7 Feb 10 -Overclaimers v Reliable Claimers List

[Rob Romero]

Full marks for the most spectacular misunderstanding of my previous post . . . . you dived in and attacked the specifics and ignored the real point of the message. . . Preddy was not clairvoyant, of course he claimed 6.

I’m sorry if my response came off as insulting, but my point was that a pilot SHOULD NOT claim a plane as shot down unless they were CERTAIN they had. For instance if the pilot bailed out, the target exploded, there was a catastrophic component failure (i.e., wing or tail shot off) or the plane was SEEN to have hit the ground. I suppose there were instances where a pilot believed that a plane they hit HAD TO have been shot down when it had not, but these would have been comparatively rare, like when some of a bomber’s crew bailed out but the pilot stayed behind in control, or when a burning fighter spun into overcast only to have the flames snuffed out due to the dive (i.e., Robert Johnson), but the fact remains that some pilots were MUCH more accurate in their assesments than others. This was important not only for records, accolades and promotions, but for battle damage assessment by commanders. And if this issue were so unimportant, why would the effort be spent to develop gun camera film. Yes, there were secondary benefits such as the identification of new enemy aircraft types, but the primary motivation was BDA and verification.

poor logic, gratuitous insults, and (willful?) misuse of simple English . . . might be expected from non-English speakers in an English-only SIG, but most of this stuff seems to be coming from New York City!!!

Well that’s a first for me Don, I’ve never been insulted by an author before, especially one I’ve bought books from. Ouch (!) and I’m a teacher; my only excuse is that I teach math! No wonder we’re ranked last in the developed world.
Though I try to make my responses coherent and grammatical, I refuse to be obsessive about it. Well, maybe I should use spell check!

Hasn't this nonsense gone on long enough to delete this thread?

I don’t know but, there seems to be a decent amount of interest in this thread which revolves around a LEGITIMATE issue. Quite a few have read it and there have been quite a few responses.

[Nikita Egorov]

What should we do with the registered losses but absent claims that should correspond them?-))

I understand Rob in his wish to simplify the problem by tighting each ace to the certain percentage. It would be very nice if there were no misidentifications, duplicated kills, wrong timing, misprints, "neck itching", losses balancing and many other things that consitute a real headache of any researcher.
In this case I suggest that we should, while stating something serious, back it with references to first hand documents that everybody could cross check this in the archive and confirm that the particular case at issue was researched in full scope.

John, in my opinion every plane that was excluded of the unit's inventory list (sent to repair facilities, factory), due damage received in air combat and could not be repaired by unit's repair team should be counted as a justified kill to the enemy pilot responsible for bringing it down. There are many such cases on the Eastern front, and if we reject this we deprive German aces of some of their confirmed victories...