Sitzkrieg in air - both German and Allied victory?

[Laurent Rizzotti]

If you compare fighter losses with fighter claims (including enemy fighter but also bomber and reconnaissance aircraft), you will find that most of the fighter units of WW2 would be "victorious", claiming more than their own losses.

In some unit histories, to reach this, the writer had to compare claims against the number of pilot lost in combat, that is usually far lower than the number of aircraft lost.

Peter Cornwell's "Battle of France Then & Now" is excellent for covering the air battles on the French border, but the North Sea battles are out of his scope and saw a great part of the German and RAF losses, so should be included in the total to see which side won... if any did.

My bet would be to search numbers in the old book "Fledgling Eagles: the Complete Account of Air Operations During the Phoney War and Norwegian Campaign, 1940", by Christopher Shores, with John Foreman, Christian-Jacques Ehrengardt, Heinrich Weiss and Bjorn Olsen.

Cornwell's has more details, especially on crew losses and distinction between damaged/destroyed aircraft, but it seems to me that most if not all combat losses of the period were already known to Shores and co at the time.

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by Laurent Rizzotti

If you compare fighter losses with fighter claims (including enemy fighter but also bomber and reconnaissance aircraft), you will find that most of the fighter units of WW2 would be "victorious", claiming more than their own losses.

Laurent is right, defending fighters are not really intended to shoot down attacking fighters but to eliminate the threat from bombers and reconnaissance. They should only be engaging enemy fighters to get through to their "real" target. The attackers may well have a higher "fighter vs. fighter" score but still lose the larger battle.

[John Beaman]

Have you looked at Dr. Prien's series? Along with The Battle of France, Now and Then, as referenced by Nick, these two sources should be reasonable definitive.