Nath[BDP],
No, you're right. You'll have to contain yourself to merely claiming 300% of the aircraft killed, just like the Germans in the Battle of Britain.
HFMudd,
BS. The Germans were just as sloppy as everyone else. There is a faction that likes to tout them as being the best at everything, but this faction has blinders on.
Any combantant that has the air fighting over its land territory is much more accurate.
Consider that in the Battle of Britain the Germans claimed 3,500 kills or so and the British actually lost 1,100-1,200 or so (I've seen the numbers but I don't have them in front of me). The British in the same time period claimed about 3,000 and got about 2,000. The British claims, which have twice the accuracy of the German claims, are still 1.5 times the number they actually got.
The Japanese didn't have an actual policy and they didn't award kills to individual pilots like the western powers did. Not until the end do you see Japanese fighters with kill markers on them. The other thing to consider is that when wreckage fell on Germany or Britain it could be used to confirm a kill, the Japanese were mostly fighting over water so there was no wreckage.
Nath[BDP] is correct in technicality, but not in tone. He implies that there was intentional fraud on the part of Japanese pilots. I'm sure there was some, but no more than on the part of Germans, Brits or Yanks, maybe less as there was no incentive or rewards based on indiviual kills in the IJA or IJN. The IJA and IJN did track total kills for a squadron.
Saburo Sakai has never said that he absolutely got 64 kills. He thought that he had at the time, but he always acknowleged that kill claiming was imprecise at best.
The reason that I am after Nath[BDP] on this is because he is trying to demean ans diminish the skills and efforts of a group of people and he is using their race as his basis.
You'll hear a lot of Luftwaffe fans praise Hans-Joachim Marsaille as quite possibly the best fighter pilot ever. He was undeniably very, very good and possibly was the best. However, his kill total is significantly less that he claimed. Cross referencing his claims with British records reveals that he sometimes claimed more kills in a fight than the British had aircraft in the area. This takes nothing away from him, I doubt he over claimed intentionally, but it does show that over claiming happened to all sides.
Well, except the Finns. Russian records show that the Finns got more than they claimed. But Finland is the exception.
