August Lambert's Vic Tally....

[Jim P.]

Come on. This 'exagerator' krap, is just that, krap. EVERYBODY, British, US, German and whoever, overclaimed. That's a fact. Get over it. Trying to assign motive to a particular individual's claims 70 years after the fact is krap. These are CLAIMS - the fact that they ended up being credited is the 'problem'. In hindsight, with the records available from all sides, its easy for any of us to criticize and try to make somebody out to be a bad guy. Thing is we aren't playing a video game where a computer tells us we scored a kill. All these guys, from all sides, were fighting in combat in 3-dimensional space with enemy aircraft all around. If you saw smoke or pieces coming from your target, you made a claim. If you tried to follow your victim into the ground, generally you died. (One of the more well-known examples of this is with Rall in home defense. He lived, but lost a thumb.) Get over it. Were there documented cases of pilots intentionally or otherwise overclaiming? Certainly. Think Flying Tigers - $500 a pop was a lot money back then, 300 vs. 100 documented losses - think a schwarm from 4./JG 27 in North Africa caught in the act - think BoB officialdom knowing that RAF Fighter Command was overclaiming x 3 per known losses, let stand for morale purposes. The Japanese thought they had sunk the carrier Enterprise 4-5 times. They hit the thing, saw the explosions and the smoke, but if they'd tried to stuck around to actually watch it sink, who would have lived to tell the whole story? The bottom line is, we're here with the benefit of having records from all sides to check the veracity of everybody's claims, which for the most part don't always match up. Its way too easy for us, 70+ years after the fact, to be critical and try to ascribe motives to actions for a combat environment that we can't really begin to fathom.