French multiple counting of single kills

[rammjaeger]

The War Chronicle of a German paper printed in May 1918 an offical German report named "How the Victory lists of the French pilots are made". The article said "It is known that the number of victories, which our enemies confirm to their pilots, are a multiple number of our real losses. Until now we thought this difference was created by the lively phantasy of the enemy pilots ..." Than the article is saying French press articles in "Eclair" and "La Guerre dérienne" show a new fact: French pilots which together defeat one German aircraft get a full victory credited each (like Brits, Americans, Italians - HT) since some time - victory inflation is the result.

My questions - related to this article:
1) Who is able to confirm or refuse that the French counted in this way like the other Allieds?
2)When did the French Air Service started to count so?

Regards,

Hannes

[Billy_Bishop]

Quite simply, if you look at Barrett's contribution, "Victory Scores" at http://216.169.126.3/contrib/vs.html you'll see that it was well known, at least now, that the French credited shared claims.

For the most part, the USAS used the rules of the sector they operated in, if they were in a sector that was under British Empire command, they followed those scoring rules, if the sector was under French command, that nation's rules were used.

As I understand it, once a sector was designated as being under US command, the USAS adopted rules similar to the French for victory claims.

VBR,

Al Lowe

[rammjaeger]

Thank you, Al. I printed this contribution already out some time ago but simply forgot to look at Barrett´s contribution.

I am still wondering that the German Air Service or propaganda did not notice that earlier. Also articles questioned more frequently French than British victory reports. So the "the precise French victory numbers" are a legend too.
More about French claims in the next thread.

[Barrett]

It probably wasn't known at the time (in fact, almost certainly wasn't) but the top French aces had few shared victories: Guynemer and Fonck each just a couple. The balloon shooters such as Boyau and Coiffard tended to share far more victories than the other leading aces.
Where this topic gets confusing is with unit totals. If you add up all the individual scores you get considerable inflation, whereas of course with the Germans (and only the Germans) the individual figures usually tally with the staffel total, barring the rare instances of multiple pilots claiming the same victim (Did not/did too/did not/did too/Schweinhund!) in which case it went to the unit's record.