Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!rutgers!att!cbnews!military From: fiddler@Sun.COM (Steve Hix) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: dogfighting Message-ID: <7250@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 8 Jun 89 01:01:42 GMT References: <7022@cbnews.ATT.COM> <7128@cbnews.ATT.COM> <7210@cbnews.ATT.COM> Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM Lines: 61 Approved: military@att.att.com From: fiddler@Sun.COM (Steve Hix) > From: Jeff K Medcalf > >>Erich Hartmann avoided them at all costs -- >>and it's hard to argue with the top-scoring ace of all time, 352 confirmed >>kills (WW2 Eastern front), never even scratched, never lost a wingman. >> >> Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology >> uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu > > But remember that during WW2, German pilots also counted kills on the ground, > rather than solely in the air. And since 90+% of the prewar Soviet Air Force > was destroyed on the ground, as were much of the French and Belgian Air Forces, > German fighter kills tend to be unrealistic. I think that the top scoring ace > of WW2 in air kills only was British, but I don't remember for sure. Maybe. (The RAF top-scorer was Johnnie Johnston? With 38 or so?) While the Soviet AF was almsot totally destroyed in the very beginning, remember that a lot of the one destroyed on the ground were knocked out by bombers (Ju-87, Ju-88, He-111 and so on) as well as the ones done in by fighters. Especially in the beginning, the fighters would have been providing high cover for the bombers. (Not that they didn't come down to the ground whenever they could.) Note also that Luftwaffe requirements for a confirmed kill were much more stringent than was the allies'. I think one of them was that a kill had to be confirmed, in writing, by at least two ground observers, one of whom had to be a commissioned officer. (I.e., Hartmann dropped more than the 352 he's credited for.) Also, at least some of the Luftwaffe's high scorers were not in the Eastern theater at the very beginning, having been transferred from the west after "See Lowe" was finally cancelled and the Western front turned pretty static for a while. (I'm not certain about Hartmann, but he *was* pretty young at the time. Still, he might have been in from the very beginning.) Hans Joachim Marseille (158 confirmed) got all his in the West, almost all of them in the air, too. [mod.note: Marseille gets my vote for most phenomenal pilot of the war. He apparently loved to get into dogfights, and was superb at deflection shooting (i.e., at a target moving across your line of fire). In one case, he and his wingman got inside a group of South African P-40's flying a defensive circle; he orbited inside the circle at low speed, shooting down 6 P-40's in 12 minutes. His wingman noted that, "each time he fired, I saw his shells strike first the enemy's nose, then travel along to the cockpit. No ammunition was wasted." In downing the six aircraft, he used only 10 20mm rounds and 180 rounds of MG ammo. On another day, he shot down 17 aircraft. (Ref: _Fighter Pilots of WWII_ by Robert Jackson.) - Bill ] One reason that the German scores got to be so high (as were some Japanese, such as Nishizawa with 102) was that they were *not* rotated out from the front periodically as were nearly all allied pilots. They stayed in combat (excepting R&R leave) until they were either killed or the war ended.