Luftwaffe Aces KIA in Normandy in 1944

[Christer Bergström]

Are you telling us that the mere fact that an Allied pilot claimed that he shot down a German fighter at Domfront, is enough to convince you that the German version that Wurmheller collided with his wingman at Alencon is wrong? And you don’t mind that the place of Wurmheller’s demise actually is 60 km from the place where that Allied pilot said that he had shot down a German plane? Alencon is a major town in the area, and Domfront is a small townlet 60 km away, but you still think that that Allied pilot used Domfront as a reference, despite the fact that he actually was flying near Alencon? Or maybe the easiest thing is to just assume that there were many things wrong with the German report? However, although we have been told several times on this board that the German reports are incomplete etc, you find it totally excluded that even if Fleming actually shot down a German plane (which is far from certain), it couldn’t have been another German plane than Wurmheller’s? Aren’t you guys just trying to press reality into your square form? I’d advice a little more caution. A historian would never accept such weak “circumstantial evicence”.

I could give you lots and lots of similar cases where a bit of “positive thinking” creates victors. Maybe there even was a Japanese pilot who claimed a victory somewhere on 6 August 1945, the day when the US top ace Dick Bong was killed? What? Killed in an accident near Burbank, California? But the Japanese pilot claimed that. . .

I wonder why none of the German pilots who flew on the Eastern Front for real, and not just read about it in books 60 years afterward, don’t agree with Franek in the notion that “Eastern Front was quite a comfortable place for fighters”. Maybe they never asked him?

I wonder how “comfortable” Karl-Heinz Weber thought it was to get shot down in air combat with Soviet aircraft on 3 September 1942?

Regarding the notion of Soviet numerical superiority in the air, it is true that the Soviets often held a certain numerical superiority in the air, but it never reached such “biblical” proportions on a major battle scene as the Allied numerical superiority over Normandy. Actually, the Luftwaffe often managed to attain a numerical superiority on vital sectors on the Eastern Front until as late as in 1945. In the area where Weber was shot down, and by the same time, the Germans recorded a total of 583 German and 698 Soviet air sorties each day. It would have been even worse to the Germans if the Soviets had been able to mount the 8:1 numerical superiority which the Allied airmen were fortunate to enjoy on average at Normandy. Imagine not 698, but 4,700 Soviet aircraft sorties encountering those 583 German sorties each day. That of course would have increased the German losses. Since it is more dangerous when there are 4,700 enemy aircraft around (the “Normandy proportion”) than when there are 698 enemy aircraft around, of course it was much more dangerous to fly over Normandy than on the Eastern Front. But to say that the Eastern Front was “a quite a comfortable place” is just not in line with reality. I wouldn’t even say that Normandy was a quite a comfortable place for Allied fighter pilots - even though they flew fighters which were almost as superior to the German aircraft as the Bf 109 F-2 was superior to the old I-16 Mark 24, and even though they had an average flight training consisting of 225 flight hours on operational aircraft against a mass of German rookies with only a dozen flight hours or so, and even though the Allies enjoyed a numerical superiority of 8:1 on average. Even a cursory look at the loss figures - an average of around two Allied aircraft were shot down in France in June 1944 for every German aircraft that they managed to destroy - shows that not even under those circumstances was it “a quite a comfortable place”.

This board is a quite a comfortable place. Anyone who suggests that war is a quite comfortable place maybe should ask someone who has been in a war.