RDUNN: "I'm not sure its a matter of sooner or later but of theater and circumstances. The RAF obtained a document with 12th FK claims for a period of several months during 42 and 43 and after detailed research was able to determine that they were virtually 100% accurate.

Over the African Desert (as documented in Shores 'Fighters Over the Desert' and other sources) claims by Marseille and other top aces were reasonably accurate but far from perfect. In the same theater there were charaltans that made totally bogus claims. "

Perhaps the discussion could branch into two: 1) how strict were nominal claim verification procedures? and 2) how accurate were claims, actually? The two would be related obviously but much less than 1:1 correlation.

I don't know much about the progression of nominal LW claims procedures, but as you say many modern works on LW seem to show fairly widely varying actual claim accuracy. Another data point would be claims by Me-262's against USAAF props as given in Foreman "Me-262 Combat Diary". My amateurish and rough comparison of these to published sources of US losses makes them seem quite exaggerated, a small % are directly verifiable and though a larger number are possible in the "boundary condition" sense that more US fighters were lost that day than claimed by 262's alone, given all other possible combat and other causes, and the losses not being id'ed as losses to jets, it seems unlikely a large % of such losses were really to jets. Perhaps those who've researched this on a primary level would comment?

To take an example of another war and air arm, Soviet verification of claims in Korea was nominally quite tight: fellow pilots, allied ground witnesses and gc film were often all provided, plus later in the war wreck surveys by the Soviets themselves. Yet still the great majority of the claims can't be found as losses in US primary records, at all. A secondary debate can be had of causes given in US primary records (as I understand is the case with MACR's in WWII, later records have a different format(s)) but this is a debate over already a much smaller universe of losses than those claimed and not a lot of those cause attributions seem really that likely to be wrong, looking the other way in terms of burden of proof only a small handful can be shown to be wrong.

Btw to site owners this is a terrific improvement in the software, thanks very much. I bet it will increase the success of this forum which has always had remarkably learned posts but not so great format of software :D

Joe