Hi all,Originally posted by mdiehl
Sakai's claims have not been verified by US records. Indeed, the last time I looked for an *internet* set on the subject, the best that people could credit him with was a 200% overclaim. Moreover, there is no substantiating evidence to indicate that he shot down or even fought against every kind of Allied a/c deployed to the PTO, or had the last Japanese victory of the war. It is not even clear that he engaged any P39s, as 5th AF histories that I've been able to track down so far (albeit not all Pursuit Groups histories are available to me), do not indicate any P39 losses (or even engagements with Zekes) until after Sakai was shot up and invalidated by his encounter with SBDs. The nearest I can put him is 3000 feet above some P39s.
The accounts of a handful of Zekes flaming B17 after B17 sound very spurious to me. No doubt five pilots "flamed" the same B17 several times, before it escaped with two shot out engines. A 400-1000% overclaim by Japanese pilots would be in the correct range.
The verification of pilot air-to-air kills in WWII has always been somehow
"controversial"...
But this doesn't mean that we should dismiss the loosing side claims (of
German and Japanese pilots) and take as 100% accurate the claims of allied
ones (British and US).
In all the books I read about the subject it was always said that Germans had
one of the most hard and rigid system of pilot kill claims and that their
numbers should be regarded as accurate.
They (Germans) required fellow pilot (i.e. witness) verification and many
times the kill(s) would not be awarded for months because of long process.
Also Germans never awarded half kills (i.e. where two or more pilots kill one
aircraft) and instead they awarded the kill to unit (and thus the unit would
end with greater number of kills than when you would add up all the individual
pilot kills).
Of Japanese system there is good info in Saburo Sakai's book "Samurai" (try to
get European edition - the US edition was edited with certain things omitted).
In his book Sakai writes that they also had rigid and conservative system of
pilot claims - so I don't think Sakai's number (nor number of his fellow
squadron pilots) should be greatly reduced.
Also there is a one interesting book called "Aces of the rising sun" which, in
appendix, has list of what Japanese pilots claimed in war and what is
estimated to be true looses with finds after the war. If I remember correctly
the Japanese true numbers was usually around 80% of true number (as claimed by
that book).
Leo "Apollo11"
P.S.
In later stages of war (and after the tide has turned on allied side) the gun
cameras were fitted on many (most?) allied fighters and this would give rather
accurate results without any doubt. But for propaganda purposes this was never
done in earlier stages of war (the Battle of Britain is best example). Also
the claims of bomber gunners were also very very questionable because many
gunners would fire on one German aircraft and afterwards all would claim it.
In books about that period it was said this was encouraged (even if it was
known to be wrong) because of hard looses to bomber crews - they needed morale
boost.
