Do you still have "real trouble with" the 100+ victories of German "experten" ?
*sigh* I suppose that I was the first to raise this, but I'd still like to keep it to Rudel.
Nevertheless, lest you interpret my silence as assent, the answer to the above question is "yes." No other combatant power - not Russia, Japan, England, China, the US, anyone, regardless of how long they were at war, produced even one pilot who claimed 100 victories, much less 100 pilots making that claim. So I think it's reasonable to be skeptical from the start.
The explanations I've seen for why the Germans were so wildly different from everyone else don't overcome my skepticism. "Target-rich environments" work two ways, as we see even in AH, because often it means you're outnumbered and that means you're likely to get killed. "They flew for the whole war" doesn't work because the Russians and Japanese - whose pilots, like Germany's, flew until they died - did, too, and also because Germany's greatest ace flew for "only" two and one-half years of the war, significantly less than Johnnie Johnson or Saburo Sakai, for example. I hope we can all discount the "they were super pilots flying super planes" explanation.
I've seen the technique you refer to here - Toliver and Constable's book comes to mind - where one takes a known rate of kills and extends that over a longer time period. But that calculation doesn't account for risks, particularly for the increasing risk of making an error as a pilot is exposed to constant combat. Sooner or later the odds catch up with most everyone - except for these 100 charmed German pilots (and all the others who didn't quite make the 100 mark but were really close) (and there were several hundred of these).
Then I wonder whether anything could be gained by being generous on kill confirmation? Many people think that the 8th AF did that with bomber gunner claims in order to the boost morale of people exposed to a dreadfully-high risk of death. For the Germans, of course, being able to boast of a pilot who single-handedly could destroy hundreds of tanks, or a bunch of pilots who could shoot down hundreds of planes, was consistent with both propaganda and Nazi doctrine, not to mention perking up the morale of the troops.
AND THEN, just as I was about to hit the "Post" button, I thought I should make sure that it was really only 100 German pilots claiming over 100 victories each (it was really 103), and I stumbled on this quote in Wiki:
"In the 1990s, the German archives made available microfilm rolls of wartime records, not seen since January 1945, available to the public.[6] These showed that while in theory the Luftwaffe did not accept a kill without a witness, which was considered only a probable, in practice some units habitually submitted unwitnessed claims and these sometimes made it through the verification process, particularly if they were made by pilots with already established records.[6] In theory the Luftwaffe did not accept shared claims, but it happened. In theory each separate claim should have referred to a particular aircraft, but in practice some victories were awarded to other pilots who had claimed the destruction of the same aircraft.[6] In 1943 the daily OKW communiques of this period habitually overstated American bomber losses by a factor of two or more. Defenders of German fighter pilots have always maintained that these were reduced during the confirmation process. But the microfilms prove this not to be the case.[6] Some 80 – 90 percent of the claims submitted were confirmed or found to be "in order" for confirmation up to the time the system broke down altogether in 1945."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_aces_from_Germany. Hey, it's Wiki, but it lists some sources that we can check out when we have more time.
So at the end of the day I think to myself, "super men or generous confirmations?" One of those seems more likely to me.
- oldman
