Need help getting my head around this, Allied Flying Aces really sucked this bad?

[SFBayGamer]

Went to see Dunkirk last night and clearly the movie should have been entitled "The Skies Over Dunkirk" as the real hero per Christopher Nolan was the RAF pilot who even with no actual fuel in his plane appears to scare off the entire Luftwaffe single handily and save 300,000+ British troops.

I then went to google to determine if that is even remotely based on actual RAF pilot before I answer my son on whether indeed this guy was legit and came to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...II_flying_aces

I was immediately met with a wall of Swastikas, because apparently the entire Allied air effort couldnt make it out of LFR in WOD raiding while 'Ze Germans' were world firsting (or fisting?) Mythic Legion content left and right.

I knew Ze Germans were good pilots, but this is insane. The vaunted American and British Air Corps are sitting below Finland and Romania for the love of God.

Before I begin to question my entire childhood mythology (?) of American Air Superiority, could this be some of sort of weird fake wikipedia entry and the actual historical reality was totally different??

[mizeri]

germans had the better planes and better training at the time, they were years ahead in weapons and armor. the patton museum here has a german tank in it, and this thing is just a beast compared to what the allied forces were using.

[Independent voter]

Don't think they had Spitfires then, Americans didn't have their Mustangs.

Was listening to the BBC history show and the historian said that the Germans had stopped their advance by then, supply lines were too long and they really couldn't believe how successful they were.

[Locklen]

Don't think they had Spitfires then, Americans didn't have their Mustangs.

Was listening to the BBC history show and the historian said that the Germans had stopped their advance by then, supply lines were too long and they really couldn't believe how successful they were.

This. Basically, the allies were playing catch-up on tech during the early part of the war, but when we did catch up, we had far more industrial capacity and overwhelmed them.

[Ivanstone]

It wasn't really a technology gap. American and British fighters were excellent. The Nazi's had a couple advantages:
1 - They got some early practice during the Spanish Civil War.
2 - Nazi kill counts are massively inflated by the Eastern front. Russian planes weren't bad but they took some skill to fly and many Russian pilots didn't live long to acquire that skill. It didn't help that they cut corners in manufacturing to increase their numbers but numerical superiourity wasn't a big enough advantage.

[eldood]

Germans fighters have been fighting wave after wave of sub-trained, ill-equipped Russian fighters until 1944.

So yeah, there is that. If you take a look at the tank aces, you end-up with pretty much the same results, where Tigers have kd ratio of 8+.

[I Push Buttons]

Went to see Dunkirk last night and clearly the movie should have been entitled "The Skies Over Dunkirk" as the real hero per Christopher Nolan was the RAF pilot who even with no actual fuel in his plane appears to scare off the entire Luftwaffe single handily and save 300,000+ British troops.

I then went to google to determine if that is even remotely based on actual RAF pilot before I answer my son on whether indeed this guy was legit and came to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...II_flying_aces

I was immediately met with a wall of Swastikas, because apparently the entire Allied air effort couldnt make it out of LFR in WOD raiding while 'Ze Germans' were world firsting (or fisting?) Mythic Legion content left and right.

I knew Ze Germans were good pilots, but this is insane. The vaunted American and British Air Corps are sitting below Finland and Romania for the love of God.

Before I begin to question my entire childhood mythology (?) of American Air Superiority, could this be some of sort of weird fake wikipedia entry and the actual historical reality was totally different??

Clicked the first guy on the list:
"He claimed, and was credited with, shooting down 352 Allied aircraft—345 Soviet and 7 American."

There is no fluke, just assume the Russians trained and equipped their pilots the same as their infantry. Not at all.

[Kellhound]

The Germans (and the Japanese) started out with better trained pilots flying better aircraft, and ended up defending against massive bomber raids, both of which account for a good amount of the discrepancies. Also, the Axis tended to keep their best pilots in frontline units while the allies tended to rotate them into training billets to raise the overall quality of replacement pilots. Further, there were more Allied planes than Axis planes, so that also aided in German aces' high numbers.

[Shakadam]

All the top scoring German aces and the top scoring non-German (i.e. Finns) all fought the same enemy, Soviets.

Soviet aerial warfare was terrible in terms of quality, tactics, and training until the later part of the war.

[SFBayGamer]

Clicked the first guy on the list:
"He claimed, and was credited with, shooting down 352 Allied aircraft—345 Soviet and 7 American."

There is no fluke, just assume the Russians trained and equipped their pilots the same as their infantry. Not at all.

Right? That is what I assumed too, the classic American Hollywood thing where we just naturally assume the USSR was filled with just targets rather than actual warriors, but the top Allied Ace of the entire war was a Russian! I knew Russians had IL-2 Sturmoviks for ground support but apparently they were beasts in Air to Air as well?

Someone tell me Tom Hardy's character wasnt a total lie...someone.

[Bolow]

Germans fighters have been fighting wave after wave of sub-trained, ill-equipped Russian fighters until 1944.

So yeah, there is that. If you take a look at the tank aces, you end-up with pretty much the same results, where Tigers have kd ratio of 8+.

Post-Kursk the Germans couldn't achieve anything more than local air superiority for anything more than an hour, and mid-late war Soviet aircraft were more than a match for their German equivalents. Yeah things like the LaGG-3 were called Varnished Coffins, but it's successor the La-5 and La-7 were easily as good as the FW-190 at the time, especially in the much lower altitude that combat took place on in the East.

Tank kills are kind of dumb to track anyway. FWIW Germans counted basically anything that was hit and disabled as a kill. The problem is if you spend the whole time retreating like the Germans, you can't actually "secure" the kill so any tank that doesn't get burnt out or exploded, get repaired in a matter of days and sent back out. Even if the Tiger is rocking an 8.0 KD it doesn't matter when everyone else can pump out 20 tanks for the cost of one of those.

[Shalcker]

Before I begin to question my entire childhood mythology (?) of American Air Superiority, could this be some of sort of weird fake wikipedia entry and the actual historical reality was totally different??

Most of it is difference in accounting.

That is, for Germans it was "you claim a kill, you considered as got a kill"; and they could double-claim kills too.

It's right there in the article:
Accuracy of claims
Main article: Confirmation and overclaiming of aerial victories

In the 1990s, the German archives made available microfilm rolls of wartime records, not seen since January 1945, available to the public.[6] These showed that while in theory the Luftwaffe did not accept a kill without a witness, which was considered only a probable, in practice some units habitually submitted unwitnessed claims and these sometimes made it through the verification process, particularly if they were made by pilots with already established records.[6] In theory the Luftwaffe did not accept shared claims, but it happened. In theory each separate claim should have referred to a particular aircraft, but in practice some victories were awarded to other pilots who had claimed the destruction of the same aircraft.[6] In 1943 the daily OKW communiques (Wehrmachtbericht) of this period habitually overstated American bomber losses by a factor of two or more. Defenders of German fighter pilots have always maintained that these were reduced during the confirmation process. But the microfilms prove this not to be the case.[6] Some 80 – 90 percent of the claims submitted were confirmed or found to be "in order" for confirmation up to the time the system broke down altogether in 1945.[6]

[I Push Buttons]

Right? That is what I assumed too, the classic American Hollywood thing where we just naturally assume the USSR was filled with just targets rather than actual warriors, but the top Allied Ace of the entire war was a Russian! I knew Russians had IL-2 Sturmoviks for ground support but apparently they were beasts in Air to Air as well?

Someone tell me Tom Hardy's character wasnt a total lie...someone.

That isn't indicative of the overall quality, though.

[SFBayGamer]

Most of it is difference in accounting.

That is, for Germans it was "you claim a kill, you considered as got a kill"; and they could double-claim kills too.

It's right there in the article:
Accuracy of claims
Main article: Confirmation and overclaiming of aerial victories

In the 1990s, the German archives made available microfilm rolls of wartime records, not seen since January 1945, available to the public.[6] These showed that while in theory the Luftwaffe did not accept a kill without a witness, which was considered only a probable, in practice some units habitually submitted unwitnessed claims and these sometimes made it through the verification process, particularly if they were made by pilots with already established records.[6] In theory the Luftwaffe did not accept shared claims, but it happened. In theory each separate claim should have referred to a particular aircraft, but in practice some victories were awarded to other pilots who had claimed the destruction of the same aircraft.[6] In 1943 the daily OKW communiques (Wehrmachtbericht) of this period habitually overstated American bomber losses by a factor of two or more. Defenders of German fighter pilots have always maintained that these were reduced during the confirmation process. But the microfilms prove this not to be the case.[6] Some 80 – 90 percent of the claims submitted were confirmed or found to be "in order" for confirmation up to the time the system broke down altogether in 1945.[6]

YOU PRINCE! Thank you. I knew some massive data genius with an actual PhD in Wikipedia would solve this mystery. There is no way the disparity could have actually been that huge in RL.

[BuckSparkles]

Likely because they shot down so many russians.

[Ivanstone]

Right? That is what I assumed too, the classic American Hollywood thing where we just naturally assume the USSR was filled with just targets rather than actual warriors, but the top Allied Ace of the entire war was a Russian! I knew Russians had IL-2 Sturmoviks for ground support but apparently they were beasts in Air to Air as well?

Someone tell me Tom Hardy's character wasnt a total lie...someone.

Ivan Kozhedub flew the La-5 mostly. It was a decent plane, somewhat comparable to German ones and he lived long enough to get good at flying it. There was always plenty of opportunity to fight Nazis which was different from the Western front.

Sturmovik's weren't a "good" air to air plane but it was tough as hell and sometimes that's good enough. It was a shit tonne better than the Stuka or any other comparable ground-to-air plane.

[Akainakali]

The Germans (and the Japanese) started out with better trained pilots flying better aircraft, and ended up defending against massive bomber raids, both of which account for a good amount of the discrepancies. Also, the Axis tended to keep their best pilots in frontline units while the allies tended to rotate them into training billets to raise the overall quality of replacement pilots. Further, there were more Allied planes than Axis planes, so that also aided in German aces' high numbers.

This. Whole post nailed it completely.

It's one of the reasons why Japanese aviation basically collapsed as a threat towards the end of the war. The elite brutally trained pilots with combat experience were almost all dead and they couldn't train replacements to replace them. The handful that survived the war had massive kill counts as a result.

[Kellhound]

Most of it is difference in accounting.

That is, for Germans it was "you claim a kill, you considered as got a kill"; and they could double-claim kills too.

It's right there in the article:
Accuracy of claims
Main article: Confirmation and overclaiming of aerial victories

In the 1990s, the German archives made available microfilm rolls of wartime records, not seen since January 1945, available to the public.[6] These showed that while in theory the Luftwaffe did not accept a kill without a witness, which was considered only a probable, in practice some units habitually submitted unwitnessed claims and these sometimes made it through the verification process, particularly if they were made by pilots with already established records.[6] In theory the Luftwaffe did not accept shared claims, but it happened. In theory each separate claim should have referred to a particular aircraft, but in practice some victories were awarded to other pilots who had claimed the destruction of the same aircraft.[6] In 1943 the daily OKW communiques (Wehrmachtbericht) of this period habitually overstated American bomber losses by a factor of two or more. Defenders of German fighter pilots have always maintained that these were reduced during the confirmation process. But the microfilms prove this not to be the case.[6] Some 80 – 90 percent of the claims submitted were confirmed or found to be "in order" for confirmation up to the time the system broke down altogether in 1945.[6]

Overall, the USSR lost about 3X the number of aircraft the Germans lost. It is inevitable that the German air combat kills (both in raw numbers and per pilot) ended up far outstripping the USSR.

[Shiny212]

How do you think the nazis nearly conquered the whole world? Hitler created an unrivaled war machine and only narrowly lost after mistakes were made.

Trucks, bikes, tanks, heavy weapons, planes were all miles ahead of the rest of the world when the war broke out.

[Heladys]

Went to see Dunkirk last night and clearly the movie should have been entitled "The Skies Over Dunkirk" as the real hero per Christopher Nolan was the RAF pilot who even with no actual fuel in his plane appears to scare off the entire Luftwaffe single handily and save 300,000+ British troops.

I then went to google to determine if that is even remotely based on actual RAF pilot before I answer my son on whether indeed this guy was legit and came to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...II_flying_aces

I was immediately met with a wall of Swastikas, because apparently the entire Allied air effort couldnt make it out of LFR in WOD raiding while 'Ze Germans' were world firsting (or fisting?) Mythic Legion content left and right.

I knew Ze Germans were good pilots, but this is insane. The vaunted American and British Air Corps are sitting below Finland and Romania for the love of God.

Before I begin to question my entire childhood mythology (?) of American Air Superiority, could this be some of sort of weird fake wikipedia entry and the actual historical reality was totally different??

Vastly better planes for the germans to start the war, and very slow introduction of Spitfires when they were ready. Also, the german war machine had been training troops a lot longer.

When the Brits got their feet under themselves, they kicked ass.