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See my last line, "That said I enjoyed the presentation and recommend the "Verified Victories" book which is exceptional."
Yes Nick, I have the book and it is very, very good. What I was hinting at was that the Germans disregarded a lot of their rules very quickly after war began and, as Daniel and many of our fellow forumites have made clear is that by 1944 they'd loosened them to such a degree that the claims have gone from inaccurate to ridiculous.
I wonder if the Germans had tried a little less at making so much of their "aces" they might have looked at while the perpetual picking off of inexperienced enemy fighter pilots might raise individual scores they needed to get better results from attacks on bomber formations. I assume that was the reason the points system for decorations was introduced?
Not surprisingly there are parallels with WW1. The Germans rarely ventured far over enemy lines and instead of attacking the British and French airfields waited for formations to appear and picked off a lot of stragglers. This of course meant that the British and French were able to damage transport and installations behind German lines. Once again allowing their "aces" to build up scores and promoting them in the print media. Towards the last year of the war they again relaxed their confirmation system to bolster the "aces" tallies.
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