Stepan Ivanovich Kretov - Il-4 ace

[knusel]

Good morning,

I'm looking for info about Il-4 ace Stepan Ivanonich Kretov who destroyed at least 60 planes on the ground and 10 or 12 in the air.
Did he achieve 10 or 12 kills ?
Did he fly all his combat missions in the Il-4 ?
Why did he die at the tender age of 55 ?

Cheers,

Michael

[knusel]

...meanwhile he has been granted an own wikipedia entry:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A...B2%D0%B8%D1%87
which also mentions his at least 10 aerial kills.
His total of 400 combat missions was flown in the DB-3 and the Il-4.
How many missions and kills of these were in the latter ?

[Kari Lumppio]

Who cares?

[knusel]

You?

[HGabor]

Knusel,
I would not pay too much attention to the number of 'kills' that certain pilots claimed. You would be shocked to see how far they can be from the truth. Some pilots' reliability is under 20(!) % or less, no mater how 'big' aces they were based on their tally and biography.

In short: without doing REAL research on the lost enemy aircrafts in order to compare them to certain pilots' claims, these numbers do not have too much historical value. They are still full of speculation, error and fiction. These 'kill-statistics' can be OK for a video game, but not for historical research. All depends on what your goal is.

Gabor

[marcus]

Hello Gabor.
Has anyone ever bothered to try to check how accurate the records are? It's easy for all to say the pilots are overclaimers, but what about the records themselves? Have they been falsified or doctored to avoid reprimand or whatever?

I mean, a simple reconciliation of -

Total Aircraft at start + Lendlease + Built New - Total Aircraft left at end = Total Losses.

One could then compare losses per the available records with this figure to determine their accuracy. For research into claims to be valid, the numbers really need to balance.

If the numbers don't balance then you rally can't say anything at all about the claims, because the documents you base your research on are inaccurate, which, of course, leads to unreliable/irrelevant conclusions.

For example, if the reconciliation shows hundreds or thousands of losses unaccounted for, who is to say how they occurred? Do you just ignore the imbalance?

Marcus

[HGabor]

Marcus, this is a fair question which requires a fair answer. What I said about the lost planes is based on two Soviet air armies (5 and 17 VA) between October 1944 - July 1945 that we studied. For this time period we have hundreds of Soviet mechanical reports (copies) of incoming planes (by serials) and plane losses (by serials) including wear and tear replacements, - everything from the Central Military Archives of the Russian Federation (TsAMO RF). The very same AC serials are repeated in the upcoming inventory reports until the plane was lost/written off. Then it is obviously not listed anymore. Moreover the reports overlap each other at multiple levels of reports: regiment, division, Corps, Army level reports, as well as loss reports, personal achievement reports, etc. Losses are all supported by the field recoveries we made with our aircraft museum. In other words: the discovered numbers on the unearthed aircraft remains match the Soviet loss reports for 100%.

Overall we are talking about a library worth, cross referencing material of several thousand pages. So this is such a massive 'databank', that nobody, like nobody would make up just for fun. Not to mention that these reports were internal reports for their own personal use (in order to get new plane replacements, etc.), not for the post-war public to see. (These papers got declassified only after the early 2000s.) The other thing is that mission reports reveal the time when the planes were in the air and where their losses occurred. If you compare them to the Axis claims, it is obvious that if they claimed a plane in the morning, but the loss occurred in the afternoon, then it was an overclaim/fraud/you name it no matter if the date is the same. We are down on the level of hours and minutes, not just 'days'!

By the way, you can see some document samples in my earlier comments. I hope this answers your question.

Gabor

[HGabor]

It is also important that in every case the times are reconciled, since the Soviets used Moscow local time in their own reports while the Germans used local time in Hungary, which was also Berlin local time. So eg. 10:00AM in the Soviet combat reports is 8:00AM in the German reports (in Hungary). This has to be checked every time when comparing Soviet losses to Axis claims in the country.

Gabor

[HGabor]

Marcus, just a sample of recovered IL-2 Sturmovik parts with the plane's c/n: 1875397. See beside the very same c/n listed in the Soviet (summary) loss-report of the 17 VA in March, 1945. The Soviet AC documentation is absolutely correct, in fact it is regularly used by the researchers to identify the recovered remains (bones) of missing aircrews, based on the MATCHING airframe and AC engine-numbers found in the Soviet loss reports as well as on the recovered remains:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/194997...posted-public/

In short: yes, the mentioned documentation can be used for testing/verifying the Axis victory claims. Some will stand the test, others will fail. Luckily those days are over when everything was accepted based on one sided and unchecked claims, resulting false legends and false history.

Gabor

[Laurent Rizzotti]

Originally Posted by marcus

Hello Gabor.
Has anyone ever bothered to try to check how accurate the records are? It's easy for all to say the pilots are overclaimers, but what about the records themselves? Have they been falsified or doctored to avoid reprimand or whatever?

I mean, a simple reconciliation of -

Total Aircraft at start + Lendlease + Built New - Total Aircraft left at end = Total Losses.

One could then compare losses per the available records with this figure to determine their accuracy. For research into claims to be valid, the numbers really need to balance.

If the numbers don't balance then you rally can't say anything at all about the claims, because the documents you base your research on are inaccurate, which, of course, leads to unreliable/irrelevant conclusions.

For example, if the reconciliation shows hundreds or thousands of losses unaccounted for, who is to say how they occurred? Do you just ignore the imbalance?

Marcus

By the way, the complete equation is the following:

Total Aircraft at start + Lendlease + Built New - Total Aircraft left at end = Total Losses = Aircraft shot down in air combat + Aircraft shot down by Flak + Aircraft destroyed on the ground + Aircraft destroyed in accident + Aircraft worn out.

In WWII, it seems to me that for all air forces, accidental losses were bigger than combat losses.