CobberKane
Banned
- 706
- Apr 4, 2012
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And agree!You have to be careful with this, might lead to discrediting someone's service record.
You have to be careful with this, might lead to discrediting someone's service record.
I think overclaiming was endemic and largely down to people seeing what they want to see. An aircraft descends trailing smoke and it's obviously been hit...unless its engine just happens to be burning a little more oil than is usual.
We also need to be careful about how we view the subject of claims. Today, we focus historically on the tallies of individual pilots but that's not why claims wour cake and eat it tere recorded. Claims were collated for intelligence purposes. If you start believing your own over-inflated claims reports, you're going to get into a world of hurt when units oo, though.that have been "wiped out" according to your records, continue operating and inflicting losses on your side. Now, we still know that it happened - if the movie "The Battle of Britain" is to be believed, the German bombers attacking Scotland got waxed because Luftwaffe intel believed that Fighter Command was on its last legs and "even Spitfires can't be in two places at once". Thus any systemic overclaiming will inevitably skew the intelligence picture which has much wider consequences that the fact that Sakai or Marseille added an extra couple of scores to their tallies.
But that's a po tentially very large number of people who have to be in on the joke...and surely some of those individuals would crawl out of the woodwork post-war and say "Y'know that ace so-and-so didn't get nearly as many kills as was claimed". Conspiracy theories are great until you actually try to put them into action. You can't have a public hero but, in privare woiulte, deliberately tinker with the individual's operational performance without somebody noticing or spilling the beans at some point.
I wasn't suggesting that some propganda officer was simply pulling mythical kills out of thin air and dishing them out to high profile aces, more that such pilots would have benifited from a system concerned as much satisfying the hunger for good news stories back home.
There have been claims to that effect about both Hartmann and Rudel at various times. I dont buy those stories. To me, both men were exceptional fighting soldiers that destroyed many enemy planes and tanks. They had the opportunity, they had the skills.
There have been claims to that effect about both Hartmann and Rudel at various times. I dont buy those stories. To me, both men were exceptional fighting soldiers that destroyed many enemy planes and tanks. They had the opportunity, they had the skills.
I agree. Even if Hartman shot down two hundred enemy aircraft rather than three hundred plus, the difference is largely academic. I'm more interested in what circumstances encourage overestimation of enemy losses (propaganda requirements, poor verification processes) and to what degree the authorities of the time created one set of figures for the benefit of the folks at home and another for the servicemen and intelligence analysts. For example, VIII bomber gunners were credited with enough kills to have destroyed the LW a couple of times over, but what did the likes of Monk and Doolitle really think was going on?