KG51 losses on 23 August 1942.

[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Franek

I intend to write up a more lengthy answer with regards to this, but in order to get the 1944 project site ready for launch I will have to wait some days to do so.

What I do believe we should be aware of is how the system behind these records and files were made and ment to function (follow the paper trail approach...) and I feel an obligation more or less to complete my research into this matter in an article, and it will come!

As I have noted earlier - the responsibility of reporting the losses was traversed through the chain of command. Setting aside the handling of more or less autonomous units and ad-hoc units, the responsibilities for making this paper trail appear was quite straight forward, and as seen in the orders from for example the Gen.d.Lw. operating in south eastern parts of Europe, an extremely important tool in order to get the resources needed for operation! (I will quote these orders excactly in the coming article). Thus the notion brought forward by some during this discussion that what we now see as the GenQu6Abt documents were purely for statistical purposes on high levels of command is fundamentally wrong. Of note is especially the order to be even more accurate in the reporting to the GenQu with regards to formation leaders, as this influenced how the Luftflotte, Geschwader etc would have to act in order to replace these. This is not statistics, this is hands down, on the ground operative stuff.

I also acknowledge, as I have done in several of the earlier answers, that errors were made. This is natural in an organization as large as this. The company I currently work for has 151000 highly qualified persons employed world wide. Do one make errors - YES! Do dataflows brake down and introduce errors - although one use millions every year to try to amend this - YES! But we all strive to at least get the best result we can with regards to data quality. I firmly believe (oh ye have faith) that the bureaucrats of the Luftwaffe did the same thing, and this can be seen in the documents they have left behind. They were striving to get the best data quality they could, and constantly reminding the 'organisation' how this should be done.

One final note - but a fairly important one, which I have tried to relay earlier: Damage to aircraft where no personnel were injured or killed, and where the technical officer in question assessed this to below 10% was not reported at all! This is fairly important when trying to discredit the documents as a whole as a bad dataset.

Looking at this from the macro level, a dataset consisting of some 90000 records, covering damage to about that number of aircraft if not more (some single records can containg information on 100+ aircraft, while there are several records connected to some specific aircraft (damaged, repaired, damaged again)) will definitely be 'significant' for any statistical purpose.

But there will be holes, and there will be discrepancies. So my notion is - instead of using a lot of time and energy to try to discredit this data source on the fact that a few errors exist, try to add to the data, but try to fill the holes with data of better quality. As you yourself have mentioned Franek, even the RAF made errors, and they were looking directly at the remains of the aircraft in question for the specific purpose of intelligence. At this time of the war immensely important to them! But they mad a bad record nevertheless... and even Poles in the RAF can have a bad day with regards to judgement... the 315 Sq and October/November 1944 were not a very good combination...

As we have seen on this board almost countless times, the human mind is not necessarily 100% reliable after 60++ years. And what we are after as researchers is not necessarily what caught the mind of the people operating in the armed forces at the time. (German pilots operating in Bergen area in Norway generally do not have the faintest with regards to how their aircraft were camouflaged or what code this or that guy had on their aircraft, but they remember the rain and the girls very well!)

So let's get on with the real stuff, welcome to the 1944 project guys!

Regards,
Andreas B

[Franek Grabowski]

Andreas
First of all, I never said, that no attempts should be made to make German losses data more accurate and reliable. I do not know, why do you write this.
I will wait patiently for your article, as it would be hard to comment without expression of your views. Nonetheless, I would expect an answer for few simple questions like what kind of data could have been extracted from information about aircraft markings or who supplied replacement aircraft to individual Staffeln?
Andreas, please also have in mind, that all your 151,000 employees are highly skilled and trained volunteers. Comparing it to the Luftwaffe, you would have to consider following factors:
you have to multiply the number of employees,
only part of them were volunteers, while most were drafted or considered deskjob a punishment,
they are as skilled as they wanted to be, and you have to employ them anyway, due to shortages,
several of the people, especially at the bottom of information chain, have their own opinions on what is important in life,
communications is far from perfect, and in all cases prone for errors, both typing and language, not to mention hand written papers,
there is a war around, and people are more bothered to survive than to care about anything else,
careers of people in chain, especially at the bottom and the top, may be dependant on those data.
I think it is just enough, to expect gaps and inaccuracies, created to various reasons.
You say: 'instead of using a lot of time and energy to try to discredit this data source on the fact that a few errors exist', but in no moment you provide any answer about the extense of those 'a few errors'. At no moment you nor your protagonist provide a simple estimation of completness of those data. Please note, that discussing 90,000 losses, variation of accuracy in range of 1-10% is 900 to 9,000 losses. I would not call that insignificant and unimportant.
You note: 'As you yourself have mentioned Franek, even the RAF made errors'. I have claimed all the time they did, and actually did a lot of them. Several of those are not verifiable, despite much more complete sets of documents available than in case of Luftwaffe. I know this, because for the Polish AF we have a really unique combination of surviving records, coming from different archives. Mind you, that we have documents allowing to verify (with a margin of error) every flight made by almost every Polish Squadron (there are some gaps) during the war, be it operational or not. You do not have such possibility for the RAF, not to mention Luftwaffe. Thus based on my knowledge of PAF/RAF system I extrapolate my conclusions on the Luftwaffe. Of course, there were some differencies in both systems, but they should not be way off.
In case of mentioned CEAR, we likely have a simple typing error, perhaps due to misreading handwritten notes. This happened, happens and will happen. Nonetheless, you failed to reply, why so called accurate Luftwaffe documents provided completely bogus data?
I am not sure what do you mean by words: 'the 315 Sq and October/November 1944 were not a very good combination'. 315 Sqn claimed no victories at the time, and suffered few losses, so indeed I may agree, it was not a good time.
Andreas, I am not sure what the passage about memories was about to meant. I have an impression, that you try to consider any information coming from Allied sources as insignificant, unreliable and unimportant, even if it is a photo or other physical evidence, like a bit of parachute.
Andreas, one simple question. Galland estimated losses for Big Hit as 2,6 aircraft destroyed per airman killed. Statistics of Polish Spitfire losses are not as optimistic, but IIRC they were about 2,1 aircraft per airman. German losses for 1941 the Channel offensive are 1,2. Please explain me, why the latter are so much different, and what was the source of Galland estimations.

[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Franek

1. I never have and never will state that information coming from the allied side should be neglected, it should not! I only state that if the ONLY evidence we have are eyewitness accounts, no physical evidence like debris, a crashsite or a captured pilot or crew, no guncam film, no nothing, we should treat this 'evidence' from both sides in a stringent way - record it but not accept it as the simple truth, and especially not try to say that because this and that chap was such a great person he could never have made a mistake. I have talked to enough WWII pilots from both the allied and german side to at least acknowledge that they were all in a situation were stress related errors could have been made. The major stress release factor at the time, at least that is what the chaps I talked to relayed, were alcohol - not necessarily the best memory enhancer.

2. With regards to replacement aircraft, the easy answer is that the unit requested replacements through the line of command. The requested replacements were gathered by a unit that from my recollection was called L.In.16, and the aircraft were allocated to the unit via the commanding Luftflotte. They were then transported from the production or repair facilities, often via a Luftpark facility, to the storage areas and finally to the frontline units. Records of these daily allocations to the Luftflotten exist.

3. With regards to your calculations, it is a bit hard to make a statement based on the data you provide. By 'Big Hit' do you mean the Battle of Britain, or the Grosse schlacht PROPOSED by Galland but never used?? Also, it would be of interest to see the data you have used to make your own calculations. I can offer a statistical analysis of all fighter losses in the frontline Luftwaffe units from 22.6.1942 to end of January 1945, and the corresponding personnel losses in return.

I would also be very grateful if we could decide to stop using so much time and energy on these discussion - you will probably never agree with me anyway - and rather go back to gathering as much information as possible in an ordered system.

Regards,
Andreas B

[yogybär]

Gentlemen,

I also work in such a big company with >400.000 employees. And it is a german company.

We have reporting structures, "divisions", (business) units and "Stäbe". We have very good software for tracking workhours, costs, profit etc. pp. And also, there is politics inside this organization. I KNOW that in some places comfortable lies are prefered. Wether it is to camouflage own faults of to get more resources then really necessary in order to lower the risk in ones own "Abteilung" (department or wether it is just to blow up ones own importance... there are a lot of possible motivations.

Similar motivations were in the Luftwaffes "employees" also, I am sure. Therefore, I am sure that even in the german Luftwaffe figures were manipulated on different levels to different extents.

Examples, some historically proven, other from fantasy:
- A Mechanic in III/JG54 knows that his pilot is on the edge of his nerves. So, he finds out that the 190D-9 has a "Masseschluß" (electrical problem) and the "poor" pilot cannot fly on ops. One more A/C unservicable.
- Staffelkapitän XY wants to be protect a pilot who wrecked his plane by error, so writes a report "due to tech. reasons". Or even better: Lt. Lipfert forgot to lower the wheels of his 109 during a landing. Explanation afterwords: They didn't want to come out... ts ts ts, always mechanical problems
- Kommodore XY's I./JGZZ has several A/C crashlanded on the AF due to enemy fire / dogfights. His team had to use them as "sparepart-spender", so one week later he is happy that he can report them as "blown up when retreating from the AF" or such.

Surely there were a lot more reasons and even more excuses used in the organizsation "Luftwaffe", which we do not know any more today. Similar to the excuses we find all over the place in our "perfectly organized" "Global Player" companies.

And I am very sure that this was and still is the case in all other Air Forces all over the planet. Maybe even worse in the VVS, where one can read a lot of examples of deliberate excessive claims etc. pp.

Therefore it always would be good to countercheck all information available to get a full picture. But still one should consider that it is only a picture!

[Andreas Brekken]

Hi, Yogy

I am sure this happened, and I am sure we can find several more examples. My problem is really when it is written as you do: Leutnant this and that etc, because we can then never put this into the correct context, and the result is that these cases become urban legends and nothing more.

I would really like to have the unit of the Kommodore you mentioned, as I would like to check this against loss records, and see what they say.

And that pilots reported losses due to technical error rather than pilot error I am sure. Who wouldn't if they could. Thing is that we cannot know how widespread this was or could have been, but the fact is that we also have several examples of pilots doing something similar being prosecuted, and that only a higher level technical review freed them from the accusations.

What I think we must do here is to keep apples from bananas - the examples you mention here has nothing to do with the 'scheme' proposed by Franek where he state that there were a major 'hide the losses' operation going on in the Luftwaffe, resulting in the data we have being a long way from the complete picture.

But I think that this thread is really picking up, and we are getting real examples we can use and discuss. In my opinion we should try to gather these 'special' cases in a separate thread and try to 'solve' them to the best of our ability with information from all sides

Regards,
Andreas B

[Franek Grabowski]

Joerg
You just hit the nail, though I think you are a little bit unfair towards Soviet aviation. And talking about big companies, it recalls me Enron.

Andreas
Please do not twist my words. I have written several times that German loss records are incomplete, inaccurate, and indeed sometimes doctored for various reasons.
I would also like to ask you not to play any dirty game on me. In regard of 9 April 1945 raid, the problem is not with lack of loss returns but with the fact that for some reason surviving(!) German action report explicitly state there were no losses, despite hard evidence to the contrary.
Otherwise, sorry, I was not responsible for destruction of documents at Auxerre. Nonetheless this shows the exact point - lack of majority of German documents and dispersion of surviving bits. I am curious, how the one can be so sure of accuracy of those data, if he had no chance to cross check them all.

1. Most courts find witness statement as enough to hang a man, but we are much more strict here. Still, we should not reject any statement based on oral evidence just because nothing else is available. Miles of gun camera films were exposed during the war, but most of them was disposed years ago, and we are often left with a pile of paper. Still, those reports do include very interesting observations, like statements of multiple witnesses, eg. whole wing observing a single victory, statements, that wreckage was filmed or parachute observed, notes that another pilot filmed whole action from behind, etc., all written within hours from action. What to do if it is contradicted by GQ6? Cases, that victorious airman took some material evidence from his victim are rare, though still the one can find a bit of parachute which is not reflected in German documents in any way.

2. This confirms there was nothing abnormal to the procedure. Does records of aircraft losses and movements within respective Luftflotten survive? Or perhaps we are left with the highest level stuff only?

3. Yes, I mean data provided by Galland for Grosse schlacht. Our calculations, made with Wojtek Matusiak, were based on widely available data eg. published by Don Caldwell and on detailed research on Polish Spitfires (Poland was the largest operator of the type apart of RAF). We have assumed that Spitfire is similar enough to compare to Me 109, and that some vital statistics should be similar. Data on Polish aircraft were used because of their reliability and completeness, but as noted, the number of aircraft used was significant, so allowing for generalisation. Correction was made for different conditions - Luftwaffe did not need to fly across the Channel. This way we have achieved aircraft losses per capita killed, showing a major discrepancy. Another interesting observation was a very low number of German airmen saved on parachutes, see JG26 in April 1942 for example.
We did it as a kind of joke for too serious people, so I am astonished to see that our estimates were so close to Galland ones!

On a final note, I am adding detailed footnotes and sources to my research, whenever possible. It is not my problem some people do not read it.

PS I am not trying to play intellectual, but rather intelligent.