Confirmed/unconfirmed French air victories

[spad]

Perhaps contentious but....

Were unconfirmed victories, later confirmed,not consolidated in later accounts? My thinking is the number of similar claims where, given the ammunition available, on a single sortie, claiming a single victory would be difficult, a second remarkable and a third...Fonck excepted for the same reason as Guynemer accepted...

The records seem to indicate several instances where the victory is replicated at least a second time (RFC/RAF also suffer the same problems as we know).

In case I am decried as being a British advocate look at my previous posts, the French more than held their own in aerial combat...

cordialemont

Keith

[Barrett]

In the course of my work with the American Fighter Aces Assn occasionally we found pretty obvious examples of duplicate claims being credited. It was a complex situation because of necessity the operative agency (nearly always the USAF and its antecedents) was responsible for the error. Getting such things reversed/corrected was a non-trivial function, and I'm hard pressed to recall an occasion when it occurred. The most notable example was reducing the Yamamoto mission credits from three Bettys to two, but that was due to Japanese sources, not the AF/whatever correcting itself.

[Gregvan]

The champion in the "unconfirmed victories" category among French fighter pilots was not Fonck, as many would guess. That would be Georges Madon of SPA 38. He survived the war credited with 41 official victories, making him the fourth-highest credited French ace. However, he claimed 105 victories in his memoirs, for a total of 64 unconfirmed successes.

You can read David Méchin's fine biography of Madon in Cross & Cockade International, Volume 48 No. 3, 2017.
Greg

[spad]

As a veteran subscriber to C & C (since I was at university.... many, many, many years ago) I continue to look forward to every issue (the recent article on Chaput was equally superb) :)




regards

[spad]

On another point does "probable"/non-homologee mean the same thing in English? I have seen them as comparable but...

Most "probable" claims from individuals (OOC in British language....anything other than destroyed in American :)) indicate combats unobserved by someone other than the claimant. If two claimants is this unconfirmed (non-homologee) unless confirmed by ground units/air units?

In simpler terms if two or more pilots see the same result from their attack but it is unconfirmed from the ground it is non-homologee whereas if the "victor" is the only witness it is "probable" ("likely" in English - much along the lines that I may be Kylie Minogues boyfriend :D)?

...I need more wine, I am correcting pre-Christmas drama history exams and a bit of logic, no matter how obscure seems a relief :)

coupez, plein gaz

regards chaps

[await]

It seems to me that "a probable victory" is not the equivalent of "une victoire non homologuée." That would be "an unconfirmed victory," as you mentioned. An aircraft sent down "out of control," without any evidence of severe damage or some indication that the pilot was dead or badly wounded (such as an extremely steep dive at low altitude) would not be considered a "probable" victory.

[spad]

However the terms are conflated in several accounts... so the answer seems to be there is no etymological separation. I have never seen a description of a French ace's tally of victories where they are separated into NH or probable in an official record. I think I would need to see what the Service Aeronautique defined as "probable" and whether the criteria were different for unconfirmed ("non-homologee").

As you know in WW2 the RAF initially made "unconfirmed" (as different from "damaged") but from the late summer the term "probable" was introduced to describe unconfirmed victories. In WW2 I note that French aces also did not use the unconfirmed description.

I believe in the German air service during WW1 the term unbestätigt is distinct from zlg (zur Landung gezwungen) but am not sure whether these were combined in a tally of victories.