When I downloaded Tony Wood's files of Germans claims from the East and West as well as the Spanish Civil War, I thought the main job would be to get the data into Microsoft Excel. Turns out not to be the case.
Seem as if the Germans firmly used only the Soviet I-type designations, and they were incorrect with more than a few of them. Just a few examples include:
1. Claiming many I-26 which I changed to Yal-1 (though some could be Yak-3.s).
2. Claiming 170 I-180 aircraft. The Soviets only built 10 production plus 3 prototypes and they never reached squadron service. It is almost certain these claims were I-16's as the I-180 was developed from the I-16.
3. Claiming many DB-7 aircraft. The designation DB-7 was an early and mostly internal designation for the Douglas A-20, so I changed these to A-20's.
4. Claiming many "KaGG" aircraft. Technically it's not a mistake but I changed these into LaGG-1s even though many could be LaGG-3s. I also changed LaGG-5 into La-5 since there was no LaGG-5.
5. I changed Kittyhawl, Kittyhawk I, Tomahawk, Curtiss, and several other designations into P-40.
6. I changed PS-84 into Li-2 since that is the proper designation.
7. I changed R-3 and R III into ANT 3 and R-10 into KhAI-5. If you go look them up, the R designations are easily turned into a proper identification.
8. There were 13 different varieties of names for Spitfire, so I changed them all to Spitfire. These included Spitfire, Spitfire V, Spitfire Vc, Spitfire w.b., Spitfire +. Etc.
9. They had 4 or 5 varieties of U-2 which I changed into Po-2.
10. They claimed a Curtiss P-46 and a Curtiss P-49 which I changed into P-40 since no P-46 or P-49 ever got into the war. I figured a typo there or simple misidentification.
11. So far, I cannot figure out what a DJ-6 aircraft is, so I left it as DJ-6.
12. Several claims were listed as Bisely or Bisley V with Blenhiem in brackets, so I changed all the Bisely's into Blenheims.
The list above is not complete, but you get the idea.
Once all that was done I had to address the Excel-specific things. If you do a query in Excel and you look for "I-16" Excel sees it as text. It will return a finding for all the "I-16" it finds, but will also return a finding for "I-160" and "I-161" since both contain "I-16" in the text. So I changed "I-16" into "I-16 Only" to differentiate it from the other selections. Same goes for "P-3" and "P-38" and "P-39" as well as a few other claims.
When I say "changed" above I should explain that there is a column titled "Claimed" in the Tony Woods files. I added a column titled "GenericClaim" right next to the "Claimed" column so I could clarify the claims without taking away the original claim designation in case it comes up later. So although I DID change the claim designation, I did not remove the original claim designation.
Finally, after a couple if days of playing with it, I arrived at a consistent file and did a query of the victories by designation and year. The list is too long to show in here in total, but a partial list is shown below.
The total at the top are the totals for all the victories, and you can see when the bulk were scored. Notice the almost complete drop-off in 1945, as we would all expect. There was evem MORE work to be done on the Spanish Civil War claims since the Germans were totally mistaken about a lot of claim, but they were consistent with the mistakes. That's another post.