This is hypothetical....
I know from reading Yeagers autobiography that there was General that
wanted planes
repaired in a certain way. Well the ground crew would paint the serial
number on the next
plane the General wanted to see finished and repaired. Satisfied the ground
crew did their job
they would put the correct serial number on the plane and move it back
into service.
I do not know if the Migs had any serial numbers on them, ours did.
I suspect the Russians did see ours and recorded them.
Thereby, detailing who was whom flying when.
Of course pilots were assigned different or available aircraft other then
their personal aircraft.
My point regarding the F84's, were/did we play a Serial Number Game
with the Russians
to keep them off guard and mess with their accouning of US aircraft.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 6:54
PM
Subject: Re: revising air war kill
tallies
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
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2003 5:19
PM
Subject: Re: revising air war kill
tallies
Joe,
I think the big problem is the fact that at least one of the US authors
indicated that aircraft lost in combat were not counted as combat losses if
they did not crash in the immediate vicinity of the mission or combat area.
There are a number of losses which were ditched in off either coast of North
Korea which were lost under suspect conditions.
The B-29 crews argue about a number of damaged aircraft written off as
flak damage when the crews claimed it was "horizontal flak" from MiG cannon
and not ground gunners.
Big problem is how much of this is anecdotal and how much is actual
serious after-action reporting. We've gone over some of them in the past,
but the problem still remains which aircraft were lost for what reasons.
One thing which IS obvious from reading the details from
autobiographies of guys like Abukumov is that a lot of the claims were
validated by who got to the crash site first, and in many cases it seems to
be VVS pilots and not the PVO gunners. Ergo, an aircraft shot down as an
F-86 is claimed due to a smoking hole in the ground, which mysteriously
matches up with an F-84 shot down by flak.
But when there is R500 bonus at stake, hey, money talks...
Cookie Sewell
AMPS