Frank Luke's victory total

I have seen three different victory totals for Frank Luke in various books, including 18, 19 and 21.

I seem to recall the 21 figure include two Fokkers that he allegedly shot down on his last flight. Apparently these kills were witnessed by French civilians after he got his balloon kills that day. At that's the story I seem to recall reading somewhere many years ago.

The Christopher Shores book `Air Aces' only credits him with 18 and four of those were said to be `shared.'

So was Luke's total as low as only 14 single-handed victories or was it as high as 21?

[Barrett]

Bud:
Last winter we had quite a tussle on this subject. The USAF still credits Luke with 18 victories, but our sometime correspondent Mutley (involved in plans for a Luke movie) said that documents were found at Luke AFB before WW II indicating that some official agency had credited him with 21. In any event, the missing 3 claims were Luke's first combat in August (reportedly he saved his CO from a lurking Fokker) and two more Fokkers cited by French civilians in the CMH investigation right after the war. With the depth of info available these days, it should be possible to ID one or all of these 3 potential victims.

I believe that it was either 20 or 21. What suprises me is that both Luke and Rickenbacker won Medal's of Honor after the war. Luke's was posthomuous,and Rickenbacker's several years later

[Shooter]

Matthew, I do not know you, so I do not mean to insult you, but if you check more closely, you will see that 14 of FLJ's air-to-air victories were captive observation balloons. When a balloon goes up, everyone in the next three to five adjacent counties will know about it. The pyrotechnics are rather obvious.

The remaining four fixed-wing a/c he bagged were pretty much confirmed (one was a "share" with Joe Wehner I am told), and the additional "three" unconfirms do not come into the official equation.

Even in the worst possible estimates, Luke was the something of a "baddass" if you know what I mean. I personally do not doubt totals of 18, 19, 20, or 21. Any of those scores are believable, in my opinion.

[Reinout]

Personally, I believe in 18 with 2 unconfirmed.

Matthew,

What's so surprising about Luke getting a Medal of Honor?

Kind regards,

Reinout

[Billy_Bishop]

Actually, it's 18 confirmed and 3 unconfirmed.

VBR,

Al Lowe