[Juha]

Hello
not being Hartmann specialist I have no firm opinion of his claim accuracy, only that “Blond knight” would have been most appropriate material for Göbbels‘ propaganda machine. But more generally.

1) not all overclaimed, vast majority of pilots who claimed victories overclaimed but not all. And the extent of overclaiming varied greatly, even inside units. IMHO vast majority of overclaiming was made in good faith in the heat of high tempo very dangerous actions but on the other hand some had more realistic view of the effect of their actions than others. Just claiming that everybody overclaim we simply closed our eyes from realities of human nature and in fact advance boastfulness and do disservice to those who were careful in their claims and so were often more forgotten than some of their more boastful comrades. But I agree that we must be careful in our conclusions because it is very difficult to dig out the truth in many cases.

2) On the other hand. pilots being humans, IMHO there is no doubt that some because of glory seeking/career advancement/competition between pilots might well sometimes “forgot” to mention in their combat report that the plane they claimed was already clearly very badly damaged. A few even went to fraud for ex. the "Expertenschwarm" of 4./JG 27. The risk of being exposed was not very great and the official punishment not necessary harsh. We don’t know for sure why Sawallisch got killed in a/c accident shortly after their fraud was exposed but Bendert, besides being sent to train new pilots, which he might or might not got as a punishment, got his Ritterkreutz for his troubles. Harsh, isn’t it. But that goes to at least most of AFs, in all successes bought medal, career advancements, glory etc not only to the pilot but also to his unit and so also to its CO. So if the CO begun suspect that one of his “stars” was in fact overclaiming badly he might well try to solve the problem inside his unit and not report his suspicions to upper echelons.

3) Then there was the propaganda aspect. I have always been rather sceptical for “Bully” Lang’s world record on kills per day because it just happened to happen just before the day when one of the most humiliating defeat of WM happened and just in right place, namely in Kiev which Soviets retook/liberated almost without fight after Vatutin had completely outfoxed Mannstein. What a coincident, Göbbels could put on main pages the headline that a glorious LW pilot single handled shot down 18 “Red…..” planes and put somewhere else a small news that “by a brilliant tactical manoeuvre WM succeeded to disengage from Kiev”. I don’t doubt that Lang shot down a number of Soviet planes on that day but 18, timing is a bit too good for my liking. So I wasn’t surprised when Caldwell wrote in his JG 26 WD Vol 2 that while an excellent Kommandeur (of II/JG 26) he also had tendency to overclaim. So I’m not claiming that Lang was frauding his claims IMHO he was simply overclaiming but that when his 18 claims on 3 Nov 43 were accepted there might well being some propagandist element in it.

Juha