Percentage of Verifiable Victories of Various Aces –Updates & Recommendations

nice work,,,a thought, on claimin.say a german pilot adolf galland his in a dogfight,with a spitfire,and as 56 planes to his credit,so far""""",,hes over france and on his own,he shoots at the spitfire,the spitfire then statrs,to smoke,galland then runs out of ammo or his guns jam and his fuels low,galland follows the spitfire, down only to discover, the spit fly on course,to great britain,galland returns home and says he shot at a spitfire but it will get home,NOW the spitfire pilot althrogh,damaged,flys home,but thers a a small fire,.oil.he then decides to land , on the coastline or some fields,wheels down if poss,but cant lower them, then decides to crash land his plane,ok then steps out,, his plane his damaged right,hes 10 miles from his base,isnt galland ,be able to claim it as a shoot down,,there must be hundreds of pilots on all sides that have done this,,a brill thought,
gary

[Kapper]

Hi all,

I have a few points I would like to raise on this issue.

Firstly Dora9forever has raised a very good point here. To support this issue I'm referring to Caldwells works JG26 War Diary's. As I work away from home, I don't have these books with me so I'm working from some of my notes and memory, but those of you who have the book can check this out.

Where the author was able to access the Pilots logbooks he has been able to refer to all the pilots actions. Pilots such as Peter Crump, Waldemar Radenar, Wilhelm Mayer, and Heinrich Schild had a high percentage of claims not submitted or not confirmed early in thier careers (over 50%). I've got Mayer's 6th claim as his 1st confirmed victory and Shild's 7th claim as his 1st confirmed victory.

As with the allies the Luftwaffe had to go through a debriefing process before the submission of claims. In Caldwells book he has referred to instances where a junior pilot complained about the officer responsible for sorting claims within the unit had rejected his claim, instead awarding the claim to a more senior pilot and submitting the claim for confirmation in that senior pilots name. Therefore, a number of claims were never submitted into the claims process by the unit and unless you have the pilots logbooks, you do not know they exist. From memory, he detailed at least one instance where he varified the junior pilots claims.

The author also refers to instance where claims were not forwarded by the unit due to a lack of witnesses. The author mentioned at least one instance where the pilot noted in his logbook a claim that was not even submitted to the unit debriefing (claims?) officer for lack of witnesses, but from allied sources he was able to proove that the victory happened.

Therefore, unless you have a copy of the pilots logbooks you do not get a full appreciation of all his claims. It appears that within units they can be very sceptical of junior pilots claims, however once they proove themselves and become a more senior pilot, they tend to take them more at their word. This results in fewer claims not being submitted or not confirmed late in the careers of senior pilots and their claims becoming less reliable than earlier in thier careers.

On a second point I am warry of saying someone is not a reliable claimer. One of the first books I ever read as a young man (soory I can no longer remember the name of the book), quoted a statement from a senior RAF offficer about the validity of Marsielles claims. Now thanks to the excellent work of Shores in his book "Fighters over the Desert" and good work by other historians, Marsielles is now considered a reliable claimer. The point is not to make accusations untill fully reseached. For instances when your looking at Erich Hartmann, you can refer to the list in Tollivers book and the Tony Woods list for a copy of his claims list. You will notice that a fair amount of the information in these two Lists are different. Tolliver admits that he did not have all of Hartmanns logbooks and Tony Woods lists are known to have mistakes with translation from the hand written documents stored on microfilm. So which is correct? I've read the article on the net about Hartmans 80 but have yet to see a detailed analysis.

As information becomes available the situation can change and more accurate detail can be listed. This can be evident from Dr Priens histories of JG53 and JG77 when compared to his later work in the JFV series.

The third point I'd like to raise is that a Army in retreat generally has poor records, having destroyed/lost documentations during the retreat or have documentation filed at a later date or not at all. This is very evident for the allies in Greece (how many victories did Pattle really claim??) and the Russian retreat of 1941. The same can be said about Tunisia, Normandy and some period on the Eastern front for the Germans. For these reasons I believe not only should we be researching the claims but also everything that occurred around that time. Time, dates, location can all be recorded incorrectly, especially if the documentation is submitted well after the event. This is not a simple task as evident from Shores "Fighters over Tunisia" which is probably his weakest work in a range of excellent books. In this book the author on several occasions had a lack of detail over many actions.

Overall, I believe to give a reliability factor on known information is an interesting activity but I am warry of comments to say someone is unreliable when there is still many gaps to fill. I've watched the discussion on Rudorffers (& JG2) claims in Tunisia with interest, I hope some day that someone can piece all the actions together and put together an updated work of Shores Fighters over Tunisia.

Regards,

Craig...

[alessandro bray]

Hi Craig,

you have emphasized good and, at least for me, shared point of view.
In Tony Wood’s and Prien’s lists we find only a small number of n.b. but for some pilots whose logbooks are preserved, the number of unconfirmed victories is certainly higher; in the case of Radener and W.Meyer for examples probably the real number of enemy aircraft downed is higher than that officially credited to them and certainly the knowlegde of all the pilot’s claims (confirmed and not) can give a better understanding of his status.
I’m searching only to have an idea of how losses sustained from one airforce tally with claims of another. My is not a sentence on the pilot’s attitude to be reliable or not.
Already in other topics we have discussed all the elements of dogfighting that can lead a pilot to think in good faith to have downed an enemy aircraft and then in the case of Hartmann for example should be more prudence before say he is unreliable.
Even in a limited theater of war as Malta in 1942, with small number of units, with only one main type of fighter as opposition (Hurricane till mid 1942 and then Spitfire) is difficult to reach univocal conclusions on claims/real losses, so I can imagine is very difficult for the Russian front...


I have attached a list of Michalski claims with personal notes.

[marsyao]

of course, there were cases of under report of air victories, but we have to admit that those "underclaimes" were always far outweighted by overclaims, and in the wartime, pilots from every single one country overclaimed

[Kapper]

Alessandro, Marsayao

Sorry if I was misunderstood. I was not trying to create an argument about underclaiming or overclaiming. At the end of the day when the number of claims outway the number of losses, then over claiming or optimistic claims must have occurred.

I was simply trying to highlight the issue that if you are going to look at a pilots reliability you should look at all the facts. To say that a pilot is unreliable because you can only verify a small proportion of claims can be a wrong statement when little information is available. Personally, I would exercise caution in calling a pilot unreliable until the claims are fully analysed, which is difficult for some campaigns due to lack of information and conflicting data.

As I pointed out in my previous post, things can change as more information becomes available, suddenly a pilot considered unreliable could be considered reliable as with my reference to Marsielle.

Regards,

Craig...

[thenelm]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, did guys over/under claim? Obviously. Good Lord, these guys, from all countries, were fighting a battle in an environment where if you actually watched your 'claim' all the way into the ground, you'd more than likely end up dead yourself. Can we ascribe actual kills to specific individuals claims, sure, for some guys, assuming we know specifically who they were fighting against, and in probably more often than not these types of combat were small unit vs small unit. On the other hand we're also assuming specifically that these guys, from all sides, always knew in this ever changing environment, exactly where they were over the area they were flying over - a pretty bizarre assumption in an active 3-dimensional combat environment, especially when over anything but your home country, even with maps - again something you might not want to be spending lots of time referring to with enemy opponents all around? Can we make intelligent guesses/assumptions as to who may have shot down who? Again sure. But the only real way to accurately check true results is through claims versus losses. But trying to ascertain individual results, i.e. who got who, will always have limitations with some of the huge air battles that occurred in any theater of the war. Even gun camera films seems to seldom lead to a 100% identification of one's opponent other than aircraft type. I could go on (and on), but it just seems to me that a lot of this stuff, while useful to a point, doesn't result in any where near an accurate accounting. And, again something I've said before, trying to ascertain or ascribe motive for 'overclaiming' to guys long dead, from all sides, is kind of an exercise in futility. The attempt is nice, but the result - eh. Please note that I'm not saying all this as attempt to justify just the LW claims. Its a known fact that the RAF overclaimed by something like 3 to 1 in the BoB, but officialdom allowed those claims to stand as a matter of morale for the UK. There is also the Flying Tigers who claimed some 300 victories over the JAAF versus about 100 documented losses. The Japanese? Well, many of the claims from some of their guys just don't add up, but that's a whole field that will always be suspect do to lack of records, or maybe even more likely the language/translation barrier. These are just a couple of the more notable non-LW situations. Probably wouldn't take too long to find other examples.

[Rob Romero]

James A Pratt III thanks for your postitive contribution!

Thenelm; there is A LOT of activity and number of researchers in this area you are unaware of (MY LIPS ARE SEALED). In the case of some pilots/units e.g Manfred von Richthofen's Jasta 11 there has has been some very solid research in which it has been possible to establish the victors to a high (though never of course 100%) degree of certainty; moreover in a surprisingly high percentage of combats throughout the history of aerial warfare it is has been possible to isolate likely victors by time and place. Even in the large scale brawls such as those against the massed 8th AF bombing raids, it has still been possible to cull out individual claimants & victims and even where this is not possible, one can garner a sense of reliabity by comparing overall claims to loss by cause (fighter vs. flak etc.). Morever reliablity & unreliability (especially over a period of time) is indicative if not determinative in an absolute sense.
Lets hope this thread can be kept alive.

Thanks,
Rob Romero

[Sylvester Stadler]

This essay lists Manfred von Richthofen as claiming a total of 80 kills of which 74 are allegedly confirmed. While almost every book which is about or mentions von Richthofen and his 80 kills, I have one book in my possession which is Von Richthofen and the "Flying Circus" by H.J. Nowarra and Kimbrough S. Brown, published by Harborough Publications, 1959, which states that Manfred had a total of 84 claims of which 80 were confirmed by the Luftstreitkräfte. Generally, the authors who examined the 80 confirmed claims never considered the other four unconfirmed claims as to their ultimate fate or possible victim.