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Dear Jens, according to Groehler the numbers are the fighters under various Luftflotte, so I think they were all operational, I think. His 22.6.41 figures are those normally given figures for operational a/c at the beginning of Oper. Barbarossa.
Dear Christer, some knowledge of how to use statistics scientifically correctly doesn't hurt anyone. And exact use of terms is better than those like "...more or less the whole LW - particularly the day fighter force..." without first explaning what that means (60%, 70%, 85% or 90%)
I wonder why to exclude the night fighters, they were combat a/c pure and simple, in fact they needed more resource to produce, maintain and man than a average combat plane? Was the reason to get more suitable figure? If You check my message You will see that I used purely fighter figures because in the quote I referred You wrote Bf 109s and Fw 190s. According to Groehler night fighter figure on 31.5.43 was 32 in East, 456 in West and 24 in Italy.
One reason why the Western Allies had so overwhelming, other than the industrial power, was that they shoot down clearly more German a/c than than the Soviets. If we take the LW monthly fighter lossesin 1943, because You Christer had that super-veteran theory, IMHO You seem to have more interest in fighter pilots and because La-7 (the heading of this tread) was a fighter, they were, again according to Williamson Murray's LW p. 138.
At Eastern front Jan 85, Feb 63, March 100, Apr 67, May 110, Jun 85, Jul 201, Aug 150, Sept 99, Oct 94, Nov 45
At Western front 87, 77, 140, 143, 183, 157, 335, 248, 276, 284, 281
At Mediterranean 124, 89, 140, 247, 97, 131, 246, 133, 167, 92, 54
So alone in Med. LW lost 272 fighters more than in the eastern Front in the first 5 months of '43, and many of their opponents had been veterans of Eastern front. It had been a hard and heavy fight but in the end Western Allieds had mauled the LW in Med. badly and will cripple it during the next 2 months. And of course there were also the Italians, but at Eastern front there were Romanians, Hungarians, Finns, Slovaks, Croats and the small Italian contigent, so this comparasion isn't complete, but I'm not going to went through all my material to check also the lossies of smaller Axis powers.
And of course the fact that the Germans Fought 2front war helped Western Allies as it helped SU, or what You thing would have been the effect of 1000 fighters, 150 long range recon a/c, 170 heavy fighters and ground attack planes, 528 bombers etc more at the disposal of LW at the Kursk. In fact figures should be far bigger because there would not have been losses in West and in Med. And the lesser need of night fighters had made possible more other a/c.
Juha
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