The confirmation of air victories of top Allied aces by LW sources?

[Paul Thompson]

Originally Posted by Juha

Soviet claims accuracy, depended how one defines "much more", time frame (RAF claims in later part of 1941 and early part of 1942 were badly inflated but then RAF began to tighten up its claim procedures), operational area (USAAF fighter claims seemed to be more accurate in ETO than in MTO or in SWPacific.

In theory Eastern Front claims are more easy to check because there formations were usually much smaller.

In fact several British aces flew more operational sorties/sotalentoja than any of the Finnish aces or Kozhedub.

Juha

Hello Juha,

A case can be made that Soviet claims should be much less acurrate than those of the RAF and USAAF. First of all, gun cameras were very rare in the VVS, even at the end of the war. Second, many Soviet claims were made during large combined-arms operations, where the situation was even more confused than during the Battle of Britain and high overclaiming therefore very likely. Another important factor is the geographical extent of the battlefields, more similar to the Pacific than to Western Europe, which made verification difficult.

The formations may have been smaller on the Eastern Front, but very few of them are as well documented as the ones which flew in the Arctic, you might not quite appreciate this as the beneficiary of so much good Finnish research

A few Soviet aces, including Gulaev, have very high ratios of victories to missions flown, which may be a sign of overclaiming. However, I think this and much of the above discussion is not particularly significant. Whether or not some pilots overclaimed or not matters little for the course of the air war, as has often been mentioned on this forum. The more interesting and substantive discussion would focus on why certain air forces were more effective than others and what effect this had on the war as a whole. To give a specific and highly relevant example, the RAF exerted an influence on the Luftwaffe's resource distribution in 1941 which was far in excess of what any discussion of aces would suggest.

Regards,

Paul