[Kapper]

Hi all,

I have a few points I would like to raise on this issue.

Firstly Dora9forever has raised a very good point here. To support this issue I'm referring to Caldwells works JG26 War Diary's. As I work away from home, I don't have these books with me so I'm working from some of my notes and memory, but those of you who have the book can check this out.

Where the author was able to access the Pilots logbooks he has been able to refer to all the pilots actions. Pilots such as Peter Crump, Waldemar Radenar, Wilhelm Mayer, and Heinrich Schild had a high percentage of claims not submitted or not confirmed early in thier careers (over 50%). I've got Mayer's 6th claim as his 1st confirmed victory and Shild's 7th claim as his 1st confirmed victory.

As with the allies the Luftwaffe had to go through a debriefing process before the submission of claims. In Caldwells book he has referred to instances where a junior pilot complained about the officer responsible for sorting claims within the unit had rejected his claim, instead awarding the claim to a more senior pilot and submitting the claim for confirmation in that senior pilots name. Therefore, a number of claims were never submitted into the claims process by the unit and unless you have the pilots logbooks, you do not know they exist. From memory, he detailed at least one instance where he varified the junior pilots claims.

The author also refers to instance where claims were not forwarded by the unit due to a lack of witnesses. The author mentioned at least one instance where the pilot noted in his logbook a claim that was not even submitted to the unit debriefing (claims?) officer for lack of witnesses, but from allied sources he was able to proove that the victory happened.

Therefore, unless you have a copy of the pilots logbooks you do not get a full appreciation of all his claims. It appears that within units they can be very sceptical of junior pilots claims, however once they proove themselves and become a more senior pilot, they tend to take them more at their word. This results in fewer claims not being submitted or not confirmed late in the careers of senior pilots and their claims becoming less reliable than earlier in thier careers.

On a second point I am warry of saying someone is not a reliable claimer. One of the first books I ever read as a young man (soory I can no longer remember the name of the book), quoted a statement from a senior RAF offficer about the validity of Marsielles claims. Now thanks to the excellent work of Shores in his book "Fighters over the Desert" and good work by other historians, Marsielles is now considered a reliable claimer. The point is not to make accusations untill fully reseached. For instances when your looking at Erich Hartmann, you can refer to the list in Tollivers book and the Tony Woods list for a copy of his claims list. You will notice that a fair amount of the information in these two Lists are different. Tolliver admits that he did not have all of Hartmanns logbooks and Tony Woods lists are known to have mistakes with translation from the hand written documents stored on microfilm. So which is correct? I've read the article on the net about Hartmans 80 but have yet to see a detailed analysis.

As information becomes available the situation can change and more accurate detail can be listed. This can be evident from Dr Priens histories of JG53 and JG77 when compared to his later work in the JFV series.

The third point I'd like to raise is that a Army in retreat generally has poor records, having destroyed/lost documentations during the retreat or have documentation filed at a later date or not at all. This is very evident for the allies in Greece (how many victories did Pattle really claim??) and the Russian retreat of 1941. The same can be said about Tunisia, Normandy and some period on the Eastern front for the Germans. For these reasons I believe not only should we be researching the claims but also everything that occurred around that time. Time, dates, location can all be recorded incorrectly, especially if the documentation is submitted well after the event. This is not a simple task as evident from Shores "Fighters over Tunisia" which is probably his weakest work in a range of excellent books. In this book the author on several occasions had a lack of detail over many actions.

Overall, I believe to give a reliability factor on known information is an interesting activity but I am warry of comments to say someone is unreliable when there is still many gaps to fill. I've watched the discussion on Rudorffers (& JG2) claims in Tunisia with interest, I hope some day that someone can piece all the actions together and put together an updated work of Shores Fighters over Tunisia.

Regards,

Craig...