WW2TV Horvath lecture/presentation

[keith A]

Exactly Nick. On the point of Battle of Britain claims. In the Battle of Britain the RAF had a target rich environment and fighter pilots being fighter pilots shot at everything. Consequently two, three, four, five pilots believed they were solely responsible for an enemy aircraft going down. It may have been so but the others also saw the same picture. Luftwaffe pilots probably did the same.The RAF did overclaim. I believe the stats are about 1:3. I haven't seen the Luftwaffe claims in this period but from memory they were extremely high, leading to extravagant claims by Goering (much like his claims in WW1). In 1941 when the RAF was doing pretty much all the daytime offensive work over the Channel, and consequently were losing escort fighters, rather than bombers, in large numbers it is true that in the main certain squadrons in the Kenley and Tangmere Wings were massively overclaiming. As I stated earlier in this discussion I think the RAF got more accurate as the war went on. Although I am not Vince's main opponent in our other forum (I believe he thought/thinks me anti-German and when I gave him evidence that this was not so he didn't even acknowledge my responses, even when I gave evidence) but that's another discussion I think he believes that correcting perceptions of aces is the same as insulting their memory. I hope I am not perceived as denigrating fellows who flew and fought when my most frightening flying experience was in 1987 aboard an Afghan Airlines flight, hitting turbulence at night over Moscow. Bishop was a popular bloke who managed to find a way to work the system, Finucane (and I suspect Bader and Caldwell and many others) did the same in WW2. The Americans used the "Race of Aces" to massively inflate both "ace" tallies and enemy casualties. All we are trying to do is give perspective. 352 kills is a ridiculous number, 301, 275, 250 it's all just numbers and so massively different from those claimed by their opponents that unless you believe in a German gene or a superiority in FIGHTER engineering (let's face it their bombers were poor, their transport aircraft bizarre) that is at least ten times better than the opponent your argument falls apart. Especially as by the latter end of the war Luftwaffe pilots were not being trained over a long period before being committed to battle. Nuff said (by me).