USAAF Study 85

VCB = Victory Credits Board.

As an aside, in my "Our Might Always-History of the 355th FG" I have a summary for each 8th AF Fighter Group air to air victory credits by LW type (Me 109, FW 190, Jets and Other (didn't have room to itemize Me 110 or Do 217 (etc.) or Me 262 vs Ar 234 vs Me 163)for each 8th AF FG.

All were extracted from 8th AF VCB and compared to USAF 85. ALL of my ground scores data was extracted from 8th AFVCB.

buffnut453 said:

Actually, I think the Yamamoto Mission highlights the problem of accounting for pilots' claims. USAAF pilots engaged in the mission claimed 3xBetty and 1xZero shot down when, in reality, only 2xBetty aircraft were destroyed. The intense focus on that raid prompted a thorough review, even though there was no official debrief of the pilots immediately following the raid. I'm pretty certain that Lanphier's claim to the Zero was later declined (although he was originally credited with the kill) while Holmes' claim to one of the Betty airframes was subsequently shared with Barber. These conclusions were only reached after intensive, multi-year investigations. Such focus was not given to every single engagement so who knows how many other "small engagements" resulted in 100% overclaiming as was the case here?

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Great example. The final VC awards were Barber 2-0-1 (Betty plus Zeke Destroyed plus Betty damaged (that Holmes and Lanphier later shot down) and Holmes 1.5-0-0 (Betty shared plus Zeke destroyed) with Lanphier getting 1.5 (Betty shared with Zeke Destroyed.)

Yes, the IJN state that only two Bettys were lost ---------------> over claim by 5th AF of 5 to 2 actual. The PTO 5th AF did not have the same process as 8th and 9th AF in the ETO.

Thanks drgondog. I didn't realize that Barber was also credited with a Zero.

The fundamental logical flaw is that smaller engagements must result in "accurate" victory claims. There may be less overclaiming in smaller engagements (in some of the BoB engagements, overclaiming was 3, 4 or even 5 times actual adversary losses...on both sides) but 100+% overclaiming can in no way be considered accurate.

Thanks Bill. Is your "Our Might Always-History of the 355th FG" available online or for purchase? Or is it private research data?


I posted the Yamamoto mission specifically to highlight it as a case in point and I knew it would grow from there. They disputed the original claims and argued about who shot down which plane, but found the answer in the end. It is only ONE mission and it got a LOT of scrutiny becasue of the target. I think if all the missions that resulted in claims got the same scrutiny as the Yamamoto mission, we'd HAVE our "best available" list. But nI would NOT want to generate a best list for just the U.S.A., but for all the cl,aims of WWII. That would be an expensive study!

It's sort of like the fight over Pappy Boyington's claims. It is true he only got 22 flying with the Marines, but he also got another 5.75 - 6 flying with the AVG. So he is properly rated at 22 against other Marines but has a score of 27.75 - 28 overall for the entire war, and should be shown as such somewhere. Many people pushed that one but, curiously, hardly any other pilots were accorded the same scrutiny.

It was pushed by friends of Joe Foss, who later became governor of South Dakota ... and so had some political clout behind it when it came along. Makes me wonder where all the other aces would fall if their careers and accomplishments were subjected to the same level of attention.

I am very much against such selective attention. It's called discrimination. If you're going to scrutinize one pilot, then do a study of the entire list or let it go. Do some analysis for private use maybe, but don't move one guy around on the official list and neglect all the other guys on the same list.

Greg,

Entirely agree. However, you seem to be missing the key point I'm making. Several times you've made the assertion that the USN/USMC claims in the Pacific theatre are accurate because of the (typically) small number of participants. The Yamamoto Mission clearly disproves that assertion because, despite the small number of participants, there was still overclaiming of more than 2:1 by the USAAF. True, the "scores" were subsequently corrected but that didn't happen for all the other engagements in the Pacific theatre. The logical extension is that USN/USMC claims could easily be inflated to the tune of 100% overclaiming which is a considerable margin of error. As I've noted before, that's still better than many such claim/loss ratios in more complex theatres but it hardly counts as accurate.

One mission disproves nothing.

I don't jump to conclusions; I use a modified scientific method. I form a hypothesis and attempt to disprove it a significant number of times. The key is significance.

In the Yamamoto mission you had a high-value target escorted by relatively no-value targets. When the attack started, the fighters jumped into the fray and the bombers scattered in different directions, not related to any objective, but instead related to evasion. The Japanese pilots didn't care if they hit a target, they wanted to get Yamamoto away from the P-38's.

It's a completely different scenario from a fighter vs. fighter combat or a mixed fighter-bomber group with an objective. This type group would have the fighters engage but the bombers would press on to the objective.

The Yamamoto mission is of the outlier variety, VERY uncommon with the complete objective of shooting down only the bombers and specifically the bomber with Yamamoto in it. I can think of no other mission in the entire Pacific war with so specific an objective.

Though important in relevance, I consider it to be a VERY abnormal mission and the results support that. Typical mission have engagements where any aircraft was a fighter target and people would tend to fixate on their target only and have the wnigman watch for counterattack from out of plane, and then acquire a new target once the first one was dispatched or lost.

It results in totally different tactics and is quite apart from any training they received, any combat instincts developed over time, or any other missions they participated in.

Folks, I know this is over a year old but I came across the link USAF Study 85 for those interested..

http://www.afhra.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090601-121.pdf

Thanks for the link!

This is my source doc for all the AAF Victory credits that I have been working on - some 15000+ records which are painful to reconcile to theatre totals because AAF assigned some credits to operational control in lieu of squadron 'only'. Greg gave me some help in using pivot tables in Excel that have helped the reconciliation process

The really incredible thing about Bill's research is exactly that - his painstaking research. Without pivot tables, it can be exceedingly difficult to find a credit of "O" (capital letter O) in an enormous column of "0s" (the number zero). While you can maybe find the odd error, pivot tables merely focus the search in the right area. I forget exactly what he found, but it was 100% Bill's data. His research of Report 85 goes way beyond anything I have ever seen before, but I have noted that many government reports and summary tables from the post-war but before personal computer days have math errors in them.

The errors are not usually major, but are generally off by a couple from the tabular data they are supposed to summarize. Also, many government reports have been transcribed using OCR software and the early OCR packages would sometimes make the strangest errors. I have found victory totals with "III" (3 i's) where a "3" should go, and that makes no sense from an OCR perspective. Several records in report 85 have letters where victory credit numbers should be. When I tried to look them up, the ones I could find and confirm suggested a systematic OCR error. I think it was likely related to the fact that the report was generated on a dot-matrix printer, and the OCR software was sometimes having a hiccup on some specific dot matrix pattern.

Bill's data, on the other hand, seemed to contain only ONE error in the entire data set of more than 15,000 records and I can't recall exactly what it was. But he zoomed in on it rapidly. His work definitely outshines the collective efforts of specific government studies I have managed to look at in some detail, accuracy-wise. If you want a very good, accurate look at some ETO data, his work is a premier place to start. I trust his numbers more than any other source I have found to date.

Now if we can just get him to look at the rest of the theaters and publish, we'll have some great data, at least for the USA. Who knows, maybe he speaks German, Japanese, AND Russian.

Kiss my A** Greg, LOL. I'm working the MTO now and wiil pass on to you. That said I am working on the Evolution of the P-51 from "P-40 replacement to one of the best all around multi purpose fighters" project taking up a lot of cycles.

God, I wish my father was still alive to review my outline.

And, Thanks for the kind words Greg.

You are most welcome, but it really wasn't "kind." I was just making a pretty damned factual observation.

Count me in on any of your forthcoming publications when they become available.

I wish the Air University public websites and database were available online, but they have been "unavailable" and under review for some years now. Lacking that, things like Report 85 seem like the last resort, and they are available only in non-searchable pdf format, so it would be a manual chore to input all the data.

My primary resource shortfall is time. I have an upcoming course to teach that I haven't taught before, and reviewing the book and labs takes precedence over other personal interests.