Reading about Maj. Dick Bong the other day. He shot down 40 planes in his P-38. The number 2 WWII American ace was also in a P-38 and got 38.
I direct your attention to this page:
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pettypi/elevon/aces.html
Looks like the top German ace got a whopping 352. They had fifteen pilots over 200. The Americans only had three pilots over 30!
What’s the deal here? Why the low totals for American aces? And, as a side note, why were top two Americans flying twin-engine P-38’s?
Blasting inexperienced Soviet pilots in obsolete aircraft who outnumber you substantially is easier than shooting down experienced German or Japanese pilots in aircraft that are at least comparable to yours and are in comparable numbers. And look how many guys those numbers are spread among. There just wasn’t enough business to go around.
What’s wrong with a P-38? It could outperform a firetrap of a Japanese bomber and put an awful lot of lead into it. I refer you to the first situation above.
The numbers on this page strike me as suspicious for two reasons, first (as you’ve mentioned) that so many german aces literally had hundreds more kills than any ace from any other country. I’d suspect they must be using a more “lenient” method of confirming and recording kills.
The second question is I notice some pilots have scores of x.5 - how do you get half a kill?
Not to mention that it was the only Allied fighter that could fly home with one engine inoperative. 
Which was important in the Pacific Theater.
If two pilots shot down an enemy aircraft they would share credit and would each receive half a kill.
We rotated experienced pilots out of combat zones. For example, if a fighter pilot flew a 25 mission tour, he was usually sent back to the states to be an instructor or something, if he volunteered for a second tour, he get a visit to the psychiatrist (really) and then if approved, flew a 12 mission tour. The Germans and Japanese simply kept their pilots in combat continuously. As a result, a German ace might have flown ten or twenty times as many missions than an American - if he survived. This meant that at the end of the war, there were very few German aces left - but they were very very good(and lucky)to have lasted that long, and had more opportunity to roll up their score. We probably had a greater number of aces proportinately, if with fewer kills, but I don’t know if anyone kept that kind of statistic.
We also set higher standards to confirm a kill than the opposition, who had propaganda and morale in mind. A lot of victories went unclaimed because they couldn’t meetthe standards used. Even so, we claimed more aircraft shot down than the enemy ever lost.
Half a kill is scored when two pilots have hits on the same plane and it is not clear who fired the shot that brought the enemy down. Americans use the same system.
jwg is absolutely right.
American kill totals were low in part because we got into the war later than everybody else, but mainly because we yanked our best pilots out of combat and used them to teach the newbies.
I read in one of James Dunnigan’s books that 5% of the pilots get something like 50% of the kills.
The two reasons already mentioned, basically:
Firstly, that Axis pilots didn’t get to return home after a set number of tours, so they had more opportunity to shoot down more aircraft (and to become more skilled pilots).
Secondly (and most importantly IMHO), that Axis pilots had far better aircraft and were better prepared to use them than their opponents in the early stages of the war. The Me-109 was a better fighter than anything else until the Spitfire came of age, and even then it remained better armed - it was also either faster or more manoeuvrable, but I can’t remember which. Knocking down Polish biplanes, British Defiants and Battles or Russian Yaks wasn’t as hard as it was knocking down Mustangs or Lightnings later on.
A third reason occurs to me too: the Germans had more practice shooting at bombers than the Allies did shooting at German bombers (the Battle of Britain excepting), so they could rack up some easier targets. Plenty of target practice, really. Anyone have any cites to tell me I’m talking rubbish here?
Strictly a WAG…
But I recall that the Germans were given credit for planes they destroyed while still on the ground.
Easy to do with the many sneak attacks the Nazis initiated throughout the war - very dangerous after hostilities had started.
Ground attacks may have killed more American fighter pilots in Europe than air to air combat.
dos centavos
Seriously, it seems like it would be very difficult to keep count as the battle raged. If I were up there fighting for my life, trying to hold my plane together, keep from running into the ground and other planes, I would be far too busy to keep a tally. Who is the impartial witness who keeps score?
dropzone, I got no problem with the P-38. Still the most beautiful combat airplane the U.S. ever made in my opinion. I just wondered why it was that our twin-engined fighter seemed to work so well while the Bf-110 was “meat on the table”. From the hype, you’d expect the top American ace to be in a P-51, right?
And where are the Navy fliers on this list? With all the large air battles in the Pacific, you’d think a Navy pilot would have gotten in on the action.
Does anyone have a cite for how accurate those German numbers were?
And, can anyone recommend a good combat flight simulator that includes the P-38 as a flyable airplane?
The Me-109 and Spitfire were a wash as far as performance went in 1940. After that, Spitfire performance quickly outpaced 109 performance - later models of 109 were quite poor airplanes, unbalanced, underarmed, and not very good over 400mph. There’s an evaluation of the 109G6 online that is very uncomplimentary. Needless to say, I don’t have it bookmarked.
Of course, the Fw-190 made up for that, but then the West had airplanes like the Tempest; the Typhoon was able to handle it at low to medium altitudes, as well. The P-47 outclassed it at high altitude, and it was well matched with the P-51 (except it was far more heavily armed).
So the mass of German airplanes were not better than RAF/USAAF equivalents. Freaks like the 190D9 (common-ish), Ta-152 (hen’s teeth), and Me-262 (ditto) were too rare to make big impacts.
It comes down to length of time in combat, and quality of opponents - the Soviet airforce that Hartmann flew against for the better part of 3 years was not very good. The top scoring ace flying against the Western Allies, Heinz Bar, had 220 victories in nearly 6 years of flying.
The impartial witness for confirming victories would be the gun camera. About as impartial as you can get. Plus, witnesses on the ground, and ground troops finding the actual wreckage, and your wingman or another member of your flight seeing it go down all add up to a pretty good system for confirming victories. And while the Nazi Party might have been a propaganda machine, the Luftwaffe was fairly apolitical and kept sharp records. Some think that the Luftwaffe claims are quite a bit more accurate than the USAAF/RAF ones, but that turns into a religious debate so is best left unexplored.
The P-38 had very good pitch authority and fairly light wing loading, so it turned well, especially at low altitude, where most combat in the PTO took place. It was a failure in Europe, though - in this interview Adolf Galland is quite derisive of it. He compares it to the Me-110.
The P-51 is an overrated aircraft. Better than the P-38, but not as good as the P-47, at altitude - it just had a much longer range than the latter. It was near worthless for ground attack in the ETO (water cooled engine = extremely vulnerable), so after they became available in numbers (1944ish) the P-47 went on to ground attack while the P-51 remained as an escort fighter. Escort missions are not conducive to lots of kills.
The top scoring US Navy ace was David McCampbell, with 34 kills. Not too shabby, third on the list of US aces.
Top Marine was Greg Boyington, 22 kills in the PTO, 6 with the Flying Tigers in China.
I recall reading that the first squadrons of Me 262s were all hand-picked aces, some with hundreds of kills under their belts, and perhaps that as much as the jet’s performance accounted for their kill ratio - 46 to 1, something like that?
There’s a significant advantage in being able to outrun everyone by 150 mph or so. I wonder how much they got their totals patted nicely with a brace of missions in a 262.
Also, as I recall, the 109’s main advantage over the Spit in their early days was its rate of climb, while the British plane could turn a bit faster.
You guys really oughta check this out. Then wander around the rest of the site.
I’ll see you in a few days.
Just to add my opinion, which mostly covers things already said.
First point, the US got into the war later than the Germans, Russians, British, Japanese, etc. so they had less time overall in combat. While just about everybody else was well into it in 1939, the US stayed out until nearly 1942 (and took a while to ramp up even after that).
Secondly, we did rotate pilots out unlike most other countries (Germany being a prime example). Add this to the first point and that accounts for a large percentage of the difference right there.
Thirdly, although at the end of the war I’d say the US had the best collection of fighters going, we had some real clunkers at the start of the war. The P40 and Wildcat were tough, but lacking in performance compared to Zeros and Me109’s and such. And don’t even mention the Brewster Buffalo.
Fourth point, a lot of the German aces racked up kills against Soviet pilots that were inexperienced and flying inferior aircraft. And don’t take this as fact, but wasn’t there a tradition of assigning kills to the squadron commander sometimes even when they were made by someone else?
Fifth, by the time the US had better fighters in substantial numbers in Europe, there were lots fewer German planes to shoot at. My dad flew in B17’s toward the end of the war (the war ended just after his 16th?? mission), and he never even saw a German fighter during that time. I know less about the Japanese but wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happened in the Pacific theatre.
Sixth, IIRC the P38 turned a heck of a lot better than the Bf-110. Apparently the Hurricanes and Spits could make short work of the 110’s, and at some point the Germans started using 109’s to fly escort for the 110’s.
Seventh, boy am I long-winded!
Check out the numbers of some of those Finns in that link in the OP. Maybe not all of them were flying Buffalos and maybe they weren’t flying them throughout the war, but they did okay. The weather helped out its problem with overheating that was a liability everywhere else.
Don’t know about Axis planes, but some Allied ones had the WWII equivalent of a video camera installed. I belive footage from these cameras was mainly how score was kept. In the Pacific, there were also coastwatchers who could observe dogfights in the area and verify the pilots’ accounts.
Take a look at The Tuskeegee Airmen for examples of WWII combat footage and Father Goose for a humorous look at the life of a coastwatcher.