Confirmation and Overclaiming of Aerial Victories During World War II

Confirmation And Overclaiming Of Aerial Victories During World War II

In aerial warfare, the term overclaiming describes a combatant (or group) that claims the destruction of more enemy aircraft than actually achieved. The net effect is that the actual losses and claimed victories are unequal.

Honest overclaiming typically occurs in one of two ways: (1) more than one fighter pilot attacks the same target in quick succession and when they see it destroyed each claims a victory in good faith, and (2) a target is hit and appears to go down, but the pilot is able to land the plane. In some instances of combat over friendly territory a damaged aircraft may have been claimed as an aerial victory by its opponent while the aircraft was later salvaged and restored to an operational status. In this situation the loss may not appear in the records while the claim remains confirmed.

Most discussion of overclaiming centers on air combat during World War II, because of the significant amount of air combat relative to conflicts before or since.

Read more about Confirmation And Overclaiming Of Aerial Victories During World War II:  German Methodology For Confirming Aerial Victories, Examples of Overclaiming

Famous quotes containing the words confirmation, aerial, victories, world and/or war:

    Whenever reality reinforces a child’s fantasied dangers, the child will have more difficulty in overcoming them...So, while parents may not regard a spanking as a physical attack or an assault on a child’s body, the child may regard it as such, and experience it as a confirmation of his fears that grown-ups under certain circumstances can really hurt you.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.
    Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)

    And, “Better defeat almost,
    If seen clear,
    Than life’s victories of doubt
    That need endless talk-talk
    To make them out.”
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    The body and the soul know how to play
    In that dark world where gods have lost their way.
    Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)

    I have agreed to go into the service for the war ... [feeling] that this was a just and necessary war and that it demanded the whole power of the country; that I would prefer to go into it if I knew I was to die or be killed in the course of it, than to live through and after it without taking any part in it.
    Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)