LUFTWAFFE EXPERTEN Claims vs. Kills

Originally Posted by DerAdlerIstGelandet

I am saying that Hartmann had no reason to lie just like your allied pilots who supposably did not either.

As for Bong and McGuire I was just making a point. Whether they did or not I do not know nor care because it was done on all sides.

I'm not saying Bong and McGuire did not have a reason or motivation to make false, or overly optomistic claims. I'm saying that these two pilots were scrutinized like no others as they reached the 30+ kill levels, so making such claims would have been much more difficult and risky.

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

No argument here, just making a point here that just because you scored a lot of kills does not make you a cheater.

[delcyros]

Any idea, anyone, where I can get the losses for Africa (all allies) june-october 1942 with reliable sources???
For Hartmann, the soviet veterans, I did used to speak last year, do not question Hartmann´s claims. In fact he was officially accused by them to shoot down more than 340 soviet airplanes.
I doubt that the soviets have reliable loss sources anyway, this is making the whole question very hypothetic. Maybe if they open their archives at St. Petersburg and Smolensk for histoirians, but I doubt we will see this over the next years...

[Erich]

Del :

PRO-Kew in London for RAF losses / the Austrailian government archiv's for Aussie losses in Afrika. Again proven or not or not even listed. It is like this everywhere..........

viele Glück !

Erich ♪

Originally Posted by DerAdlerIstGelandet

No argument here, just making a point here that just because you scored a lot of kills does not make you a cheater.

It's not so much a matter of "cheating" as of having been overly optimistic about the fate of a given target or making a claim on the same plane another pilot made a claim on.

Sabaru Sakai for instance claimed a bunch of kills that are proven to have in fact survived. In his judgement (and those of his wingmen) the plane was hurt bad enough that it could not survive - when in fact it did survive. If it had been a Japanese plane it almost certainly would have been a kill. The Japanese just didn't recognize how much tougher US planes were until quite late in the war.

=S=

Lunatic

[evangilder]

But the Japanese never had an official accounting of enemy kills. They felt it lead to units not being cohesive and created competition. So all we have to go by are log books. Not exactly the same for the Germans.

Agreed. But the point is that pilots made frequent mistakes regaurding kills, even when there was no real incentive to make false claims.

=S=

Lunatic

[evangilder]

True, but at least with American and German accounting, there were confirmations by other pilots or crews in theory anyway. But for Japanese kills, you can only really go by their personal logs. There is no confirmation to speak of. I am not speaking of false claims, in the heat of battle, things move at an incredible rate of speed. You can read battle accounts from guys that stood right next to each other and get very different reports. Neither are necessarily wrong, just processed differently. This can lead to "false claims", or to just seeing things differently than they really occured.

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Originally Posted by RG_Lunatic

It's not so much a matter of "cheating" as of having been overly optimistic about the fate of a given target or making a claim on the same plane another pilot made a claim on.

Sabaru Sakai for instance claimed a bunch of kills that are proven to have in fact survived. In his judgement (and those of his wingmen) the plane was hurt bad enough that it could not survive - when in fact it did survive. If it had been a Japanese plane it almost certainly would have been a kill. The Japanese just didn't recognize how much tougher US planes were until quite late in the war.

=S=

Lunatic

And you will have that. As Even said combat is very fast pased and mistakes like this happen. The only real way to account for all this is to take the official loss records and compare them with the official kill records. I think if this were done there would be a vast majority of overclaiming found no matter which country we were checking for the stress and speed of combat does not change because of the flag that fly under.

[the lancaster kicks ass]

Originally Posted by RG

The Japanese just didn't recognize how much tougher US planes were until quite late in the war

well that's not true, why would it take them so long, for the first few years all those planes that were hard to shoot down were one offs?? or just because they're not american they're too stupid to realise that the planes they shoot at everyday are hard to destroy??

Originally Posted by the lancaster kicks ass

well that's not true, why would it take them so long, for the first few years all those planes that were hard to shoot down were one offs?? or just because they're not american they're too stupid to realise that the planes they shoot at everyday are hard to destroy??

At Guadicanal the Japanese estimates of the numbers of US planes killed wasy typically inflated more than five fold, often ten fold. The Japanese thought America was replacing the losses when in fact they were not suffering the losses in the first place.

They knew US planes were tougher than Japanese planes, but they did not realize nearly how much tougher they in fact were.

=S=

Lunatic

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Originally Posted by the lancaster kicks ass

well that's not true, why would it take them so long, for the first few years all those planes that were hard to shoot down were one offs?? or just because they're not american they're too stupid to realise that the planes they shoot at everyday are hard to destroy??

Oh Boy here we go again.

[the lancaster kicks ass]

he started it.........

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Im not arguing it.

[cheddar cheese]

Im not gonna make any comments about anything. I figure its for the best (for me)