Quote:
Originally Posted by Andreas Brekken
Hi.
Just a short message to mr. Thompson: The obvious reason for the difference in survivability between east and west were obviously that the Luftwaffe operated mostly over German controlled territory in the west at this time (largely seen), while they were operation directly over or beyond the frontline in enemy held territory in the east. At least how I see it.
Regards,
Andreas B
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Hello Andreas,
Thank you very much for the excellent introduction to the various types of loss records, I will eagerly await the full article! Looking over what you have written, it looks like the Monatsmeldungen for Gesamt-Flugzeugverluste and more specifically the sheet broken down by Kriegsschauplatz und Luftflotte, is the set of documents most relevant to my inquiries. I have a couple of questions about this:
1) Were such tables constructed for the entire period covered by the individual loss reports, from 1939 to 1945? Are all of them still extant?
2) Are they available anywhere apart from BA-MA?
On a different note, I agree with your assessment that the personnel losses in the East were caused by operations over hostile territory. However, this surprised me insofar as many famous pilots, especially the aces, seem to have survived multiple aircraft write-offs in the East. In view of the overall statistics, it looks like the men involved possessed some uncommon and no doubt extremely important crash survival skills, in addition to their proficiency in air combat.
Regards,
Paul Thompson