Friday Update, June 01, 2012

[Osprey]

Originally Posted by Bobb4

There were 2719 Russian aces who scored over 5 kills while the UK only had 539. The US had 1293 (two fronts including Japan) with the Germans having 2884 on two fronts, East and West.
So cut the Russians a bit of slack

Interesting. How does that compare to the number of pilots enlisted though? It would be better to have percentages because it's pretty much obvious that in total numbers the UK will be far lower. The UK population in WW2 was about 30 million at the time, what was the Russian population?

Also, I don't know what confirmation was required for a 'kill' but RAF pilots had it relatively tough compared with the other nations on the Western Front, requiring a witness seeing the enemy go in or an actual crash site. On the Western front the fights were often above 25kft and shot down A/C were not recorded. All nations overclaimed, just some more than others.