[Larry Hickey]

Icare9,

This is precisely one of the tasks of the "Eagles over Europe" (EoE) Project Working Group (WG). If you've been following this board for a while, you'll have seen many posts from our revised EoE Luftwaffe Loss DB, compiled by Peter Cornwell, but with support and inputs from many others, which includes what can reasonably be interpreted from the records of the opposing sides. We have carefully documented all of the thousands of Luftwaffe losses/damages/casualties from 1 Sept. 1939 through 31 Dec. 40, which has resulted in hundreds of updates, changes and reinterpretation of the data that Peter had previously published in his classic "Then and Now" books on the Western (French) Campaign, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz to the end of 1940. In addition, the Scandinavian Campaign, Bomber Command Operations, and all aviation activities anywhere else in Europe have been added, including all coastal and British Navy operations. Everything except training losses. We have especially added a great deal of new material to the "damaged" category from analyzing Luft. photography, Flugbuchs, KTBs, and recon unit reports included in German Heer records. In fact, this massive DB is still undergoing constant updates, and probably will continue to be modified almost indefinitely. In addition to the German side, we are now well into a parallel upgrade to Peter's previous lists of all British losses, in all theaters and during all campaigns in Europe during this same period. This effort has included using all known existing Luftwaffe and Allied claims reports (about 40% of the German Bf110 claims are missing for 1940) and evaluate and attribute these claims against losses/damages/casualties on the opposing sides.

If you want to see what can be done, use the search tool on this DB for posts made by Peter Cornwell, and to a much lesser extent myself, although I cover many other topics, to see specifically what this effort has produced in specific instances. I'd like to make the point that your comments indicate that you may expect a rather high degree of precision from doing this in matching man to man over the skies of Europe during this period. Many relatively isolated combats can, and often do, produce pretty compelling results, but a great many of the combats involve multiple aircraft on both sides in a relatively limited time frame and airspace, making it impossible to say who shot down who with a high degree of confidence. The fact that we've added so many new damage reports to the data helps explain many heretofore puzzling claims on either side, but it is still evident that over-claiming, sometimes quite extensively, took place on all sides of the action, which further complicates an already difficult effort to attribute losses and damages on one side to a pilot, pilots or sometimes even a specific unit on the other side. However, what can be done is being done and will continue for that 16-month period until we're finished. This will also include the addition of Polish and Norwegian air operations, as well as updating Peter's previous work on the Dutch, Belgians and French. A huge amount of time and effort has been expended on this but we're well on our way towards concluding this part of the EoE project this year.

Regards,