Hello, dear friends.

Last summer, the Russian researcher of the air war on the Eastern Front Oleg Kaminsky published work on the analysis of the claimed victories and actual losses of the Luftwaffe and the Soviet Air Force in the air battle over the Kuban in 1943

The figures are so amazing that I decided to ask your opinion.

I've read in several authoritative works of Russian researchers describing the air war on the Eastern Front and published the last few years, that the claimed victories of Soviet pilots are absolutely implausible. German claimed victory, by contrast, generally very accurate (as far as possible in the fleeting dogfight).

For example, a detailed analysis of each day's air battle at the Kursk Bulge (two months!) in the paper of V.Gorbach "Over Fire Arc" (first published in 2007 in Russian).

Oleg Kaminsky (he used the documents from the archives in Freiburg) and open Russian sources claim that:

April 17 1943:

Soviet pilots claimed the destruction of 19 "Bf-109".
In fact not lost Luftwaffe fighters over the Kuban on this day. Only one "Bf-109" (Bf 109 G-2 WNr. 13,576 of II./JG.3) was hit and damaged during landing at 40%.

German pilots claimed to have destroyed 33 Soviet fighter over the Kuban on this day. O. Kaminsky has no complete data on Soviet losses that day, but Kaminsky has data on at least 11 Soviet fighters destroyed over the Kuban on this day.

Finally the question: Do you have any data on the losses of the Luftwaffe on this day over the Kuban?

If you're interested, I'll write later Kaminsky's statistics on other days of the air battles over the Kuban. There numbers are even more amazing.