Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Erkki]

No need to get hostile...

And I have no clue what that list you are posting is.  However it looks like the selected victories of a certain pilot or group.  I dont even know where to begin in pointing out the number of biases that shows.

The same unit I mentioned earlier, JG 26. Any accusations of bias in reading diaries, statistics and facts cross-checking can be pointed towards Donald L. Galdwell. He has a reference list but its rather lengthy and I'd prefer to not copy it here...


Edit: I just really dont think that it is in any way meaningful to look at full casualties only. Every air force overclaimed kills by factor of 1,5:1 to 4:1 or so and a large part of losses have always been outside of combat. Then theres the whole thing of plane quality being just one of thousands of factors playing, albeit usually(or always) one of the most important ones.

Yeah Germans overclaimed too(here you see Galdwell notice that out of 160 claims only 100 were later approved and confirmed and the true number was probably at least a bit lower), but the Germans at least had a detailed bureaucratic system for confirming victories(there needed to be a wreck, an eyewitness or some other means of proof). Not as good as gun cameras, but better than widow's pension depending on rank, medals and kill count like for a long time in the Soviet Union.

[mainiac]

Air unit AARs for air to air combat are useless unless corroborated against the other sides AAR.  And using a single unit as representative of overall trends is the sort of thing that actually does make me angry so please dont do that.

PLEASE look at the goddamn numbers for allied reports on lost hurricanes, De502 and He75 in Air to Air combat.  I think you will be quite surprised.

[Erkki]

British alone lost 120 Hurricanes. Planes operating across the channel dont get overrun in bases. Do you want the reference list so you can cross check yourself? Notice that my summary(from the book) already has 60 claims filtered out. Because they didn't happen. Overclaiming has already been taken into account.

[Dorsidwarf]

Air unit AARs for air to air combat are useless unless corroborated against the other sides AAR.  And using a single unit as representative of overall trends is the sort of thing that actually does make me angry so please dont do that.

PLEASE look at the goddamn numbers for allied reports on lost hurricanes, De502 and He75 in Air to Air combat.  I think you will be quite surprised.

Just to mention, you have been coming off as pretty hostile. I dont think you mean to so *shrug*

[Lord Shonus]

Air unit AARs for air to air combat are useless unless corroborated against the other sides AAR.  And using a single unit as representative of overall trends is the sort of thing that actually does make me angry so please dont do that.

PLEASE look at the goddamn numbers for allied reports on lost hurricanes, De502 and He75 in Air to Air combat.  I think you will be quite surprised.

To explain (not to maniac specifically) why this is true:

Imagine that a flight of five fighters from each side meet each other in a head on fight, it turns into a free-for-all dogfight, and a given Allied pilot has fairly bad luck. In the first pass, he takes a hit to the engine that stalls it out, sending him into a flat spin. He's high enough up that he can get the engine restarted and regains control. Shortly after this, another burst sets his left wing on fire, but the wing fuel tanks are leaking so bad that the fire quickly starves. Just as he gets under control to perform an emergency landing, an Axis pilot settles behind his damaged plane and turns it into a fireball. The remaining planes -all damaged- break off due to lack of fuel, and the Axis squadron commander confidently claims his men three kills, all of which are confirmed by other pilots. Meanwhile, the Allies only lost a single plane. Is the Axis lying?

No. In this hypothetical battle, the planes from both sides are snapping off short bursts at any opportunity, and three seperate pilots watched their bullets inflict what should have been (and probably would have eventually, but the pilot might have salvaged something from the first two) fatal - a stalled plane spinning out of the sky, a plane covered in flame, and one simply exploded. Even in such a small fight, there's no way for them to tell that that was the same plane each time, and each sighting should have been a kill. Thus, they believed that three planes were destroyed. That's before you get into pilots seeing things from different angles and thinking they're different events in the debriefing.

Scale this up to a full-sized battle, with dozens or hundreds of aircraft per side.  It's extremely easy to think that you killed many more aircraft than you actually did. The solution here is to look at the records from both sides - if the Axis claim 3 kills, and the Allies have "1 destroyed, 4 damaged", something is wrong.

[Erkki]

Its almost impossible/impossible to get sources that actually distinguish losses between combat losses and others, let alone ones that differentiate claims and approved/confirmed victories. This is why I quoted the JG 26. There are some units that I can give numbers for the entire war.

Even if you remove the bomber and recon kills and and then some more you end up with over 2:1 kill ratio against Spitfires, Hurricanes and H75s of which the first one especially is not exactly a sub par opponent for Bf 109 E, good part of the victories being scored during escort missions where the fighters had been tied to staying with the bombers. JG26 didnt exactly have it easy compared to the units that either just hung back or fought in the South and didnt see a glance of a Spitfire.

Of course its just one regiment during a limited time. This time. I can compile more and if wished do cross-checks of my own against RAF/USAAF/V-VS units at least for individual battles or campaigns, it just takes time.

[mainiac]

The solution here is to look at the records from both sides - if the Axis claim 3 kills, and the Allies have "1 destroyed, 4 damaged", something is wrong.

If you want to try and assess individual actions look at both sides.  If you just want a general picture all you need to see is the number of planes both sides listed as lost in combat.  This is certainly not a comprehensive picture but an intelligent person can use this information, guided by proper skepticism, to learn something.  That's a lot more then can be said for the AARs.

That is why I keep asking Erkki to LOOK AT THE NUMBER OF PLANES THE BRITISH AND FRENCH LISTED AS LOST.

Even if you remove the bomber and recon kills and and then some more you end up with over 2:1 kill ratio

No then you end up with me angry because I and Shonus have explained to you that you are using a shit metric that means NOTHING and you keep citing it.

Anyway, I'm ignoring you and will respond to no further posts you make.

[Strife26]

Mainiac, you're being more than a little hostile for little profit.

[mainiac]

Well I'm done with it now.

[Dorsidwarf]

The solution here is to look at the records from both sides - if the Axis claim 3 kills, and the Allies have "1 destroyed, 4 damaged", something is wrong.

If you want to try and assess individual actions look at both sides.  If you just want a general picture all you need to see is the number of planes both sides listed as lost in combat.  This is certainly not a comprehensive picture but an intelligent person can use this information, guided by proper skepticism, to learn something.  That's a lot more then can be said for the AARs.

That is why I keep asking Erkki to LOOK AT THE NUMBER OF PLANES THE BRITISH AND FRENCH LISTED AS LOST.

Even if you remove the bomber and recon kills and and then some more you end up with over 2:1 kill ratio

No then you end up with me angry because I and Shonus have explained to you that you are using a shit metric that means NOTHING and you keep citing it.

Anyway, I'm ignoring you and will respond to no further posts you make.

What exactly is shit about his metric? Pilots of both sides were well-known to have both deliberately and accidentally inflated their kill-count, and records of "destroyed vs damaged" aren't much better.

That's not even going into "What do you count a plane with half a tail shot off which went into a death-spiral into the cloud layer, then managed to pull up beneath and make a controlled landing?"
After all, the pilot who shot it down will count it as a kill, the pilot who survived wouldn't count himself as a kill, and if the plane was only badly damaged, it might not even be counted as a loss.

In a situation with large and uncertain bias in both directions, taking an average isn't much more likely to be more accurate than picking one or the other.

[mainiac]

What exactly is shit about his metric? Pilots of both sides were well-known to have both deliberately and accidentally inflated their kill-count, and records of "destroyed vs damaged" aren't much better.

You asked and answered your question there.

We do however have very good data on the reverse.  All nations kept records about the planes they actually had available.  So saying that the French wrote off around 87 De520 and 29 H75 might not be perfectly accurate or consistant but it's like night and day in terms of accuracy compared to an AAR.

[Erkki]

Lol, allright. Well, dont then provide anything yourself. Numbers lost =/= numbers lost in combat =/= numbers lost in air combat =/= numbers lost in air combat in fighter vs. fighter battles. You cant just plain combat losses or you end up with stuff like F6F having kill ratio of close to 1:1 against the Japanese when its in reality something in the order of 8:1 against non-kamikaze fighters and 10-15:1 overall, overclaiming accounted for. Do you want the other side of the numbers or not?

Full French-Benelux campaign losses for RAF were 80-ish Spitfires and 120 Hurricanes. No Spitfires in France so they all fought over the Channel and Dunkerque, facing mainly JG 26 and JG 53. 42 Spitfires lost during Dynamo alone. Your Wikipedia numbers. But what does one do with that figure when the % of air losses against fighters is unknown? It could be mere 50%.

[Sheb]

Yeah, mainiac, I don't know why you feel the need to shout at the guy who brought the more data here.

[mainiac]

Because treating data as saying something that it doesn't say is a bad thing.  It gets us further from the truth, not closer.  Doing a bad thing on a greater scale is not more praiseworthy, it's worse.

[Sheb]

Except that he's bringing the best data he has, and you're bringing nothing.