[Christer Bergström]

” I wonder why to exclude the night fighters”

I never did. All I said was that the air war at night should be placed in a special category. As I said: “Before I go any further, I will make one reservation. Regarding the air war at night, the situation is the opposite to that in daytime: At night time, it is absolutely clear that the Western Allies (or more precisely, the RAF Bomber Command) encountered a level of opposition in the air which the Soviets were lucky to be saved from. I would say that the RAF Bomber Command and the Soviet Air Force were those two Allied air forces which faced the strongest opposition from the Luftwaffe.”

”One reason why the Western Allies had so overwhelming, other than the industrial power, was that they shoot down clearly more German a/c”

Again, I never denied that. This was precisely due to:

a) The bad qualitative shape of the Soviet AF (as compared to the Luftwaffe) in the first period of the war which allowed the core of Luftwaffe experts to accumulate such a tremendous experience, and
b) The mounting Western Allied numerical superiority

Now how could this Allied numerical superiority in the air be achieved? There are several reasons:

a) Between June 1940 and June 1944, the UK and USA had no frontline on the ground to cover (this regarding Western Europe), and placed the main emphasis in the West on building up a large force of aircraft, which was tasked to soften up the grounds for the invasion toward the end of the war.

b) The USSR had lost some of its most important industrial areas and mine regions, together with millions of manpower, in the large areas of the USSR which the Germans occupied in 1941. The Western Allies never were beset by anything similar.

c) In 1941 - 1942, between two-third and 75 % of the whole Luftwaffe was actively seeking to extinguish the Soviet Air Force inside the Soviet Union itself, which of course severely hampered all Soviet efforts to re-build its battered air force. Meanwhile, the RAF was - comparatively speaking - left alone on the British isles, and faced only two Jagdgeschwader which remained largely defensive. And regarding the Americans - well. . .

d) Between 1941 and 1945, the Western Allies were able to build up the air forces on the British isles without any interference from the Luftwaffe; they were able to cancel their air offensive whenever they found the need to do so in order to conserve their forces (like the Americans did on some occasions after they had sustained too heavy losses at the hands of the Jagdwaffe). In other words, they were never “receiving” - always “giving”. Their Soviet allies never enjoyed this luxury - they had to build up their air force in the midst of enemy fire. Thus the Soviets had no chance to reach the same enormous numerical superiority visavis their enemy as the Western Allies maintained from early 1944.

“alone in Med. LW lost 272 fighters more than in the eastern Front in the first 5 months of '43”

That of course has several reasons, and the most important the reasons were:

a) The mounting Western Allied numerical superiority (which mid-1943 reached a point at Tunisia/Sicily which the Soviets were unable to mount at any important combat zone - again because the Germans gave the Eastern Front a way higher priority than the Mediterranean).

b) Nearly 50 % of all German combat aircraft in the Mediterranean area in May 1943 were fighters, while only 23 % of all combat German aircraft in the East were fighters by the same time. Thus, when the Western Allies with their huge numerical superiority came across a German aircraft in the Med, there was a greater probability that it would be a fighter. When the Soviets came across a German aircraft over Kuban, there was a big probability that it would be a non-fighter - and with a numerical superiority.

“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.”

As a matter of fact, those Eastern Front super veterans gave the Western Allies a bloody nose in Tunisia. Many of them were able to attain the same amount of successes against the RAF and the USAAF over Tunisia as they previously had done in the East. Have you studied the victory-to-loss ratio for the German fighters over Tunisia during the early part of the campaign (before fuel shortage and and overwhelming Allied numerical superiority wore them down)?

Ernst-Wilhelm Reinert had carried out around 500 combat sorties and achieved 103 victories on the Eastern Front in 1941-1942 when he was shifted to Tunisia. Between January 1943 and early May 1943, he was credited with fifty victories against the USAAF and the RAF - quite comparable to the success rate achieved by other top aces on the Eastern Front at that time, and also comparable to the rate of successes that he had achieved against inferior equipped Soviets. Heinz Bär arrived from the Eastern Front to North Africa in October 1942 and shot down twenty RAF and USAAF fighters in two months - about the same rate of successes that he had scored previously on the Eastern Front.

But of course German super veterans were killed in Tunisia; they were killed everywhere.

See my article: http://www.bergstrombooks.elknet.pl/bc-rs/text.html

“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.”

Of course, but I think you missed my point, which was that if the Luftwaffe forces in the East and in the West had entirely swapped places at any given time from mid-1941 and onward, it would have been easier for the Soviets and more difficult for the Western Allies. The Luftwaffe was always stronger on the Eastern Front than on the Western Front, if we pay attention to both quantity and quality. (Not either quantity or quality, but the quota between quantity and quality.)

We have all (I believe) heard the discussion on the victories attained by the German fighter pilots in the East in 1941 were comparatively “easy” due to the low quality of Soviet pilot training standards. Some authors have denied that, but I think it is an irrefutable fact.

At the same time, I think it is an irrefutable fact that due to exactly the same factors, the victories attained by the Western Allied fighter pilots in the in 1944 also were comparatively “easy” due to the low quality of German pilot training standards. In 1944, German rookies who barely knew how to fly were shot down to the hundreds when they were caught in a position of altitude and speed inferiority by numerically superior Western Allied fighter pilots. Those Western Allied pilots were up to far greater difficulties when they were unfortunate to encounter such super veterans as Theodor Weissenberger, Emil Lang or Alfred Grislawski - but even those super veterans had to face a huge numerical superiority, and they were hampered through the disastrously low quality of the rookies who were assigned as their wingmen and Rottenflieger.

I am surprised that some people with considerable knowledge on the Luftwaffe is unable to see the obvious fact that the Luftwaffe was more powerful in the East than in the West, and that the Western Allies thus had an “easier” task than their Soviet allies had. With exception of the war at night, which differed radically from the war in daylight and thus is a completely different story - don’t you agree?

Again: In daylight from June 1941, the Western Allies were lucky that they were saved from facing the tremendous resistance in the air which the Soviets had to endure all the time.

I have to emphasise again that the decisive factor to the indeed very heavy German air combat losses in the West in 1943 - 1944 were the unsurpassed and steadily mounting numerical superiority which the Western Allies enjoyed. The situation in the West would have been completely different if the Western Allies would have had to settle with a force no bigger than the number of Soviet aircraft in first-line service - against a Luftwaffe force with the same power as the Luftwaffe force in the East.

All best,

Christer Bergström