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RG_Lunatic said:Soren, would you care to provide that AFDU report? Or do you expect me to hunt it down too?
Soren said:RG_Lunatic said:Soren, would you care to provide that AFDU report? Or do you expect me to hunt it down too?
Sorry but this one isnt available on the Internet (As far as a know at least)
RG_Lunatic said:The figures quoted were:
1/3rd of Luftwaffe' aircraft and 1/5th of the pilots were lost during Big Week. By the end of March, 1944, the Luftwaffe' had lost over 1000 pilots including 28 Experten.
RG_Lunatic said:As for those Dora production figures, can you qualify the defintion of "production"? As we have discussed before, werknumber allocation is a very poor method for determining actual German production. So are factory accountings. Deliveries, acceptances, and of course deployments, in that order, are the much preferred data.
Pilot accounts don't seem to support the idea of anywhere near even 1000 Dora's having been in operation, let alone almost 2000. If there really were that many, where were they?
=S=
Lunatic
RG_Lunatic said:And that was largely the case. In 64 combat sorties during WWII, Chuck Yeager only saw German aircraft in flight on 5 of his sorties. Such claims of not being able to find German fighters in the air are common from early Summer 1944 till the end of the war.
The figures quoted were:
1/3rd of Luftwaffe' aircraft and 1/5th of the pilots were lost during Big Week. By the end of March, 1944, the Luftwaffe' had lost over 1000 pilots including 28 Experten.
I'm looking for good info on actual losses, so I can confirm or disprove the figures listed above, but so far, I've not found too much.
=S=
Lunatic
Big Week was the name given later to the coordinated six-day air offensive (ARGUMENT) launched in February 1944 by RAF Bomber Command and the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF) as part of the Combined Bomber Offensive.
USSTAF had been formed under General Spaatz on 1 January 1944. It comprised the Eighth and Ninth US Army Air Forces, based in the UK, and the Fifteenth USAAF which was based in Italy. The previous year Eighth USAAF had suffered heavy losses during raids on Schweinfurt and elsewhere. Consequently, US daylight raids deep into Germany had been suspended until long-range fighters to escort the bombers had been delivered, and good weather made the raids viable.
When both these conditions were met, starting on 20 February 1944, more than 3,800 USSTAF bombers and 2,351 from RAF Bomber Command dropped between them nearly 20,000 tons of bombs on German fighter factories and associated industries, the British at night, the Americans during the day. American losses amounted to 254 aircraft, including 28 fighters, while RAF Bomber Command lost 157. These were heavy losses- Eighth USAAF had a rate of attrition for February which amounted to almost 20%-but Big Week put German fighter production back two months. Its purpose had also been to begin the attrition of German fighter pilots to undermine the Luftwaffe's continuing will to resist. In this Big Week was successful as a precursor to the escorted raids that followed it (see Graphs 1 and 2). From that time the daylight bombing campaign was only partially countered and during the Normandy landings in June 1944 (OVERLORD) only a handful of German aircraft were immediately available to oppose them.
http://www.valourandhorror.com/BC/Backg/Big_week.htm