thruth or BS?

[Pongo]

Oldman, what you are saying does not work. The allies were awarding partial kills and shared kills and squadron kills and kills for ac on the ground and kills for shooting down flying bombs...Killls by bomber gunners were vastly inflated.
The worst kill counters I have heard of were the Japanese in the solomons..the Japanese high command was sure they had whiped out the Henderson AC several times over just based on the kills they claimed. They were never even close.

Ignore Caldwell for a second and try to find numbers of Allied aircraft lost in ww2...and then look at the numbers of German pilots. Then consider that a small portion of pilots get the majority of kills in all wars for all counties. and you will see some allarming numbers available for the Germans. Given a simular number of targets and a simulare time to engage them the allies would have had 200kill + aces as well.  there is no magic, it is just oppertunity, opertunity that the Germans had.
How many aircombats did David Mcambell participate in to shoot down 34? Aircraft...dozens at most..imagine letting him go at it for 5 long years against enemies with vast numerical supperiority.
he would have had lots more kills.
Our belgian fellow does not know what he is talking about. Even if there is some discrepency in one engagment vs the belgians, adolf Galland no matter what else he was..was a good fighter pilot and has been recognised as such by his adverseries.

one final note. the top 2 canadian spit pilots in malta shot down more planes between them in 6 months then all the canadian spitfire pilots in Britian during the same time. How..good pilots with opertunitiy. Had axis ac been available to them for 3 years in those numbers they would have been 200 kill aces or dead.

[GRUNHERZ]

Yep one thing you left out of your arguments is that the kill/sortie rate between the top germans and top allies int that much different. The Germans just had more experience and time to fight.

And your constant references to all LW aces as nazis tells me you an axe to grind, ever heard of Nowotny or Molders, or Marsaille.

[HoHun]

Hi Oldman,

>Nope. Mainly because it was so contrary to the experience of every other country's pilots. Allies, Axis, you name 'em, the top aces everywhere else maxxed out at 100 kills or so - and most weren't even close to that. Nazis claimed to have 100 guys in this category. Granting that the situations were different everywhere, I think this pushes the believability envelope

Look at the sortie/kill ratio, and you'll see that the difference becomes less pronounced. Look at the encounter/kill ratio, and the difference might actually vanish.

"[The Americans] normally went home after one hundred missions. If I would have been sent home after one hundred missions, I wouldn't have had any victories at all." (Walter Krupinski, 197 victories)

Here's an example for the asymmetry of air combat: Mike Spick, quoting the USAF "Saber measures" study, shows that in the month preceding D-Day, at a fighter sortie ratio of 2.9:1 the Luftwaffe scored 2.9 kills per sortie compared to 1.3 for the Allies. However, the Luftwaffe also lost 3.6 planes per sortie, compared to 1.0 for the Allies.

Casting this into a simple mathematical model which assumes all pilots of one side have equal abilities, and everyone who's shot down is killed, I arrive at the following results for this period:

Luftwaffe: 34500 sorties with a force of 1500 pilots

- 1 pilot with 5 kills
- 5 pilots with 4 kills
- 32 pilots with 3 kills
- 157 pilots with 2 kills


Allies: 97500 sorties with 7500 pilots

- 4 pilots with 3 kills
- 88 pilots with 2 kills

Now judging by these scores, the Luftwaffe clones seem to be much better pilots than the Allied clones - they have far more high-scoring pilots, and higher scores as well!

However, the truth is that even in he clone model, the Luftwaffe lost 1242 planes while inflicting just 975 losses on the Allies, and didn't deal out as well as it took. The scores of the aces - which in my example have absolutely nothing to do with skill - are really independend of the success of the opposing forces.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[HoHun]

Hi again,

>the Luftwaffe scored 2.9 kills per sortie compared to 1.3 for the Allies. However, the Luftwaffe also lost 3.6 planes per sortie, compared to 1.0 for the Allies.

This is per 100 sorties, of course.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[lord dolf vader]

what about his claim that the mission against the belgian hurris was a deliberate lie. if this is true i think hes right in calling all the other victorys into question. if a guys willing to make up such a insulting lie to glorify himself he is obviously not to be believed.


now that is assuming the hurry scattering story is a deliberate lie.

anyone find the belgian guys facts to be wrong ?

[Oldman731]

Originally posted by Pongo
Killls by bomber gunners were vastly inflated.
Absolutely true.  I suspect that the same factors that inflated gunner claims worked to inflate Luftwaffe claims.  I'm not implying malice here - all of us recognize that keeping track of whether the enemy plane really crashed would not have been a priority when you were just trying to stay alive.

Ignore Caldwell for a second and try to find numbers of Allied aircraft lost in ww2...and then look at the numbers of German pilots. Then consider that a small portion of pilots get the majority of kills in all wars for all counties. and you will see some allarming numbers available for the Germans.
I don't have these stats.  Plus I don't have any idea what the ratio of loss caused by flak, enemy a/c action, a/c malfunction, and oldman-style stupid flying would have been.

Given a simular number of targets and a simulare time to engage them the allies would have had 200kill + aces as well.  there is no magic, it is just oppertunity, opertunity that the Germans had.
Not sure I agree.  The Japanese had time and opportunity, and didn't come close.  Johnnie Johnson flew almost continuously from 1941 through 1945 and had, what, 38 kills?  Opportunity works both ways; seems to me that if you're getting swarmed you would have less chance of getting a kill than if you were the swarmer.

Our belgian fellow does not know what he is talking about. Even if there is some discrepency in one engagment vs the belgians, adolf Galland no matter what else he was..was a good fighter pilot and has been recognised as such by his adverseries.
No doubt Galland was a superior fighter pilot, and I don't think that the Belgian ace was saying anything else.  He was questioning Galland's score, and by implication Galland's honesty in reporting his kills.  So far as I can tell, the Belgian backed his contention up with research.

one final note. the top 2 canadian spit pilots in malta shot down more planes between them in 6 months then all the canadian spitfire pilots in Britian during the same time. How..good pilots with opertunitiy. Had axis ac been available to them for 3 years in those numbers they would have been 200 kill aces or dead.
The "or dead" part is significant, I think.
- oldman

[Oldman731]

Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
Yep one thing you left out of your arguments is that the kill/sortie rate between the top germans and top allies int that much different. The Germans just had more experience and time to fight.
See my note back to Pongo.  Also, I think the "more time to fight" argument doesn't apply, most notably, to Hartmann, who didn't start flying until, when, late 1942?

And your constant references to all LW aces as nazis tells me you an axe to grind, ever heard of Nowotny or Molders, or Marsaille.
Accurate observation on your part.  Hortlund and I did this awhile ago, and were told then that it belongs in the O'club, so I won't pursue it here beyond pointing out that all three of those guys had swastikas on their airplanes' tails.  My skepticism would be there even if they had been daughters of the American revolution - as I have forthrightly admitted when it comes to discussing US bomber gunner claims.
- oldman

[Oldman731]

Originally posted by HoHun
Look at the sortie/kill ratio, and you'll see that the difference becomes less pronounced. Look at the encounter/kill ratio, and the difference might actually vanish.

"[The Americans] normally went home after one hundred missions. If I would have been sent home after one hundred missions, I wouldn't have had any victories at all." (Walter Krupinski, 197 victories)

Yo HoHun!  Haven't seen you flying (come over to the dark side of the CT with us!).  In the meantime:  It isn't just the US rotation policy.  Not one of the other combatant nations produced so many aces with claims in the hundreds.  Japan claimed, what, two?  And it isn't even close otherwise.  I'm honestly surprised that more people have just assumed that the German claims were accurate because they were fighting so long.

Here's an example for the asymmetry of air combat: Mike Spick, quoting the USAF "Saber measures" study, shows that in the month preceding D-Day, at a fighter sortie ratio of 2.9:1 the Luftwaffe scored 2.9 kills per sortie compared to 1.3 for the Allies. However, the Luftwaffe also lost 3.6 planes per sortie, compared to 1.0 for the Allies.
But, er, where did he get his figure of 2.9 kills per sortie for the Luftwaffe?  Would that be based upon, you know, um, Luftwaffe claims?

Casting this into a simple mathematical model...
I can always count on you for technical assistance!  But here I'm not thinking models.  I'm wondering what the actual research has shown.  So far as I can tell, judging by those who have actually compared losses claims, as our Belgian friend did, the Germans are not coming out well.

- oldman

[GRUNHERZ]

Sure the more time to fight argument applies.  Lets look at Hartmann. Find me one allied pilot with 1400 combat sorties,  or 800 actual combat engagements?  Or is this a fabrication too?

Oldman everyone has investigated these kill talleys in the past 50 years, and nobody has come up with anything outrageously innacurate about them - and you wont either.

Erich Hartmann shot down 352 enemy aircraft, it's that simple, he was the best of the best.

[HoHun]

Hi Vader,

>what about his claim that the mission against the belgian hurris was a deliberate lie.

The assumption that German kill records were imaginative appears to have been quite common among the WW2 generation authors. While time passed, much research has been carried out, and the accusations mostly seem to have been dropped.

I think the general (and usually well-justified) caution towards German propaganda did lead to each inconsisty in the files to be interpreted as deliberate fake by the early researchers.

If Coppen's reasearch can be confirmed, sooner or later someone will pick it up and put it in print.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[HoHun]

Hi Oldman,

Sometimes I wonder how our in-game scores would look if kills were awarded based on our after-action reports ;-)

>But, er, where did he get his figure of 2.9 kills per sortie for the Luftwaffe? Would that be based upon, you know, um, Luftwaffe claims?

It was a USAF study, not a Luftwaffe study :-)

USAAF and RAF knew their losses quite well, all they needed from Luftwaffe files were sortie count (and maybe number of Luftwaffe losses).

>But here I'm not thinking models.

Oh, models are an invaluable aid, and often we use them without even thinking about it.

Your statement

"Mainly because it was so contrary to the experience of every other country's pilots. "

implies a model which has similar conditions for all sides. This implicit assumption of course is a bit problematic - which my model, based more closely on history, tried to illustrate :-)

>So far as I can tell, judging by those who have actually compared losses claims, as our Belgian friend did, the Germans are not coming out well.

As I wrote in another post: It were the WW2 generation authors - for example Caidin and apparently Caldwell, too - who openly doubted the German scores. Their doubts seem not to be shared by modern authors though much research has been carried out since.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[Oldman731]

Originally posted by HoHun

>But, er, where did he get his figure of 2.9 kills per sortie for the Luftwaffe? Would that be based upon, you know, um, Luftwaffe claims?

It was a USAF study, not a Luftwaffe study :-)

USAAF and RAF knew their losses quite well, all they needed from Luftwaffe files were sortie count (and maybe number of Luftwaffe losses).

So how did the USAAF and RAF know how many of their planes were lost to fighters, vs. flak, mechanical damage, pilots auguring &c?  I would love to see this study, if you have a line on it.  Honest.  Because I'm still betting they used German claims.

As I wrote in another post: It were the WW2 generation authors - for example Caidin and apparently Caldwell, too - who openly doubted the German scores. Their doubts seem not to be shared by modern authors though much research has been carried out since.

Heh heh.  Just so you know, Caldwell IS a modern author; see his web site at http://www.butler98.freeserve.co.uk/jg26.htm.  He and Roger Freeman are among the few historians who have actually sat down with the records and puzzled through the claims and losses.  I don't think that this is a settled question, by any means.  I suspect, instead, that no one wants to do the work.

- oldman (who does not want to do the work, either)

[HoHun]

Hi Oldman,

>So how did the USAAF and RAF know how many of their planes were lost to fighters, vs. flak, mechanical damage, pilots auguring &c?

Remember the Allies filed combat reports for every mission containing all known details on their own losses. Observation of the fate of lost aircraft was vital so you'd know the status of the crew. Combat operations usually involved multiple aircraft who'd probably witness what happened to their squadron mates, and there was radio, too. There might be a share of unclear cases, but there can be no doubt that the causes for the majority of the losses were known reliably.

>I would love to see this study, if you have a line on it. Honest. Because I'm still betting they used German claims.

Have a look at:

http://www.au.af.mil/au/aul/bibs/korea/aerial.htm

U.S. Air Force. The Relationship Between Sortie Ratios and Loss Rates for Air-To-Air Battle Engagements During World War II and Korea: Saber Measures Charlie. Washington, 1970. 22p.
Doc. call no.: M-U 42210-75

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[hyena426]

i wouldnt dout that germans got that many kills,,,they had some good fighter pilots,,and they were going up outnumberd,,,i notice even on aces high,,when im outnumberd,,i still get atleast 2 to 3 kills flying smart and with the much faster planes at the time,,they could keep the kills racked up,,,i think at the fall of germany,,they were sending up 200 planes,,against 3,000 a day,,and still getting kills with inexperienced fighter pilots,,,,by the time the end came germans didnt have any good pilots left,,and numbers were against them plain and simple,,,,if not for all of the countries helping out,,,we would proubly all be speaking german at this time,,they were so far ahead in fighters and tech,,,little more time,,they would of been unstoppible,,,but thx too many of the people who gave there lives to stop them ,,we still got are own countries and lives,,,but i have to say,,,if not for the numbers,,i dont think they would of been stopped,,good fighter pilots,,and even better planes

[fats]

hyena,

How difficult would it be to use paragraphs and stuff? Perhaps folks would actually bother to read your posts then. If you wish to be unreadable to the extreme you should type all caps.


// fats