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Cookie,
Russian authors have picked up on and amplified single statements probably
made in some US books for example 1) only planes that crashed in NK were
counted as lost 2) the US later re-evaluated losses upward in
stages so what's the next stage? 3) US didn't count damaged written off
planes. But I don't think any of those three can be shown to be true in
reality.
1) if one counts all the losses individually, in a source like Korwald say,
including all that clearly should be counted (eg. "damaged over NK by MiG's,
pilot bailed out over SK") the total adds up to about what the USAF said right
after the war (1953 Statistical Digest, source for Futrell's numbers). So
there's simply no indication of cheating of the level of "oh that one didn't
crash in NK so it doesn't count". Except a relatively small number of B-29's,
related to 3).
2) just not so. Every correct accounting USAF has ever given AFAIK is
essentially consistent with '53 Statistical Digest tables. 58 Sabres lost is
often quoted, but I believe that's just a mistake. The 78 in my edition of
Futrell is from the Stat Digest and is consistent with Korwald and the
tables in Thompson/MacLaren book (more or less, some mysteried remain). The
statement often made that the Sabre Measures Charlie study said 103 F-86's were
lost in air combat is simply not so: the column totalling to 103 in
that report is labelled "blue losses" and the monthly losses correspond to
the total losses for *all* fighter types (incl F-51) in the '53 Stat
Digest table for each month.
3) Aircraft damaged beyond repair seem to generally be included in the 53
Stat Digest numbers. The possible exception is B-29's but not a large number and
it does not apply to other types to any large degree. For example the 30 or
so F-86's listed in Korwald "damaged" (in addition to 80 or so air-air
losses) can almost all be shown to have been repaired and flown later.
Any really statisticially signficant cheating would have to be IMO on
the issue of calling air combat losses something else completely. Here an
example is the period Nov 1950-May 20 1951. Diego came up with IIRC 32 US
air combat losses for this period in a paper he wrote that was on ACIG site. The
seeming rule was almost all AAA or mechanical losses were counted
as MiG losses if there were otherwised unfulfilled MiG claims the same day,
plus he added a few completely "hidden losses" when he felt Soviet documentation
was strong. Korwald totals 16 losses counting logically, the official total
is not clear for the period, probably 17 or 18 (prob incl an F-51 loss
definitely not, I found, to MiG's and Shirlaw's F-86 4/51 code M
and probably counted in the 78 though unlikely to be due to MiGs). I got 20
initially, 19 best guess after more review of primary records. There's only
one case of a non-MiG loss where attributing to MiG's seems possible
based on time place, circumstance and lack of other US units' combats at the
time and place mentioned by the Russians, less than 50-50 on further review
though I still included it. This doesn't prove anything about the whole
war, just leads me to doubt that the number of such misattributions
is statistically signficant. Russian claims in the period btw were 152 by
my count.
I completely agree the Russian wreck accounting is not reliable enough to
establish new losses missing from US records, and don't see logically how
such it could generally prove an airplane was downed by one cause rather than
another even if reliable. For example one case debated here long ago was the
supposed Soviet turkey shoot of F-84's plus a few F-86's 9/9/52. As mentioned
then the tail numbers in Soviet records for 9 supposed
F-84 wrecks mostly don't correspond to any F-84 and the I since
tracked down that the ones that do are of F-84's provably in existence
after the war. Strangely the tail numbers of the 3 F-84's actually
shot down are not given. More recently I also learned that machine gun serial
numbers given as proof of an F-86 downing that day are those of guns fitted
to one of the 3 F-84's.
Joe
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