Luftwaffe claims on RL5/1446-1462

[Andrey Kuznetsov]

Hello,

according to the content of several threads on our forum, it is clear that the forum members don't use RL5/1446-1462 available online now.

Tony Wood for his well known list of claims used the filmed copies of these documents, partly poorly readable, so a certain amount of error was inevitable.
Jochen Prien and his co-authors of Jagdfliegerverbände volumes corrected some of Wood's errors, but they themselves made even more mistakes, some of which can only be explained by the difficulty of processing a huge amount of info. At least this is correct for the part I checked in detail - some months of 1943 in the Luftflotte 4 sector. Apparently, the main source of their сlaims lists were also microfilms of a partly poor quality.

I don't have the volumes "Luftwaffe Aces – Biographies and Victory Claims" by Johannes Mathews and John Foreman. From communicating with Johannes on our forum I have become convinced of his thoroughness and therefore think that these volumes are the best published source on the topic. But according to some his posts, he also used the filmed copies, with the ensuing consequences. I hope Johannes will correct me if I am wrong in this case.

BA MA copies are as good as possible. Thanks to this, it is possible to read even most of the records for April 1943, one of the months with the worst readability of the original. In some cases, reducing the brightness of the image helps. Some of these records used to appear in published works as "illegible".
In some cases "Abschussübersichten" helps to clarify the time of claims, as the readability of these documents is much better. These "Abschussübersichten" are also among the RL5 interval in question.

Availability of these documents online is a mini revolution.

A curious example. A few years ago Boris Ciglić and I discussed whether Uffz Hans Reiff (8./JG3) could confuse the Boston (as his claim on 20.4.43 near Gelendzhik appeared in published sources) with Che-2 (MDR-6) flying boat that he actually shot down. Now it turned out that he claimed GST Flugboot really, i.e. flying boat, although he was mistaken in the model.

Best regards,
Andrey