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Re: Hartmann: claims vs. victories
Johannes
I think that there is some unclarity about the process of reporting victories.
I understand that pilots following combat mission had to went through a debriefing, either on Staffel or Gruppe level, regardless of claims made. Claims submitted were then doubtless put through a preliminary verification at the same level. Those which passed were then submitted to RLM, no doubt with plenty of associated paperwork.
I guess that the pilots had liberty to keep their copies or not, they were in the unit's records anyway.
The problem is, as I understand, that this paperwork did not survive, except few cases. Nonetheless this paperwork is just essential to try to recreate combats and their results.
Based on time and place of a victory, without getting through the circumstances, I would not risk a definite statement that the claim was a fraud. More so, in several cases, at least in the period of my interest, there are no full details of all victories. Sometimes names are missing, sometimes no place, sometimes no time. In some cases it is possible to verify information provided, like wrong time, presumably typo error at some point. Without this complete data, any assessment of reliability of claims is nearly impossible.
In general there are two main reasons of overclaim. One is combats over sea or any other area, where it is not possible to see the wreck. Another intense dogfights involving numerous aircraft. The overclaim does not mean that the claims filed were frauds, however. I have seen several cases of same aircraft being fired by numerous pilots, neither noticing each other, or misidentification of aircraft going down due to eg. black out. Funny case was a one of a BoB pilot claiming He 111. He attacked the aircraft, scoring critical hits. Nonetheless following a break, he noticed another He 111 going down in the area of his attack, and claimed as his own. In fact, the one attacked crashed as well. Both were attacked by numerous fighters. Had been there no combat report with narrative, this could have been possibly considered a fraud, while it was a mistake in heat of combat.
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