Hooton's Luftwaffe Loss Totals - request for clarification

[Paul Thompson]

Originally Posted by 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

Hello Carl!

Your points are well made, but I think the situation is not quite so clear cut. Polemical statisticians like Ellis obscure the fact that no reliable and directly comparable figures regarding Luftwaffe strength and losses seem to have been published.

Trying to address the issue of loss distribution between fronts in 1943, I've looked at Hooton and got the following:
a) Eastern front: 3201 in combat, 2268 non-combat; 5469 total
b) Western Mediterranean: 2500 in combat, 1639 non-combat; 4139 total
c) Day Fighters over Germany from "Luftwaffe" p 188: 698 in combat, 533 non-combat; 1231 total
d) Bombers and Jabos over Britain - "Eagle in Flames" p 274: combat losses only listed, total 191 bomber and 65 Jabos; grand total 256

Adding in the unknown western day fighter, Reich night fighter and Eastern Mediterranean losses, looks like Maksim's percentage is roughly correct, maybe a little too high as far as the Eastern Front goes. What do you think?

I will be back soon with more ideas and possibly more data.