Warbird Information Exchange

My reference is "Soviet Aces of WWII" by Hugh Morgan.
The Budanova case is on P. 80.
Wiki is a free info source where anything can be posted until somebody says different. I prefer sources who are serious researchers such as Morgan.
P.83 states that the VVS pilots claimed over 40,000 enemy aircraft shot down. I don't believe that # includes partial or shared kills.

Something to remember regarding US Navy claims is that the Navy unlike the various US Air Forces never really developed any systematic accounting of fighter pilot claims. Therefore the system for establishing victory credits varied from unit to unit and there was on overall accounting of claims. As well carriers had pretty limited space for record keeping and intelligence gathering. This can mean two things now. USN claims may not be all that they are thought to be in either direction.

1. What ALLIED aircraft (type) shot down the most axis aircraft?
2. What American aircraft (type) shot down the most axis aircraft?
3. What Axis aircraft (type) shot down the most allied aircraft?
4. What Axis aircraft (type) shot down the most American aircraft?

Sorry, too lazy to do the research ... I'm sure some of you scholars know the answers ...

August as usual made many of the points that I would have made. WIX in general tends to give a US-centric view. The Russians had four years of daily hand-to-hand (if you can call it that) combat that ran up a lot of unquantifyable German kills. My guess is that Yak-9 if not the LaGG shot down more planes than the F6F (or P-39).

Possible, but difficult to get the statistics. Absent sources it is all speculation

In answer to the B-17 - my guess is that the Ilushkin 2 Shturmoviks shot down more than the B-17. Remember, there were many many Shturmoviks flying in close combat every day. Again, can't quantify these but the numbers must surely have added up to more than B-17s ever shot down (though as August said, maybe well short of what the B-17s claimed to have shot down).

B-17/B-24 had major overclaim issues -true. It would strain credibility to assume that the IL-2 shot down a fraction of actual LW fighters shot down by B-17s. The USAAF bombers were far better armed, engaged in many more pitched battles with Luftwaffe and should have had many more opportunities for multiple gunners to shoot at the same German fighters with .50 cal weapons.

The IL-2 almost always had one weapon to defend against a universal 6 o'clock attack.

Why do you assume the IL-2 shot down more LW fighters?

As to the F6F - how much trust can we give to these numbers? Many of these kills were over water, so not wrecks to be assured of kills. The high F6F numbers have always seemed suspect to me - were most of these kills collobrated by gun camera footage (did most of the F6Fs even have cameras?). As carrier planes they did not see combat as regularly as land-based aircraft.

One can speculate on the Awards process all day long. Bring your own fact base and draw conclusions as you wish. Right or wrong you have to start with two assumptions - 1.) the claims process was bounded by both an Officer's code of conduct (don't lie, cheat or steal) and 2.) actual claims records as they existed were retained for follow up Post War review.

I can't speak for the USN but USAAF scrubbed the awards from all USAAF claims after the war (USAF Study 85). The results of that process will never be 'better' strictly due to the passage of time and lack of any follow up contradictions

My guess again is that Russian aircraft would likely win in every Allied category, with Me-109 winning in every axis fighter category by virtue of its use in Russia. From the Russian point of view, everything in western Europe and Africa was merely a side show, and there is something to be said for that view. (give me a moment to change into my asbestos clothing...)

From the German POV relative to the airwar, the West was the grand stage in 1943 through the collapse of the Eastern Front. Only after January and Boddenplatte did the LW finally shift resources eastward instead of trying to stop RAF/US attacks on Germany.

remember even outfits like JG 77 and JG 51 located in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia were forced to engage 8th and 15th AF strikes from eastern Germany through Rumania to attempt to blunt strikes on Oil targets. They weren't even fully devoted to Soviet threat.

Actually, nobody knows the answer to these questions. Fighter pilots of all nations overclaimed kills anywhere from 2x to 5x their actual kills over the course of the war, depending on tactical circumstances and the conventions of the air arm or unit, as verified postwar from the loss records of the other side. This was all known to each side's brass at the time, but big kill numbers and lots of aces are good for morale, so they quietly used much lower and more reliable estimates for their own planning.

Your sources for "2x" and "5x" are?

Loss records for the Allies are far more complete than Axis records, german records seemed better than IJN until 1944 when both went 'south'

The majority of aces, who claimed 5, 6, or 7 kills, actually never got 5.

That is a bold statement and sounds like a claimed 'fact' - If an opinion, everyone has one of those. If you think it is factual what are your proof points to both qualify and quantify that ANY percentage of aces with awards of 5-7 in fact had less than 5?

The total numbers and the kill ratios claimed for aircraft like the Hellcat are .

What is your claim for total number - that you pose is 'not BS'?

5, 50, 500, 5000? and what sources would you cite to support your conjecture?

what approach do you suggest to bring it down to 'hard facts' or extremely high probability of 'fact'??

Although overclaiming was universal, it occurred more at some times and places than at others, and therefore we cannot reliabily compare not only the absolute, but even the relative numbers of kills credited to different aircraft in different theatres.

Agreed

Heavy bomber gunners often claimed around 10x the number of aircraft that the enemy actually lost, which is Glyn's point. No kill tallies for B-17s or B-24s, individually or collectively, can be taken seriously.

Also agreed


One could do systematic analysis to get the real data, making heavy use of the records of the side whose aircraft were shot down, except that (1) there would be major gaps in the data, (2) the question isn't of enough importance to interest any real historian, and (3) the pseudo historians who dominate the WWII-aviation-history genre are much too interested in perpetuating the old myths to be interested in the project.

Major disagreement on 2.) unless you have a unique qualifier to the definition of 'real historian'. The air war in Europe is a very concentrated body of perpetual study - with more seeking Truth than "proof'

August

Just one observation at this stage.

The high claimers offered with data have essentially been 'one service' aircraft, as drgondog's already pointed out - RN FAA Hellcat claims will be a small and therefore statistically insignificant number, compared to the USN's. The Mustang in Commonwealth use, again reasonable but not a high score type. It gets interesting when there's a spread across national use, and researchers have to collate data from multiple national sources, rather than 'just' the USN for instance.

I just wondered about the P-40 family. Used by the whole of the Commonwealth in the Med and Far East, Russia and the USA, as well as other theatres such as the (tedious) AVG.

The P-40 for the USAAF has only 706 air awards for USAAF. It is hard to conceive that despite its very wide use, that it approached 2,000 by the end of the war (pure Speculation on my part - coming from a place where the sun does not shine)

Due to the nature of owners (China, Russia) and the nature of combat (early Pacific war) actual counts will probably never be known. However the P-40 pilots were often outnumbers, and had no 'turkey shoots' as the F6F pilots did - not to belittle anyone's efforts, of course.

The P-40 is not likely to be close to the top simply because it struggled to get a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio (whatever the real number may be) and was largely out of the air superiority game in 1944 and 1945. In 1943 it was definitely taking a back seat to the P-38 and P-47 for USAAF and relegated to CAS for Commonwealth and even the Chines were getting equipped with Mustand=gs in 1944.

Counts are interesting - but deriving 'rankings' from them is childish, IMHO, as you aren't comparing like with like, or the objective (command of the air - not counts) or acknowledging the real achievements (experience, target rich/poor environments, combat advantage etc. Then you get to the unreliability of claims, even with the best of intent.

Just some thoughts, not covered so far...

but deriving 'rankings' from them is childish