This was going to be a post about japanese fighter ace Saburo Sakai(around 60 kills) while also mentioning Hiroyoshi "the Devil" Nishizawa, Japan's top WWII ace (around 110 kills). But while comparing them to aces of other countries I encountered something your average non-war buff american probably doesn't know. That is that about the top 60 fighter aces of WWII (and all time consequently) were all german. And where does the US rank on this list. You don't want to know.
I was looking at something similar myself a while back - in my case the top-scoring aces from each country in all conflicts. Here are the results. I can't vouch for 100% accuracy - individual kill tallies are often disputed and I didn't have time for exhaustive fact-checking, but the figures are hopefully in the right ball-park). I, too, got a few surprises:
Germany Luftwaffe Erich "Bubi" Hartmann 352
Finland Finnish Air Force Ilmari Juutilainen Finland Finnish Air Force 94
Japan Tetsuzo Iwamoto Japan Imperial Japanese Navy 94 (202 according to his personal combat record)
France René Fonck Aéronautique Militaire 75
United Kingdom Edward Mannock Royal Flying Corps, Royal Air Force 73
Canada Billy Bishop Royal Flying Corps, Royal Air Force 72
Soviet Union Ivan Kozhedub Soviet Air Force 62
South Africa A.F.W. Beauchamp-Proctor Royal Flying Corps, Royal Air Force 54
Australia Robert A. Little Royal Naval Air Service, Royal Air Force 47
Romania Alexandru Şerbănescu Romanian Air Force 47
Croatia Mato Dukovac Croatian Air Force 44
United States Richard I. Bong U.S. Army Air Forces 40
Spain Joaquin Morato Nationalist Air Force 40
Belgium Willy Coppens (Willy O. F. J. Coppens de Houthulst) Belgian Military Aviation 37
Austria-Hungary Godwin Brumowski Luftfahrtruppen 35
Italy Francesco Baracca Corpo Aeronautico Militare 34
Ireland Brendan Eamon Fergus "Paddy" Finucane Royal Air Force 32
Slovakia Ján Režňák Slovak Air Force 32
Hungary Dezso Szengyorgyi Hungarian Air Force 30½
New Zealand Alan Christopher Deere Royal Air Force 22
Poland Stanisław Skalski Polish Air Force/RAF 18
Czechoslovakia Karel Kuttelwascher Royal Air Force 18 (20?)
Israel Col. (Ret.) Giora Epstein Israeli Air Force 17 (top scoring jet ace)
North Vietnam Nguyễn Văn Cốc North Vietnam Air Force 9
There are more surprises here than the huge gap between Germany's top aces and those and all other nations (an understandably forgotten fact, given that those incredibly high scores were achieved by Luftwaffe pilots fighting in the service of a truly vile regime). The next highest-scoring national ace was from Finland? The United States' highest-scoring ace beaten by a Romanian and a Croatian (best not to not to mention the cheese-eating surrender monkeys). No doubt I'll look more closely at these figures and related topics in future posts.
1 comments:
The German scores were probably verified more rigorously than any other country's (cue obvious jokes about rules) and so the scores for people like Hartmann, Rall etc are probably pretty close to truth. The general reasons as to why the scores are so high are:
1) The were nearly all on the Eastern Front (although Galland managed over 100 on the Western Front) against massive odds (far higher than Battle of Britain pilots faced), meaning plenty of targets.
2) The enemy was close, so they flew up to twelve sorties a day.
3) There were no "tours of duty" as such in Luftwaffe: pilots tended to fly until they broke down or were shot down.
Post a Comment