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Old 29th August 2005, 15:42
Andreas Brekken's Avatar
Andreas Brekken Andreas Brekken is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2004
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Re: German Claims in Poland 1939

Hi, Franek.

Please look into Your previous postings on this board and try to see them with a clear eye:

On one hand the rest of the research community(with this Marius which I do not know but is clearly trying to back his work up with documentation included) are told to fuck off from making questions on the validity of claims and losses when certain Polish pilots are involved, on the other this is a right You have with regards to German pilots especially.

I do not mean to be harsh with You, but an eyewitness account is an eyewitness account, nothing more, and cannot really be used as a single standing evidence without a form of material backup. It really does not matter if the person You or others have interviewed are men of honor, their story is only their own perception of what happened.

I know for a fact, from earlier work experience, that an eyewitness account can be VERY far from a description of what really happened, and the accuracy will deteriorate with factors such as stress (fright, cold conditions, hot conditions, etc etc etc etc), that You are tired, that You are experiencing physical pain, that You are hungry, thirsty, that You are using stimulants such as metamphetamin and I could go on for a long time on further factors and combinations of these. I am quite sure that any pilot flying in a combat situation will suffer from at least one of these conditions, most likely from a combination of a number of them.

Please, Franek, I am not by any means stating that any Polish pilot or fighting man is a liar or anything else, only that we have to try to find some pieces of PHYSICAL evidence in our work, to substantiate the very interesting and colourful personal accounts we have from the participants.

If we (I am now talking about the community that are interesting in telling the gripping story of the WWII air war) could agree (in UTOPIA maybe ) to maybe stop focusing on making heroes or villains, and start to work on substantiating the recollections of the combatants with documentation, the story would be maybe a bit less colourful, but a heck of a lot more truthful.

(I am of course talking about all kinds of documentation and hard evidence. A dataplate from a Bf 110, or in your case two would make this discussion a whole lot easier )

Regards,
Andreas