Hooton's Luftwaffe Loss Totals - request for clarification

[Paul Thompson]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

I should have thought when you're discussing a battle/campaign that losses might be the aggregate number of aircraft that the units engaged needed to replace during the period concerned — essentially anything that you can't patch up locally and return to action before the battle/campaign is over.

I agree with you, Nick, but with a caveat. Since the campaign is a part of the war as a whole, it is very significant for the outcome of the war how many aircraft are total losses and therefore leave the order of battle permanently. I suspect, although I cannot prove it, that the Luftwaffe wrote off a greater percentage of damaged aircraft than the RAF or USAAF, because of the weakness of its repair infrastructure. In consequence, Germany began losing the air war even before the superiority of the Allies in productive capacity became overwhelming.

Originally Posted by Laurent Rizzotti

The database is complete for JG and SG units, or at least as complete as the original Luftwaffe documents are. In the late 44-45 period, most of the German fighters were on the Western front, and suffered far more losses there. On the Eastern front, there were more Fw 190s SG units than Jagdgruppen.

Laurent, thank you for making that clear. I understand that most Luftwaffe fighters were in the West during this period, but that does not wholly account for the difference in losses. Both JG and SG units in the East lost aircraft at a much lower rate than those in the West, according to the database. This is somewhat surprising in view of the fact that this was a time of successful large-scale Soviet offensives. Could it be that the German units flew very few sorties and largely avoided air combat? That may be a very broad generalisation, but it is strange that the Eastern front units never reported particularly significant losses in air combat, or indeed from any other form of enemy action.

Originally Posted by Maxim1

Paul, in fact, the source for this breakdown is my own work

I have analysed all Bewegungsmeldungen that are available on Michael Holm's site and compiled several Luftwaffe loss tables.
Regards,
Maksim

Maksim, thank you for your work! So you provided these figures to Khazanov and Medved?

The lists you provided raise interesting questions. I presume you relied on Michael Holm's data for the location of Luftwaffe units. That should introduce significant errors, since Henry de Zeng and Douglas Stankey have demonstrated in their books that Holm's location data is often erroneous and incomplete. That's not to criticise you, since Hooton's data is from the same source and should suffer from exactly the same problem! There is of course also the problem of monthly data being provided in the tables, which does not account for some units losing aircraft in different theatres in the same month. Be that as it may, the data is still very interesting. I'll be back within the hour with a comparison of your monthly data to Hooton's. The data, from the same source, vary by quite a bit!