Sounds like Karhila was officially credited with damaging three IL-2s but many years later he misremembered and thought it was five IL-2s. Of course the way to see how many he actually damaged and maybe if any of them crashed is to look at the Soviet records for the relevant air regiments on that day. Maybe some of those IL-2s actually crashed and he did better than he thought! However until that research is done his official claim of three damaged is the one that stands since his memories decades later are unreliable.
highest kill ratio (2 Viewers)
- Thread starter nimrod.michaeli
- Start date
Do you mean like a summary of the results of the divisions in that specific VA (Air Army)?
andrewgeorge
Airman
- 74
- Mar 20, 2024
I just want to point out too that the fact he remembers the action unfolding a certain way is itself important to know and understand, even if he was mistaken then or mistaken decades later.
Pilots' experiences and present sense impressions are part of the historical record too, and they're worth knowing about in their own right.
FulmenTheFinn
Airman 1st Class
According to Keskinen's and Stenman's Suomen Ilmavoimien Historia (SIH) series Karhila was credited with 3 damaged Il-2s that day, none of which were shot down.
The tally for the claims accepted by FAF HQ for 2 July 1944 is:
-10 claims credited to pilots with a witness (T), of which 8 are verified from the Russian archives as shot down
-7 claims credited to the regiment without witness (R), of which 4 "
-11 damaged cases (V)
All of them by Finnish Bf 109 Gs (FAF code MT, abbreviated from Messerschmitt).
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The folks who lived under Soviet rule created many Soviet records. They had access to many other records and worked with them. Many of those folks had the opportunity to talk to people who were part of the Soviet system since the 1920s, in times of war and peace...and who also created records. So yes, the folks do know what they are talking about.
As for post #241, it contains interesting assumptions. Let me comment selectively.
1. "Soviet records are incredibly accurate"
May be so. But accurate doesn't mean true. Falsified census results, so-called 5-year plans, and mock trial records were very detailed and accurate.
2. "Losses are always documented. If an aircraft becomes a loss, there is always a record of that loss".
Over 50% of June-July 1941 VVS losses were put into the "неучтённые потери" category. Rough translation: unaccounted losses. No individual loss records, just a summary for over 5,000 aircraft. Accounting for other equipment, fuel, and other material was also in a bad shape. Yes, it was unusual, and that category later shrank before disappearing together with a fog of war. Ironically, new categories appeared later, such as "естественная убыль" for fuel, opening new opportunities for corruption in peacetime.
3. "Soviets can't lie about records because everything is accounted for".
Everything was supposed to be accounted for. It just didn't work in real life. A totalitarian system has its limitations. It also creates incentives for lying.
I was referring to the millions of civilians not knowing what they are talking about and obviously the people filling out the records knew what they were talking about.
***
1. The records are true. This is about aviation regiment reports, not fake mock trials used to execute unwanted people or 5 year plans
2.
The chaotic retreat in the summer of 1941 was the only exception where the records just labelled the losses as unaccounted for. The situation at that time was completely unique and so incredibly chaotic that accounting for losses was impossible. This is the only time where this happened and it was out of the Soviet's control.
3.
Everything was accounted for and the reason why can be seen above. If you lied you would only get yourself in trouble and honestly you would probably be sentenced to death.
I recall he was of the opinion that if he claimed all 5 he actually shot down he would not have been accepted with his claims as he had no witness for them. Now when this sergeant on a hill saw he shooting down all of them very vividly 47 years later is a tall testament of the reserve officer Karhilas skill as a pilot. Only mistake of sergeants testimony is that he saw him shoot down all of them ( I recall sergeants had binoculars as they were on a hill for a look out ). Whether Karhila wanted to down play his feat or sergeant missaw it all I cannot say. Karhila was known to be the only sober man in the squadron and eager to get his Mannerheim cross ( which meant a lot of money too ). When I talked with this sergeant who was in hospital bed before his surgery he was able to exactly show with his hands how captain Karhila managed to shoot down his adversaries.... with a half barrel roll.......one by one ( Karhila was cheered to hear this as he responded immediately as that was how it happened ). The Il-2s had emptied all they guns and rear mounted machine guns on the fleeing civilians on the rail road junction. I bet for captain it was bit cruel moment too as they were sitting ducks for him.
This story really got under my skin as I myself had been a leader of the R/C air combat hobby at the time.....and had flown 150 flights with a 1/12 scale Messerschmitt 109 G model ( which I still have on my shelf here ).
I would now after what I know grant him ( captain Kyösti Karhila ) the Mannerheim cross posthumously.....even if it was only in 1/12 scale.
Mannerheim Cross - Wikipedia
My curiosity to know what the infantry men saw in the skies was my habit at the time when there still were Continuation War( WW2 ) soldiers alive in Finland.
This sergeant was from eastern Finland ( Kajaani ) and was thus in the local ( City of Oulu ) university hospital for treatment. His first reaction to my question was that there were no finnish airplanes in the sky back then...but then as if a lightning had struck him he started to memorize the incident. I think I actually got more than I bargained for...it brought a tear in my eyes....as I asked him how many this pilot shot out of the six...and he responded all of them.
Kyösti flew his 109 G-6 with Rüstsätze VI....so he had 2 extra 20 mm cannons in his wings. For instance Illu Juutilainen wanted them removed from his plane...as it made it slower. I bet Kyösti if anyone had the fire power to wipe out all the six Ilyushins.
View: https://www.reddit.com/r/WWIIplanes/comments/1j9u46d/messerschmitt_bf_109_g_fitted_with_the_r%C3%BCsts%C3%A4tze/
Was it really R2 kit or R6 as that claims ?
The main engine-mounted 20 mm MG 151/20 cannon (Motorkanone) in the Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6 carried 200 rounds of ammunition. [1, 2]
Armament and Ammunition Overview
- Nose/Engine Cannon: 1 × 20 mm MG 151/20 with 200 rounds (or optional 30 mm MK 108 with 65 rounds in the /U4 variant).
- Cowling Machine Guns: 2 × 13 mm MG 131 synchronized machine guns with 300 rounds per gun.
- Optional Underwing Pods (Rüstsatz 6): 2 × 20 mm MG 151/20 cannons with 135 to 145 rounds per pod. [1, 2, 3, 4]
So lieutenant had 1070 projectiles to send at the fleeing IL-2s. So about 178 per each plane.
Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6/R6 (MT-461): His primary mount during the heavy combat of July 1944 while serving with HLeLv 34 in Lappeenranta, with which he scored numerous victories.
----
MT-461 refers to a specific Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6 fighter aircraft that served with the Finnish Air Force (Ilmavoimat) during World War II. [1, 2]
Aircraft History & Context
- Model: Messerschmitt Bf 109 G-6/R6 (manufactured by Erla).
- Pilot: Flown prominently by Finnish fighter ace Luutnantti (Lieutenant) Kyösti "Kössi" Karhila (32.25 total confirmed victories).
- Unit: 3rd Flight of Fighter Squadron 24 (3./HLeLv 24).
- Operational Timeframe: Summer 1944, during the intense defensive battles of the Continuation War against the Soviet Union (stationed at Lappeenranta, Finland). [1, 2]
Markings and Camouflage Scheme
In Finnish service, MT-461 wore a unique blend of German factory camouflage and distinct tactical Finnish theater markings: [1]
- Standard Camouflage (German RLM Scheme): Unlike some Finnish Bf 109s repainted in the domestic olive green/black scheme, MT-461 retained its original German Luftwaffe day-fighter camouflage consisting of RLM 74/75/76 (Dark Gray / Medium Gray upper surfaces over Light Blue undersides and fuselage sides with gray mottling). [1, 2]
- Tactical Numbers: Wore a prominent yellow number "6" on both sides of the fuselage, just forward of the national insignia. [1]
- Serial Designation: The Finnish registration code MT-461 was painted in black on the rear fuselage/tail section. [1]
- National Insignia: Wore the blue swastika on a white circular field (the official Finnish Air Force national insignia from 1918 to late 1944). These were located on the fuselage sides and the upper/lower surfaces of the wings.
- Axis Theater Bands: Featured standard Eastern Front yellow identification markings, including a yellow band around the rear fuselage and yellow under-wing tips.
Profile 35: "Four Six One" as flown by Kyösti "Kössi" Karhila
Aircraft artwork based on the personal interviews of aviation artist, writer and filmmaker, John Mollison
ww2fighters.blogspot.com
Kyösti "Kössi" Karhila was able to shoot a bomber with 3 bullets:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUzDNNW3oKw&t=327s
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Well this settles it. Karhila only had 3 damaged claims and none of them crashed meaning he had 0 real victories that day.
By the way, where did you get that list? Is it part of a full list analysing all the victories on every day? I would like to see more of it.
It does not settle it.....
In the video Karhila claims 5 il-2s....and has found out that 9 Il-2 were missing that day ( in that area ) from the soviet archives via Geust.
I bet the sergeant was correct ....he killed them all. He even remembers how they were destroyed when he used his "cannon battery".
He had asked back in the day...did anyone see his kills. No one had seen it .....was the answer.
In the HvLv24 he was put to a CO of the 3rd flight....apparently as he was such a good flyer and a marks man...that reservists apparently always weren't.
The 3 cannon Me-109 G was given him....and squadron commander asked him if he wants the cannons...as he said it is heavier....so he had answered...then I cannot flee away can I ? He also mentioned that first time he fired them...the plane seemingly stopped in the air. In his previous post he had a Me-109 which guns had jammed on 17 flights...and he was really happy he got a plane that had working guns.
I had read all the books about our fighter pilots stories and I was really surprised that Kössi actually raised his hand only after there was knowledge that someone had seen a finnish fighter pilot downing a flight of 6 Il-2s on a bright summer day in 1944 during the largest land battle in Europe's history.
What is a bit funny is that it took 47 years and a sick infantry sergeant and a model builder to discover the case. Then again also Kössi was a keen model builder.
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FulmenTheFinn
Airman 1st Class
It's my own work based on a variety of sources, mostly Finnish literature. The Finnish kill claims are essentially digitised by hand, row by row and column by column, from Keskinen's & Stenman's literature, but I've translated everything into English, including military ranks. There's just shy of 2,400 FAF claims in the list, including split claims and damaged cases*. I intend to refine the list further so that each day with claims also summarises how many of each type of aircraft were claimed and how, and by what Finnish aircraft, e.g.:
I should probably also add the type of claim (T, E, R, V or V but verified shot down) to the daily summary. I'll probably also end up translating the abbreviations into a more readable format, as I've done with my Brewster kill claims table.
I also have a sub-project going on in the table where I'm filling in VVS losses from the Winter War based on a variety of Russian sources, as well as Geusts's Finnish works, and comparing those to Finnish claims.
In part because of all this WIP, I'm keeping the table private for now.
I have however published my table of the Brewster pilot kill claims that were accepted by various air forces, including the FAF, here, if you're interested in that. It is also still a WIP, especially in the sense that the British 339E claim sheets need to be merged. There's also almost no information in my source material on verified Japanese losses in relation to the claims of Allied Brewster pilots. While Finnish Brewster pilot claims have been cross-checked with Soviet records extensively, little work seems to have been done on cross-checking the Allied equivalents with Japanese records. I'd expect Allied Brewster claims against the Japanese to be 80-90% air, as in "didn't actually result in a kill". Finnish Brewster claims against the Soviets are, according to the data, 69%, or alternatively 66%, air.
It's also worth remembering that these claims with all that air in them are just the ones that various air forces during the war did accept as genuine kills. I've seen Finnish cases where a pilot might've submitted almost 20 claims, and FAF HQ accepted none of them, or maybe just a couple. In the Winter War for example, where Finnish pilot kill claims where at their highest reliability, the FAF rejected at least 80 of them. Of course it's possible that a few genuine kills slipped through as uncredited kills, but the odds are firmly on the side of pilots having a strong tendency to overclaim. As Michael Pearson put it in his 2006 The Burma Air Campaign 1941-1945: "Fighter pilots the world over are, like fishermen, prone to exaggeration, and independent confirmation of claims is often impossible." Overclaiming is of course not unique to pilots or airmen, but more a feature ingrained into the chaotic nature of combat; e.g. the Germans at some point in the war (1942?) adopted a method of just flat out halving kill claims against armour coming from the front by 50%, before even considering adding them into the statistics.
*EDIT: Just to add, accepted FAF claims by Finnish airmen cover the period from 1 December 1939 to 3 October 1944. The VVS, interestingly enough, lost quite a few aircraft already on the first day of war against Finland on 30 November 1939, almost entirely to non-enemy-related causes! Here is a potentially incomplete list of losses from that day, with possibly OK cases in orange and damaged cases in yellow. The rest were written off (W/O and MIA):
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As
FulmenTheFinn showed, the IL-2s were all shot down by other Finnish pilots not Karhila. He has done the analysis and hard work to identify the truth on that day, discovering that the IL-2s were shot down by Järvi, Koskelainen, Lampi, Ohls, Lehto, Mattila, Salomies, Myllylä, and Nuorala.
Nice! I would love to see it when you fully release it all
FulmenTheFinn
Airman 1st Class
For that I cannot take credit. Kalevi Keskinen & Kari Stenman went to the Finnish archives and wrote down all the FAF claims accepted by FAF HQ that can be found in the archives. They then published these claims in a number of smaller lists in at least 7-8 SIH publications and a number of other books. What I've done is gone over the latest iterations of those lists and consolidated, digitised, translated and expanded upon them by fixing errors and adding totals to the numbers of claims and by breaking the data down in various ways (the original lists for instance gave no figures for the total amount of claims except for individual pilots in a select few publications). But the groundwork was laid by Keskinen & Stenman, so if anyone deserves the credit for the existence of these lists, it's them. Although I do wish they'd also listed all the claims not accepted by the FAF, as well as aircraft claimed destroyed on the ground by Finnish bombers...
The verifications from Soviet records in turn are based on information provided to Keskinen and Stenman by the likes of Carl-Fredrik Geust, Mikhail Bykov, Oleg Kiselev and Andrey Mikhailov, who have done extensive research on Soviet aviation loss records found in the Russian archives. It is worth mentioning though that not all verifications in Keskinen's & Stenman's literature are necessarily assigned to the correct claim (and thus person and airframe), as it's often impossible to know whose kill claim is the one that resulted in the actual kill. Which is also why in their later works they stopped assigning them to individual claims in cases where there are many possible shooters.
I'm busy right now, so here's a brief answer. I am reasonably familiar with the Soviet system from the 1920s through the 1950s. Especially during the Stalin era, the prevailing mindset seemed to be that it was better to execute some innocent people than to leave a single guilty person unpunished. At one point, regions were assigned quotas for the number of executions to be carried out. Local authorities would draw up lists of suspects, but if some could not be found, neighbors might be taken instead. The same happened if the quota exceeded the number of potential suspects; the necessary additional victims were simply rounded up from somewhere else. The main priority was meeting the quota. Consequently, there was an element of randomness involved in the system.
During the war, there was also SMERSH, whose methods were very straightforward.
However, there was a certain logic to it as well; for instance, during the army purges, refusing to confess was crucial. Take Rokossovsky, for example: despite being in an exceptionally precarious position due to his background, he did not break during interrogation, even though he lost teeth and likely suffered other physical injuries—not to mention the psychological trauma of mock executions etc. Many of his comrades broke and confessed, but unlike them, Rokossovsky was still alive in prison in March 1940. This allowed him to be recalled to active service after the disastrous showing of the Red Army during the early part of the Winter War, which made Stalin realize the need for experienced commanders.
The reason is simply that I place far more trust in the combat report written or dictated by Kössi immediately after the battle than in recollections from 40 or 50 years later. And wasn't the sergeant's account one where he told the story to another patient in 1991, who then passed it on a few years later? There is no certain information regarding the sergeant's name or the date of the event he described. Is there any information even about the sergeant's unit or the exact location from which he made his observations?
I have nothing against soldiers; I completed 11 months of service myself and subsequently attended refresher exercises for a time. My eldest uncles both took part in the wars, having volunteered for service. Both were wounded—one so severely that he was left with a permanent war-related disability. I have also met a few fighter aces and spoken briefly with them. It is simply a matter of trusting a combat report over recollections—especially ones so vague that they cannot be verified.
SaparotRob
Unter Gemeine Geschwader Murmeltier XIII
I just watched this on YT. I present it as a brief divertissement. It seemed appropriate.
View: https://youtu.be/oYJI80bn4yU
View: https://youtu.be/oYJI80bn4yU
Do you honestly think this way ? Did you watch his video in the Virtuaalilentäjät meet ?
What I found a bit strange in his tally were the two Mustangs. There were only 10 is USSR.
Hän on 84 vuotias videolla...hän on kyllä iäkäs joka selittää hienon sortumisen papereihin kirjoitetusta ja selkeän tunnekuohun selittäessään yksityikohtia/mieleenpainuneita "filminpätkiä" tapahtuneesta 6tta Il2 konetta vastaan käydystä ilmataistelusta.
I am a bit sorry that I did not record the sergeant story but took it with a heavy grain of salt as nothing of this sort was never written in the annals.
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GrauGeist
Generalfeldmarschall zur Luftschiff Abteilung
Vatnouri is the position where he claimed the Mustangs on separate days were shot down.
He had no Airacobra kills...there were hundreds of them in the skies at that time.
FulmenTheFinn
Airman 1st Class
Once again, there were no Mustangs on the Finnish Front. Nor were there Spitfires, Lightnings or Kingcobras. This has all been well-established since the '90s. Finnish pilots misidentified a variety of domestic Soviet types for Western types. Actually on that note, in the Winter War many Finns misidentified Soviet SB and DB bombers for Martin and Douglas bombers respectively, manufactured under license in the USSR. This comes up at least a couple of times e.g. in Robert Winston's Aces Wild.
