[JoeB]

The Ford explanation is good. I'd add or further emphasize that at some point if people say X's records deliberately understate combat losses, they really have to do some research and show it specfically, and matching opposing claims to operational losses doesn't get it done, that's really annoying actually when authors suggest that without further research to show why it's true in any particular case. If too hard to prove, OK too bad, but don't insinuate it if you can't show it specifically. This obviously could be much more broadly applied than to Japanese loss records v. early Allied overclaims.

Incompleteness is a more serious issue maybe. I believe books like Ford's and for example Bartz's on USAAF in Philippines use mainly the Jaapanese Defence Agency histories written in Japanese around the 60's IIRC(?), and the English language US sponsored monographs of immediate postwar, plus Japanese secondary sources. Not literally raw primary records. So the background of those works and what sources they used would have to be considered. The Japanese language sources I don't know, but the monographs vary widely in how detailed they are about operations or losses. And Ford doesn't give JAAF losses for many incidents; sometimes just gived the AVG claim w/o saying if supported in JAAF records, and the total JAAF losses in his summation can't be individually broken out, perhaps involved guessing. I'm sure he tried. The bogus thing was to criticize him for trying.

An error on the other side though could be to say "here are the pretty certain combat losses of the JAAF v. AVG per Ford." It doesn't seem to be quite the same as for some other cases where most actual primary records, and through overlapping types of such records detailed data for pretty much every day's operations, still exist and have been reviewed directly by the author.

Joe