Oh for Pete's Sake... Plenty of persons with nothing to gain reported this or that air combat in such and such a place that resulted in the destruction of this or that aircraft. There is plenty of gun camera footage from WW2 to prove that an awful lot of pilots mixed it up wilfully and got the job done. If WW1 pilots had enjoyed the benefits of gun cameras we'd see the same thing from that war. >
If you wanna play devil's advocate and knock a given percentage off every pilot's claims, that's fine with me. The authors and experts (Toliver, Constable, Held, Spick, Tilmann, Franks, Shores, Boyne, and hundreds more) have been over and over this issue. Virtually every reputable book on the controversy suggests a standard of deviation for kills confirmed that are subject to some doubt of less than 10%. :
I would submit that if for a given pilot you reckon the unconfirmed and reduced claims with the confirmed kills that are doubtful nowadays based on historical data collected by the super sleuths, most of the time you'll find that they pretty much counterbalance one another. So generally speaking a pilot credited with shooting down 30 opponents probably shot down anywhere from 26 to 34. Who bloody well cares? Why be a tee totaller? ???
It seems to me that many of the people who come along 60 or 80 years later and give Ace's recognized scores the "Flat Earth Society" revisionist treatment are simply motivated by jealousy. Just because no one's dedicating highways and marble markers to me doesn't mean I embark on a campaign to smear the memory of others. I'm a common man- and most of these famous fliers started out that way too- but they were there, they lived it; I wasn't and I didn't.
These pilots were brave people and I refuse to believe that they were all a bunch of liars concerning their exploits. They earned their place in the history books- as for me, I just buy the history books and READ them.
