It doesn't matter the loss reason because they would die anyway. Obviously if a SAM hits them first, but they would die of rifles anyway, the SAM gets the kills. Same as the Arab Israeli wars were Egypt got zero air kills because all the sams killed everything immediately.thewood1 wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 12:32 am I think the Korean War is a great benchmark for this discussion. From F4U Corsair Units of the Korean War from Osprey with data scattered across multiple pages, but most on Page 50.
USN total sorties was 255k sorties. 75% of sorties were ground attack and 1/3 of those were direct CAS. So 191k sorties were ground attack. These were all low-level attacks with AD-1s and F9Fs. No high-altitude with pull up altitudes measured in hundreds of feet. Total combat losses were 358. 90% attributed to ground fire. It was stated that the majority of that was 20mm or greater. So lets say that 260 losses were to 20mm or greater. That leaves, at most, about 100 losses to rifle caliber rounds. So now you have to assume a large number of those were actual AA machine guns. But lets say all rifle caliber rounds were soldiers firing into the air. That means out of almost 200,000 separate sorties, you have at most 100 losses that can even remotely be caused by rifle rounds. Even that is an over-estimate. Even if you assume double that had enough damage for a mission kill with an aircraft returning to base, that's still a total of only 300.
Keep in mind that the AD-1 and the F4U flew very low and relatively slow attacking large concentrations of troops. I'll also point out that the USN has 1.5 times as many operational accident losses in combat aircraft than in combat losses. That means you were more likely to go down due to accident than with a rifle caliber round.
In fact, a quote in that same book had one squadron leader state that pilots feared 37mm and greater flak over any other type of AAA. Thats because those dedicated AAA guns had the sighting, traversing, and training to be a real threat.
It's like saying if you get hit by a truck and die, you would never die of a car. No, the truck got you first, you would die anyway. The important conflicts are stuff like indochina were only rifles were available. Wikipedia claims zero losses which is absurd and obviously a omission.
