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Old 24th August 2008, 22:15
JoeB JoeB is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 121
JoeB
Re: Stepan A Bakhaev/Bakhayev/Bahayev

Yes most lists, including those, nominally request additions and corrections. The problem with the ACIG Korea lists is more basic than errors. As I maybe too indirectly said the first time, IME/IMO they are deliberately slanted. To put it in simple approximate numbers about 1/2 or less of the known Soviet claims are presented in that list (whereas they apparently used a standard published Russian language source, I've been able to find only a relatively few other claims not in that source). And they present about twice as many US air combat losses as actually occurred. The process there as I alluded to is simply to redesignate US non-air combat losses, clearly so stated in the web-based source, KORWALD database, they used. Extensive debate on that forum, 'offering corrections' didn't uncover any better argument for those systematic loss cause changes than: 'everybody knows the US understated air combat losses in Korea'. In my research in primary records I've found the KORWALD (web database they used) attributions of US loss cause to be backed by details in the records in a very high % of cases. I didn't firmly conclude the attributions to be mainly correct before I did that research. But, I certainly wouldn't assume the attributions were systematically wrong without having done that research. The list compilers did. It's more than lack of info or room for corrections, it's an altogether quite significantly, though not wildly, distorted picture and doesn't appear to be accidental.

It makes me doubt other ACIG lists, though I'm not as familiar with the all the other many topics to know for sure if the same thing is going on, or if so in which direction. I agree it's a unique collection of info. What exactly one can confidently use it for, I'm not as sure.

Joe
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