[rof120]

Williamson Murray's book "Luftwaffe etc." is most interesting and very useful even though most readers who are writers too did not understand what he was talking about (Murray did) and foolishly took his "Losses as Percentage of Initial Strength" (last column of tables III - French Campaign - and IX - Battle of Britain -) as the loss percentage in combat, which is seriously wrong because the actually engaged force was much less numerous than the "initial force". For example the latter was 1,369 for Me 109s on 4 May 1940 but "only" 1,016 were actually deployed. This means that no less than 353 Messerschmitt 109 fighters existed but were NOT engaged in combat (more than 1/3 of the engaged force - possibly Me 109 B, C or Ds...). The late Patrick Facon, historian with the historical dept. of the Armée de l'Air, is one of those who didn't understand and hence drew wrong conclusions "proving" how ineffective French fighters were. Facon is a highly-respected historian (not by myself) and his works are often quoted… Big sigh…

Apart from this W. Murray indicates that 169 Me 109s were lost in combat (table III). In table V we can see that the "Number of fighter pilot casualties" was… 169 too. This can be true - such a coincidence is possible when publishing so many figures and statistics. Nevertheless it would mean that almost every single Me 109 destroyed in combat had a killed pilot too. Accidents caused some casualties but in very many cases the pilots survived accidents on take-off or landing, in particular if caused by the narrow undercarriage, and some other accidents too (this seems to have changed later in the war because green German pilots were by far not as good as 1940, but we are discussing only 1940 here).

As I explained in previous posts I don't believe that Me 109 losses IN COMBAT (including losses to AA and air-gunners) were as low as Murray's 169 (some error or misunderstanding probably occurred) and I believe that they were much higher than that, something like approximately 420-430 (plus losses to other causes than air combat - taking "Der Spiegel's" total figure of 535 as a basis). This makes 169 pilot casualties much more credible for, as far as I know, approximately one fighter pilot died for every three destroyed fighters (roughly 1/3). But unfortunately I don't know if we can trust this figure of 169 killed. Perhaps someone has more precise information, possibly from Prien's JFV volume 3.