GrauGeist
Generalfeldmarschall zur Luftschiff Abteilung
Like who, for example?
highest kill ratio (6 Viewers)
- Thread starter nimrod.michaeli
- Start date
Clearly of the aces I know...Mauno Fräntilä and Kyösti Karhila.
Heh?
Show me a fighter pilot who does not want to make noise?
Sorry, but this is a reach.
You have to remember that after Stalingrad everyone knew we were going to loose the game we did not start.
Why make noise if the verdict after the war was hanging or a 10 year trip to gulag.
Even a membership in boy scouts was deemed criminal in the eyes of the victor.
GrauGeist
Generalfeldmarschall zur Luftschiff Abteilung
You talk as though Finland was occupied by the Soviets at the end of WWII.
Well they did not know it in summer of 1944.
All patriotic movements were deemed illegal and 25% communists in the parlament...before the war they were illegal.
andrewgeorge
Airman
- 92
- Mar 20, 2024
Your hypothesis is that during the continuation war Finnish fighter pilots under-claimed enemy aircraft destroyed because they were afraid of Soviet retribution after the war?
I think on the face of it that doesn't make much sense but it doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong--it would just be a very odd phenomenon. Especially since other Axis fighter pilots continued to over claim combat results at typical rates up to the end of the conflict. It seems to me that any anxiety about post-war retribution would be based more generally on one's status as an officer in the Finnish Air Force, not on how many Soviet aircraft he reported destroyed on this or that sortie.
Actually, I should clarify that: I do think you're necessarily wrong about that being a widespread pattern, since it appears to be a basic fact that on the whole Finnish fighter pilots (like all WW2 fighter pilots) over claimed enemy aircraft destroyed by a significant margin. But whether it ever occurred in any one instance? I'm theoretically open to it. I'd just need to see some evidence.
Well I mentioned that Mauno Fräntilä did not count his kills at all. It may be because he was devoted christian.
andrewgeorge
Airman
- 92
- Mar 20, 2024
Interesting. Surely his unit counted aircraft destroyed though. Typically command wants to know whether any results were gained from a mission.
FulmenTheFinn
Airman 1st Class
His arguments are completely unknown to Finnish aviation history, completely unsubstantiated, and countered by well-documented post-war history, which among other things included plenty of literature and histories of the war that did not shy away from presenting Finnish military accomplishments against the USSR, along with whatever numbers of enemy men and materiel the Finns thought they'd destroyed, as fact.
If we're talking about wartime underclaiming and not some imaginary post-war censorship of Finnish fighter pilot claims, then of course that did happen. But it was so rare compared to overclaiming that one might even describe it as a rounding error. Case in point, in my almost 3,000 entries of Finnish fighter pilot claims, only a dozen or two cases are ones where an enemy aircraft was reported damaged, but which later research has verified was in reality shot down, i.e. was an underclaim. It's not necessarily an exhaustive list, but it gives you some idea of just how rare underclaiming really was.
The FAF credited Mauno Fräntilä with 5.5 victories and 2 damaged cases over 380 sorties.
Source: Suomen Ilmavoimien Historia 26: Ilmavoitot, Osa 1: Lentäjät A-M, p. 32.
andrewgeorge
Airman
- 92
- Mar 20, 2024
Surely this is correct. Overclaiming to one extent or another was without exception the norm in every Air Force in the Second World War.
I specifically asked him is it possible some of your kills were marked in Illu Juutilainen score card. He said it is possible.
What I found interesting in finnish written text is that he claims that Me-109 G would still be lethal against Hawk or Hornet. He says that in air battle the numbers don't matter that much ( I bet he refers to a regular gun fight ).
He was shot down in Winter War and tried to run to the finnish side, but was caught in between the lines and was under firing for several hours...until at night time finnish trooper came and fetched him to Finland...he was frozen from his back to the ground. He was perforated with 2 bullets...and had lost a lot of blood. In Winter War the weather temperature was -40 C on some nights.
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BTW.....finnish air force Gloster Gamecock strafed 3 Soviet bombers...are those then kills too ?
During the Winter War (1939–1940), the Finnish Air Force operated the British-designed Gloster Gamecock biplane (locally licensed and nicknamed Kukko). [1, 2]
Strictly speaking, the Gloster Gamecock did not score an air-to-air shoot-down ("kill") during the Winter War, though it was involved in a famous, high-profile operational incident: [1, 2]
During the Winter War (1939–1940), the Finnish Air Force operated the British-designed Gloster Gamecock biplane (locally licensed and nicknamed Kukko). [1, 2]
Strictly speaking, the Gloster Gamecock did not score an air-to-air shoot-down ("kill") during the Winter War, though it was involved in a famous, high-profile operational incident: [1, 2]
- The DB-3 Incident (January 29, 1940): Finnish Gamecocks intercepted two Soviet Ilyushin DB-3 bombers that had landed on Finnish soil (mistaking it for Estonia) to transfer fuel between the aircraft. The Finnish fighters strafed and grounded the bombers, forcing the Soviet crews to flee and leaving one DB-3 to be captured relatively intact by Finnish forces. [1, 2]
