Warbird Information Exchange

While the "Most successful fighter in Europe" thread is being discussed, I thought I'd add a related one.

On the wall of the Eagle Hangar of the EAA Museum at Oshosh, there's a display listing the victories of the US fighters:

P-40 481
Wildcat 1,327
P-38 1,771
Corsair 2,140
P-47 3,752
P-51 4,950
Hellcat 5,156

There is no further explanation or a source quoted for these figures. I've always assumed that these are air-to-air victories but I haven't found a source to verify that. Hellcats rule!

So, it would be interesting to see what the comparable numbers are for the Spitfire, Hurricane, Zero, Bf-109 and Fw-190.

Dennis

I think something to do with those numbers though would be to compare them with the actual service time. I don't know off hand when all those planes came into service, but it would be interesting to see how that affects the numbers. Obviously if the hellcat was in service longer than say the mustang (which i dont' think it was), it would affect the data. Something to ponder!!! anyone got that info quick?

brian

Well, this may be like comparing apples with oranges but I added up the 6 page "partial listing" of aces in Walter Musciano's book "Messerschmitt Aces" and came up with 36,914 air victories. And of course the complete count is probably higher since this only lists the aces...and the totals for some of them aren't listed.

However, all of those victories listed weren't just in 109s. Galland is listed with 104 but at least one of his victories was in the 262. And I'm sure there's other instances like this.

Other than that, this number does give a rough relative comparison with the US fighter victories. And puts some numbers behind what we've all been conjecturing: the 109 shot down a huge number of Allied aircraft!

Dennis

I would be tempted to ask if these figures are only US 'kills'. Hard to believe the P-40 number would be that low given it saw combat in every theatre in WWII and was produced in very high numbers.

The AVG in China alone had something close to 300 kills with their P-40's.

Dennis

Quite right, Fighter Wings like JG51 and JG52 flew , I think, solely the 109, and had, between those two alone, scored some 18,000 air to air kills from 1939-45. Mind you they were basically in continuous combat for all that time.
Just as well they didn't count air to ground

Dave