Hello Dan,
thank you for the article. Some of statistic tables are interesting. I have some comments and questions.
As for your main thesis I can only repeat the question of Ruy Horta: “Did the results of your study lead you to your conclusions, or did you want to proof your point by using statistics?”
The problems of your article begin from the first sentence of the abstract: "German air force, a key component in the initial German victories during the Second World War".
Not a key component, but one of the components, not more.
But comments and questions:
1. Table 1. Allocation of Luftwaffe operational aircraft …, and following tables.
How you divide the units between “At the front” and “In reserve”? Maybe if you will list the units with allocation for the specific date (for example 10.Feb.43) your methodology will become clearer. Also distribution between Ostfront, Germany, West, Southeast, Mediterranean etc. more useful than the faceless “West”.
How and where you are counting Lfl.5?
For the estimation of comparable efforts the number of sorties is more important than allocation. Do you saw that data in BAMA? If not, for some large timeframes these data survived the war in the reports to Heeresgruppen, to armies etc.
2. Table 6. Allocation of German anti-aircraft guns and supporting equipment, December 1942.
About zero in the row “Heaviest guns (105-128 mm)”: I don’t have entire picture but in Kerch area in Jan.43 (and evidently in Dec.42) were two “heaviest” batteries: 105 mm 4./321 and 128 mm 1./Lehr u.Versuchsabt. If the data in other rows are likewise “correct” …
Also, Heeres-Flak and Flak units integrated in ground forces divisions etc are beyond this analysis. And the lion’s share of ground forces was in the East.
3. Table 9. Anti-aircraft batteries lost with all equipment, 1939 to July 1944
As you write correctly “Of course, losses of entire batteries exclude the many losses of individual guns during routine operations”. So the losses of “batteries lost with all equipment” have a questionable value for the analysis. But it is more important that the data seems doubtful, both for East and West.
In 1941-43 in the “West” (in Tunisia) were lost 19. and 20.Flakdivision. Some batteries probably were lost in Libya, maybe on Sicily and in 1940 in Narvik. But more than 150 batteries?
How many batteries were in Tunisia in May 1943 for example?
For the East: it seems that only Stalingrad is counted. But German army had retreated (partly in disarray) many times in 1941-43: from the outskirts of Moscow, from Caucasus, from Upper Don, from Orel-Kursk-Kharkov-Mius etc etc etc with heavy losses of all kinds of weapon. Some AA batteries were lost in the Kerch peninsula in Dec.1941 certainly during Soviet landing operation.
4. Table 11. Luftwaffe losses before and after 22 June 1941 …
For such inhuman phenomenon as the war the losses and their replacement is a normal process - as far as the replacement remain on the same or the higher level (quality and quantity) as the lost means of war and personnel. You probably know when the reduction of quality of the Luftwaffe crews began. It was certainly not before 22.Jun.41. In 1939-41 some crews were lost, but all other became more hardened. Green crews had a time to training due to great pauses between significant operations in 1939 - 1st half of 1941.
5. Table 12. Luftwaffe losses January to August 1942, by theatre of operations
Do you saw the following thread?
http://forum.12oclockhigh.net/showth...highlight=Chir
From the 98 planes captured after Stalingrad on the Chir station at least 68 planes are the total losses unknown from the German documents or known as repairable before the discussion about Chir finding. It isn’t singular known example. And how many such examples are not known yet …
So the statistics based on GQM returns is certainly incomplete, unrepresentative. At least the losses of planes transferred to the repair units are not counted. It was in Tunisia also, as Andrew Arthy wrote, but the scale of such Ostfront losses is certainly far more high for obvious reasons.
6. These mines were particularly effective in the initial period of the Soviet-German war, because the Soviet navy was “practically unready” to defend against their advanced firing mechanisms, which included combined acoustic and magnetic detonators (Kuznetsov and Morozov 2015: 42, 50)
As co-author of the book you cited I can say that though Soviet navy indeed was practically unready to sweep these mines 22.Jun.1941, German mining campaign had failed. Partly because the solution was founded quickly (among others the further «father» of Soviet A-Bomb and of nuclear energetics Kurchatov and further President of Academy of Science Aleksandrov had worked with that problem in Sevastopol). Partly it was due to German unwise tactical solutions and even due to bad knowledge of the operational characteristics the own mines by German headquarters. The sole palpable result for German airdropped mines was later, during April-May 1942 in the Kerch Strait, partly due to difficulty of minesweeping due to local German air superiority.
And I'm surprising that Germans had used 41% of aerial mines in 1942 in the East, during the almost pure overland campaign.
7. Table 16. Expenditure of selected classes of Luftwaffe munitions, second half of 1941
It is amazing technique to not count the most used bombs (50 kg and lower) with explanation that more heavy bombs were «reserved for especially important tasks». No comments.
Too long post, I’m stopping.
Best regards,
Andrey