Beware of the Hun in ths sun

Thanks to Meridian for starting to dig down into the reasons why Second World War German flying aces shot down so many more planes than pilots of other nationalities (mentioned in my recent post "Aces High"). Meridian notes that:

1) They [the astronomical German scores] 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.

To which, getting into QI mode, I could add that:

4) The Soviet Union, as well as being a target-rich environment, gave enemy fighter pilots opportunities in other, more specific, ways. When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, the Soviet Military Air Forces (or VVS, to use the Russian acronym) were equipped with less effective aircraft, piloted by fliers who were expected to comply with standardized and predictable procedures (there's nothing new about counter-productive micromanagement). As if that wasn't enough, the VVS was extremely short of experienced personnel and had been hit hard by the Red Army purges, which didn't even stop for the German invasion and exacerbated the problem.

There must have been a major vicious circle going on here, with the Soviets hastily getting rookie pilots into the field to replace the ones they themselves had shot or sent to the Gulags. Then another collection of rookie pilots would have to be scraped together to replace the first lot of fledglings, once they'd been shot up by the Luftwaffe's experienced fighter pilots, and so on. These sort of issues on the Eastern Front probably go some way to explaining why Finnish, Romanian and Slovak pilots fighting with the Axis are so unexpectedly prominent in the list of aces.

5) Even when the Soviets started getting their act together, producing more and better planes, sorting out their tactics and amassing a pool of more experienced pilots, the nature of the fighting in the East meant that there was still an unusually reliable supply of targets for capable German fighter pilots. A lot of Soviet air power was dedicated to the support of ground troops - for example, the most-produced Soviet aircraft of the War was the Il-2 "Shturmovik"*, a ground attack aircraft produced in huge numbers (the Wikipedia entry notes that the Il-2 was "the single most produced military aircraft design in all of aviation history as well as the third most produced aircraft in history behind the Cessna 172 and the Polikarpov Po-2"). Il-2's were well-armed and armoured, but ground attack missions involved flying relatively slow and close to the ground, so they they must still have presented an enormous number of targets to fighters using the advantages of height, speed and surprise.

6) As the war progressed, German airspace also became an extremely target-rich environment. In Britain, we remember the Battle of Britain, which lasted 3-4 months and produced a fair crop of fighter aces for the defenders (the top score going to the Czech Sergeant Josef Frantisek with 17 kills). The later Anglo-American strategic bombing of Germany was on an immensely bigger scale and went on for years. I was just a looking at a graph reproduced on the Airminded blog, showing the tonnage of bombs dropped by both sides in the European conflict which makes the point far more forcefully than words. That immense tonnage of bombs dropped meant a vast concentration of Allied bombers over German-controlled airspace, hence more than enough targets for a skilled fighter pilot.

7) In North Africa, the RAF always outnumbered its Axis opponents, but generally used older or lower-performance aircraft than those based in Britain and was involved in a lot of ground-support missions. As on the Eastern Front, this gave German fighters a lot of low-flying slower aircraft to attack using the advantages of height and speed and helps to explain the success of German pilots like Hans-Joachim Marseille (credited with 151 kills over North Africa).

Well, that's more than enough enough about Jerry - more ace-related factiods later....

* to be really pedantic, I think that "shturmovik" was actually a generic Russian term for a "ground attack" aircraft, rather than a specific name for the Il-2, but the name got attached to the Il-2 (aircraft and video game), just as the term "stuka" (the generic German acronym for a dive bomber) got stuck to the Junkers Ju 87.