Erich Hartmann: 352 victories or... 80?

[Laurent Rizzotti]

My two cents. I read the article last month and write of memory.

I think both number of 352 and 80 are ridiculous. Most of the times overclaiming is 25-40% so Hartmann probably shot down 200-250 aircraft.
The original article uses all the revisionist tricks. Basically pick some precise cases to show that the "usual story" is wrong, and then using these as a proof that all cases are wrong. In the article, the author gives some examples, uses them to justify the fact that Hartmann only shot down less than 1/4 of his claims and in another "generalization" (don't remember if it is implicit or openly written) doubts the veracity of the German fighters in general.
In this case, the author seems to have choosen the wrong examples or to have quoten bad sources (another usual aspect of revisionism, that usually shows outdated wrong sources, so proving them wrong is easier.... and obviously not saying that every serious historian knows these sources are wrong).

While reading the article, I was thinking (as I always did with "revisionism"): what is the goal of this ? You will notice that putting the score of Hartmann at 80 is telling the best German ace "really" scored less victories than the best Soviet ace, who scored more than 80 victories. This is absolutely not written in the article and only my personnal interpretation.
The "who shot down who" question is most often a very difficult one and often misleading... A part of the "solved" cases compared partial list of losses with partial list of claims. A more interesting question is to try to compare global victories to global losses, when possible for each battle (a battle that may last hours and expand on hundred of kilometers in the case of the big Allied raids over Germany).