I found the article OP controversial. It's funny, I was just discussing on another forum the problem of using a closed system in research, which garners assumption about discrepencies without considering tangential explanations not related to the method of research.
For example wrt the daily records of the DAF in North Africa, many of Marsielle's kills were SAAF machines which may not have been entered as RAF losses. His 6 P-40 kills during one mission on 5 June 1942 were variously confirmed by fellow pilots and German ground forces, who noted they had SAAF markings, but what was remarkable to the propaganda machine was his ground crew report that only 10 twenty-millimetre shells and 180rds of 7.92mm ammunition had been used from his magazines during that mission.
This was the momentum of his legendary status rather than the presumption of supreme killing capabilities in terms of numbers downed. His precision, defining the term experten. Marsielle himself was somewhat humble, he attributed his success to a familiarity with low speed manoeuvring and like other Luftwaffe experten-celebrities was quick with tips for fresh cadets. He was also well liked and respected among peers, a perfect media celebrity and role model. He even had an unsavoury past to keep hidden just as many media celebrities today.
So it's not just a case of goose stepping German propaganda inflating kill records in an attempt to make Allied pilots shake in their boots. It would be an entirely ridiculous project because of patriotism and the attraction of the underdog. The thing to remember about propaganda is that it is aimed at your own population. Modern political media is for example propaganda, American media is inherently Americentric, British is (Anglo-) Eurocentric, etc. It will always only view things from that nation's cultural point of view, that is in point of fact the true target market. German propaganda has a target market of the German public. Naturally it exaggerated when things went poorly, but there was no reason to when things went well, that is simply when it becomes topical and personal, talking less about sweeping strategic successes and more about individual personalities involved in specific instances.
What is also odd is that the kill reports distributed officially between nations in part involved the politics and adminstration regarding downed, captured aircrews. I believe there is some code of military conduct to inform enemy nations of those combatants captured and incarcerated. Generally speaking it is in every belligerent nation's best interests to be relatively faithful with combat records distributed to the enemy, a practise infamously ignored by the Japanese although in this case a good intelligence network filled a lot of blanks. Generally speaking Germany had a reputation of adhering quite well, as did all the Allies. I don't think it unlikely that combat records would then be contested in media for the benefit of patriotic civilian morale, but official (closed) military records really shouldn't differ greatly or else there really ought to be some reasonable explanation for the discrepency other than flat out lies. It's just not in a military's best interests to do this.
I think it is a given however that kill claim awards and related decorations for individual pilots are more a propaganda (read: morale and media) device than an official military documentation, irrespective of the nation's reputation. Anecdote would claim Hartmann had downed more than 352, whilst other figures less than their record suggests.
Notably, the USSR had a prohibitively strict method of recording pilot kills: the enemy aircraft had to leave a wreck within Soviet held territory for the kill to be recorded, irrespective of pilot and peer claims or ground observer correlation. Hence among Soviet pilots their actual kills are likely to be almost always much higher than their individual records suggest. Decorations by comparison were given largely by patriotic examples, many were posthumous and all are largely propaganda related. Some individuals hailed as heroes of the Soviet Union are completely fictionalised, such as the famous Vasili Zaitsev (whose story is really the combination of three unrelated, successful snipers operating around Stalingrad and the entire duel with the Wehrmacht Oberst is totally made up, he never existed).
Russell Brown also states,
The inability of the German Fighter force to support its ground forces effectively, contrasted sharply with the evolution of the RAF's tactics and operational procedures as the Desert War progressed.
The tactical use of Medium Bombers, and the highly effective Kittyhawks which were able to offer direct support to the troops with their bombing and strafing was never matched by the Luftwaffe. The fact that many of the fighter pilots ran up big personal scores was irrelevant to the prosecution of the war and the undue emphasis placed on such achievements was an indication of the failure by German Commanders at all levels to understand the principles of Air Power.
Claims like this are definitely the product of propaganda. It is in complete reverse of the events by theme, including the general consensus of dozens of historians, and is deliberately and entirely misleading. This Russel Brown sounds like a poster boy.
The "inability of the German forces to support its ground forces effectively" was a wholly circumstantial conclusion, misleading because the prelimenary statements ought to be a time frame, this was only the situation from about mid-1942, was directly the result of the inability of the German forces to maintain usable and adequate supply to the Front, which is celebrated as the primary focus of the North African campaign, also the nature of maintaining usable airfields throughout the campaign (easier during retreat, next to impossible during fast advances), and the industrial situation in Germany with no adequate replacement for the Stuka which required air superiority to function, it had nothing whatsoever to do with Luftwaffe aerial doctrine and is in fact claims a direct reverse of what that doctrine entails.
It is agreed by the majority of historians in publication that it was the Allied air forces which only began to understand the necessity of combined operations between land and air (and sea) which leads to successful operations. This is clearly stated in documentation surrounding the rewriting of the American military handbook of 1943, which was the first time a notation stressing the importance of Army and Air Force cooperation was officially made by the United States or Great Britain. The official aerial doctrine of Great Britain was that Army and Air Force operated completely independently.
Once again the success of the DAF was entirely circumstantial, it most certainly had not the slightest thing to do with doctrine. It had to do with winning superiority in supply and proliference during 1942. Even at the very end, the Luftwaffe managed to keep air superiority over Tunisia for example (but not anywhere else), and this whilst hopelessly outnumbered. In North Africa it is my contention the DAF approached Army support operations like ants rushing a dead bird, when numbers weren't overwhelming DAF ground attack missions died off whilst Luftwaffe ones soared. You could say in fact the Luftwaffe was built around Army support operations as a primary edict where this is not at all true for the Allies or GB until much later in the war.
If you ask me the whole thing seems like a simplistic, post modern, patriotic German bash. Let's attack the experten celebrities. Thing is, they were just media celebrities, there's no need. I don't think their awards are actually exaggerated, all things considered they aren't unrealistic, so much as their faults are absent which makes them seem superhuman. Luck played a huge part, for example. They were driven half mad. They got downed a lot but were lucky about that too.
