Kassa (Kosice) - 26 June 1941

Mirek,

Very adamant, but not so likely. I fully agree with Sid: his reasoning in what concerns a navigational error as the cause for the bombing of Kassa/Kosice is sound. The possibility of an attack originally directed against Slovak territory is much more plausible than another aiming at a prospective Romanian target... As Dénes rightly pointed out, there was a state of war between Slovakia and the USSR.

Hi to all
OK I agree it aslo could be Slovak but the rest is the same. Soviet thougt tyeh attacked Slovak targets.

Hi!
I'm new here, it's my first post.

All that story is very interesting!
I don't know what to think about all that, as I can't belive in some apparently strong arguments against version "it was Romanian attack".
First is the range of the bombers which was said to be to short to attack Kosice from Bucarest. As I estimated, the "safe" route Bucarest-Suceava-Chernovtsy-Kosice (chosen in order not to fly over Hungarian territory) is about 800km, so it is within range of Los, which had operational range of 1500km with full bombload and max range 2600km with bombload reduced to 1774kg. That means that Los could fly from Bucarest to Kosice, go back, and still had extra 1000km range in reserve.
Another question is why the planes had to start from Bucarest, I heard that they started from Suceava, which is much closer from Kosice.
Russian bombs - I belive that some of them could be in Polish magazines since WWI. Poles used many WWI bombs, mostly German PuW, even in 1939. Also Germans could deliver some new Soviet bombs, freshly captured on some Soviet airfields. They had a few days to capture some for such "strategic" mission. I also belive that Germans might have some Soviet bombs from period of Soviet-German military cooperation in early '30s.
It was also said earlier that only Soviet bombers were able to carry 100kg bombs at that time. It is not true, as the main armament of the Polish Los bomber were exactly the 100kg bombs.
Political/international arguments are not fully convincing too. For the Germans it was more risk to bomb Hungary with German crews, as it could harm German reputation too deeply. Yes, Germans were careful with Hungarian/Romanian relations, but they could risk something to drag Hungary to war, and sending Romanians over Kosice was for me safer idea than risking the German reputation. In case of failure it was easy for Germans to say: "it's Romanians! we have nothing with that!".

Sure that I don't have any proof, but the story makes some sense for me and is not easy to prove that it is a myth.

Cheers!
Grzegorz Mazurowski
Warsaw, Poland