Erich Hartmann: 352 victories or... 80?

[Kari Lumppio]

Hej!

My guestion of the Soviet losses stemmed from the fact that the "did not return" category losses are often of the same level as combat losses. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that more than half or so of the "did not return" were caused of loss of orientation, bad weather, loosing instrument in clouds etc.

Juri Rybin has done extensive work of the Northern airwar. Valtonen's book gives numerous examples from late 1944 where German claims well exceed the real Soviet losses. The same is true vice versa and Rybin takes a lot of flak from his Russian colleagues because he has also written so. Mombeek's JG5 book uses (I guess) data from the same source and again there are many cases of german claims without real losses (or "no data found"). Was JG 5 the only Luftwaffe unit overclaiming? If II/JG54 did not overclaim then FinnAF nor Finnish AAA did not shoot down any Soviet plane during the Summer 1944 Soviet offensives. Should I believe that?

IMO there has to be discrepancy of the combined total of Luftwaffe claims Christer gave and the total what was submitted from the unit level. Is the total claims number correct and where is it derived from? Has Luftwaffe higher level corrected the claims to correlate with the real Soviet loss numbers? That would procide a circular reference. You are the expert here and I would like to learn more.

Taking FinnAF as analoque, it seems higher echelons were well aware of overclaiming but did not take measures against that (and why would they? to raise spirit of the corps?). It looks to me that only when the kill race went overboard spring 1943 some action was taken to reduce the overclaiming (with some success). My interpretation is that this was done to avoid unnecessary aircraft/pilot losses because of the "hunting sport".

Cheers,
Kari

PS About the famous authors missing from this forum. You suggest that I make my own guesswork. Frankly, I do not have the faintest idea of what authors you are talking about. That was why I was asking the first place. I was just curious as I would like to know what I am missing. OK with me if you want to keep your secrets.