Hello Gabor,
I understand your reasoning about the Axis losses. However, I’ve just found the following link, which completely contradicts my vague memory of 150 Ju 52s lost. Can you comment on the data?
http://www.wiki.luftwaffedata.co.uk/...title=Budapest
“Losses incurred by the Transport units
36 Ju 52/3ms
7 He111Hs
1 Ju 87
1 Do 17
12 Gliders plus 36 abandoned after landing in the enclave (either at the racetrack or at the park).”
Thank you for the information about investigations into escort procedures. Did the Soviets make any significant changes as a result? I get the impression from examples like the Prokhorovka investigation that these sorts of investigations often failed to lead to any changes in procedures.
I agree that it’s impossible to determine after the fact what led to a particular aircraft loss. I think the statistics are interesting in as far as they are an official admission of significant losses to fighters. Avoiding Il-2 losses to fighters was a major focus of the VVS at this stage of the war, so this makes the data significant, showing that the fighter threat was too large to ignore or re-label as losses to AAA.
The large numbers of La-5F could be one of the reasons why the 17 VA had problems, they were clearly too old to fight the Bf 109G-10 or other late-war Axis fighters. I’ve noticed a very sharp decline in La-5 strength, from 259 to 183 in 2 months. Am I correct to assume this was largely due to combat losses?
Here’s an article to follow the points made by you and Juha. It is about Il-2 survivability, as far as I can gather, but I’d be glad if you could tell me more, Google Translate only goes so far! See link, click on forward arrows to see further parts:
http://vadimvswar.narod.ru/ALL_OUT/A...IL2Expl001.htm
Regards,
Paul Thompson