Quote:
Originally Posted by Dénes Bernád
To say that Luftwaffe on average overclaimed 3:1 during the whole war is simply not true, and its sounds as historical revisionism.
As it has been discussed here previously, a few units on a few occasion indeed overclaimed to a rather high degree, but that was the exception rather than the norm. Of course, overclaim in the Jagdwaffe did exist, but to a much lesser degree than Shikhov alleged.
In one instance when I could check both the claims and the other side's losses (over Transylvania, in the Autumn of 1944), for every Luftwaffe fighter claim there was almost always a matching Rumanian loss. And that was fairly close to the war's end, when Luftwaffe air victory confirmation wasn't that strict as previously...
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I should say that Luftwaffe overclaim in my opinion depended on two factors: activity of combat and personal characters of individual pilot. I know some examples when Hartmann overclaimed vastly and to the contrary I have not faced any such occasion as regards to Lipfert.
Here is the example: August 9, 1942 pilots of JG3 and I/JG53 claimed 50 enemy planes around Kalatch and Stalingrad. In fact 8 VA and 102 IAD PVO lost 19 planes. If we presume that all of them were shot down by fighters we will have overclaim ratio at 2,6. At the same time on August 11, 1942 all German fighter claims correspond with matching Soviet losses.