How good was Japanese aviation?

[mkloby]

wow you guys are still at this

[FLYBOYJ]

Originally Posted by JoeB

No, it only covers to the end of the first set of Japanese offensives in that area around the beginning of March. For New Guinea I'm comparing the Japanese losses given in Sakaida "Winged Samurai" w/ the US claims and losses given in Hess "Pacific Sweep".

Thanks for the info Joe, then how accurate do you consider Army Air Forces Statistical Digest?

[JoeB]

Originally Posted by FLYBOYJ

Thanks for the info Joe, then how accurate do you consider Army Air Forces Statistical Digest?

For enemy aircraft destroyed, *by itself*, it doesn't offer that much. Not because the claims exceed enemy losses, that's almost always true for everybody (in WWII at least), but the degree of overstatement varied a lot over time. However if you can benchmark a series of sample incidents in a particular period and theater to real enemy losses, but can't find the real total enemy losses (this is often true in '43-45 in the Pacific) you might reasonably assume the claims/real losses inflicted ratio was constant in that period and theater and discount the total claims with it. You just can't assume that ratio was constant between periods, among numbered AF's, and especially between bomber and fighter claims.

For losses and causes I would guess the Stats Digest is much closer to the real numbers, but probably not exactly correct either. We saw the Feb '42 fighter loss to enemy a/c number appears wrong, although that was an early confused period. I doubt anyone has studied that in detail for the whole war, huge job. For the Korean War I've tried to correlate the USAF Stats Digest for that war (from 1953) with each actual loss from detailed records, a more manageable project. I found the air combat loss totals were fairly close but lower than the actual air combat losses for two reasons: accounting errors which ended up slightly understating net for whatever reason, and losses to "unknown" that can be seen from corresponding enemy claims to have been air combat losses in fact; 10-15% understatement of air combat losses overall; but reasonable people can disagree exactly what constitutes "air combat loss". My guess would be WWII situation was similar.

Joe

[FLYBOYJ]

Very Interesting - I still find that even with some of these skewed stats if we looks at "close" kill/ loss numbers of the USAAF in the South Pacific it really wasn't as bad as some would make it. I could remember reading articles as a kid and those writers would have you thinking that we lost 10,000 aircraft between Pearl harbor and GuadalCanal. The same for the Performance of the F4F. One of our members posted that only 192 F4Fs were lost in air-to-air combat for something like 600 aircraft claimed. Even if you split those numbers it still shows the USAAF and USN weren't suffering in many cases...

[syscom3]

Good info Joe B.

[Chingachgook]

The US/RAAF claim to JP loss rate over Darwin seems suspect IMHO. Any chance that the Japanese were cooking the books on their losses?

This kind of thing did happen, LW cooked the books in the Battle of France...

[JoeB]

Originally Posted by Chingachgook

The US/RAAF claim to JP loss rate over Darwin seems suspect IMHO. Any chance that the Japanese were cooking the books on their losses?

This kind of thing did happen, LW cooked the books in the Battle of France...

AFAIK the original source of those Japanese losses (which have appeared in more than one English language book) is the Japanese official history of the war, the Senshi Sosho, 100+ volume work published from 1960's-80's that used a large mass of original Japanese records many of which were held in the US until the late '50's but never translated. I know some western scholars have commented on Senshi Sosho's detail and lack of apparent bias; nobody has found evidence of cooking in it AFAIK. But prove any negative...

I don't recall the exact Spit claims v fighters in that case. For all Japanese a/c in that 1943 Darwin campaign the Spit claims were overstated around 3 or 4:1 according to Japanese accounts, though IIRC somewhat worse v the Zeroes and better v bomber/recon a/c. See the US P-40 claims in 1942 above which followed a similar pattern. In turn the JNAF 202nd Air Group claimed over 100 Allied a/c downed over Darwin in that campaign <30 actual. So no, on the surface those loss numbers don't look so strange to me.

The Allies, including Brit/CW overclaimed that much or more against the Japanese in many early combats and campaigns, and the RAF overclaimed similarly to that in some encounters with the European Axis (including the Italians) esp in the first half of the war. Late in the European war, the RAF (and USAAF fighters too, though not bombers) with numerical and qualitative superiority and spare resources to put into operational analysis (gun cameras and also intel manpower to follow a detailed claim procedure) claimed much more accurately than that. But it's a mistake, IMHO but with backing I think, to project that situation to the rest of the war and "suspect" enemy losses that seem to show several:1 overclaims by Allied fighters. The simple explanation is that the hard pressed Spits overclaimed a lot, in line with numerous other examples of high overclaims by losing sides in air combat.

Joe