Quote:
Originally Posted by Icare9
I was asking if there was a level of research to establish who shot down whom but did accept that in the melee of a dogfight where one victor may shortly thereafter become a victim without the claim being able to be made by the pilot.
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My experience is that where numerous aircraft are involved, you simply don't have enough information reliably to assign a claim to a particular loss (in the unlikely event that the numbers of claims and losses match up in the first place). The best you can say for a lot of actions is that these pilots made claims and those aircraft were lost but you can't identify personal responsibility.
Also it's worth having a look at Alfred Price's books "The Hardest Day" and "Battle of Britain Day." In one of those he unravels the tale of a stricken He 111 fired on by something like half a dozen different RAF pilots as it tried to get home and claimed separately by all of them.