How?? Without a wreckage, without witnesses, on what basis barkhorn would approve these claims??
Lipfert , who served under barkhorn in II/JG52, writes that without witnesses he never received kill credit
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How?? Without a wreckage, without witnesses, on what basis barkhorn would approve these claims??Every single person would have approve these claims at the time. From the information they had everyone would have approve these claims.
The basis that Barkhorn had was that he saw Hartmann hit a plane and then he saw what he thought was critical damage. He then saw explosions which he thought was the aircraft crashing. That's his basis. He was the witness. Hartmann had witnesses.How?? Without a wreckage, without witnesses, on what basis barkhorn would approve these claims??
Lipfert , who served under barkhorn in II/JG52, writes that without witnesses he never received kill credit
After this answer I am speechless , and I quit .The basis that Barkhorn had was that he saw Hartmann hit a plane and then he saw what he thought was critical damage. He then saw explosions which he thought was the aircraft crashing. That's his basis. He was the witness. Hartmann had witnesses.
I think this is a good decision since you don't know what you're talking about.After this answer I am speechless , and I quit .
Well yes, we don't know 110% exactly what happened. But we have lots of data now to get a pretty good idea of what happened. The data is enough to make conclusions which are 90%+ accurate I'd say.Critiquing individual aerial combat 80 years later is fraught with difficulty. Nobody really knows what they're talking about with regard to the actual combat, so it's down to guessing.
Tough to argue with a guess, isn't it?
Yes because you were rude first! You talked aggressively.You called me idiot!
You may even get 100% accuracy but you cannot use that accuracy to make accusations about those in the past. It was shown increasingly through the war that the number of claims was proportional to the number of eyes viewing the conflict. In the BoB the RAF generally overclaimed by 2-1 but they operated in squadrons or pairs. In the big wing of 5 squadrons claims shot up and overclaiming was 4-5 to 1. This was repeated when leaning in to France where the RAF claims generally with the same pilots overclaimed by 5 to 1. This reached a peak with US gunners in bomber formations, they were shooting at everything they saw, believed they were the ones that hit whatever was hit but viewing from different angles and snap shots in time ended up overclaiming by 20-1 and more. In WW2 there was massive pressure from the home front of all sides to produce aces and heroes, just as in the post war era there was massive pressure to discredit the same aces and heroes. Having seen some real documentation howlers in peace time factories I am slightly amused at people drawing sinister conclusions from war time documents and recollections of pilots after being in combat. Watch an F1 race and see the interviews of two drivers who crashed together, they never agree on what happened even after watching video of it.Well yes, we don't know 110% exactly what happened. But we have lots of data now to get a pretty good idea of what happened. The data is enough to make conclusions which are 90%+ accurate I'd say.
Yeah. We need blueskies over here to cheer the place up.Y'all need to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable.
I agree, it's made me annoyed at how toxic this has become. All I wanted was a normal and reasonable discussion and it's become this. Hopefully we can disagree and just shake hands over it! I apologise if anyone got offended or anything like that. I'll also apologise for saying idiot too, so that hopefully everyone can move on! As Tim said in The Office "can't we all just get along?"Yeah. We need blueskies over here to cheer the place up.
Oh man...and the dreaded red card, too.There should have been Swiss referees present at each aerial engagement. Shots exchanged. Ref blows whistle. All activity stops. Ground referees inspect wreckage, or lack of wreckage. Ref blows whistle. Action resumes.
I only call people names if they are rude to me first. He was rude first. What do you expect me to do? However I still apologise for what I said because if I name call then I'm contributing to the toxicity. That is the last thing I want to do. Now that I realised that, I apologised.Several members commenting here do not have the benefit of having English as their first language, so the conversation may seem a bit harsh.
May want to take that into consideration before reacting and calling names.
What about the sin bin? You have to leave the combat area for 10 mins before rejoiningYellow card if the "shot down" plane is recovered?
That amused me, the Battle of Britain took place before Barbarossa reclaiming damaged aircraft by the British was on such a scale its very hard to figure out the rate of attrition. Some of the reclamation centres had airfields attached so pilots in damaged planes could land, and refurbished ones take off.Yellow card if the "shot down" plane is recovered?