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I am surprised the luftwaffe's pilots should not be beaten so badly prior to D-days.
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Why? At this stage, the quality of the Luftwaffe was being worn down to a mere shadow of what it had once been.
In March 1944, the German Luftflotte Reich performed 3,672 combat sorties and lost 349 fighters. That equals a loss ratio of 9.4 %. (Prien, “JG 1/11”, p. 821)
These 3,672 combat sorties were flown against approximately 18,000 sorties by US 8th Air Force (including 8,773 heavy bomber missions; I don’t have totals for fighter escort missions, but usually by this time there were more escort fighters than heavy bombers on each mission), plus several thousand sorties over Germany and the Netherlands by the 15th AF and the RAF.
Even if the Americans lost more aircraft than the number of Luftwaffe aircraft they were able to shoot down, the sheer numbers made the US losses have a less serious impact. Because of the large numbers of aircraft deployed on each mission by the Americans, the loss ratio in 8th AF heavy bombers was 3.3 % in March 1944, and in the US fighter units it was even lower. Such a loss ratio can be sustained by any air force without having any negative effect on the quality of the crews.
Luftwaffe fighter pilot losses in March 1944 alone reached nearly 22 % of pilots present on 29 February 1944. In February 1944, nearly 18 % of the pilots present on 31 January 1944 had been lost. The losses surpassed the replacements, so rookies had to leave their pilot training schools before their training was completed and were sent into action - against numerically superior Allied air forces. What you see when you read about 8 April 1944 is the effect of all of this.
BTW - read 4 FG's story here - the book is online:
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnrlove...ed/frames.html