Fighter pilot claims & validations?
Erik Shilling
Subject: Fighter pilot claims & validations?
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 1997 17:29:36 -0400
d...@christa.unh.ed Dan Ford wrote:
>I would be grateful to know of any and all references to the
>question of how claims made by and credited to fighter pilots in
>any air force stood up when postwar records became available.
snip
This is in reply to Ford's request for any information regarding
studies made by the military concerning information regarding
claims of Japanese, German, British, and American fighter pilots,
compared to actual aircraft destroyed during WW II. Perhaps the
the following information may be what you are looking for.
Knowing your deep interest regarding the Flying Tigers, and
assuming you have a burning desire for the truth, I have also
included his comments concerning this group in its entirety. The
letter was from a History professor, who had taught at the Air
Force Academy in Colorado, and is now a professor of history at
Ohio State University.
I posed the following question to Dr. Guilmartin, "Why do you
think the AVG was so disliked by some in the military, especially
during the time when the AVG was de-activated, and why there are
those today trying their best to rewrite history in an attempt to
put the Japanese in a more Favorable light?"
Quoting from the professor's letter:
"The best I can do to explain the wishy-washy treatment (I am
being charitable) one author gave the Flying Tigers is to say that
ever since the "anti-war" movement took over on campus during the
vietnam war, it has been an "in" in academia to be anti-military.
I have also found, most recently while working on a study of the
impact of airpower on the Gulf War for the Secretary of the Air
Force, that even within the military non-aviators simply don't
understand professional integrity as we do. I guess what I mean
by that is that while we all remember things that didn't happen
quite the way we remembered them - combat is like that - decep-
tion by a combat aviator, lying in other word, is very rare and
the liars are generally known and stigmatized.
A factor in the Air Forces hostility toward the Tigers. Chennault
embarrassed the regulars so badly that they couldn't admit how
right he was and how wrong they were with regard to training and
tactics. They covered their tracts by minimizing the AVG's
accomplishments. It's a subtle bias, but it shows in the official
histories if you know what you're looking for.
An example from personal experience: as a young captain teaching
history at the Air Force Academy I was involved in the oral
history program, and one of the first interviews I participated
in was that of General J.P. McConnell, who was Chief of staff
during the mid-60s. I and another young Captain involved in the
interview were sons of pre-war Randolph graduates who had bounced
back and forth between the Air Corps and the flying business and
knew many of the Tigers. We were also aware of what a cruddy job
the Air Corps had done developing and teaching air-to-air tac-
tics. One or the other of us asked McConnell about the AVG, and
his reply was telling: A bunch of reserve officers one step ahead
of the Sheriff." If it's any consolation, the Lafayette
Escadrille got the same sorry treatment from the air Service in
1917 that you got from the AAF in 1942. I guess some things never
change."
"I haven't studied World War II in the Far East. but I have done
a lot of reading and teaching on airpower and on World War II in
general, and my conclusion is that the Tigers's claims are
probably pretty close to the mark. Back in the late '50s when the
twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain was coming up,
there was a big debate in Britain over the supposedly inflated
claims of the RAF fighter Jocks. British academia doesn't suffer
from on ingrained, across the board anti-military bias that ours
does, and after some serious archival research the conclusion
that emerge was very interesting.
The correlation between German losses and Fighter Command con-
firmed claims was extremely close, day in and day out. In fact,
the jocks's kill claims were about 10-15% high - aircraft seen
going into clouds trailing smoke where the fire subsequently went
out: two pilots firing on, damaging, and claiming the same
aircraft without knowing of each other: etc.:etc. - but German
losses to flack and operational wastage, notably landing acci-
dents, made up the difference. (unlike the Japanese, who suppos-
edly lost all the records of their outfits that fought against
the Flying Tigers in Southeast China, Burma and Thailand.)
With full wisdom of hindsight, the British fighter pilots'
confirmed claims were the best single measure of German losses
and the only accurate one. To reinforce the point, air-to-air
kills were the biggest single source of German losses, and the
others;, only landing accidents were consistently a major one
taken in isolation. It is abundantly clear that near-kills and
survivable battle damage inflicted by British fighters clearly
drove operational wastage. To put it in concrete terms, who - or
what - gets credit for the German bomber with battle damage which
crashed on landing? How about the Me-109 pilot who got scared and
disoriented in combat, ran himself out of fuel and had to bail
out? What about the Me-109 pilot who tangled with Spitfires and
got off without a scratch, but was so drained emotionally and
physically by the experience that he lost his concentration and
washed out his gear on landing? All three are technically opera-
tional wastage, but none would have happened without air-to-air
combat.
I expect the same kind of relation between confirmed air-to-air
kill claims and enemy losses will prove to be true of the AVG. If
anything, I would be inclined to suspect that your confirmed
kills understated Japanese losses in light of the fragility of
Japanese aircraft, the primitive condition of most of their
fields, Japanese supply and maintenance problems, the hugh
distances by European standards and the wretched weather.
End of letter.
Since All Japanese records concerning their combat against the
Flying Tigers was destroyued by them. Regretfully there are
absolutly no Japanese records available.
Erik Shilling
Dan Ford
Thank you, Erik, but I was hoping for something a bit more concrete. A
book, a magazine article, a record-group citation.
I am interested in all forces, all theaters of operation, 1939-1945. It
seems incredible, but evidently no one has ever made such a study. I had
great hopes for Colonel or Professor Guilmartin, but evidently no trace
of his work remains but a letter to you.
In my experience, the Public Records Office in Kew outside London has the
most accessible documentation for this period. Does anyone have record
group citations for (for example) comparisons of British fighter pilot
claims as validated by German records, and vice versa?
- Dan / http://www.cris.com/~danford
(To reply to me, remove the ** from my return address)
Emmanuel.Gustin
Erik Shilling (eri...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
: Quoting from the professor's letter:
: ever since the "anti-war" movement took over on campus during the
: vietnam war, it has been an "in" in academia to be anti-military.
Political tendencies could affect the interpretation, but not
the raw figures, so I think this is irrelevant. Let's keep
politics out of this, or the level of this discussion will
spiral downwards.
: "I haven't studied World War II in the Far East. but I have done
: a lot of reading and teaching on airpower and on World War II in
: general, and my conclusion is that the Tigers's claims are
: probably pretty close to the mark.
Meaning that he doesn't know, but is willing to make an
(educated) guess. His guess is as good as any, I suppose,
but it hasn't the value of actual data.
: The correlation between German losses and Fighter Command con-
: firmed claims was extremely close, day in and day out.
As this is contradicted by all other publications on the BoB
that I have ever seen (most of them British), I wonder what the
source for this claim is. Prof. Guilmartin must have read it
somewhere --- but where?
: Since All Japanese records concerning their combat against the
: Flying Tigers was destroyued by them. Regretfully there are
: absolutly no Japanese records available.
Can someone explain to me what these famous "lost records"
exactly were? That "all Japanese records" were lost seems
impossible, as several authors have quoted from Japanese
documents relating to this period, listing units, aircraft,
pilots, and losses. So there seems to be a partial, not
a complete, loss of records. Which ones were lost?
Emmanuel Gustin
Erik Shilling
Erik Shilling
Dan Ford
On 11 Jun 1997, Erik Shilling wrote:
> My source that Japanese records concerning their battles against
> the AVG is Daniel Ford's own book the Flying Tigers and Chennault.
>
> ON PAGE 369 IS THE FOLLOWING WHICH I QUOTE, "That Curiously the
> Japanese records of the battles over Burma were destroyed by them
> (Japanese)
That sentence does not appear on p 369 or any other page of my book.
> AFTER SPENDING NINE MONTHS IN JAPAN, WHY DID YOU WRITE THIS?
To my regret, I have never been in Japan.
> Curiously I have never seen in any of your writing that gives the
> number of AVG that were lost to the Japanese. How about giving their
> official version of AVG shot down. This is very interesting, since it
> will show the unbelievable extent of their lies.
Look again. Japanese army pilots over Burma routinely overclaimed by a
factor of five. I mention several such occasions. They were probably not
lying, any more than the Flying Tigers were lying when they overclaimed.
There is a page on my website which helps explain why Japanese fighter
pilots were especially given to overclaiming.
> >Yasuda, Yoshito
> >He was claimed to have been killed by Duke Hedman and Shuck Older
> >but lives to tell his side of the story.
You aren't quoting me here, but never mind; it's close enough
> This is not true.
> This is the problem I find with most non military types. Their
> misunderstanding of the terms used by the military. Claiming a kill
> does not refer to the PILOT, but that the aircraft was destroyed.
They claimed they shot it down and one pilot said he saw it burning on the
ground. They were wrong. Yasuda flew back several hundred miles to Loiwing
and landed his plane on his home field. Reading the combat reports and
Yasuda's account, there is no possibly that this was any other engagement.
(Incidentally, Yasuda had no ammunition in that dogfight.)
I am certainly not a military type, but I served in the U.S. Army for
about the same length of time as you did, Erik.
> Final question. Without exception you have taken the word of
> Japanese as gospel. Never once have you sided with the Americans.
Nonsense. Since I was alive in those years, I despise both the Germans and
the Japanese for what they did to the people unfortunate to fall into
their hands. See my website for Colonel Tsuji, Outram Road prison camp,
and of course the Holocaust. Also look back on the postings on this
newsgroup. The question you should ask yourself, Erik, is why you are so
willing to leap to the defense of the German air force while dismissing
every Japanese accomplishment as a lie.
If there were a cult of the Japanese air forces on this newsgroup, as
there is a Luftwaffe cult, you can bet your underwear that I would be
posting hot and heavy on the subject. But there isn't. Virtually everyone
is willing to hear you praise Erich Hartmann as a noble knight of Germany,
while dismissing Yoshita Yasuda as a liar. Yasuda was a good pilot, he saw
a hell of a lot more combat than you did, and he deserves your respect.
(I am still interested in citations on fighter pilot claims as validated
by enemy losses. Books, magazine articles, archives. Anybody? Thanks!)
Emmanuel.Gustin
Erik Shilling (eri...@ix.netcom.com) wrote:
: MY quarrel is with those who continually write about, and use as an
: "accepted fact," this 3 to 1 theory based upon baseless evidence.
: Have these experts whose studies that are being so freely quoted,
: actually studied the military archives of German and British combat
: reports, which include pilots combat reports that include their
: claims as well as the air force's actual losses.
For the Battle of Britain? Of course it has been done! Probably it has
even been done a few times too often.
As Dr. Guilmartin wrote: The controversy about the kill claims in the
battle of Britain raged in the 1950s. It began in 1947, when the records
of the German Quartermaster-General were published. These were the
official German figures of the losses, as reported by the combat units.
The Quartermaster-General was in charge of replacements, so units did not
have a motivation to downplay their losses.
Those records show that the German loss of aircraft in the Battle of
Britain (taken over the "official" length of the battle) was 1733. The RAF
claims over the same period totalled 2698. That inevitably means that the
RAF overclaimed by at least 56%. Probably more, assuming that of those
1733 some were lost to other causes.
Similarly, German sources listed their official claims, which could be
compared to RAF records. The latter are still available from the Public
Records Office.
Since 1957, the figures have been refined and detailed by the work of a
seemingly endless series of authors, who studied the reports of both
sides. In their history of the BoB, Hough and Richards (the former is a
1941-1945 RAF fighter pilot, the latter the author of the offical 1939-45
RAF history) mention "The Defence of the United Kingdom" (official
history, published by HMSO in 1957), "Battle over Britain" (by Francis K.
Mason, 1969), and a series of "After the Battle" publications. The
official records of both sides have now been thoroughly studied -- the BoB
must be the most studied battle in history. But the result has not
fundamentally changed.
So it is hard to explain how Dr. Guilmartin can, starting from the same
records, prove the opposite. But it seems his report does not apply to the
Battle of Britain itself, but covers a longer period.
: They are contradictory Because Dr. Guilmartin uses military
: archives as his source, and the others went out and counted wrecks
: to prove their point. (Very scientific??)
A wreck count is not unscientific if you can estimate a "wreck find ratio"
that gives the relation between found wrecks and actual lost aircraft.
Proper use of statistics (many pitfalls there) can produce reliable
estimates --- preferably with an error bar.
However, the evaluation of BoB claims is based not on wreck counts, but on
the comparison of the official records of both sides. It has been that way
since 1947.
: Apparently you did not read Guilmartin's complete letter. He was
I seem to have missed the post of the entire letter. I have only
seen a post with a number of quotes. The way my NNTPSERVER deals
with the storage of messages is mysterious.
: Many of you apparently do not understand the vital importance
: accurate information is to the military.
I perfectly understand that. But I do not accept that it implies that the
military actually HAS accurate information. The distinction is important.
The problem of compiling accurate data is universal. Wandering off topic:
During WWII the US general staff worked with the "Joint Army-Navy
Committee on Assessment of Loss or Damage on Enemy Naval or Merchant
Vessels." JANAC mainly had to verify claims by submarines, and according
to John Prados (author of "Combined Fleet Decoded", an "intelligence
history" of the Pacific war) it did a good job. But on the same pages he
dismisses the actual claims of the submarines, AFTER approval by the USN
command, as "of doubtful authenticity, hardly a reliable source".
: This is easily proven. Try to locate the Japanese combat records
: concerning their Burma, Thailand, and Southwestern China against
: the AVG. The written records of the British and AVG, are still
: available.
Actually I have an article written by Bernard Baeza in which he compares,
for certain days, the RAF and AVG records with the information that is
still available from Japanese sources. He does not describe how clear the
remaining Japanese records are, except in some cases ("Les archives
Nipponnes sont formelles"). But he repeatedly complains that the RAF and
AVG records, and the non-official memories of AVG members, all contradict
each other!
: My source is Japanese leading living Ace, Saburo Sakai.
Is he still alive? I thought he had died a few years ago.
: Who
: incidently admits the Japanese over grossly claimed their victories
: and under Claimed their losses.
In public, certainly. The Japanese Navy would not even admit its real
losses to the Japanese Army. And that victories were inflated is well
known. It was even to the Japanese.
John Prados writes:
"Both [Admiral Toyoda and air commander Fukudome] were familiar with the
tendency for aircrews to overestimate results. Toyoda automatically cut
claims by half; Fukudome insisted that an elite unit like the T Attack
force ought to be credited with at least a third of what it claimed."
[The claim under discussion was 11 sunken aircraft carriers and 8 damaged,
2 sunken battleships and 2 damaged, and so on. In fact the only result had
been damage to two cruisers.]
But they still had to write their real losses down in reports. And as you
wrote, accurate information is vital to the military. (Even to the
Japanese military.) At most the cause of losses could be changed, from
combat to accident. There are witnesses that this was done by some German
units near the end of the war. (Apparently, the command complained that
pilots were taking too many risks with their precious aircraft, and local
commanders found no better answer than to falsify the records.) I don't
know on what scale this was done.
: To paraphrase Winston Churchill. "Why are so many so eager to trash
: those who help save their ass?"
I don't think that an attempt to verify the facts by using the available
data can be considered trashing.
Emmanuel Gustin
CDB100620
On the subject of the importance of accurate intelligence to military
planners and their actual possession of it, the raids on Rabaul in the
fall of 1943 provide an interesting example. The 5th AF set out to smash
Japanese air strength (as well as shipping and shore installations) there
and made a determined effort. The best estimates they could make of e/a
destroyed in the air and on the ground between 10 Oct and 11 Nov were 560
aircraft. This was no casually arrived at figure. Attacking aircraft
used both still and motion picture cameras to record the strikes. F5 foto
recon planes flew before and after and sometime during-raid missions and
photographed everything. Of course, crews were debriefed carefully.
Civilian newsmen who accompanied the raiders were also debriefed. And
"Ultra"-type decrypts of radio traffic, coastwatcher observations, etc.,
were all used.
Yet on 11 Nov, allied sitreps indicated the Japanese had 252 aircraft on
Rabaul, just two fewer than they had before the raids began on 10 Oct. So
the Japanese had to have poured in hundreds of replacements. 5AF HQ
figured that the Japanese must have sent something like 1,000 planes to
Rabaul (factoring in operational losses) in the 30-day period, a huge
reinforcement that would have stripped other areas of crucial aircraft.
Yet no trace of such a massive transshipment of aircraft could be
discovered in radio traffic, ship movements, aircraft movements...nothing.
The 5AF fighter pilot claims were probably the most accurate due to the
thorough debriefing, the use of not only gun cameras, but cameras loaded
with color film (black and white film could not handle the contrast
between bright sky and dark jungle), which was easier to interpet, the
observations of bomber crewmen and PR aircraft. Each pilot reviewed his
own gun camera film with intelligence people not once, but many times, the
projector being stopped, backed up, crucial frames reviewed, often prints
made of them and studied with magnifying glasses.
However, the Japanese were fighting over their own territory with four
airfields close at hand. Even a badly damaged fighter had a good chance
of making it to one and landing in a sufficiently large enough piece that
it could be salvaged.
Strike claims by bombers were grossly inflated even by intelligence
analysts, who counted as destroyed aircraft that were apparently put back
in flying condition in short order. The most effective strikes were those
that achieved complete surprise, catching the Japanese aircraft in the
open. These were low-level missions by B-25s unacompanied by B-24s. The
high flying B-24s gave the Japanese, radar-equipped, plenty of warning and
their bombers flew off until after the raid was over and their fighters
had time to get in position to challenge the intruders. The B-25
"gunships" dropping parafrags and WP and straffing with 8 fixed .50s plus
6 swivel guns could wreak havoc on surprised airfields--but just how much
havoc was apparenly overestimated, despite the best efforts to be
conservative in damage assessment.
Japanese records--those that survive, most were burned at the time the war
ended--are problematical in that they contain such phrases as
"self-destroyed" and "not yet returned" that obscure true loss figures.
On the American side, during this month of Rabaul raids, 38 P-38s were
lost, 21 B-25s were lost and 20 B-24s. Causes by percent broke down this
way: P-38s, 27.6 percent to enemy action (including AAA), 34.6 percent to
operational accidents, 37.8 percent to weather; B-24, 40.9 percent to
enemy action, 27.3 percent to operational accidents, 31.8 percent to
weather; B-25, 68 percent to enemy action (illustrating the danger of
low-level attack), 16 percent to operational accidents and 16 percent to
weather.
[I know that when you figure out that 27.6 percent of 38 equals 10.5 you
scratch your head over how half a P-38 could have been shot down, but
that's the way the stats read. It reminds you that official data was
often concocted to impress rear echelon brass (who love breakdowns by
percent because they can use them in meetings to sound knowledgeable) and
may have questionable connection to reality.]
Dan Ford
Emmanuel, you are a wonder. Is it possible that English is your second
language? Are you another Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov? It's not fair
that furriners can write our language better than we can!
On 13 Jun 1997, Emmanuel.Gustin wrote:
(Among other eloquent things)
(his interlocutor being the indefatiable Erik Shilling)
> : My source is Japanese leading living Ace, Saburo Sakai.
>
> Is he still alive? I thought he had died a few years ago.
>
> : Who
> : incidently admits the Japanese over grossly claimed their victories
> : and under Claimed their losses.
>
> In public, certainly. The Japanese Navy would not even admit its real
> losses to the Japanese Army. And that victories were inflated is well
> known. It was even to the Japanese.
One of the amazing things about reading the records of 1941-1942 is how
honest the Japanese news agency Domei's reports were, up until the Battle
of Midway. (After that, they definitely fudged.) Indeed, if you read the
combat bulletins of the major Pacific belligerents, American, British, and
Japanese, and check their admitted loss figures against the postwar
records, you will find no bullfeathers whatsoever--up until June 1942, in
the case of the Japanese.
After Midway, there is a clear sense in the Japanese press that the cause
was lost. All of a sudden there is a rash of stories about gallant
suicide pilots at Pearl Harbor, and of the "War God" Tato Kato of the
army's 64th sentai, as if telling the Japanese people: hey, we're going to
lose, but we will lose more nobly than anyone else in history.
Jarto Niemi
d...@christa.unh.edu Dan Ford wrote:
>I would be grateful to know of any and all references to the question of
>how claims made by and credited to fighter pilots in any air force stood
>up when postwar records became available. I am familiar with some of the
>Battle of Britain combats, and those involving the Japanese air forces in
>the first year of the Pacific War, but I'd like to go beyond that. For
>example, have any Russian records of losses surfaced in the past few years
>that would serve to validate or contradict claims by the German and
>Finnish air forces, or the Japanese army air force in its 1939 border war
>with Russia?
A Finnish aviation historian named Hannu Valtonen (see ref1 & ref2)
is of the opinion that German and Finnish air victory claims contain a
lot of air, especially in the later war years. The Soviet loss figures
that he is using have been derived from the Russian archive records.
It seems that Valtonen has not collected the Soviet data himself but has
used the archive collections and summaries made by Norvegian researcher
Rune Rautio and Russian researchers Juri Rybin and Mihail N. Suprun. As far
as I know they haven't published their results.
Personally, I would like to know more about the Russian records, because
due to my own bias I have difficulties to find the Soviet era records
completely reliable. Anyhow, I think that kill claims of Germans and Finns
are too high, but the question is how much.
Some examples of claims versus losses follow.
Example 1 : Kursk 1943 5.7.-8.7.1943 (ref1)
Actually this cames from a Russian article, so perhaps some
Russian reader might give more info on this.
Hazanov, D: Nad Kurkoi dugoi. Aviatsija i kosmonavtika 7/1993
A= flights, B=nb of destroyed enemy planes , C=own losses
Soviet data German data
A B C A B C
5.7 3385 320 176 4475 425 26
6.7 2800 217 171 2709 205 14
7.7 2770 245 122 3516 177 13
8.7 2280 166 97 2859 116 7
----------------------------------------------------
11235 948 566 13559 923 60
Example 2 : Northern Norway and Finland on 9th October 1944 (ref1)
German :
fighters claimed 85 enemies shot down
losses 9 (1 shot down by enemy fighters, 1 shot down
by AAA, 7 destroyed in the ground by Soviet infantry)
Soviet :
fighters claimed 37 enemies shot down
losses 26 (12 shot down by enemy fighters, 3 shot down by AAA
3 MIA , 3 cause unclear(obscure data), 5 non-combat)
Example 3 : Northern Norway and Finland in May 1942 (ref2)
German claims Soviet losses by Rune Rautio
fighters AAA fighters cause unknown AAA
Hurricane 113 4 38 13 -
MiG-3 17 - - - -
Tomahawk 9 - 11 2 1
Pe-2/-3 6 4 5 1 -
SB-2 - 3 2 - -
DB-3 4 - - - -
I-16 2 1 - - -
P-39 - - 2 2 -
LaGG-3 - - - 1 -
I-15 - 1 - - -
---------------------------------------------------------------
151 13 58 19 1
Ref1 : Hannu Valtonen, Pohjoinen ilmasota : Suomeen liittyvat sotatoimet
syksysta 1944 kevaaseen 1945 (The Northern Air War : Opreration related
to Finland from the fall 1944 to the spring 1945 ). Printed 1996
ISBN 951-95688-4-0.
Ref2 : Hannu Valtonen, Luftwaffen Pohjoinen Sivusta: Saksan ilmavoimat
Suomessa ja Pohjois-Norjassa 1941-1944 (The Northern Flank of Luftwaffe:
German Airforce in Finland and Northern Norway 1941-1944). printed 1997
ISBN 951-95688-5-9
- Jarto
------------------------------
To reply to me, please use the address : Jarto...@vtt.fi
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