Re: North Africa! Where was the Luftwaffe?


Perhaps a final comment on the possibility of overscoring:

From Wing Commander Asher Lee:- "A young German ace [Moelders] ... claimed
three Spitfires shot down. The ground staff noted that his guns had not
fired and that all his ammunition was intact in the aircraft." Now, this is
not impossible - there are similar Allied claims, *but* the claims stated
that the guns were not fired - the German pilots, seeing that they were
being attacked, manoeuvred and crashed into each other. Kills were awarded
because it was the attacker's action that had led to the outcome. The
critical thing here is that the pilot did not claim to have shot down the
German aircraft. How accurate the Asher Lee quote is I don't know - source
is Martin Caidin, Me 109, Ballentine; original source would have been Asher
Lee, The German Air Force, 1946, Harper & Row.

Max, I have that book and have to emphatically disagree with even
Caiden's use of it as a proper source. It was written in the immediate
post-war period and reflects the attitudes of the day, particularly in
the way it universally denigrated the Luftwaffe. I am not in the
"Luftwaffe = Supermen" camp, but it was a dangerous and at times
effective force - W/C Lee's book suffers from myopia and the author
didn't have access to the archival material that has flooded historical
circles in the intervening 60+ years. Of all the books on my shelf, I
consider Asher Lee's to be the least accurate - it is more a judgement
than an objective analysis or history. The forward gave such a slanted
view of the war that I approached the text with a more critical eye
than I normally would and I found literally dozens of false statements
and examples of flawed logic.

The Moelders story doesn't match any historical event, BTW. There were
other pilots guilty of this sort of behavior, but unsubstantiated,
anonymous anecdotes can hardly be viewed as historical fact.

The other thing I would point out is that if Caiden wrote it, I
wouldn't believe it. That guy was he best bar napkin reporter I know.
"He never met a story he didn't like!" He and Pierre Clostermann are
the two authors that got me hooked on aviation as a kid, but as
sources, they both lacked veracity.

v/r
Gordon

.

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