[Dénes Bernád]

Who shot down who, and overclaims/underclaims are probably the two most difficult, and politicised, aspects of combat aviation history. I usually refrain in specifying such "matches", as there are many factors to be considered, not all of them always available.

One difficult question is: what is considered a "loss"? Obviously, not only the expressely specified official "combat losses" have to be considered, but also those categorised as "missing in action". Often, official descriptions are misleading, like "technical problems", "collided in mid-air", etc. Even those aircraft that somehow managed to return to their base heavily damaged, should be considered as "confirmed", as usually that particular aircraft was written off. Moreover, it confirms the honesty of the victory claimer.

And there is the flak. As far as I know, about half of all combat losses were inflicted by flak fire (of course, this varied greatly, depending on the front zone and date of combat). Based on my experience, official documents tend to attribute combat losses to flak fire, rather than enemy fighters, as it was less "degrading", as flak fire cannot really be avoided, when enemy aircraft - at least theoretically - could, and it depended on the pilot's skill, or awareness.

Summing up, I believe this kind of research cannot ever be accurate, only approximative.

Finally, it's a shame, indeed, that such works are not published in an international language (preferably English), so we can see how far one went with such an exercise.