he did it during the mp streams with Johan. He got an ace and due to daniel not allowing them to retreat he literaly died basicly instantly.
Air ace life spans
- Thread starter Greenboot
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That could be a rare event, not a regular mechanic, but with more chance to happen if you have many aces.
Don't forget... when the US boys appeared in the skies above Europe there wasn't much to shoot at anymore. I think the last big impression by the Luftwaffe was at the battle of Kursk, after that it was barely able to defend anything.
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So because the Soviets overestimated their kills, Germans didn't overestimate theirs? That's not even close to logical.
German record keeping was massively prone to exaggeration. The best information we have is from the battle of Britain. There it's a long period with stable fighting as far as air combat goes and really good British records. The British records show the loss of 915 aircraft. The German records claimed 3,058 aircraft shot down. A 3:1 exaggeration... and those are "confirmed" kills, the kills still in the system after the oh so rigorous system rubber stamped 90% of the pilots claims. Mind you I'm not talking pilot losses which are even lower but aircraft losses.
Furthermore Germany routinely inflated the performance of it's heroes to absurd levels in all aspects, not just aircraft. The entire Nazi ideology was based around claiming that German heroes could do anything, the triumph of the will. Air combat victories are one of the best places for such exaggeration of the heroes.
This isn't to say that the Soviets didn't take a really bad mauling. But dont trust the German numbers, they are complete and utter crap and their claims are always high when compared to the actual inventories on the other side.
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Eric Hartman flew ~1300 sorties. With 352 kills, that's ~3.7 sorties per kill.
Ivan Kozhedub, Soviet 2nd highest kill ace, flew ~330 sorties, had 59 confirmed (and there are hints, that he gave away a bunch of kills to other pilots, to boost their confidence) kills during WW2. That's ~5.6 sorties per kill.
Thus, had the soviet pilot had the chance to fly as many sorties as Hartmann, he would have given the German a run for his money.
Ivan Kozhedub, Soviet 2nd highest kill ace, flew ~330 sorties, had 59 confirmed (and there are hints, that he gave away a bunch of kills to other pilots, to boost their confidence) kills during WW2. That's ~5.6 sorties per kill.
Thus, had the soviet pilot had the chance to fly as many sorties as Hartmann, he would have given the German a run for his money.
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Fist problem in your affirmation, 5,6 sortie per kill is LESS efficient than 3,7 sortie per kill. As the number is higher, it means it takes more sorties to achieve the same number of kills.
Second problem (resulting from the first), if you make a simple rule of three calculation the result is if the soviet pilot made 1300 sorties at the same rate he would have had 232 kills. That is still a wonderful achievement, but 232 is less than 352.
330 x 3,94 = 1300,2
59 x 3,94 = 232,46
QED
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Largely true. Chuck Yeager famously shot down five 109s in a single battle when he stumbled alone into a German squadron (a feat which is pretty common among the best aces of any country, including the Germans). But due to a lack of Germans he just didn't have nearly enough opportunities to repeat those kinds of stunts.
Eh... after Kursk the Luftwaffe was certainly crumbling, but it wasn't crumbled. It was really Big Week which delivered the real death blow to the Luftwaffe. Everything after that was one prolonged death rattle until Boddenplate which was the last gasp.
When it comes to air-air combat, the key to kill overclaiming are really the pilots. Overclaiming is reduced the better your pilots are, with the kill claims of aces being far more accurate than the average. A new and inexperienced pilot was likely to overclaim by 500% or more, a veteran likely by 200-300%, but the best aces only overclaimed by only about 20-30%.
Marseille, the German ace who scored most of his kills in North Africa, and for whose victims we have the best records for, claimed some 158 kills. Post war research has verified over 100 of those kills, leaving about 50 in doubt, of which in only about a dozen cases is there absolutely no way Marseille could have shot down as much as he claimed. A portion of the remaining claims may still be kills, but while they cannot be completely discounted, it's impossible to conclusively attribute them to Marseille. In particular, on the single day when Marseille claimed a stunning 17 aircraft shot down (and the rest of JG.26 another 9) Allied records show 23 fighters were indeed shot down in that area, making it possible that Marseille did in fact shoot down all, or nearly all of his incredible one-day total.
Other Allied aces whose claims have been scrutinized against German records show a 60-80% verification rate, so Marseille's over-claiming by as much as a third was nothing out of the ordinary. For an ace. Because of this most people take the claims of the top aces as generally accurate, and there's no serious movement to officially adjust them.
The hows and the whys of this are actually pretty simple. The best aces invariably had superb eyesight and were fantastic shots. They tended to hit what they shot at, and usually hit it lethally. And they also had the vision and the situational awareness to make a pretty good assessment on how much damage they'd actually done. Poor pilots on the other hand tended to spray hails of bullets at the enemy, and record any indication of a hit as a kill. In many cases what happened was the inexperienced shooter had not landed enough rounds in a vital location to bring down his target, and the damaged enemy dove away to escape, being subsequently mistakenly recorded as a kill.
The point is that the usual rules of overclaiming don't apply to aces. If you want a rule of thumb then reduce their claims by 20-30%, but even that still leaves the German experten with colossal totals. Some salt is still required, but not much of it. By and large what research we can do has shown the aces did indeed shoot down most of what they claimed.
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Let's throw some numbers up and take a look: http://jpgleize.perso.neuf.fr/aces/ww2lbob.htm
The top 48 German pilots claimed 707 craft shot down in the battle of britain. Each of them claiming at least 5 craft shot down. Let's apply a 25% per your suggestion reduction and say it's really 530 kills. From RAF records we know the actual losses were 915. That means that 58% of the kills went to less then 1% of German pilots. And keep in mind we are also talking about only those who shot down 5 planes during the battle of britain. There were German aces who participated in the battle of Britain but didn't get up to 5 from BoB alone. They would also have this superior eyesight that you are talking about but I couldn't find a convenient tally for their claims in the Battle of Britain.
The other 98% of pilots would need to be claiming 2300 kills and only actually getting 385 in order to make these numbers add up. For the aces to be 75% accurate you would need everyone else to be 14% accurate. Plus there would be some unreported victories. Those would show up in the British loss statistics but wouldn't be correct claims, pushing that figure of 385 even lower. Basically it would mean that 98% of German pilots would need to be completely pants on head useless to leave enough kills for the aces claims to be anything other then bullshit.
This theory just doesn't pass the smell test. When you have a massive, massive disparity in the numbers claiming that this disparity didn't affect one quarter of the claims just doesn't make sense. And it's also flying straight in the face of everything we know about the Nazis. They exaggerated their supermen and they loved talking up their airforce for propoganda.
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Well, wining air force always has less aces. Great example, Vietnam, where Vietnamise had more aces and better scoring ones... And USAF dominated skies.
Let`s just be clear, the way to fight better turning planes like Zero, was known full-well before start of Battle of Pacific, with Soviet AF wiping Japanese in their border skirmishes using the same "energy" tactics Americans used against zero and later in Vietnam versus better turning MIG-17&MiG-19.
If anything, US difficulties facing zero simply boiled down to substandard training.
If you want to argue that "German tactic was an utter failure" due to not rotating aces, you have to prove both that there was some winning tactics Germans were missing, and where it came from. From what I now, German tactic was absolutely fine for the duration of war, and innovations happened as well as on allied side, while failure mostly boiled down to their pilot training being not long enough, their planes losing technological edge or becoming slightly obsolete, and simple numbers.
Japanese did not use Zeros against Soviets, and they weren't really "wiped" in air combat of Khalkin-Gol.
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This is true.
The zero was a carrier aircraft, and it wasn't even developed at the time of the border skirmish.
The Soviets used I-16s and I-152s, and the Japanese used KI-10 and KI-27 fighter planes. The Japanese planes performed quite good against their soviet counterparts, even if we consider that the Soviets had 2-3x as much airplanes.
Notice that I said like Zero.
Why yes, they lost the air, hence wiped. This doesn`t mean they didn`t put up a fight.
Depends on how you view it. Initially Soviets had far less modern crafts, so their casualties are understandable, but I-16 with experienced pilots and tactics to fight planes that yours can`t out-turn, sealed the deal, eventually getting air superiority for Soviets. Quite like in Pacific, actually.
Wiki says - Japan used about 400 aircraft during the Battles of Khalkin Gol , Russia used more than 900 aircraft.
Russia lost 208 aircraft.
Japan lost 162 aircraft.
Looking at airlosses, Japan seems to be the winner.
Russia lost 208 aircraft.
Japan lost 162 aircraft.
Looking at airlosses, Japan seems to be the winner.
No, everyone overestimated their kills. This is normal. The statistics are readily available now that almost every nation has opened their archives. What's important tho is the ratio, overclaiming by 15% seems bad until you compare it.
Actually, the fact that the Soviets had 2-3x as much fighters sealed the deal. The i-16 was an inferior fighter plane to the KI-27.
Even so looking at the following stats I dont think the Soviets had complete air superiority, and the definitely did not wipe the japanese.
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The Germans didn't overestimate by 15%. They overestimated by about 200%...
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This thread is really funny, after 1 page discussion about the the game, 3 pages of people making German pilots down because they are Germans while finding excuses why the allied aces didn´t get any kills (just give me thumbs down, doesn´t change the truth).
Even if every German ace has claimed 2 kills for every plane he actually shot down and all reports of other Nations are true, it wouldn´t change much on the aces list, the first non-German would be Ilmari Juutilainen at place 20, the first allied would be Ivan Kozhedub at place 66. And saying "but my great U.S. ace invented this and that great strategy" is the same as saying "my engineer next door invented the toaster", nice and actually great work, but has absolutely nothing to do with being an ace.
Of course U.S. doctrine didn´t encourage aces by pulling them out after a few kills, and maybe they would have gotten also 300 kills if they flew the whole war, but fact is: they didn´t do it, U.S. produced with this system a whole lot of veterans, but nearly no aces.
And no back to the theme: Hearts of Iron 4, the best game of the year 2016, aces loss rates.
I also think that the aces ingame are a bit to fragile, if a fighter wing losses 25% of it´s fighters it doesn´t lose 25% of it´s pilots, some pilots are bailing out, others mange to land on their home airfield with planes that are write-offs. If you also take into account that aces are much less likely to be damaged at all because of better situational awareness, more knowledge of combat manoeuvres etcetera, there shouldn´t be this stupid WWW one week average lifetime of aces in battles.
Even if every German ace has claimed 2 kills for every plane he actually shot down and all reports of other Nations are true, it wouldn´t change much on the aces list, the first non-German would be Ilmari Juutilainen at place 20, the first allied would be Ivan Kozhedub at place 66. And saying "but my great U.S. ace invented this and that great strategy" is the same as saying "my engineer next door invented the toaster", nice and actually great work, but has absolutely nothing to do with being an ace.
Of course U.S. doctrine didn´t encourage aces by pulling them out after a few kills, and maybe they would have gotten also 300 kills if they flew the whole war, but fact is: they didn´t do it, U.S. produced with this system a whole lot of veterans, but nearly no aces.
And no back to the theme: Hearts of Iron 4, the best game of the year 2016, aces loss rates.
I also think that the aces ingame are a bit to fragile, if a fighter wing losses 25% of it´s fighters it doesn´t lose 25% of it´s pilots, some pilots are bailing out, others mange to land on their home airfield with planes that are write-offs. If you also take into account that aces are much less likely to be damaged at all because of better situational awareness, more knowledge of combat manoeuvres etcetera, there shouldn´t be this stupid WWW one week average lifetime of aces in battles.
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What you dont seem to get is that is a considerably more generous statement for the Germans then reality.
I dont get why people find this hard. The Nazis lied. They lied a lot. They lied about their actions. They lied about their enemies. They lied so much that novels were written discussing the ways that living in a world of lives was so messed up to people. They lied about their accomplishments. They lied in the face of overwhelming evidence and insisted they were unbeatable right up until the soviets were crashing Berlin. If there is one thing we know is that the Nazis lied. And not little lies. Really big lies.
But what do people immediately say? Oh the numbers we got from the Nazis much be true. No. This is not the case. It's the NAZIS. They are well known for LYING. The exploits of their elite soldiers is the exact thing they lied about. Stop credulously accepting their numbers.
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Good job avoiding the argument. Anyways, I see where this is going, you're nobody that trying to look into the records and statistics to find out what is true and recreate history, you're just somebody that cannot bear the fact that the top performing Aces were German, and are thus trying to get some perverse satisfaction out of the fact that you are trying to lessen the incredible success German pilots had.
If you would actually be interested in this, why not look at the statistics? German kill records were already investigated and corrected, whereas some, especially Soviet ones, have never been looked at by anybody ever. And your only argument towards your assumption that only the Germans overclaimed? Well they're Germans lelelelel :^)
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What, you mean besides me citing historical statistics on this same page, 11 posts up? I'm talking about the post where I did a little breaking down the numbers to show just how implausible this crap is. You mean besides that I'm not going to go into the statistics?
If you just ignore any evidence presented by people who disagree with you, no one who disagrees with you has evidence! Well played!
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