Anybody here read the 4 volumes on the air war on the eastern front by Christer Bergstrom; excellent reads with great quality pics too, I'm on the final volume now; Bagration to Berlin.
The thing that struck me most about the VVS in WW11 was the CHRONIC overclaiming by Russian pilots, I mean everybody exagerated or double/triple claimed to a certain degree - often innocently as the same plane was fired at by several pilots, but our Russian chums took it to a whole new level apparently.
Bergstrom reckons as many 9 out of 10 VVS kills were false following his in-depth examination into surviving German records. So that gives the VVS a 9 tenths overclaim rate - EASILY the worst in WW11.
Guess the political situation must have contributed to that, what with political commissars hovering pretty close to the flight line all the time. Guess you didn't want to be failing too often with the chance of an instant transfer to a manual "mine-clearing battalion" or something worse.
So quite possibly the top scoring aces of WW11 were actually mostly British or US? I know the RAF was pretty damn fussy about allocating kills post 1940 (when victories over nazi planes were understandably exagerarted), but they are possibly the most accurate after 1940 period.
