[Keith Enge]

Laurent Rizzotti -

I'll definitely look into your suggestion about "Fighters over the desert"; that is exactly the sort of detail that I seek. I'm in the process of looking through the ghostbombers website but feel that I'm unlikely to find many balanced actions in the 1944 time frame. Allied air power tended to have rather dominating air superiority by this time. Axis attacks thus tended to be more "guerrilla" than battles between relatively balanced forces. There are some exceptions like the Bodenplatte attacks that you mentioned (of which I was previously aware).

The ghostbombers website is interesting and does cover an often overlooked campaign. I have found it surprising that I can find more detailed descriptions of individual battles in some of the more obscure theaters rather than the better known ones. For example, I could document several battles involving Vichy aircraft over Syria and Casablanca. The Winter War and Continuation War involving Finnish forces also is a rich source for balanced battles. It seems that, since battles were more rare in these secondary theaters, what battles there were are better documented. A similar situation exists in the Aleutians. Another factor in play in these battles is that they tend to be smaller and more isolated; thus, they are probably easier to document. The complexity and uncertainty of details of battles seems to increase exponentially with the number of participants (kill claims are inflated exponentially too).

I've found that memoirs of aces are almost useless for my purposes. They tended to relate the exceptional, actions in which they prevailed against daunting odds. However, I don't want the exceptional, I want more typical battles when relatively matched forces met.