New "accepted" scores of Mannock, Bishop

[Billy_Bishop]

Originally Posted by wingedwarrior

Impressive list! I see that the British authorities granted recognition of victories, but did they actually tabulate them and have an 'offical' victory total for each ace by wars end? This is where it gets murky for me.

regards,

Darren

I don't believe they did. I think most of the post war lists were compiled by some of the pilots themselves, such as Taffy Jones, and also for those who had a keen interest in the subject. The authors of ATT, I believe mostly just went over the combat reports, diaries and whatever other paperwork was involved. Taffy Jones not withstanding, many people thought that Mannock's "official" score, or rather his record of confirmed was 50, as cited in his VC award. It was mostly through the authors of ATT that we now know his score to be at least 61.

Hopefully one them might correct me on this, or at least give us the low down.

[Breguet]

Originally Posted by Billy_Bishop

But thanks to ATT, that's been fixed.

A lot has come to light since ATT hit the shelves (or its "updates"). As good as it is and they tried to make it, it is no bible. [I saw the wink but just in case some might take you seriously].

[Billy_Bishop]

Originally Posted by Breguet

A lot has come to light since ATT hit the shelves (or its "updates"). As good as it is and they tried to make it, it is no bible. [I saw the wink but just in case some might take you seriously].

That's the problem. Someone always takes me seriously.

Not that they shouldn't. But this is a passionate HOBBY for me. I don't make money at it, like some here do.

But you're correct, ATT and it's sister books are not bibles. But they did fix some long standing mistakes.

[Elfen]

Originally Posted by Billy_Bishop

That's the problem. Someone always takes me seriously.

Not that they shouldn't. But this is a passionate HOBBY for me. I don't make money at it, like some here do.

But you're correct, ATT and it's sister books are not bibles. But they did fix some long standing mistakes.

True numbers will never be known. How many planes are MIA that were never accredited to anyone? How many planes went down but were never claimed? How many planes were seen going down but never seen to have crashed?

One would have to go through the huge record of flight missions and cross reference them with every pilot out in the front at the time to even get a closer measure measure of the true picture. But who has time for that?

If one would dare do something crazy like this, and shove it all into an MS Excel Spread Sheet, how big would that file be? Remember, we are talking about every flight that went up! How long was WWII- 1914 - 1918?

[Graeme]

Elfen

The database I've been putting together for RFC, RNAS etc claims on the Western Front already has 12,969 entries. Given that there were many times the number of flights as claims, a spreadsheet with only 65,536 lines would be woefully inadequate.

Graeme