Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario

By 1941 the Regia Aeronautica had recognised that the future of the Italian fighter lay not with the air-cooled radial but with the powerful German inline engine. The licence-built Daimler-Benz DB 605 — produced in Italy as the Fiat RA.1050 RC.58 Tifone — would become the heart of three superb fighters known collectively as the “Serie 5”: the Macchi C.205 Veltro, the Fiat G.55 Centauro, and the Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario (“Archer”).

The Sagittario was the work of Roberto Longhi at Officine Meccaniche Reggiane in Reggio Emilia, a firm within the Caproni group. It was the final and finest member of a family that had begun with the radial-engined Re.2000 Falco and matured through the inline Re.2001 and the ground-attack Re.2002. Drawing on all that experience, Longhi set out to build a fighter that could meet the best German and British designs on equal terms at high altitude.

The Re.2005 was, by common consent, one of the most beautiful aircraft of the entire war. Its slender fuselage and graceful elliptical wing — a planform it shared with the Spitfire and the Heinkel He 100, chosen to spread lift efficiently and cut induced drag at altitude — gave it a purity of line that German test pilots openly admired. A wide-track, inward-retracting undercarriage cured the narrow-gear handling vices of its predecessors.

Around the 1,475 hp Tifone the Sagittario delivered genuinely first-rate performance: a top level speed of about 628 km/h, an excellent rate of climb, and an airframe so strong that test pilot Cmdr. de Prato dived one to 980 km/h without flutter or damage — the aircraft was also a rock-steady gun platform. Its armament was heavy by Italian standards — three 20mm MG 151/20 cannon (one firing through the propeller hub, two in the wings) backed by a pair of 12.7mm Breda-SAFAT machine guns — giving it real destructive power against Allied bombers.

There was a price for such elegance. The thin, refined wing raised questions about structural strength under the most violent manoeuvres, and like all the Serie 5 fighters the Re.2005 was complex and time-consuming to build. In an Italy whose factories were increasingly paralysed by Allied bombing, that complexity would prove decisive — and fatal to the programme.

The Sagittario first flew on 9 May 1942 and impressed everyone who evaluated it. A production order for as many as 750 aircraft was approved, and the type seemed set to give the Regia Aeronautica a world-class interceptor in quantity.

It was not to be. Allied air raids against the industrial cities of northern Italy, shortages of engines and materials, and the sheer difficulty of mass-producing so refined a design throttled output to a trickle. By the armistice of September 1943 fewer than fifty airframes had been completed — most sources put the figure between roughly 30 and 48. The Sagittario never reached the squadrons in the numbers it deserved, and no major sub-variants were developed before production ceased.

The handful of Re.2005s that reached service were thrown into the most desperate fighting of the Italian campaign. Flying chiefly with the 22° Gruppo, they defended Sicily against the Allied landings of July 1943, then fell back to fight over Naples and Rome as the front collapsed northward.

In these battles a tiny number of Sagittari faced overwhelming Allied air power, and they acquitted themselves with distinction. Pilots praised the aircraft's speed, its heavy punch and its rock-steady gunnery, and several Re.2005s were among the last Regia Aeronautica fighters airborne in the final hours before the armistice. After Italy's capitulation a few surviving aircraft were taken over by the Luftwaffe, which reportedly used them in the defence of Berlin and on other fronts into 1944.

The Re.2005 was not alone. It was the most refined of a trio of superb Italian fighters — the “Serie 5” — all built around the same powerful Daimler-Benz DB 605 engine: the Fiat G.55 Centauro, the Macchi C.205 Veltro and the Sagittario. Together they represented the peak of Italian fighter design, machines that could meet the best Allied and German types on equal terms.

And together they shared the same tragedy. All three arrived in 1943, just as the Allied bombing of Italian industry and the chaos of the armistice made mass production impossible. Of the three the Re.2005 was the finest to look at and the hardest to build, and so the rarest of all — perhaps fewer than fifty completed, against many hundreds of the more practical G.55 and C.205. It was a recurring verdict on the whole Italian war effort: the engineering was often world-class, but it came too late, and in numbers far too small to matter.

The Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario is one of the great tragedies of Italian aviation: a fighter widely regarded as the finest the country produced — and one of the best single-engine piston fighters fielded by any nation — that arrived too late and in numbers far too small to influence the war.

Beautiful, fast, heavily armed and beloved by the few pilots fortunate enough to fly it, the Sagittario was undone not by any failing of its own but by the collapse of the industry meant to build it. Of the Serie 5 trio it is often judged the most accomplished design, and it remains a poignant symbol of what Italian engineering might have achieved had it been given the time, the resources and the peace to do so.

• Chris Dunning, Courage Alone: The Italian Air Force 1940–1943 (Hikoki Publications).
• Jonathan W. Thompson, Italian Civil and Military Aircraft 1930–1945 (Aero Publishers).
• Sergio Govi, I caccia Reggiane 2000-2001-2002-2005 (Giorgio Apostolo Editore).