US Strategic Bombing Survey No59 - a questionable statement about 1-seat fighters production

[lritger]

Originally Posted by edwest2

Lynn,

I have been doing research for a long time. And it is time consuming. There is no way around that. In cases where two sources differ, it is important to convey the facts to the reader. Example: Source A gives this number while Source B gives another. Just reading what you wrote, the German supply system has to be taken into account. Aircraft components would have been shipped by train. Allocating the right number of train cars and scheduling pick-up and delivery would have occurred. In other words, if there was a discrepancy, there would be other ways to find out. Any falsehoods between airframe orders and actual deliveries would have been recorded. Messages from Luftwaffe units waiting on their aircraft would have been sent. Yes, transfer flights occurred, but the entire "supply chain" would have been affected. It is easy to assign bad motives to the enemy, but I suggest giving them a fair trial in the interest of historical accuracy. In other words, if there is no available evidence then no firm conclusion can be drawn.

Best,
Ed West

I went to click "like" on your post, then remembered where I was...

You are of course correct on all counts - the Nachschub system is also coming in for some examination in the book, particularly as subcontractor supplies were so important to the overall production picture for all manufacturers. And I've got a fairly massive spreadsheet on which I'm tracking every instance of a monthly 109 production count that I find in various documents... the numbers are fairly consistent and within what I'd describe as a reasonable margin of error up through the end of 1943. The wider discrepancies start to appear after the introduction of the Jägerstab in March 44, but even then, they're not THAT bad (relatively speaking), considering how frantic the production effort became... variances around 30-50 aircraft between reports aren't uncommon, and one could make a solid case that those might have been in the Einflug process and therefore didn't get counted on one report versus another. On the whole, everything seems to line up more or less between all the reports... except for Nov and Dec 44 in R 3/1926. We know that Saur was absolutely intolerant of any perceived failures on the part of the factory leadership; on 22 Aug 44, we find the following in the Jägerstab Sammelberichte:

"The works representative WNF, Dusl, is relieved of his post by order of HDL Saur with shame and disgrace. Likewise the work deployment engineer WNF."

You're right that we have no way to prove WHY the numbers were so inflated - guesses, no matter how educated, are not evidence - but we also know there was an ever-increasing atmosphere of fear at this point in the war. The theory that factories might have padded their production numbers in order to tell the Rüstungsstab what they wanted to hear, preferring to risk later punishment to avoid certain immediate punishment, is not entirely unfounded. But again, we cannot PROVE that.

What we CAN prove, though, through the recollections of the increasingly disillusioned men at the front, is the perception that the production numbers they were hearing were considered to be complete fantasy - witness the Major's comments in the USSBS report, or the oft-repeated joke about aircraft identification: "If it's shiny, it's American, if it's camouflaged, it's British, and if it's invisible, it's German." So, apologies for the long-winded reply here, but that's really all I'm trying to say - that those observations may not have been ENTIRELY baseless, based on the Bf 109 Neubau numbers reported to the Hauptausschuss Zellen for Nov/Dec 1944.

Cheers,

Lynn