At the end of December, 1942, JG54 began to change their BF-109's on FW-190A-4, which was superior to BF-109 in most regards. But number of losses did not went down. Total change to FW-190 was only completed by May, 1943.
On January 9, already known to us Lutenant Golubev, had been leading flight of 4 I-16 type 29 from the 4th GIAP. He attack in area of Ladoga Lake German fighter of unknown type and destroyed it. Second German fighter had been damaged by Golubev wingman, but he manage to excape to the clouds. He crashed later.
JG54 lost two new FW-190's and two aces. To the home base it Gatchina did not return pilots from the staff "shtaffel" Alfred Detke(33 victories) and Joseph Brehtl(27 victories). It was his FW-190 was damaged by Golubev's wingman. Berhtl attempted to crash land on the fuselage and was killed on impact North-East of Mgi."
4 GIAP/VVS-KBF continued operating I-16s until 1943. This I-16 was brought down by a pilot of I./JG 54 in the same area where 4 GIAP/VVS-KBF operated.
Comment: Not really 4 GIAP, but 4 GIAP/VVS-KBF. Vasiliy Golubev's rank at that time was that of a Kapitan.
On January 9, 1943, JG 54 registered no losses.
Black Cross/Red Star: Air War Over the Eastern Front by Christer Bergstrom
Summary of Axis and Soviet Aircraft production during the war
----- Soviet German Italian Hungarian Romanian Japanese
1941 15,735 11,776 3,503 5,088
1942 25,436 15,556 2,818 6 8,861
1943 34,845 25,527 967 267 1,000 16,693
1944 40,246 39,807 - 773 28,180
1945 20,052 7,544 - - 8,263
Eastern Front (World War II) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Both the British and the American public have long been told that "we won the war" and D-Day, in particular, has been built up as the decisive moment. The American D-Day Museum has been adopted as the national tribute to the war and Steven Spielberg, the director of Saving Private Ryan and co-producer of Flags of Our Fathers, which is just about to open, seems to have made it a mission to perpetuate Churchill's myth.
After talking at Cambridge recently about the preponderance of the eastern front and the scale of the Red Army's triumph, I was accosted by an angry young British historian. "Don't you realise that we were pinning down 56 German divisions in France alone," he said. "Without that the Red Army would have been heavily defeated." What is less acknowledged is that without the Red Army pulverising 150 divisions, the allies would never have landed.
Proportions, however, are crucial. Since 75%-80% of all German losses were inflicted on the eastern front it follows that the efforts of the western allies accounted for only 20%-25%. Furthermore, since the British Army deployed no more than 28 divisions as compared with the American army's 99, the British contribution to victory must have been in the region of 5%-6%. Britons who imagine that "we won the war" need to think again.
How we didn't win the war . . . but the Russians did - Times Online
But what American has ever heard of Operation Bagration? June 1944 signifies Omaha Beach, not the crossing of the Dvina River. Yet the Soviet summer offensive was several times larger than Operation Overlord (the invasion of Normandy), both in the scale of forces engaged and the direct cost to the Germans.
By the end of summer, the Red army had reached the gates of Warsaw as well as the Carpathian passes commanding the entrance to central Europe. Soviet tanks had caught Army Group Centre in steel pincers and destroyed it. The Germans would lose more than 300,000 men in Belorussia alone. Another huge German army had been encircled and would be annihilated along the Baltic coast. The road to Berlin had been opened
It is thus all the more important to recall that - despite Stalin, the NKVD and the massacre of a generation of Bolshevik leaders - the Red army still retained powerful elements of revolutionary fraternity. In its own eyes, and that of the slaves it freed from Hitler, it was the greatest liberation army in history. Moreover, the Red army of 1944 was still a Soviet army. The generals who led the breakthrough on the Dvina included a Jew (Chernyakovskii), an Armenian (Bagramyan), and a Pole (Rokossovskii). In contrast to the class-divided and racially segregated American and British forces, command in the Red army was an open, if ruthless, ladder of opportunity.
Comment: Saving Private Ivan | World news | The Guardian
) to see if I can squeeze out a little more info on JAAF operations in the Philippines in 1941-42 besides what's referred to in English books which used that source. It's much less detailed, and the footnotes are mostly to recollections of participants. But those vague passages don't pretend to describe details they can't support with footnotes, and I don't think there are authors actually concluding the Japanese didn't lose planes in encounters that aren't even mentioned in the history, in those cases you just don't know. In a few other cases it's very detailed w/ footnotes to actual reports (number and type of bombs dropped in particular missions v Corregidor for example), and I wouldn't hesitate to say that's what happened in same detail, as far as the Japanese knew. I tend to trust that the detail in Lundstrom's conclusions was in line with the amount of detail in Vol 49 (and some other sources he mentions, like correspondance with the leading Japanese air historians etc, he's also writing a book now just about Coral Sea with deeper Japanese info, but I doubt his basic conclusions will change).
