Hooton's Luftwaffe Loss Totals - request for clarification

[Carl Schwamberger]

I am not a expert on this subject, but offer up a couple observations that might help you find collaboration or contradiction of Hooton. I've done a bit a reading on aircraft availability/losses in specific campaigns and found the following from other historians. I offer these as suggestion for your research & not as hard facts to cite.

1. The loss rate does seem to be lower on the eastern front. It appears about half the German aircraft losses in 1943 were in the west & the Med, despite that a majority of aircraft in combat units were in the east. There are a number of technical reasons that would contribute to this, a couple have been offered in this thread. One other that is seldom directly addressed by the historians is that the US & RAF replacement air crew (pilots) were better trained than the German replacement crew from latter 1942.

2. Numbers tossed out by various historians suggest that the German pilot training, particulary fighter pilot skill fell off significantly from 1942. I've not time to search out the numbers this morning but from memory the German was accumulating 20% fewer flight hours than his USAAF/RAF counterpart in early 1942 and more than 40% fewer in mid 1944. If this is accurate it suggests a large part of why GAF loss rates are what the books claim.

3. The lower loss rate among RAF/USAAF fighter pilots suggests a higher accumulation of experience in the combat groups as the months passed.

I'd recommend taking a look a John Ellis 'Brute Force'. While I'd not start citing Ellis s 63 statisitcal tables verbatim he does provide the sources for each individual table. In this respect his book is a encyclopedia of secondary and primary sources for WWII data and worth the effort for that reason alone