Fighter victories 1940 – A few French figures

[rof120]

Originally Posted by jonny956

Interesting stuff, although a lot of supposition 1 on your part, which is not surprising given the lack of hard evidence to quantify scores. However - and please accept this as constructive criticism 2 - your writing does not 'flow' and is difficult to follow 3. You also make additions and amendments which complicate matters even further 4. If I may suggest, proof reading is key, prior to submission.5
Many thanks for taking the trouble to do this. I realise how much work is involved.
Kind rgds
Jonny

Many thanks to you for this criticism, which is constructive indeed. I am always grateful for reactions and comments so I'm not upset at all. Here are my own comments and reactions. I added big red numbers to the different topics:

1. "A lot of supposition" - here I can't quite follow you. Could you be more specific? Certainly I made some suppositions, which is virtually inevitable in such matters, but was it sooo much? The explanation for the presence of suppositions is most probably that I am working, so to speak, at the very cutting edge of the history of aerial WW II - it's partly "exploration", discovery. Some points might look like suppositions but actually are real, for example the remark according to which the officially known (or evaluated) loss figures - of all air forces - are in fact bottom figures, minima because the repair organisation in the rear, or the industry, discovered new, lethal damage on or inside the damaged aircraft. Likewise, some AC needed a new wing (left or right, or both) or a new engine or a new landing gear etc. All this together on dozens of individual AC needed production of corresponding wings, engines etc. by the aero-industry, thus lowering the quantity of new AC which could be delivered to the air forces' fighting units.

Well, any examples?

2. I do believe you and I accept this remark. The explanation is most probably that English is far from being my mother tongue. Without being all too modest I suspect that my command of this language is about as good as possible at all for a non-native speaker (or writer). I have massive evidence for this but this would be clearly off topic and upset Super Moderator Nick Beale. So I fear I can hardly become better here, also because I have only a very limited amount of time at my disposal to deal with this matter, which I consider very important. Additions and amendements have about the same causes.

3. I noticed that people often express themselves differently in different countries and languages, and often it's surprising to the non-native reader. In some serious English books on WW II I have sometimes to read the same sentence 2-3 times because its construction is so strange. It has partly to do with the way they think and how their school education was and influenced them.

Once, in Germany, I read extremely detailed technical instructions for the assembly of very heavy (high-power) turbogenerators weighing several hundred (metric) tons in new power plants so it was very important that the work was done with great precision. On a particular point there were two pages of instructions and the whole ended with this (at the bottom of page 2 of 2): "IMPORTANT: before you start any work on this you must do xxx yyy."
I was flabbergasted for I would have put this paragraph at the very beginning, making it the first lines of the whole text (first page, recto).

4. Certainly all I wrote is far from being 100 % perfect. But what author(s) is (are) perfect, hmmm? Of course you can avoid this problem if you avoid writing on the most difficult and tricky points but these are precisely the most important and interesting ones, like for example "How many E/A did French fighters really shoot down in May-June 1940?". This has been debated for 80 years by now and I don't know whether I'll succeed in giving a definitive reply (which certainly will be an approximation in any case, like 600-700 or 800-850 etc.). Very exact figures like 731 or 827 are just illusions, such precision is not possible. For the moment I consider 830 a good educated guess.

5. Proof-reading? Oh yes, of course. Want some evidence? How many typing errors did you find in my long, numerous posts? Perfect writing is not made easier by the fact that the system here puts unnecessary capital letters at the beginning of many words, the most frequent one being "Don't". See? I wrote don't but I was corrected and I got Don't. This is certainly the result of some différences (I wrote differences) between a normal English keyboard and mine, wich is not English although it starts with QWERT.

Well, thanks again. I think your input is going to be useful in any case.