Fishbed
Posts: 1822
Joined: 11/21/2005 From: Beijing, China - Paris, France Status: offline
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quote:
It would seem there was still a huge gap in skill sets if the losses suggested were as high as they were. Skill gap was particulary important in the first years, for simple reasons: poor VVS doctrinas, poor VVS team fight capability because of the lack of radios, and of course pure inexperience of the largest part of the crews (many german units on june 1941 saw fighting in Poland, France and Great-Britain, not to mention Marita or, for some of them afterwards joining the campaign later on, Africa), while on the opposite the Germans had started to develop their news tactics even before the Civil War... Then this gap, as well as technological gap started to get reduced. Year after year, VVS got more and more serious. They had their "top gun" squadrons too, viable war machines (well as you see it with the P39 successes, nearly everything that flies not that badly is virtually a potential viable war machine for the soviet pilots ;) ), new tactics, partly developped by people like Pokryshkin and his squadron. On the other hand, the pilot pool of Luftwaffe was getting lower and lower, new rookie pilots were more numerous, best battle weary squadrons had to be sometimes relocated to Germany because of the priority to homeland defense, only to get depleted by 1944 by the USAAF fighter cover. If it is true that getting an easy kill on a allied fighter was said to be easier on the Eastern front, by 1943 that's just mere statistics, as it is logical the place you've got thousands of pilots is the one you may get thousands more opportunities to score a shot. People like Hartmann and true experten, who nevertheless may have found not that hard to shoot down russians, remained the minority - experten mattered in a limited air front like Africa, but in the tumultuous overwhelming Eastern Front, you would have needed a thousand Hartmann and a thousand Rudel (to talk about air-to-ground) to make any difference... And then, when you had a Soviet pilot on your tail, that was already a different story, and at that time, experienced Soviet pilot didn't find neither that hard to shoot a rookie german pilot... AJ
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