Jose,
I've been following the thread and must say that I have had a long
running exchange with Diego on the subject.
Alas, the quote you cite is from one of the Russian books as reason why
their claims are valid and the US ones are not, and at the end of the day
there appears to be an overclaiming rate of between 6 and 10 on the part of
the Soviet pilots. The Chinese are much worse, as they appear to have used
"KGB Math" and cut their own losses by 50% while multiplying US losses by a
factor of 5. The North Korean claims (last I saw them they were something like
5,800 shot down in air-to-air combat) are patently ridiculous.
US claims seem to be about 80-100% accurate for USN/USMC ones (there are
only 23 as separate services) and about 70% for the USAF.
But at the end of the day, it's still a "who shot John" he-said-he-said
affair. Joe Brennan and I have been looking at it from two sides (he has
pretty good US records, and I have most of the Soviet ones released so far)
and it's pretty easy to figure out who was cooking the books.
Cookie Sewell
AMPS