Luftwaffe Procedure Claim in Eastern Front

[Laurent Rizzotti]

This issue has been debated many times. Comparing Allied and German scores is non-sense because they flew in completly different environments.

1) German highest scorers flew 3 times more than the most active Soviet flyers, and 5 to 10 ten times more than the American/British top scorers. So those who survived should have greater scores.

2) There is no shared victories in Luftwaffe, so most victories shared between a wingman and a leader were given to the leader. So the leader score will be higher while the wingman's one will be lowere than what it may be in USAAF, RAF or VVS. But this is a minor issue on the East Front as most of the victories scored here were on monoplanes and probably only one pilot fired at them anyway (contrary to battles vs American Allied bombers).

3) Almost all of the VVS missions were tactical and ground support was the number one mission. So German pilots flying 'Frei Jagd' had all opportunities to bounce low-flying Soviet aircraft, often laden with bombs, and then escape.
The comparison that may be made can be between the Eastern Front and the Desert Front in 1941-1942. In both cases Allied airforces had comparable tasks and (most of the times) inferior fighters, and they both suffered while German aces grew huge scoreboards.

In the end, I think that the usual overclaiming percentage (30-40% is the usual ratio) should probably be applied to the German aces scores. So Hartmann probably shot down between 200-250 AC, Barkhorn and Rall around 200 and so on.

That means that in the above cases, you can probably find tens of cases of unjustified claims, but you have to search all claims before being able to give an estimate of the "real score".

I think that in most cases it will end as something like that: Hartmann 352 claims, 100 confirmed, 200 possible (claim in battles where enemy suffered loss but less than German claims), 50 in error. I think that is the most one can "prove" with existing documents.

The next possible step would be to estimate the probable score by adding all enemy losses in battle where Hartmann get involved and compare them to all German claims. So if 800 losses correspong to 1200 German claims, you can give an estimate "reality ratio" of 2/3 for each victory.