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Originally Posted by Christer Bergström
Originally, this was part of my latest posting to the “Tunisia thread”, but when I tried to post it, I got the message that it was too long, so I make a separate thread of this:
All of this, including Reinert’s feat, is a perfect illustration of the Luftwaffe Eastern Front veterans repeating what they previously had accomplished on the Eastern Front against the same kind of fighters.
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As I always say, the study of WWII air combat across theaters, and in detail about real losses rather than claims in each theater, is an immensely rich subject.
But your underlying thesis in these discussions seems to be, rather than studying these Western cases for their own merit per se, that they can be used to judge the relative effectiveness of western Allied and Soviet air forces through each's performance against the LW. If this is the goal, surely we would have to include the performance of a western AF directly against the Soviets in a relatively large scale and prolonged air campaign, in Korea in 1950-53. And here, assessing based on documented losses, there was nothing like a general equivalence. The best Soviet units and pilots were pretty capable, but overall the exchange ratio was quite decidedly in favor of the USAF, even aside from its victories against less capable and experienced allied AF's of the Soviets, which together with the Soviets put the USAF at a position of numerical inferiority (as regarded air superiority a/c, mainly in pure battles between such a/c).
If one completely avoids this point whenever it's brought up I think it says something about the quality of the argument being made via WWII. Again, if our purpose is purely to analyze various WWII combats, then the point I make is off topic and not relevant. But if, as seems clearly the case with many recent threads, the point is mainly or importantly to gauge the effectiveness of Soviet and Anglo-American AF's against *each other* with the LW as merely the (inherently imprecise) yardstick, then a discussion of the direct results on USAF-Soviets in the same era is quite relevant and needs to be addressed.
Joe