Warbird Information Exchange

We took Stocky for a Hornet ride when he was close to 80 years old, he handled the G's better than Gizmo did in the other jet.

Stocky is a great man, anytime we (416) were in Comox on Q duty his door was always open.

A couple of years ago I read Adolh Galland's, Hartmann's GUnther Rall's and Gunther Bloemert'z autobiographies. I may have a little bit confused however a few point about Hartmann. At the beginning of the War the German aces from WWI and the Spanish War were rock stars with a couple dozen victories. Later it became a big deal to score a 100 victores against the British on the Western Front. Adolph Galland earned his Iron Cross with Oak leaves for doing this.
Later, it became increasingly difficult to earn the various awrds to go with the Iron Cross. Hartmann was motvated to get a many kills as quickly as possible because it gave him a chance to come home and see his wife and family. He requested to go back to the eastern front at the end of the war instead of staying near Berlin. My guess is that he was desperately trying to get to 450 kills before the war concluded. The German fighter pilots considered a kill on the western front to be about 3 times more difficult than one on the Eastern front. I think the high scorer on the Western front was maybe 150 kills.
One of Hartmann's early mentors advised him to "fill your windscreen with the opponents aircraft before firing." "You can't miss that way." He was an excellent shot and pilot but maybe others like Jans Joachim Marseille were better. THe Russians like to fly in large numbers close to the ground, for whatever reason. THis made it easy for him to dive in from above and at great speed. Unlike Pappy Boyington that liked to dive right into the front of a formation , shooting at the leader and creating fear and panic. Hartmann was the opposite. He would pick off the rearmost aircraft and work his way forward. Sometimes bagging three or four before the rest were alerted. Last, he loved to go where the enemy wasn't supoosed to be, maybe a couple of flight hours away from where the Russians expected to see any German aircraft. Initially the Russians were only vigilant when they thought there might be Luftwaffe aircraft in the area. Hartmann had the black tulip removed from his aircraft because it became too well known and the enemy would run from sight of it. His kills picked back up when he went to a more anonymous paint scheme.
Hartmann was never shot down, injured, or received any bullet holes in his aircraft. He never gave advantage to his opponent and he made mistakes very rarely. While he was a POW in Russian labor camps until 1955, they gave him a rough go and conformed he had 352 kills. Last. the Germans actually kept better records on kills than the Allies.

Lots of pilots are known to exaggerate. With the Cold War in full swing after the war, Soviet records would have been nearly impossible to verify from the West. So whose words do you accept? Just take the controversy of Rex Barber Vs Lanphier in downing Yamamoto's Betty as an example. There were no debriefs after that mission which led to a big argument later over who actually shot Yamamoto down. Took forensic evidence from the crash site years later to confirm that Barber's story was more true. Then there was that whole Hartman Vs Hofer theory where Hartman himself claimed he probably shot down Hofer. Well guess what? He didn't! Troy White was able to prove once the Iron Curtain fell by going through Yugoslav records that Hofer was killed in a strafing attack on a Mostar Airdrome. No doubt Hartman was a good pilot, but realize there are two sides to every story.

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Better is the enemy of Good.

I used to think the same thing, especially Adolph Galland. In Gunther Rall's autobiography, " My Logbook" he lists every kill, what type, location ,day and time of day. I'm told the Germans also logged weather conditions, who flew on those missions and details of the enemy's squadron. Gunther Rall was shot down 14 times. Bloemertz said of the 350 people his Wing stated with in 1940 only 11 survived to the end of the war. They also flew several missions a day, almost every day of the year for years at a time.

To get an idea on the ratio of kills versus combat missions you might want to have a look at the list of the Ritterkreuz recipients (fighter pilots only). I choose the link to the German version, as the English one does not give the number of sorties. "Luftsiege" = kills, "Feindflüge" = operational sorties, "unbekannt" = unknown, no data. Listed in alphabetical order. Almost all high scoring pilots had a high number of sorties as well, of those top scoring pilots flying in the same theater the ratio is not that far apart. Of course some were better than others, but the distance between the aces was not that dramatically apart.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der ... agdflieger

Michael