took aboard Mussolini
and Skorzeny, and took off again in under 80 m (250 ft), even though the plane
was overloaded. The involved Storch rescuing Mussolini bore the radio code
letters "SJ + LL" in motion picture coverage of the daring rescue.
On 26 April 1945 a Storch was one of the last planes to land on the improvised airstrip in the Tiergarten near the Brandenburg Gate during the Battle of Berlin and the death throes of the Third Reich. It was flown by the test pilot Hanna Reitsch, who flew her lover Field Marshall Robert Ritter von Greim from Munich to Berlin to answer a summons from Hitler. Once in Berlin von Greim was informed that he was to take over command of the Luftwaffe from Hermann Goering.
A Storch was the victim of the last dog fight on the Western Front and another was fittingly downed by a direct Allied counterpart of the Storch - a Piper L-4 Grasshopper-from the L-4's crew directing their pistol fire at it. The involved Storch was the only aircraft known to have been downed by handgun fire in the entire war.
A total of about 2,900 Fi 156s, mostly Cs, were produced from 1937 to 1945. When the main Fieseler plant switched to building Bf 109s in 1943, Storch production was shifted to the Mráz factory in Czechoslovakia. A large number were also built at the captured Morane-Saulnier factory in France, starting in April 1942, as the MS.500 Criquet. Both factories continued to produce the planes after the war for local civilian markets (in Czechoslovakia it was made as K-65 Čáp, 138 were made by 1949).
During the war at least 60 Storchs were captured by the Allies, one becoming the personal aircraft of Field Marshal Montgomery.
Because of its superb STOL characteristics (which would be
of obvious great benefit to bush pilots, for example) there have been many
attempts to recreate or outright copy the Storch in modern form, namely in the
form of various homebuilt aircraft.