What Finland Quietly Did With the 159 German Fighters It Kept Flying Until 1954

In March 1954 — nine years after the Second World War ended — a Messerschmitt Bf 109 took off from Utti airfield in Finland. Every other air force on earth had scrapped the type years before. Finland had quietly kept its 159 German fighters flying through an armistice, a war against Germany itself, and a peace treaty that capped its entire air force at sixty aircraft. This is the story of the "Mersu": how Finland bought the Gustav in 1943, fought it to a record 663 confirmed victories under aces like Ilmari Juutilainen — the highest-scoring non-German fighter pilot in history — then kept it as its frontline fighter into the jet age, legally, openly, and on a shoestring, until the last flight of all, on 13 March 1954. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Last Messerschmitt 0:57 A German Fighter in 1954 1:59 A Small Country at War 3:05 Germany's Offer 4:06 Four Squadrons 5:07 The Highest-Scoring Non-German 6:09 The Summer of 1944 7:09 Deliveries Under Fire 8:12 The Wartime Ledger 9:17 The Armistice 10:22 The Lapland War 11:28 102 Survivors 12:24 The Paris Treaty 13:33 The Quiet Arithmetic 14:41 The Fifties 15:36 The Ledger 16:32 13 March 1954 17:47 The Verdict Sources: Kalevi Keskinen & Kari Stenman, Finnish Aces of World War 2 and the Suomen Ilmavoimien historia series; Finnish Air Force Museum, Tikkakoski (Mersu service records; MT-507); Treaty of Peace with Finland (Paris, 1947), Article 13; Richard P. Hallion, Air & Space Forces Magazine. One figure to note: published unit tallies sum to 667 victories while the Finnish Air Force's cited total for the type is 663 — this film uses the Air Force figure. Photographs: SA-kuva, Finnish Defence Forces archive (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons. Ilmari Juutilainen portrait (1942) and Juutilainen with Brewster BW-364: CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Rovaniemi ruins, 1944: Finnish Heritage Agency (JOKA), CC BY 4.0. Museum photographs of MT-507, the VL Pyörremyrsky and the de Havilland Vampire: public domain, except the MT-507 engine detail, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. #WWII #Bf109 #Finland #Aviation #History #Documentary Displaying desc59.txt.