French WW2 decimal score aces

[Moriii]

Originally Posted by knusel

According to this website
http://www.pierre-clostermann.com/victoires.html
the French seem so have acknowledged 33 victories (19+14sh) whereas 23 kills seem to have been acknowledged by the RAF.
He seems to have conducted a lawsuit for that. I wonder if my French is sufficient to understand all that correctly.

That's pretty much it.


Closterman filled a lawsuit against a book published, I believe, in 1991. It's not clear when he went to court because the ruling dates from 2001. A copy of the ruling is at http://www.livresdeguerre.net/forum/...hp?index=37129
(this website, active 10 years ago, is far from reliable, but the copy/paste of the ruling is probably accurate).


The ruling itself is kind of strange. It blames the authors of the book for not making the effort of interviewing Clostermann himself. The ruling also says Closterman is a very respectable person (which he certainly was), suggesting that's enough a ground to assume he is right in all he says. The ruling doesn't say the sources the authors use or the analysis they make is flawed in any way, except they should _also_ have interviewed Clostermann...


There is some Streisand effect in going to court to start with. The book is long forgotten and seems all but impossible to find (it's not even at the BNF). It's hard to believe it had a wide distribution at the time of publication. The whole things sounds a lot like personal feud between Clostermann and one of the authors or the publisher. In all cases, the lawsuit draws attention to the reliability of Closterman ace claims, pretty much the opposite effect of what the plaintif wanted...