Kill Claims

[stephen]

Originally posted by Barrett@Mar 6 2004, 09:44 PM
[b] Well I'll be dog-gone. Stephen, I was acquainted with Gordon Collinson and his lovely wife during the early days of CFM. They lived nearby in Scottsdale and visited the museum a few times.

Thanks for the kind words, Shooter. Barrett, Gordon was a good guy and we exchanged letters for quite some time. He did the SE 5a thing in the summer of '18 with the Brits. He sent me all sorts of photos (which I promptly sent back with a request for autographing&#33 and I have all his letters, records and pictures on file in my safe. Not sure if I got a copy of his logbook or not... I asked every pilot I contacted for a copy if they still had it. Some amazing stuff turns up in logbooks .

As long as we corresponded, we never met in person... so tell me what you thought of him after your meeting. How well did you know him and how many times did you meet him? If letters are any reflection of his true personality, he was a pretty decent fellow.

My thoughts on the fragility of WW1 aircraft is not so much a question of structural integrity (in "normal" flight) or the ability to absorb damage, but the rather high-unreliability factor of their engines...at least in a relative sense to later periods. Engine problems seem to have been a common occurence, and whilst not always fatal, should have been certainly disconcerting to the pilot once in the air and on his way!

Also, regarding the much debated controversy of claims-verse-actual-kills rate, I'm curious on thoughts about the reverse: that is many pilots' accounts of fairly certain victories that were not to be confirmed upon return to base. It had to happen that a pilot actually did destroy or put out of action an enemy ship only to be denied the credit afterwards. But to what extent?

[Shooter]

It also happens that sometimes a driver inflicts such damage on a bandit that limps home only to never fly again because of cumulative damage that renders yon bird unserviceable. The driver doesn't get credit for that victory either, even though the bad guys do drop one more a/c off their line-up card.

Some say that the whole bit about validity of victory scores might even out a bit because of stuff like that. As it happens I think the whole debate is of little importance, people.

But here we are, kicking it around yet one more time. And this will not be the last. Trust me.


Shooter sends

[Craig]

Originally posted by stephen@Mar 8 2004, 06:56 PM
[b] Not sure if I got a copy of his logbook or not... I asked every pilot I contacted for a copy if they still had it. Some amazing stuff turns up in logbooks

I find it rather surprising that they were allowed to keep them. Was this 'policy'? I know that they weren't allowed to photograph anything, and vaguely recall a thread some months back concerning a young British pilot who got in deep caca for doing so.

[stephen]

Most of the pilots I knew never gave that stuff a second thought. For reference, I contacted nearly 100 pilots. I had repeated correspondence with nearly 50 of them, and got to know about ten or fifteen of them quite well.

Among my pilot pals, nearly all of them had lots of photographs and most of them owned a camera or knew someone in the unit who did. I have probably 6-10 logbooks from some of my better pilot friends, and several more said they had lost their logbooks or had them destroyed by fire, WWII, etc., or they would have copied them for me. When I was at the Cincinnati home of Roland Richardson a few years ago, he told me he even brought home one of the Marlin machine guns off his SPAD 13! It now resides (undisplayed) at the USAFM.

So I don't know what official policy was, but I know that a great percentage of my pilot pen pals had log books and all the photos and souvenirs they could bring home.

[Alan]

IMHO, a logbook is a personal thing. It's what pilots use to keep their time. Today's logbooks don't hold a lot of room for things like detailed combat reports, but I've never seen a combat one.

Craig, as long as there was a combat report filled out, what possible use could a logbook have to a governmental agency?

Barrett, I'm going to assume you have probably encountered the most amount of combat pilot's logbooks in all your studies/research/writings, even if, I assume, most were of the WWII type...what say you? Did combat logbooks look any different than the one you use today? Were they green pages, too?

Stephen, what kinds of information was in those WWI log books? Different items than combat reports?

Also, that was a very well done article. It has given me a lot to think about, personally....

[stephen]

The British log books had columns for: Date and Hour, Wind Direction and Velocity, Machine Type and No., Passenger, Time in Air, Height, Course, and Remarks.

For instance, my copy of the log book of Lt. E W Desbarats of RNAS 1 shows the following entry for Sept 6, 1917. Anything in quotes is typed EXACTLY as written in Desbarats' logbook, punctucation and caps included. My copy is not a typed manuscript, but an actual page by page xerox of the logbook itself that Desbarats made for me, so everything is correct from his own hand:

Date and Hour: "4.50 P.M."
Wind Direction and Velocity: "N 2"
Machine Type and No.: "Sop. Tri-N 5479"
Passenger: "Self"
Time in Air: "0-40"
Height: "4,000"
Course/Remarks (Desbarats wrote across the margins to combine these two columns): "Went up to look over ground. Lost F.S.L. Rosevear in cloud, landed in R.F.C. 'drome to get direction of our 'drome."

A few days later, Desbarats was shot down and made POW. His log book was sent back to his family with his personal belongings.

I also have US and French logbooks but am out of time for copying at the moment. Hope that helps.

[stephen]

Oops. Forgot your last question. The information in log books was somewhat different than in combat reports. The CP's were more detailed as to the action itself and rarely listed things such as time of departure. Instead, CP's concentrated more on the description of the action itself, observations made during combat, the time of the combat and any claims made. It also listed some redundant information from the log books such as machine and serial number, etc.

[Barrett]

Originally posted by Alan@Mar 9 2004, 01:14 PM
[b] IMHO, a logbook is a personal thing. It's what pilots use to keep their time. Today's logbooks don't hold a lot of room for things like detailed combat reports, but I've never seen a combat one.

Barrett, I'm going to assume you have probably encountered the most amount of combat pilot's logbooks in all your studies/research/writings, even if, I assume, most were of the WWII type...what say you? Did combat logbooks look any different than the one you use today? Were they green pages, too?

WW II USN/USMC used standardized logbooks; AAF had "Form 5s" as far as I know, which were wires together. But very few naval aviators kept their lown logs: the squadron yeoman or whomever usually did it. Much to chagrin of modelers, there was no colum for side number, just BuNo. Joe Foss' log from Guadal shows he flew 34 Wildcats and scored in 10!

Basic entries are similar to today's private logs with entries for date, a/c type, serial, passenger(s), etc. Not so much duplication for IFR & stuff. There was a complex series of mission/flight codes that nobody seems to have retained! Of course, the thing most folks look for in the wartime logs are the red-ink stamps of a rising sun indicating a kill.

[R Pope]

One thing that may have made WW1 claims a bit easier to confirm than WW2 is the smaller "battlefield". Many kills were in sight of ground troops, and even your home base. WW2 air battles ranged over continents and oceans.