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>The 400 losses I cite as due to aerial combat
are that: >something over 200 were either shot down directly/blew up >in
midair in combat or crashed into the Gulf of Korea near >waiting SAR aircraft
and boats; the rest either crashed on >landing or were mechanics' writeoffs
due to damage >inflicted. I know the Air Force played games with which
>bean pile the losses were listed in, but a loss is a loss and >cannot be
ignored if it doesn't fit in pile A.
Lately Diego and I have been debating incident by
incident from the beginning over on ACIG.org. I'll just plug my position, he can
speak for his own: almost every loss he tries to tag as MiG in the period Nov 1
'50-May 20 '51 (period of a nice paper he co-authored over there) which is
listed as caused by something else in US records has some discrepancy from the
Russian account: time different, place different, he needs to assume planes from
completely different fighter groups in same flight of 4 planes, etc.
He counts pretty much *all* damaged B-29's as lost, but photo's of some taken
later can be found. He cites "POW"'s as confirmation but men who pretty
obviously never existed, and can be explained by for example by a
real POW on an adjacent date, etc..
His counter argument to all
those sort of discrepancies tends to be "I just don't believe US
records (if they contradict my claim/loss matchups)".
Generally speaking I don't
think it's a serious discussion to talk about POW's or pilots "found dead
in their cockpits", "Major Crown" etc. in Russian
accounts who who don't show up anywhere in US records then or in
DPMO's inquiries in the '90's. That's really saying the DPMO guys are frauds,
because AFAIK they had full access to all US and Russian records: that's my one
area of "I just don't believe". Otherwise I'm open to being proved
wrong.
To give an idea the two sides, for that period
IIRC there were 16 official outright US air combat losses, Diego and his
co-author come up with about twice that, and I come up with around 20
admitting w/o's as losses and my research that shows one F-80 loss
attributed to AAA in that period really *does* seem to match the
shootdown account in detail, not just date.
Maybe others would take that same approach (US
records are so unreliable that contrary to almost every air war in history it
would make more sense to start with claim records rather than loss
records as the baseline) maybe the
situation changed later in the war (haven't studied that as closely). But for
now I'd stick with the air combat losses are closer to what was
recorded than 2-3 times as much.
Of course the other planes listed as lost were
lost, but I think the actual reasons matter.
If you're just saying F-86 units would have had
lower operational losses if they'd never been deployed to Korea at all because
the MiG's just weren't there, that's a point, but it still doesn't mean
the operational losses were really combat losses, unless well...they really
fell to MiG cannon. And air-grd types (including a good deal
of F-86 ops later on) I don't see how the MiG's can claim credit for
anything they didn't directly cause to be lost.
Joe
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