German aces-post 1944

[Erich]

personally concerning Galland the man was totally out of tune in mid to late 1944. He really had no clues about the Sturmgruppen in fact one letter I have seen in the German he thought the rear attacks and get in close with the bombers as suicidal...............well Addi it was of things to come, both the bombers and the heavy Fw's were going to feel the pain in a "new" type of aerial warfare.

he was over the hill in my opinion even when he flew the Me 262 in JV 44 that he wanted to create, on a personal level after seeing what JG 7 was accomplishing and with his state in such a high ranking in the Luftwaffe but thought of a bad sore by "Fatty", the guy wanted to fly the fast Schwalbe before wars end which he knew full well was coming

just my 2 cento's..........still think that Normandie was the final back-breaker the Luftwaffe in all it's silliness trying to protect the French regions when they should of really bolstered up their Reich defense measures around their vaunted industrial and city complexes instead of purely wasting precious metal and human life

[drgondog]

Erich - your two cento's are worth as much as mine.

On Normandie there are two things to consider

First, the LW inflicted the worst punishment ever to the 4th FG (twice - June 6 and August 1 and the 353rd (June 12) during that period and the 355th (lost 4 air to air for a tie on June7) . 'Course they had their eyes on the ground in front and weren't looking for those sneaky devils high and behind.

Second factor of interest - they were meeting EVERYBODY over France. Nobody was out of range including the Tempests, the Typhoons, the Spits, the Poles, the French, Jugs, Lightnings (in best element) and Mustangs.

Proportionately they fought against the worst odds of the war during that campaign.

I don't know this answer - did the LW lose more fighter pilots June-August as they did March through May? And did they lose more experienced pilots than the March-May cycle?

Jes Curious

Bill

[Erich]

Bill I was looking over just one units Bf 109G-6 losses and that of III./JG 3. what an absolute slaughter..........the Gruppenkommandeur and I am going from memory as I closed the book a bit ago, but I think he and one other pilot were the only ones left to form up the new III. gruppe in late summer/fall of 44, all others severely wounded in action and or killed over Normandie.

III./JG 54 although nearly blown off the planet put in the top scores for all of the Luftw. day fighter units with 100 claims over Normandie country, and I even think during the June-August time frame several of the aces in the gruppe scored 4 kills on single days. Will have to do a double check on that

Flying Fw 190A-8's III./JG 54 ace Emil Lang shot down 4 P-51's on June 20, 1944 over Dreux and L'Aigle

[lesofprimus]

Alls good Bill, thanks for the PM.... Gotta agree with u on point 2 of ur post... There were enemy aircraft everywhere, and many experienced pilots were gang slaughtered by those roving packs...

Erich, I have to concur with what u put in up above.... III./JG 54 was nearly obliterated over Normanie, and their total claims shows just how heavy they were in it...

[drgondog]

Erich - as I recall, several 109's from III./JG3 went down on 28 July. Is there confirmation of all the locations for those ships? I've often wondered if one Staffeln went east a couple of days earlier as the Gruppe started to leave France.

It was JG11 that shot down Yellow Flight of 357FS on July 7, thinkin' it may have been JG 5 that got 353rd, and JG26 and JG3 that got 4th on 18 August but not at all certain, and unclear which outfit which hurt 4th on D-Day

Off topic but JG3 may have been the 355th's 'Bitch' as that Gruppen took serious losses from 355 on 24 April and 16 August to name a couple of days, then 300 and 301 after them. I have no clue who put the hurt on them in the Normandie unpleasantness.

The 355 did NOT have a winning record against JG26 but as near as I can tell did against everyone else.

[Erich]

8 Bf 109G-6's lost from III./JG 3, one of them 25km west of Argentan the others there is no info given as places are unknown. In the area of Argentan two other Bf 109G-6's were lost from attached 7./JG 52

From the 29th of July through August 12 there were 50 losses in the Gruppe and an additional 15 Bf 109G-6's lost in ground attack on August 7, 44 at the airfield at Chartres. the Gruppe stayed within France till first week of September 44 losing another 50 a/c from the 12 August till September 5th

crazy

[drgondog]

The reason I asked is still trying to match a face and place to 28 July Mulhausen award for the old man. Of the 6 109s that bounced the B-24s near Mulhausen they got one of them according the history (seen to blow up) and dad chased the leader into the ground

But can't find a LW 'loss' that matches that location for either of the 109's.

Also McElroy certainly shot down Hirshfeld (only Mustang/Fw190 claim/award/loss match on that date and time) plus another unidentified 109 from an unidentified unit in the same point.

III./JG3 is the only outfit that reported 109s that seem to make sense as a possibility.

Oh well

Did you get my note about Caldwell?

[Erich]

uh oh more flys in the ointment my friend...........for July 28,44, there were 32 Bf 109G-6's flying from JG 302 and JG 27. they were soon vectored south while the SturmFw's of JG 300 stayed on course protected by 15 109G-6's of I./JG 300 flying a 1000 ft higher. In fact the only recognized kill for JG 300 this date was from a Bf 109G-6 pilot who shot down a B-17 north of Naumburg at 10.12hrs.
As you said ace Hirschfeld was shot down and bailed out but his chute did not open and also ace Gerhard Bärsdorf who had 10 kills to his credit.

I./JG 3 lost 6 Bf 109G-6/AS in aerial combat but places are unknown and no times. I./JG 302 shot down B-17's and B-24's plus a P-51 between Hof and Neustadt in Bavaria. It appears that 2 Bf 109G-6's from 1st and 2./JG 302 were lost to P-51's.

and yes thanks for the note about Don, etc.........

[Linda Alice Dewey]

Originally Posted by Udet

What of the Kassel raid of Sept 27, 1944? Read the month: SEPTEMBER, the ninth month of the year.

A 38 strong heavy bomber formation (USAAF) got nearly annihilated when the Sturmböck kids torched 34 of them in a matter of few minutes (38 heavies, 34 destroyed: 380 men in the formation, 340 which did not return, most of them killed).

Could a "band of kids hardly capable of making it airborne" have ever achieved such a masterful level of destruction?

That is just an isolated case of course; still it helps contradicting the allied fairy tale.

Hi,
A few inaccuracies in the allied losses in this post. 39 heavies were sent out, 1 blew a tire on take-off, 3 aborted. 35 made it over Germany when they got hit by the Luftwaffe. 29 crashed--25 of them over the Eisenach area. 29 German fighters crashed also, plus one American P-51. 336 men from the 445th Bomb Group participated in this battle. 117 were killed. 99 were POW's. My father was one of the B-24 pilots to make it back to England. We miss you, Eric. You have not been on our membership roll for several years.

I must say that the Americans had resources for replacements, where the Germans did not. One more battle like that in November and this type of attack was over for the Luftwaffe. The losses were just too heavy.

Of course, Eric is the expert on the Luftwaffe side of things.

[Vincenzo]

29 german fighters are american claims or luftwaffe date for battle? if they are claims surely the actually lost are less

[Erich]

sorry have been away and must leave again due to some urgency.

there were a total of 35 LW a/c lost on 27. 09. 44 due to a multitude of causes, this does not mean there were 35 pilots lost in action. this is from official German documentation via the logbooks of JG's 3, 4 and 300

E

[drgondog]

Originally Posted by Erich

uh oh more flys in the ointment my friend...........for July 28,44, there were 32 Bf 109G-6's flying from JG 302 and JG 27. they were soon vectored south while the SturmFw's of JG 300 stayed on course protected by 15 109G-6's of I./JG 300 flying a 1000 ft higher. In fact the only recognized kill for JG 300 this date was from a Bf 109G-6 pilot who shot down a B-17 north of Naumburg at 10.12hrs.
As you said ace Hirschfeld was shot down and bailed out but his chute did not open and also ace Gerhard Bärsdorf who had 10 kills to his credit.

I./JG 3 lost 6 Bf 109G-6/AS in aerial combat but places are unknown and no times. I./JG 302 shot down B-17's and B-24's plus a P-51 between Hof and Neustadt in Bavaria. It appears that 2 Bf 109G-6's from 1st and 2./JG 302 were lost to P-51's.

and yes thanks for the note about Don, etc.........

Erich - what time and location for Barsdorf? and what was he flying?

[parsifal]

Cant compete with you guys in terms of knowing the details of specific missions, but neither do I think this clarifies the issue of comparative losses. What I do know is that the ETO and MTO became an increasingly safer place for the USAAF to fly as the year progressed. Just looking at fighter losses for the USAAF, to understand the statistical chance of being shot down, IMO one has to look at the total number of ftr sorties per month (A), and divide this by the number of fighters lost to enemy air action (B), to obtain the number of sorties flown per loss (c)
A/B = C
Appying this formula on a monthly bases, one arrives at the following

Jan: 208
Feb: 184
Mar: 336
Apr: 159
May: 251
Jun: 334
Jul: 525
Aug: 466
Sep: 369
Oct: 391
Nov: 557
Dec : 441

The higher the number, the more missions are being flown before a loss is sustained. There are a number of conclusions that can be drawn from this, starting with the fact that the Luftwaffe was continuing to resist in the air, from the beginning to the end of the year. however, there is also a clear trend that shows that the USAAF was suffering less and less losses as a percentage of it forces structure as the year progressed. The Luftwaffe, for whatever reasons, was becoming less and less able to resist effectively as the battle progressed.

My source for this analysis was the USAAF Statistical Digest for WWII

[Njaco]

The loss of airfields to the LW I would think would also contribute. The Allies were taking forward airfields on the mainland and didn't have to fly the Channel so much IMHO.

[parsifal]

someone also submitted a post that suggested along the lines that the sole reason that for the USAAFs victory over the Jagd waffe was numbers. But at the risk of drawing the ire of certain elements in this forum, i have to say that I dont see it that way. I'll start by saying its partly true. The sortie rate in the USAAF was much hiher than in the LW. In the battles in January, Allied fighters flew something like 17000 to just 3500 by the LW (roughly). Clearly, the US was doing a lot more flying than the germans. However, the suggestion that the total number of American fighters was increasing is a false one. The proof is in the number of combat groups attached to the theatre. The USAAF started the year with 33 combat fighter groups, and it finished the year with exactly the same number. LW strengths fluctuated a lot more, At the beginning of the year, there were something like 2300 pilots in the LW fighter force. Of these, according to Prof Murray ("Luftwaffe Attrition 1943-45", University of Oklahoma), about 1690 could be considered "operationally ready". By November the strength of the Jagdgruppen had risen again to about 1900 pilots, having reached its nadir in September. However, the huge difference was a qualitative one. Whereas up to the end of 1943, the Germans were able to give on average 166 hours of flying time to its pilots (compared to 225 hours for the Allies), by September this figure was down to an average of 112, with only 10-20 hours on actual combat types. By comparison, the average experiance of the USAAF fighter pilots was soaring at about 500 hours. Small wonder then that in the big battles of November, the losses were so lop sided in favour the allies. My figures show that in fighter versus fighter engagements, the Germans were losing about 6-8 fighters for ewvery one US Fighter they managed to bring down. Even the overall numbers a horrible. For every Allied aircraft being shot down, the Germans in daylight combats were losing about 5 of their own. I should concede however, that these figures are approximate, because not all of the Luftwaffe records survived the war

Quoting Murray yet again, on average monthly Luftwaffe combat losses to its fighter forces were running at between 20 and 30% (depending on which month). Thats an average loss rate of between 400 and 700 pilots per month. Whether or not people choose to accept those figures, I really dont care, the facts are that the Luftwaffe was not able to keep pace with the losses it was sustaining throughout 1944, and as a result was forced to constantly raid its training cadres to comb out trainee pilots to maintain its strength. The less well trained the pilots, the higher the attrition rate, the higher the attrition rate, the more that training regimes had to be cut. It was a vicious, inescapable cycle. And given that the numbers game argument just doesnt add up, it is the only way that the massive losses of November can be explained IMO.