I have strong reasons to believe that Kozhedub and a handfull of other russian aces are very different case then any other nations' pilots.
You must remember that you are dealing with the communist regime with all the implications.
I am positive that the following thing happened to those ace pilots:
Once a pilot showed some promise by shooting down say, 5 enemy planes, he was brought to the attention of the propaganda machine and milked for what it's worth. He had the medals and ranks heaped on him, the newspaper and radio correspondents covering him exclusively and so on.
All precautions were taken to insure that those pilots continue to rake their kills while minimizing the chance of them being shot down.
They were not allowed to take off without a few wings tasked with nothing but covering their six.
You can be sure that all their kills were reported as close to the truth as the conditions allowed. It's just how they've got them that is not reported.
I have seen statements to that effect in some books, obviously written by authors outside of the communist school.
I have talked to the war veterans that were shure that such practice took place.
I am sure from my own experience that there was no way the communist machine could have behaved differently.
We had lots of records in the Soviet Union that were not so much faked as staged, like a coal miner performing many daily norms in the course of his "Socialist Competition". What was not mentioned was the fact that on that day the whole mine had it's output halved because everything was working to support the "hero" coal miner.
I've read practically all the printed memoirs of soviet military commanders - my dad collected them. They are utter BS - the autors were prevented from writing anything significant, like why their division arrived to the western border to "defend" it two weeks before german attacked on June 22, 1941, if the german offence was not expected.
Or why it was "defending" on the western bank of the river. Or why they did not have trenches dug.
Or any kind of casualty reports or reasons for things done.
I am not even talking about the outright lies - in almost every case the russians are outnumbered by germans and advance (or heroically retreat, or better yet, die to the last man) after inflicting much heavier casualties on the enemy. Of course it is the germans who do not know how to fight smart and use human wave assaults.
Once you know history, or at least suspect the lies and keep an eye for it, you can read a lot of things between the lines and catch some of the truth the communist censure did not mean to surface.
It's a pity that the most prominent soviet marchall, Zhukov, preferred not to write any memoirs rather then produce the censored BS.
I believe that Kozhedub was a real war hero. At the same time I would not believe a word of his interview or his memoirs.
miko--
P.S. While the scoring of the particular pilots or snipers might have been very strict in the Red Army, the numbers officially reported in the newspapers showed total german casualties and equipment losses many times higher then they appeared.
Also the number of total human losses of the Soviet Union was arbitratily named in 1946 by Stalin at 7 million (to make it smaller then german losses reported at the same time).
In 1955 when Khrushev was fighting against the remnants of the Stalin's inheritance in his bid for power (Stalin safely dead by then). So the war problems were blamed on Stalin and the losses were reported at 20 millions to make him look worse.
When Gorbachev removed most of the censure, the most prominent historians (communists, of course, but now "liberal thinking" when it was safe) came up with the 47-50 million as the closest number.
[This message has been edited by miko2d (edited 08-11-2000).]
