why were there no spitfire super aces?

who said pre war instructers ...there were hundreds of battle hardened veterans who were coming out of burn wards and out of back braces to watch over the training schools ...i think it was a mistake to rotate all fighter pilots out of combat after a certain arbitrary time period ,even those pilots who wished to stay in harness...if a three week furlow to berlin was enough time away to impair the combat skills of a luftwaffe man and get him killed on his first sortie back on duty ...the just imagine how the skills of our raf and aac pilots must have decayed after 6 or 8 months away from the front. and what useless dated information they must have often drilled into their trainees...the ever shrinking pool of luftwaffe super aces was doomed by the swarms of anglo american and russian pilots ...but they would have been regardless of the rotation system 50 brand new just arrived from stateside mustang pilots with 350 hrs in their logbooks is more than a match for three super aces leading a gaggle of 20 ten hour german boys ....

 

How was the information that rotated pilots were giving to the trainees dated? How vastly did the tactics of the air war change between say, January 1943 and July 1943?

Why would this have been more outdated and more dangerous than using instructors whose knowledge is even more outdated due to extensive recuperation times?

Yes, they still could have produced pilots, but of a poorer quality and poorer starting level and overall such a system would have condemned a lot of young men to die, as it did for the Luftwaffe, than using the broader range of experience. As an additional negative, what the hell is it going to do for trainee's morale if all their instructors are disfigured with burns, in wheelchairs, missing limbs or other extremities?

All this just for the questionable propaganda boost of getting a few 100+ aces through the system.

The system worked, the Luftwaffe didn't loose because their super-aces were swamped by excessive numbers of allied fighters (This may have killed some aces, but it didn't cost the Luftwaffe the airwar), they lost at least in part because of their inability to adequately train pilots to replace the losses being inflicted.

BTW, rereading this thread I really take issue with this:

I have never equated a pilot's capabilities with anything so trivial, however the fact remains that a fighter pilot's job is to complete the mission he is tasked with. It could be to shoot down enemy planes, or it could be to shoot up a loco, bomb a troop emplacement, a little target of opportunity strafing.

By this logic the Navy carrier pilots who could often go months in between combat sorties should have been practically useless, yet they weren't.

Fatigue kills too, it was a big killer for Fighter command during the BoB, I daresay that a number of the few might have lived a lot longer if they could have been afforded a few week's rest now and then.

Do you have any reason to suggest that the individual pilots encountered would have been any more skilled in the absence of this policy? The superaces even in the Luftwaffe were a small elite amongst the many, a many whose quality dramatically deteriorated. Similarly any RAF/USAAF superaces would also be a small elite amongst a horde of pilots, these unfortunate men shot down like this would still in all liklihood have been there and still would have been shot down.

Let me turn this on its head, the Luftwaffe super-aces did not prevent the equally one-sided slaughter of green pilots over Germany. The differences are that this wasn't one man shooting down five less skilled pilots, but thousands of pilots shooting down a great number of less skilled pilots.

How do you know? If he could have trained twenty more men to shoot down twenty planes each that would have been a better use of his skills. No, equally I don't know whether he could do that or not, but equally you cannot say for certain that he couldn't have done that in between being rotated between front line and training duties.

Not really, even if we had half a dozen Hartmann's that were kept flying until killed/captured/wounded they would have accounted for around 2000 awarded kills, a relative pee in the ocean overall (and that's assuming they weren't lost before then), against an incalculable cost of lowering of the overall capability of the green pilots reaching the airforces fighter units as a whole.

 

One thing to remember about those vast German scores is that a lot of those kills were scored on the Eastern Front where (at least in the early days) the opposition would have been of a much lower quality.

Western pilots didn't really ever get the same numbers of low quality opponents to knock down, since by the time the Germans started running out of pilots, they were running out of fuel to get them up in the first place.

 

A quick look at the sorties/per kill ratios on different fronts:

Hartmann: 352 kills and 1425 sorties, all East, K/S ratio 4.05
Galland (official figures): 104 k and 425 s, all West, K/S 4.09
Barkhorn: 302 k and 1104 s, all East, K/S 3.67
Mayer: 102 k and 353 s, all West, K/S 3.46
Johnson (leading USAF ETO ace): 26 kills and 91 sorties, all West, K/S 3.5

As you can see, it was pretty comparable for all participants on (at least if we look just ETO figures) all fronts.

Richard Bong's K/S from far east was exactly 5.

edit: Of course this doesn't show the quality of new pilots, but gives a general direction on how the top scoring aces did. It is however generally aknowledged that western front was harder than the eastern front as far a air battles go even if it doesn't show on the figures.

 

ever since i was a little kid ive been fascinated with fighter planes and pilots ..i built all the models i read everything i could lay my hands on pertaining to airiel combat ,i watched the blue max ,at the theater 3 times and battle of brittain twice ...it wasent until i started chatting on line in the early 90s that i began to hear about this kills per sortie phenominon ...i dont recall reading about any special notice or awards being given out in ww2 because a pilot had a high ratio of kills per mission flown ...at least its never mentioned on any citation for the silver star or dfc or moh ..in the us aac ,navy and marines this kind of distinction appears to have gone completely unnoticed , although the number of enemy planes shot down was very much followed by newsmen and schoolboys all over america.....i know that in the uk petrol is very expensive ,perhaps in the raf they had special decorations for gallantry above and beyond ,,,,in saveing her majestys gasoline ...but then in germany gas is expensive too but i dont recall anyone getting the swords or diamonds for being extra frugal mit der fatherlands benzine...unless they were already worrieing about greenhouse gas effect or smog over berlin why would anyone give a rats arse about a kill per sortie ratio...the answer is they did not consider this ratio in the least... now ,hubsu ,im an american and i would like to belive that since bong is a 5 and barkhorn is only a 3.7 then ergo bong is the superiour pilot ! ...im a salesman and i confess though im fairly good at causing others to ingest bullsht , im not terribly good at feeding it to myself....im all grown up ,there is no santa claus , no easter bunny and a high kill per sortie ratio in the real world means exactly , dyk..... its just a statistic ,intrestinmg to some perhaps but a non issue to the worlds airforces in ww1 ,ww2 ,korea ,viet nam ,the six day war ,yom kippur...ect btw ..im a pilot and an avid online dogfight simmer ...and ive been in hundreds of online fights in all kinds of ww2 fighters ...one thing i can pretty much assure you of ...if bong ,maguire and boyington were to encounter rall ,barkhorn and bar ,at the same altitude and all of them in their respective 1944 mounts , the yank pilots would all be dead in a matter of a few minutes ...even if my boys were matched up against their own peers (luftw pilots with 38 kills ..of course i couldnt give you any german names because luftwaffe pilots of this grade were as common as dirt and are virtually unknown soldiers to the world at large) ..the results would be the same, if the yanks tried to turn ,they would die ...if they tried to dive away ( which would save them from almost any jap fighter they encountered ) they would still die...a pilots kill per sortie ratio might be seen as important to al gore and the green party today but if you were to walk into any ready room at any airfeild or carrier in 1944 and try to tell the young pilots that this would be considered important data to historians in the year 2000 they would be comletely dumbfounded ......i guess if one is dismayed and perplexed as to why the damn nazis appear to be some kind of aryan supermen , at least in air combat ..then this kill to sortie might be a way for us grandsons of the aac and raf to be able to mitigate in our minds this troubleing dispairity in combat achievments...i guess i would prefer to belive as i did at age 12 , that the steely eyed pilots of america were the best in the whole world ( THEY were , IN THE MOVIES) ..if this kill per mission thing works for you guys ,well ok then ...i guess from a modern perspective of being mindfull of fossil fuel cosumption and hydrcaron production its a valid comparisn ...but wait , i think bong had two engines....

 

Oh for goodness sake, Woody, don't keep trivialising others arguments.

It's got nothing to do with saving fuel and you should know damn well there was no such concern during WWII, and no-one on here mentioned that or Al Gore or the Green Party or Greenhouse gasses except for you. Again you seem to trivialise others posts rather than actually provide a counter-argument.

If you can't or wont provide valid counter arguments then there really is no point to this discussion, and unless you can provide actual counter arguments rather than just dismissing others posts as bullshit then I see no point in wasting any more of my time on this debate.

You are welcome to your view that the Luftwaffe was populated by all conquering Aryan Supermen, I do not share it.

 

Oh buggers, I made a biiig error there. Even though I said "Sorties/ per kill" in my text, I slipped a "K/S, Kills/Per sortie" in my actual list. Of course, if you looked at the number you'd have noticed the mistake right away. So, replace "K/S" with "S/K" and you'll see that actually Barkhorn is the better pilot when it comes to sorties flown for a single kill. But that list is far from a complete one. The list that I have in my hand has around 150 names from Luftwaffe alone and in general it shows the exact 3-5 sorties per kill for aces. Few exceptions of course occurs.

In other words, it took Bong 5 sorties to achieve a single kill when it only took 3.7 sorties for Barkhorn. Multiple kills per sorties were an extreme rarity rather than a norm.

 

sry i was bitchy simon...but ive heard this same kills per sortie rationalization on several different www2 or aviation forums now . while i agree that kills per sortie is A measureing stick i dont see how anyone might confuse it with THE measureing stick... i dont agree that because lt tommy atkins has 20 kills in 80 missions , that he is then equal in skills to obershtumbaunfitrfuher shmidt who has 178 kills in 800 missions ..in fact i would argue that this huge logbook of LW combat hours is the reason that the top luftwaffe guys shot down raf ,vvs and usaf pilots by such lopsided margins....in the usa we had good training ,we had good planes in the p51 and p47 , we had brave and well led pilots ,still we got our asses handed to us by the uber aces..in the eto bob johnson a jug pilot leads team usa with 28 kills...now if we look at lw aces OF THE WESTERN FRONT and count ONLY their kills against the usaf...and we include only the lw guys with kills exceeding 28 usaf kills we have some 30 lw pilots ..thats 30 uber aces with 28 kills or more , if we tallie only their kills of usaf planes ......simon ,i dont want the dang nazis fighter pilots to be so much better than the raf and usaf pilots...they just were . and if tommy atkins and herr shmidt were seperated from their respective flights and saw each other at the same time ,same alt ,speed ect ..you know very well what would happen and in fact did always happen to poor tommy... in spite of his very fine kill /sortie ratio.........whats worse , these nazi uber ace kill numbers will never be duplicated , they will stand forever ..the best top guns ever ..in history .......modern fighter costs and numbers being what they are...the lw uber aces earned their place in history , of course ,some of them were in combat almost continually for five years ,many were shot down ,bailed or crash landed 16 or more times..lots were wounded 2 ,3 or 4 times ,or broke their backs while dead sticking it in..(these long hospital stays being their only real vacation time )...some of them were crippled so bad they had to be lifted into the cockpit , so they could help their buddies once again..they may have fought for the wrong team ,it dosnt change their astounding valor in arms.......go on the web and read up on the hair raiseing adventures and exploits of the us , raf and allied aces , great and heroic true storie .......now go read up on the uber aces in the east or the west or africa or night fighters ..it dosnt really matter ..you will soon find you are trying to compare apples and oranges...of course if you fill the sky with enough atkins and johnsons ...even darth vader himself will get shot down sooner or later , but prolly not killed ...two thirds of the five hundred sortie , fly till they die -uber aces survived the war ,strangely enough....

 

The list of the "superaces" that didn't make it alive is pretty grim. They flew alot and they died alot. Since I didn't have anything else to do while sipping beer in the saturday evening than seeing what happened to Luftwaffe aces with over 100 kills, I did a list of what happened to them. Here's the results:

Total aces with over 100 victories: 104
Killed in action: 37
Missing in action: 7
Captured: 3
Killed in active duty: 5

Mortality rate amongst "superaces": 47%

Even your Oberstleutnant Schmidt was killed 5.9-1943 in Russia after having 173 kills in over 700 missions.

Looking at those numbers, I would rather have a round of Russian roulette than being one of the "superaces".

 

lol...i didnt even know there was an uber ace named shmidt..my guy was a hypothetical ace...i stand corrected ,the two thirds survival rate applies to expertan which i wrongly assumed was uber ace ...it is merely used to describe any ace ...a german pilot with 5 kills was expertan...hubsu ,how would i find out the total number of say ..raf planes detroyed by the luftwaffe or all allied planes on the western front excluding flak kills ...is this a number that is published somewhere ?

 

Has anyone mentioned the other key statistic re fighter pilots - ie survival rates ? It may even be interesting to cross reference survival rates with the respective kill figures. Sometimes such analyses can throw up interesting answers and tell us more than figures viewed in isolation.

 

Actually Francis Gaberski was the leading USAAF ETO ace with 28 kills, but I have no idea how many sorties. Gaberski was shot down and ended the war in a prison camp. I believe both Gaberski's and Johnson's totals included strafing "kills", which were included to get pilots to face the flak to destroy planes on the ground.
Even using sorties per kill favors the Germans in my opinion, there were always more allied planes to shot at and they could decide when to give battle. Bong's 5 S/K is actually pretty good, since targets became increasingly rare after 1944.

 

Yep, you're right, Allied (as well as Japanese, but not German) victories included strafing and damaged planes. Guess the reasoning behind was that a "victory is a victory, even if the plane only was damaged" and to raise spirits.

Thanks for the correction on Gabrelski's part. No idea what made me forgot him!

 

I've been trying to find the numbers for RAF and USAF 8th airforce to answer exactly that question, but to no avail. The most elusive figure is the total amount of pilots flown with their respective airforces, where to compare the figures of lost pilots. Then there's the problem of deciding what to compare to what. Take all one sortie wonders who stopped flying missions for one reason or other, the amount of pilots trained and sendt to the front regardless of their mission numbers (0-2500) or decide a set amount of sorties (for example 10) which qualifies the pilot as fit for our comparison.

I have pretty extensive amount of data from Finnish airforce and even there I didn't find the exact figure for amount of pilots who flew missions in the war. The Finnish fighter force lost 158 pilots during the war (didn't find the exact figures who was killed in action, missing in action or killed in active duty for that figure).

Amount of Finnish aces (pilots with 5 or more victories): 96
Killed and missing in action: 17
Captured: 4
Killed in active duty: 5

Mortality rate amongst Finnish aces: 23%

You may find the numbers for RAF and 8th airforce from books:
Freeman Roger, The Mighty Eighth
D. Richards and H. Saunders, The Royal Air Force 1939-1945
But I have absolutely no idea of a better place, unless you want to rummage through national archives for exact numbers. Finding the information and the amount of work to accomplish it is propably not an easy task.

Edit: Hah, I totally misunderstood Lone-Wolf's question. I really am giving out a good picture of myself with these constant misdunerstandings and errors that I make. I'll do the comparison what Lone-Wolf is asking right away when I have some free time

 

Only after a certain point quite late on IIRC, and that was in order to encourage returning pilots with left over ammunition to indulge in a little strafing to ensure that damage was inflicted to the Luftwaffe on the ground as well as in the air.

 

yes ..attacking german air fields was very dicey indeed ..one p51 ace who was shot down and became a pow on such a mission (gentile , iirc ) dicovered after the war ,while viewing squadron gun cam footage ,that he was actually shot by one of his over anxious buddies and not by german flak...

 

I believe that I have made this point in other topics, but I think that this is a good place to repeat it. After WW2 ended, the surviving German fighter pilots were asked to rate the pilots they had fought. Overwhelmingly, they said that the RAF pilots were the toughest opponents they had faced, with the USAAF second and the Russians third. One of them (Gunther Rall, IIRC) told of how he had flown in Russia for awhile and while there had picked up, in his words, "some bad habits" from fighting the relatively unskilled Soviet pilots. He was later transferred back to the West, whereupon the RAF promptly shot him down; this experience cured him of those bad habits, BTW.

 

The expression "Kill or Cure" seems particularly apt here...

 

Doesn't it, though?