Quote:
Originally Posted by mattmanB182
But wait a minute here......Werent most of the top aces BF-109 pilots?
Yea there is a Russian near the top, but most were GERMAN.
Fairly...the best fighter of the war is not even in the game. F4U Corsair.
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There are a couple reasons why that was the case:
First of all, numbers. The Germans spent much of the war with something of a numerical disadvantage, which meant that top German pilots always had a surplus of targets. For example, a P-51 pilot could fly several missions without sighting an enemy fighter, but the Bf-109 pilot would see combat just about every time he took off.
Secondly, time in combat was a factor. Most of the Allied nations had limits on the time a pilot flew in combat. After a certain number of combat hours a pilot would be rotated into an instructor billet or a desk job. At least that's how it was in the US & I think Britain. I'm not sure about the Soviets, though. The Germans didn't do that. There were pilots who flew from the invasion of Poland to the war's end. Erich Hartmann (352 kills, top German ace) had 1404 combat missions, while Richard Bong (top US ace, 40 kills) had only 200. So on average, Bong got one kill every 5 missions, and Hartmann got one kill every 3.99 missions. So, there wasn't that much of a difference, other than time spent in combat. Here's the same breakdown for a few other aces: (Sorry about the weird lines, it wouldn't display properly otherwise.)
Ace________________Country_________Kills*____Comba t______Missions/
___________________________________________Mission s______Kill
Günther Rall_________Germany_________275_____621_________2 .26
Adolf Galland________Germany_________104_____705________ _6.78
Ilmari Juutilainen_____Finland___________94______437_____ ___4.65
Saburo Sakai________Japan____________64______200________3 .13
Ivan Kozhedub_______USSR____________62______330________ 5.32
*Source: Wikipedia & various articles. Many of the exact kill counts are disputed, so it's a little open to interpretation. Also, different sides used different standards for counting shared kills, etc, which I didn't take into effect.
Don't take this as me trying to say Ace X is better than Ace Y. There are
way too many variables involved for that. It's just meant to show how some aces
might have had much higher scores if they'd been able to fly more missions.
Sorry for not including any RAF pilots, but I had a hell of a time trying to find their numbers of combat missions flown. This whole subject was a very interesting thing to look into, so I might have to do some
real research on this in the future.......