Big Cat vulnerability + ISs vs. Tigers

[Bigduke6]

Pokryshkin's memoirs make clear the thing he valued most about the P-39 was its firepower, then the hydraulic controls, and then the cockpit layout. He doesn't mention radios.

In general, Soviet radio equipment worked, at least if you believe the Soviet histories. What is repeatedly reported is early war radio shortages, especially in the ground forces.

We return you to your regular programming about mindless Soviets flying en masse into the ground and charging lemming-like into anti-tank ditches.

Oh...and JasonC is absolutely right. Armies lie to their soldiers in training, systematically, and with the specific goal of tricking soldiers into risking their lives.

[SlowMotion]

According to this

http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/romanenko/p-39/

first P-39s started appearing to flight units in May 1942. Many radios were removed from those planes because they were incompatible with Soviet equipment. Maybe that's why Pokryshkin didn't mention it. Some radios were kept, there's a comment on it in this interview, part3:

http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/golodnikov/part3.htm

Soviet squadrons were using Hurricanes, KittyHawks and Tomahawks already in 1941. A quote from an 154 IAP ace Kapitan Petr Pokryshev about Tomahawk: "Horizontal manouver - good, fire power - as one can wish, radio equipment - we never had anything like it before".

From the same site as the first link, an interviewed Soviet veteran said about I-16's radio:

"Q: Did the I-16 have radios?

N.G. The I-16 had a radio beginning with the type-17. They were poor excuses for radios. Garbage! The circuitry was wound on some type of cardboard material. As soon as this “cardboard” got the slightest bit damp, the tuning of the circuit changed and the whole apparatus quit working. All we heard was crackling.

The throat microphones were such large, uncomfortable shapes that made our necks sore."

http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/golodnikov/part1.htm

Then in part2 of the interview, there's similar question about KittyHawk radio. I'm not repeating it here, but there was a clear difference:

http://lend-lease.airforce.ru/english/articles/golodnikov/part2.htm

-----------

So what's the point: in the beginning of the German attack Soviets did have some equipment problems which gave a clear edge to Germans in this respect. Isn't this shown in CMBB as well? If you think how long some tank command delays are.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

His comment about needing only 2 .50's in that last link would cause quite a storm over on the Il-2 forums.

[Guest Mike]

Only new/gree/raw troops can be indoctrinated with untruths - experienced troops are ..well....experienced.

Experienced troops do things that the commanders don't want them to - like hte Prussian guards who spontaneously went into skirmish order from their columns vs teh French after they'd figured out what the Cassepot rifle could do, or WW2 veterans who would hit the dirt at the first sign/sound on "incoming".

Fighter armament was remarkably light for the whole war when you think about it - the .303 machinegun in British fighters was obsolescent by 1940, and so teh destructive part of the spitfire armament was pretty much only the 2 x 20mm cannon. Later marks were happy to replace the 2 .303's with 2 x .50's.

This compares with German 109 armaments typically 1 cannon and 2 HMG's later in the war, the 190 dropped 2 of its cannon in later versions to have 2 MG's and 2 MG's typical, the Russians usually had 1 cannon and 1 HMG on Yaks and 2 cannon on La's. Not sure of the Japs but 2 cannon and 2 mg's rings a bell.

Some a/c of course had much heavier armament but this was typically for anti-bomber work.

It does seem that 2-4 guns was enough for a fighter vs other fighters and light bombers as long as at least one of the guns was a cannon and the other at least a HMG.

Earlier on in the war a/c were less heavily armoured and 2 HMG's may well have been better than the 4 rifle calibre MG's fitted to most I-16's and even the 8 fitted to most Hurricanes!

[John Kettler]

JasonC,

While I think that's part of the story, there's more to those strange Russian reports than just what you describe. For one, there's a huge gap between what we think of as fighter tactics in the West and the way the Russians did it. Even in the late 1980s, as expressed in Soviet military journals, the closest thing they had to a fighter sweep was something called free hunt, and it was only permitted for top pilots, the ones rated sniper. Everything else was either under GCI control or was rigorously planned in advance. Initiative was officially defined as "conforming to the plan."

If this is how things were in the late 1980s, I can't imagine how they could be much better during the War. Remember, too, that this is a military in which information, especially maps and mission details, are husbanded to extreme, in which what we think of as common skills emphatically are not, and in which, by Western standards, the average pilot is not up to snuff, lacking sufficient training, flying hours, and tactical proficiency.

Now, take out the flight leader, lead bomber or what have you. Is there anyone else in the formation even close to his/her level of overall competence? Probably not. This is why we find whole squadrons escorting one really good fighter pilot.

This is not so much a slam on the aircrews as on a system much more concerned with maintaining control over its subjects than it was with efficiency. If the Russians had problems with simply dealing with mechanized ground warfare, and we know they did, how much worse having to deal with far more complex gear in three dimensions?

We know, from the Cold War, that complex systems were sometimes manned top to bottom with officers and/or senior NCOs, simply to get the necessary technical skill levels and military efficiency. Examples include the naval review at Spithead in 1956, where the officer-crewed cruiser Sverdlov wowed observers, the Alfa titanium-hulled sub of the 80s, and the 1960s Exercise Dnepr, where if Suvorov and other sources are to be believed, much of the Soviet military was emptied of officers and equipment in order to stun observers with an overwhelming display of military efficiency and power, made possible by creating entire divisions of officers. You know, the one whose film shows tanks, APCs, and IFVs swarming across the river, helos and aircraft overhead, and artillery fire crashing down?

It's been decades since I read it, but in Rudel's STUKA PILOT, he talks about how German radio monitoring used to listen to the formations he attacked berate their fighter cover as cowards when they fled and left the tanks to his not so tender mercies. If the war diaries from those radio monitoring units survive, his claims should be checkable.

Finally, while I fully realize the German fighter pilots entered the war with a huge tactical-technical advantage over their Russian

counterparts (Me-109 vs. I-16), it seems to me that the Russians produced only a relative handful of top aces compared to the Germans. That, in turn, suggests to me that some dynamics were at work behind the scenes. Offhand, I'd be looking at combat life expectancy, aggressiveness, personal initiative, and average kill production per pilot. I suspect we'll find that most Russian fighter pilots simply didn't last long, thus never had time to get good, thus never racked up big kill counts.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Guest Mike]

They also started with not much training - 50-90 hours per annum was common flight time for pre-war pilots, and some had only 100 hours or so before being sent to front line units before hte war - god only knows how much training they received in 1941-42.

Add that to some demanding a/c such as the LaGG-3 - nicknamed "morticians mate", and whose initials were reputed to stand for "Guaranteed varnished coffin" in Russian, and even the not-so-demanding-but much more advanced than I-153's and I-16 Yaks and Soviet pilots were in an invidious position having to come to grips with new high performance aircraft at hte same time as they were getting shot to bits.

[Andreas]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

Finally, while I fully realize the German fighter pilots entered the war with a huge tactical-technical advantage over their Russian

counterparts (Me-109 vs. I-16), it seems to me that the Russians produced only a relative handful of top aces compared to the Germans. That, in turn, suggests to me that some dynamics were at work behind the scenes. Offhand, I'd be looking at combat life expectancy, aggressiveness, personal initiative, and average kill production per pilot. I suspect we'll find that most Russian fighter pilots simply didn't last long, thus never had time to get good, thus never racked up big kill counts.

Regards,

John Kettler

The same goes for the US and British pilots by comparison to the Germans. I think your logic is inverted - the Germans had a few real aces simply because they left them at the frontline for far too long, instead of withdrawing them into school units where they could pass on their experience. The only way you could retire from being a frontline pilot in the Luftwaffe was to die or be incapacitated.

BTW - the average German pilot did not last long either. The attrition information in "Strategy for Defeat" shows that quite clearly.

All the best

Andreas

[John Kettler]

Andreas,

There are numerous gaps in my knowledge of this topic, but even so, I feel pretty safe in asserting the following: a) the Germans had more top aces, arbitrarily defining the term as meaning men with 50 or more kills and despite overall population size differences, more aces period.

I'm well aware that the Germans kept their good pilots in the line almost continuously, but I have no data handy on Russian practices, and it's been years since I read a borrowed copy of Von Hardesty's first rate RED PHOENIX. Given what I've read about wartime Russian combat leave policies (none unless wounded), I'm not optimistic that it was any better than the Germans pilots had. I do agree that once the Allies had long range fighter cover regularly over Germany, it was downhill for the Luftwaffe pilot training programs, seeing as how even basic flying became downright risky.

The British were, during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain, in nearly as bad a position, being forced to commit trainees who, in some cases, had fewer than ten? hours of flying time. ISTR some Spitfire pilots went straight into battle with no prior Spitfire time logged.

There is no doubt that once the U.S. got geared up, it was producing highly trained pilots en masse, in inviolable airspace. I think you'll find that if you look at the loss rate stats, it's the arrival of all these guys over Germany in P-38s, P-47s and especially the P-51 that puts the Luftwaffe pilot loss rates into skyrocket mode, and against the Luftwaffe second and third string they were as a scythe against ripe wheat.

Regards,

John Kettler

[ April 18, 2006, 08:04 AM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[Andreas]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

The British were, during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain, in nearly as bad a position, being forced to commit trainees who, in some cases, had fewer than ten? hours of flying time. ISTR some Spitfire pilots went straight into battle with no prior Spitfire time logged.

OT - but ISTR that is a myth. They may have had 8-9 hours flying time on type, but not total. The situation simply never got that dire. The guys were still extremely green though.

Don't know anything about the way the Soviets managed their fighter pilots, but I would not be surprised for it to have been a lot smarter than they are given credit for.

All the best

Andreas

[JasonC]

Did the Russians have shortages of skilled personnel throughout the war? Certainly, it was their scarcest input, largely due to the agricultural nature of the civilian society and the relatively small numbers who took formal education far etc.

Does that mean typical fighter pilots in 1943 or 1944 didn't know how to fly? No, and the suggestion is ridiculous. The Russians did not have a tiny air force limited by competence or by inability to produce aircraft. They had an air force bigger than the Germans and almost as large as the western Allies. And the men in that air force had gobs and gobs of experience gained through years of warfare. They were in the fight against the Luftwaffe twice as long as the US was, for instance.

In WW I everybody learned how to dogfight at the front, from a few leaders. Nobody knew anything about it before the war, because air combat hadn't even existed. Yet a few years of experience at the front was all anybody needed - even with no advanced technical equipment, no radios to coordinate anything - to create flocks of competent pilots and coordinate their efforts in mass engagements etc.

The Allies combined produced something like 400,000 aircraft in WW II. The Germans produced under 100,000. There is no way the average Allied pilot could get multiple kills - physically impossible, the German hadn't made enough planes for them to shoot down to rack up kill totals that high.

German highest scoring aces reflect simply longevity, not higher skill, and the large number of targets compared to people going after them. They are farther out on the random distribution of survival. Many of them were shot down 5 or 10 times. The Japanese high scorers are equally high for the same causes, even though their aircraft were clearly inferior from mid war on and their air force as a whole was being destroyed.

Most US fighter pilots rotated to train new ones after a varying number of missions between 25 and 50, rising over the course of the fighting. You don't rack up 300 kills in 50 missions. Particularly not when the enemy air force is scarce enough that you don't see any on the average mission. The highest scoring US ace, Bong, pulled strings to get back in action after being sent home to train pilots (and do PR work as a ace). If he hadn't, he would have topped out at under 30 kills.

A large portion of his success is routinely attributed to his spotting ability, on top of luck finding the enemy. Others in his squadron did not have nearly as many air to air engagements over a similar number of missions. He was quite likely to get a kill in one, and several times got multiple kills in one mission, all clear aces markers. But he also simply saw enemy planes far more often than the average.

A German pilot would not encounter the same difficulty finding Allied aircraft, that even Bong had finding anything Japanese still in the air over New Guinea or the Philipines.

Rudel is not a trustworthy source on anything, but a conscious propagandist. Practically everything he claims can be refuted by other side sources, every place it can be checked. People that get their ideas about the course of the war from Signal magazine have spouted the silliest nonsense about subhuman Russians for decades, every scrap of it utter horsefeathers. They took horrendous losses grinding the Germans to powder through attrition. It is physically impossible to do either let alone both, by running away all the time. It is pure slander.

The service life of the average fighter-bomber was on the order of 35 missions. In the best circumstances it might hit 50. Individual planes sometimes lasted longer, purely probabilistically, but that was the average life, with some going down faster for every one that lasted longer.

Nobody getting their ideas of WW II air combat from flight sims in which they always encounter gobs of enemy and respawn any time anything does wrong, has the slightest idea what it was actually like for a typical pilot. There was a lot more routine flying, occasional bombing, losses to flak. The air combats that did occur were far less often pursued to the total destruction of a side. The results were also quite permanent.

[c3k]

Guys,

Fighter combat is VERY different than ground combat. I'll leave it as an exercise for someone else to get the hard numbers, but the VAST majority of fighter victories were the result of one combatant seeing and engaging an unaware opponent. By VAST, it's on the order of 90%. It is quite difficult to close with and destroy an enemy who is aware of your approach.

Put a Soviet unit in the air. Destroy the leader who has the only transmitter. Put a flight of four Germans against the survivors. Allow the Germans to coordinate their attacks. They can team up against selected Soviets at will.

Skill has little to do with that fight. It comes down to coordination.

Regards,

Ken

[SlowMotion]

Radios were not needed as badly during WW1, because the whole air war was just starting. During those days radios were heavier and plane engines a lot weaker. So pilots wanted to get more performance by getting rid of extra weight. And if things worked well enough without radios, why use them?

Air war developed a lot during WW2 and several of those advances included better ways of coordinating pilots. During Battle of Britain British pilots could be guided towards bomber fleets once those had been located using radar. This was much more effective when fighters could take off, get altitude and later still be directed to needed location if needed. How could you do this without radio?

Germans had a similar system during later years when guiding their fighters to intercept allied bombers. This even though many of their own aces had been against radio usage during the first couple of years of WW2.

[Dook]

There was recently an excellent discussion on the topic of World War II aces on the H-War discussion list. I have pasted in the following post, which I found to be very insightful. It addressess many of the issues, such as the availability of targets, training levels of opponents, number of missions flown, raised by others above. Apologies for the length.

"I believe that sheer target availability had something to do with the high scores of many Luftwaffe aces on the eastern front. By 1943 the Soviets were producing warplanes at the rate of something like 1,500 per month. Obviously, competent pilots cannot be produced so quickly,but Stalin was hardly the sort to let all those planes sit on the ground while the German Army still occupied a huge chunk of European Russia. At any rate, the approach of sheer mass had served the Red Army reasonably well when applied to infantry, artillery, and armor--why not aircraft as well? Hurling huge masses of planes, many of them with inexperienced and barely-competent pilots, into ground-support tasks whenever possible meant that a skilled opponent might have a field day. And many German pilots apparently did just that--Erich Rudorffer reportedly shot down 13 planes in a single mission in November 1943, during an action lasting only 17 minutes: in October 1944, Rudorffer shot down nine planes in a single flight, so the first was no fluke (he added two more on a second mission to make it 11 for the day). Emil Lang was credited with 18 victories in a single day, in which he flew three missions.

These occasions correspond directly to some of the experiences of US Navy pilots in 1944, when the Japanese were also putting up a lot of pilots with rudimentary (at best) training. On McCampbell's famous flight in which he shot down nine Japanese in October '44 (the single most successful US fighter mission of the war), he noted afterwards that the enemy pilots just kept flying in formation as if nothing was happening, as that was apparently the extent of what they had been trained to do, while he picked them off with relative ease. I read of one pilot during the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" who was shuttling his F6F two miles from one carrier to another--not intended to even be a combat mission, but it occurred during a Japanese attack on the US fleet-- and he shot down three enemy planes on the way! Given a lot of poorly-trained pilots who came at you in mass (and who might well be flying inferior aircraft as well), such results are not necessarily astonishing.

Another contributing factor was the sheer volume of combat missions flown by Luftwaffe pilots. Johnny Johnson flew 515 combat missions 1941-45, if I recall correctly. The top Soviet ace, Kozhedub, flew 520 missions 1943-45 in amassing his 62 recorded victories. The top US ace, Richard Bong, flew 275 combat missions on two tours of duty in the Pacific, credited with 40 "kills." There was a de facto ceiling on the number of missions American fighter pilots would be allowed to fly-- usually after 250 to 400 missions,they were grounded. One low-ranking American ace who flew 283 missions during the war only fired his guns on 19 of them!

Meanwhile, on the German side, Hartmann flew 1,400+ combat missions 1942-45, and was actually engaged on some 800 occasions! Barkhorn, who had been flying since 1940, recorded 2,000 missions during the war (and engaged in actual combat on more than half of them). The German practice of basing their short-legged fighters as close to the front as possible, and of then having pilots fly multiple daily missions (sometimes as many as six or seven per day) as a regular routine further maximized the opportunities for Luftwaffe fighter pilots.

However, a "target-rich" environment and repeated daily sorties had a down side, too. What seems to have ensued was a vicious natural selection process, wherein a certain percentage of pilots survived, learned, and became highly successful; while an increasing number of "beginners" failed to survive very long. Even by 1942-43, I've read that in some German fighter units in the east, two out of three replacement pilots were killed or disabled before they shot down even a single enemy plane. I saw a TV interview with Gunther Rall in which he stated that by fall 1944, the average "life-span" of a new pilot was three missions before being killed (this was however in the west, where by comparison the opposing Allied pilots tended to be very well-trained).

And, of course, even the Luftwaffe "Experten" in most cases were more than a little lucky, in that they survived their own "learning experiences." Hartmann, for instance, was shot down 16 times in less than three years (and forced down three other times by colliding with debris from his victims, as his trademark was closing to point-blank range). Most pilots who lasted long enough had similar experiences (I mentioned previously that Barkhorn was shot down twice in 1940 without scoring). Adolf Galland was shot down two or three times on the same day! The top 15 German fighter pilots of the war were all credited with over 200 victories, a mark not reached (or even approached) by any non-Luftwaffe pilot. But the number 15 man on that list, Helmut Lipfert, was shot down 13 times en route to that total, all these incidents coming in the east (and all but two of them by Soviet ground fire, which was another "occupational hazard," and not only in the east-- I've read that more P-51s were lost to AAA on strafing missions than in combat with Luftwaffe fighters). Also, the same "natural selection" was at work on the Soviet side-- as the war progressed, they too had a growing core of survivors who had become proficient predators, and

their fighter tactics also became generally more effective as a result of lessons learned.

Of course, there were still a lot of inexperienced,inadequately-trained pilots on the Soviet side, right up until the end (as evidenced by the fact that even in early 1945 there were reports of Sturmoviks forming "Lufberry circles" when attacked-- a crude but often effective defensive tactic which was not far short of desperation, as it forfeited all hope of either accomplishing the mission or even escaping, in favor of trying to stay alive until the attackers gave up and went away. The number four German ace of the war, Otto Kittel, was killed when attacking a Lufberry circle of Sturmoviks in February 1945) So,despite an enemy equipped with increasingly better aircraft, and with more and more of their own experienced, "expert" fliers, opportunities existed for the top German pilots in the east right up until the end. Although Hartmann once chafed at a person who asked if victories were "easier" in the east, saying something to the extent of "30 of us against 200 or 300 Russians--does that sound "easy" to you?"

Having said of of this, one must still also wonder about just how accurate the German victory claims in the east really were. The Germans have stressed how difficult it was to have a "kill" verified and credited, but it is hard to see how an overly rigorous verification process could have functioned in the conditions of the eastern front, especially in the second half of the war. And it is also hard not to assume that the same pattern of overclaiming seen in virtually every other phase of air combat in World War II would not be operative here as well. After all, the Luftwaffe pilots flew the same numbers of missions-- and had plenty of targets--in the west as well, and don't seem to have done nearly as well. That brings us back, full-circle, to the theory that not only the numbers of targets, but the quality of the opposition (in terms of tactics and training,especially, as by 1944 the Soviets had some very good fighter planes in operation with the La-7, Yak-3, and even the La-5FN, the latter introduced mid-43) was central to the paradigm of why Luftwaffe pilots ran up such high scores in the east."

[undead reindeer cavalry]

Soviets really did wage war like lemmings. it was an achievement of its own kind, for which the Soviet soldier deserves respect & praise.

to deny the Soviet lemming achievement is no better than writing off Soviet attitudes & deeds with racist nonsense.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

Originally posted by Dook:

Having said of of this, one must still also wonder about just how accurate the German victory claims in the east really were.

And it is also hard not to assume that the same pattern of overclaiming seen in virtually every other phase of air combat in World War II would not be operative here as well. After all, the Luftwaffe pilots flew the same numbers of missions-- and had plenty of targets--in the west as well, and don't seem to have done nearly as well. That brings us back, full-circle, to the theory that not only the numbers of targets, but the quality of the opposition (in terms of tactics and training,especially, as by 1944 the Soviets had some very good fighter planes in operation with the La-7, Yak-3, and even the La-5FN, the latter introduced mid-43) was central to the paradigm of why Luftwaffe pilots ran up such high scores in the east."

regarding overclaiming, you can always compare German numbers to how other nations did against Soviets. for example Finns managed to score 16:1 kill ratios against Soviets with such aircraft like Fokker D XXI (with better planes like Brewsters the kill ratios were twice higher). this when Soviets had enormous numerical superiority.

[Andreas]

Dook

Quite amusing to read that post after heaving read the interview on 'lend-lease airforce'. The same notions are expressed in both, just not about the same side.

All the best

Andreas

[Shmavis]

Andreas, is that "heaving" or "having"? The Luftwaffe counted aircraft destroyed on the ground toward kills, in case it hasn't been mentioned. Wow. This thread has gone far off-topic.

[MOS was 71331]

I met a retired Luftwaffe fighter pilot in Munich in 1984, the father of a German girl I was dating. He told me he had flown 262s in the last few months of the war. He claimed he had shot down 12 planes for a net of plus 7, because he'd been shot down 5 times. He said he had met one US pilot who had shot him down in the hospital where they'd both been taken that day. As far as I was concerned, his most interesting victory was knocking down a Lancaster he'd encountered in a day mission. (He'd never flown night missions.)

[Bigduke6]

Slow Motion,

That Golodnikov article is incredible. Thank you for the link.

[Guest Mike]

Scores are of course dependant upon the system teh country used for confirmation of each "kill".

the Russians only counted those witnessed from outside the dogfight or which crashed in their own territory.

Kozedubh may have had as many as 40 additional kills if other means had been allowed.

The myth of Soviet pilot incompetance is obviously widely spred.

In 1943 the VVS gained general air superiority over the entire Eastern front. Vast numbers of a/c were produced because the conditios on that front were very poor and a lot of aircraft were destroyed in accidents or could not be repaired - relatively simple contruction techniques notwithstanding.

1500 a/c/month is too low a figure BTW - the Russians produced approx 25,000 in 1942, 35,000 in 1943 and 40,000 in 1944.

And if they had problems then presumably so did the Luftwaffe - German a/c production was approx 15000 in 1942, 25,000 in 1943 and 40,000 in 1944.

The ida that forming defensive circles indicates poor training is absolute bollocks - it is a sensible defensive move by a/c that are outclassed in air-to-air combat, such as the ELITE Zertroyer Me-110 units in 1940 over England!!

Bombers in all theatres would abandon their mission in the face of excessive opposition - of course for some "excessive" was more or less than for others, but to use thsi example as evidence of poor training is laughable.

[Bastables]

Originally posted by Stalin's Organist:

Scores are of course dependant upon the system teh country used for confirmation of each "kill".

the Russians only counted those witnessed from outside the dogfight or which crashed in their own territory.

Kozedubh may have had as many as 40 additional kills if other means had been allowed.

The myth of Soviet pilot incompetance is obviously widely spred.

In 1943 the VVS gained general air superiority over the entire Eastern front. Vast numbers of a/c were produced because the conditios on that front were very poor and a lot of aircraft were destroyed in accidents or could not be repaired - relatively simple contruction techniques notwithstanding.

German Claim system is very simialr to the VVS one. both required verifcation by someone other than the Shooter, other pilots ground troops aircraft wearage. OKL also rounded down claims by 50% intially before investigating/verfying a confirmed kill.

VVS overclimed by a much larger scale if you compare VVS claims vurses OKL losses and OKL claim vurses VVS losses there is a very large disparity in overclaiming prior to investigation even though both organisations use similiar verfication crieteria.

Let's look at Kursk the defensive phase as STAVAK knew it and operation Zitedlle as the OKW knew it.

Luftwaffe 1 Air Division 5-15 july: 94 losses

VIII Aircorp 5-15 july: 99 losses

OKL recived 923 victory claims for the 5-15 July period.

VVS losses in the Kursk area 5-8 july : 566

VVS recived claims for 5-8 july of 878 victory claims

note the vast discrepency of kills claimed before anbody investigates.

[Guest Mike]

Claim are not the same as awards tho.

the VVS system was not just "someone other than the shooter" witnessign the claim - other pilots in eth same flight didn't count so one of the primary means that many other nations used wasn't available.

VVS attacks on 5 July started with attacks on airfields and encountered heavy flak and fighter defences because the Germans were expecting them. The attacks failed and a lot of Soviet a/c were lost to flak and interceptors.

Comparison of pure numbers is pointless, because they do nto give any information on the nature of the losses

[JasonC]

Neither claims nor awards mean anything to me. Only losses reported by the losing side are remotely believeable. Incidentally, the evidence is that Russian claims were vastly more inflated, and German ones were only highly inflated. Neither can be taken, even remotely, at face value.

[JonS]

Originally posted by Bastables:

stuff

w00t!!1! He lives. Long time no see buddy. Drop me an email, you hermit.

[Andreas]

Originally posted by Bastables:

German Claim system is very simialr to the VVS one. both required verifcation by someone other than the Shooter, other pilots ground troops aircraft wearage. OKL also rounded down claims by 50% intially before investigating/verfying a confirmed kill.

That is directly at odds with the Golodnikov interview linked to above.

Originally posted by Bastables:

Let's look at Kursk the defensive phase as STAVAK knew it and operation Zitedlle as the OKW knew it.

Luftwaffe 1 Air Division 5-15 july: 94 losses

VIII Aircorp 5-15 july: 99 losses

OKL recived 923 victory claims for the 5-15 July period.

VVS losses in the Kursk area 5-8 july : 566

VVS recived claims for 5-8 july of 878 victory claims

note the vast discrepency of kills claimed before anbody investigates.

SO is right (much as it pains me to say that), you need to subtract out losses to non-combat and AAA/other ground forces before being able to make a straight comparison of claims vs. losses.

To my knowledge, nobody has ever investigated German AAA claims on the eastern front (or anywhere else for that matter). I have been led to believe that they claimed roughly similar numbers as the pilots. Which would mean that together they probably destroyed twice as many planes as the VVS ever fielded.

All the best

Andreas