What's with USAAF losses?

[Laurent Rizzotti]

To be complete, I had forgotten that one medium bomber unit, the 12th BG, was in Eastern Mediterranean in January 1943. It is covered in MAW2 and lost two B-25 ditched while running out of gas on return from a raid on Crete on 2 January 1943. Both should be also counted in "Other causes" as operational losses.

Still the definition of operational losses could vary from one document to another and from one air force to another. Aircraft destroyed on the ground by enemy attacks were probably counted as non-operational, as they were not flying operations at the time.

It is also interesting to see that in England, fighters and bombers of 8th and 9th Air Force that crashed on take-off or during the formation phase of a raid on Europe are usually covered by accident reports, while crashes on return of operations, even without any enemy action, are not covered according to my experience.

You can also see the same kind of difference in the book "Bomber Command War Diaries": it describes all raids flown (except the minor ones, gathered together for each day/night) and gives for each the losses. These losses actually are only the losses suffered over Europe, bombers crashing in UK at the start or the return of the raid are not counted, except some especially bad nights where an added narrative will cover them. But for the other raids, you are missing 5-10% of the losses.