Jagdflieger unconfirmed victories and official confirmation of claims

[Juha]

I agree with what Nikita Egorov wrote in reply 11. Of course with a strict debriefing system one could improve claim accuracy markedly as USN did, was that from 1943 onwards. Also RAF could markedly improve its claim accuracy when it finally decided to tackle the overclaiming problem. IMHO on the long run the knowledge that a confirmation system is lax would decline claim accuracy because many of good fighter pilots were very competitive and if they noticed that others got their claims accepted lightly and got medals and promotions because of that the temptation to do same was strong. Of course some would not fall to temptation because of theit integrity or because they didn't care were they 6th or 24th in the ranking list. They just wanted to do they job propertly and got they satisfaction from that and from the successes of their unit. IMHO a figter unit was in this sense an organization as any other, there were primadonnas and there were those who cared mostly the overall performance plus of course those who did their duty but not much else and so on.