[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Nikita.

As I stated - this was a joke! An irony!

I thoroughly respect the work of for example Bergström and Dikov et al - but the problem still in my opinion is that for the german losses we have the records for most the war (1939 - April 1945) readily available, at least to numbers of aircraft, unit and date, while the corresponding records from the opposite side with regards to soviet aviation especially is not available to others than a precious few.

I am not doubting the fact that these individuals are doing a tremendous work, the problem is that the general research community is not able to access the original documents and thus not able to make an assesment to their completeness and eventual flaws.

As I said in a previous remark - most of us are able to state or locate the Werknummer, code, location and date for a given German aircraft lost by a given unit, also often the pilot or crew is named, but have no tools readily available with regards to establishing a corresponding claim or loss respectively on the Soviet side.

For example, when I state that the I./JG 77 does not seem to have reported any losses for the dates September 26th and 27th 1941, this is based on the Summary loss records of the unit and Generalquartiermeister 6 Abt loss records for the corresponding dates, of which I can state the archive reference in both cases, so anyone with an interest can in fact check if I have relayed the correct data. With regards to Soviet military aviation of the period I cannot see that this is the same situation, and please correct me if I am wrong!

As you said, Bergström has relied on lists provided by Dikov and Antipov, but to what extent do we know that these are exhaustive? That they cover every unit? That there is no possibility that there are more information in documents not available? That the pilot claiming a fighter in
fact misidentified a light bomber or observer/communications aircraft?

As another example, a lot of authors that have provided loss information based on German records have obviously been working off one of the sets of documents that has no handwritten references to corrections, and thus has not been able to relay more than the original record if not working with a database or spreadsheet approach, or in a painstakingly slow and tedious manual process of handling this. In my work on the database for German losses provided on my website, my teams strategy was always to work backwards from the latest towards the earliest dates in the documents, and we included the corrections as an integral part of the system, specifically to avoid making the same errors. For some of the losses there are three or four corrections and amendments made, in addition to information from other, often western allied or local sources.

If you can relay archive numbers and also the procedure on how to order copies of such documents from former Soviet archives, I would be very thankful, as this undoubtedly would enhance the accuracy and value of upcoming publications.

I sincerely hope that we in the future will see even more information coming from the archives of the former Soviet Union, and look forward to working with you all on this very interesting topic.

As a small side comment, the database system can handle all theaters and information from all combatants, so if anyone is interested in entering data from Soviet or western allied side (in addition to the former German allies like Italy, Rumania etc) please feel free to contact me off board to establish a project on this.

Regards,
Andreas B