Enhanced my answers above.
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Also nationalistic things are not necessarily bad. I am proud to be an American, is that a bad thing.
That is bull! There is nothing wrong with being proud of where you come from and being proud of where you come from does not mean you think that you own ethnic group or country is superior to anyone.
I am an American/German. I am proud of being American and German.
Anyone else here proud of where they come from? I sure as hell hope so!
Someone here not a proud Canadian??
Yes, the reason was that his air force surrendered after 5 days, nothing to do with himself.
I am teaching you about these men to give them the credit they deserve. The only reason that I must be a dutchman to give credit to a Dutchman is that these guys are unknown to the rest of the world.
And I claim that you'll never be able to have an unbiased opinion. You put out these "metric" out of your own hypothesis that the German pilots were the best.
But you do not see that yourself. You proved that by your first reaction on Juha's choice. "No way that anyone could have been as good as the Germans." The reason that you had to reconsider after tremendous facts from Juha enhances my view about you. You reacted out of your own bias without considering even the facts.
No it shows he had the time to fly different planes and his airforce was in the war long enough.
According to your standards. I think there were many pilots that could be considered the best, not only the list above. These are unknown, unsung men, never made a name for themselves because of circumstances, independent of themselves. Using clinical statistics like you do doesn't do justice to them. I'm only using Sonderman as an example, but there are many more from every nationality.
Yes it is, you choose yourself which is important and judge by that, that's subjective.
It depends on where that leads. If it leads to faulty reasoning, then yes, it is bad. History has shown us that nationalism OFTEN leads to MASSIVE mistakes, the two world wars being excellent examples.
Really? That's not how nationalism usually manifests itself. Usually nationalism is all about how your own country and/or culture are superior.
P1234567890 said:It depends on what you mean. All countries have their good points and their bad points. If you acknowledge the bad points and want to fix them, then it's fine to acknowledge the good points as well. But if you ignore the bad points and only focus on the good ones, then there's a problem.
P1234567890 said:Just look at how people in this discussion thread have been voting. In many cases, nationalism is clouding their judgment. That's not ok. People should try to be as objective as possible in their reasoning.
I agree as so far that I can't claim him to be the best, as I said, I'm only using him as an example and chose him because I conveniently read his biography last week.I AGREE with you. I think that Sonderman obviously was a good pilot. But he certainly wasn't the best, and it sound to me like you agree that he wasn't the best.
I do understand, I disagree on the point that it is possible to distillate a judgement out of it which isn't biased. The weight you put on every point depends on what you (unconsciously??) want to prove.I don't think you understand what I am saying. The metric which I am suggesting is robust enough to capture any definition of 'best pilot'. Everyone here in some way or other is using my metric. Some people put a 100% weighting on number of kills. Others favor other combinations of pilot skills and achievements.
Okay, I'll have to believe you.I agree that I had a knee-jerk reaction which was too strong, but it wasn't out of bias for the Germans; it was out of bias against nationalism and voting nationalistically
look at what I votedI'm not sure how you're helping your argument here. Ignoring the number of different planes flown in combat only helps my man Marseille.
It's as I said, they had the fortune of serving a country that was winning, half of the war. "My" unsung heroes flew inferior planes, with inferior numbers. What does that have to do with their abilities??Ultimately there's a reason why Hartmann, Marseille, Barkhorn, Baer, Nowotny, Rall, etc. are famous and why your unsung heroes are not.
As I say, I don't think you'll be able to judge who's "best" by using statistics. But if you want to do it that way, just go ahead.I'm not choosing which characteristics and skills are important. If you notice, my list was compiled by looking at all of the posts in this thread and taking *everyone's* opinions into account.
If you have other characteristics which you feel should be added to the list, then by all means share them with us.
I will tell you this however, there is more to what makes a good pilot a good pilot than just kills.
p13232134
you are missing the point there were some great pilots out there that weren't German around , with the exceptions of the Russians if the Germans were shot down chances would be that they could fly and fight the next day. If the allied pilot was shot down chances are he would be a pow
I'm curious aside from wiki what sources are you using
I do understand, I disagree on the point that it is possible to distillate a judgement out of it which isn't biased. The weight you put on every point depends on what you (unconsciously??) want to prove.
Sorry, I still don't believe that, but we'll have to agree to disagree, I think.That's just it. I claim that even if we put a broad range of different weights on the different characteristics, the top Germans would always end up doing well.
There would undoubtedly be a lot of Germans on top of the list of "best"If we were able to create a ranking of pilots based on skill categories, then we would be able to create a multidimensional manifold where the weighting of the different skills are the variables. I claim that the surface of this manifold would be covered almost entirely by Germans.
Sounds interesting, but as long as you remember it would always be a very incomplete study. There is much more unknown of WW2 than known. For instance, you know a lot about Marseille and Hartman, but not of the pilot who was a better marksman then Marseille, but got his engine on fire after his 3rd kill and fell to his death. So, many would "not get a hearing" as PB says.This wouldn't be very difficult to do. The most obvious way would be to start off with just two variables, maybe ratio and total kills. Plot them on the x and y axes of a graph. Clearly if the weight is 0:100, then Hartmann wins. If it's 100:0, then the Dutch pilot you mentioned (as far as I know) wins. Somewhere in between Marseille wins. The plane would be divided into regions telling you for which weightings the different pilots win.
Then you would add in the other variables one by one. I believe that this would give a very objective picture of which pilots are the best.
Does this make sense?
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Who wouldn't love to have met these gentlemen here, and had this pic signed by them....? 1000+ kills!