Originally posted by Warspawn
Let me help that ol' memory out....
The P-63 was delivered in huge numbers, and was competitive as a late-war fighter plane ('43 on...would this place it Mid-war as well...perked perhaps?) They were delivered on the promise that they'd be used against the Japanese. The Russians started getting significant numbers of these planes around the time that Kursk was being fought, and started secretly replacing planes in P-39 squadrons with them.
I just read that, as it was posted above. That tells us nothing. I don't know who to believe less, Soviet documents denying something happened or Soviet pilots claiming something happened, at the height of their claim to fame.
Since HTC only looks at official specs, official engine settings, speeds, no custom-tooled, jury-rigged engine settings that most VVS flew with, I doubt they're going to use anecdotal, questionable, resources to determine if it was in use in Europe or not.
The "official" (read into that whatever you wish) record has all of the P-63s being used in one of the smallest, most insignificant fronts of the war (at the time). During this time all these thousands of aircraft have an official claim of 1-2 kills, and I can't even recall the types. They shot down a couple of Japanese planes towards the end of the war.
Besides, how would the Germans know they'd shot down a P-63 and not some late version of a P-39? They look very much alike, and have minor external differences. Same way that allied planes claimed to have shot down FWs over Romania, but were attacking IAR80s (totally totally different aircraft).
Hell there were problems telling P-47s from Fw190As, so the early FWs dropped the checkerboard nose patterns to avoid confusion (after a bad encounter).
I think we need more than that to believe they were in use in large numbers in Europe.
P.S. Wasn't Porkryshkin was flying a Yak at the end of the war?
