So What Was Driving the Soviet Kill Claims?

As pointed out in my last two posts, it appears that the Soviet air force at Kursk (in the south) from 4 to 18 July 1943 claimed more eight times as many planes shot down as the Germans actually lost. This was in an air battle that was larger than the Battle of Britain. The graph above is from page 839 of my original Kursk book and is repeated on page 285 of my new Prokhorovka book. To quote (from page 840/286):

…the Soviet claims do not appear to have been related to the German casualties. Instead, if one compares Soviet losses to Soviet claims of German losses one does find a fit. The pattern is fairly clear, the Soviets always claimed more casualties than they lost. With the Soviets losing 658 planes, and claiming 928 German kills, we are looking at the Soviets claiming about 40 percent more kills than they lost. This over-claiming is fairly consistent from day to day, and as shown elsewhere [in the book], is not a problem unique to the Soviet air force [it was also the case for the Soviet Army]. 

A briefing based upon this data was presented to Col. Fyodor Sverdlov in October 1994, who was a staff officer for the Eleventh Guards Army at Kursk and later a professor at the Frunze Military Academy. After presenting the chart showing Soviet claims to German losses, Sverdlov stated that “the enemy always suffers 30% more losses than you.” 

Colonel Sverdlov knew from his experiences in the war (and he was there from the Battle of Moscow to the end), that they regularly reported more German losses than they suffered. This was just standard procedure. I also did the same comparison in my books for Soviet claims of tanks killed compared to German losses, and found the same pattern (I may post about that at some point). Yet I regularly encounter passages in various books on the Eastern Front that quote Soviet claims of German losses without cross-checking these claims to the German records.

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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11 Comments

  1. So they assumed the enemy had a similiar attrition rate? Looking at the figures makes me wonder if these were actually compiled during the war.

    • We built these charts from the 2nd Air Army and 17th Air Army daily reports from July 1943. I have Xerox copies of them. Their losses come from these reports as does their kill claims. I just recently confirmed that the high kill claims were coming up from the regimental records.

      • Then the regiments had to deliver results and felt pressured to whitewash their performance. This means that soviet statistics are far more tainted than Nazi-German records and they are still perpetuated.

        • “Then the regiments had to deliver results and felt pressured to whitewash their performance. ”

          1) That is a claim you find no real evidence for in literature.

          2) How do you explain the high overclaiming of UK units in 1941 and US units in 1943?

          Where these units also pressed to deliver certain results? Or is the overclaiming a result of faulty confirmation procedures?

          • “1) That is a claim you find no real evidence for in literature. ”

            I am merely speculating here, but find me transparent, non propagandistic Soviet literature, that deals with intangible factors of their armed forces.

            “2) How do you explain the high overclaiming of UK units in 1941 and US units in 1943? ”

            There are certain instances and examples of overclaiming, since all belligerents suffered from this phenomenon to a certain degree. The attacker or victor (while also numerically superior) may tend to overinflate.
            Loss figures presented in various reports may occassionally approximate German losses, at least I can only speak for Normandy here. I haven’t analysed the engagements of 1941 and 1943 yet. AIR 20/4174 lists daily claims of the RAF in the BoB and not all figures seem to be completely off.

            “Or is the overclaiming a result of faulty confirmation procedures?”

            I assume this is the issue in most cases, but juxtaposing their losses with claims is illuminating and sketchy.

  2. “There are certain instances and examples of overclaiming, since all belligerents suffered from this phenomenon to a certain degree. The attacker or victor (while also numerically superior) may tend to overinflate.”

    Sorry, that is not convincing. There is a systematic 400% overclaiming in 1941 over France by the RAF, 909 confirmed kills vs. 183 actual German losses, in 1942 it was “only” 100% overclaiming (500 claims vs. 262 German losses), the allied squadrons did not have the same numerical superiority as the Russians.

    I am too lazy to search for the USAAF numbers for 1943, but it is a safe bet that they are in the 400% range for overclaiming, too.

    As long as USAAF/RAF show the same issues as the Red Army units the most likely explanation is that all three forces suffered from the faulty confirmation system.

    “AIR 20/4174 lists daily claims of the RAF in the BoB and not all figures seem to be completely off.”

    No, they are not complete off, but in comparison to German claims over France they are less accurate, that is the point IMHO.

  3. “Sorry, that is not convincing. There is a systematic 400% overclaiming in 1941 over France by the RAF, 909 confirmed kills vs. 183 actual German losses, in 1942 it was “only” 100% overclaiming (500 claims vs. 262 German losses), the allied squadrons did not have the same numerical superiority as the Russians. ”

    I am not here to convince anyone, believe in whatever you prefer. There is a systematic overclaiming by all nations, the extent matters.
    RAF claims from 10th July – 31st October 1940: 2,698 aircraft downed (all types). German Totalverluste of all aircraft in this period were 1,733 (BArch RL 2-III/950).

    “As long as USAAF/RAF show the same issues as the Red Army units the most likely explanation is that all three forces suffered from the faulty confirmation system.”

    This would require a comparison of the systems, though Valtonen analysed VVS and LW claims in the Lapland and Ruija area (1944), presented in the “Luftwaffe’s northern flank”. The German air forces overclaimed by 1:3-5 sometimes up to 1:7, the VVS up to 1:16. There are more positive or negative examples, but the LW is not entirely free of it either.

  4. “I am not here to convince anyone, believe in whatever you prefer. There is a systematic overclaiming by all nations, the extent matters.
    RAF claims from 10th July – 31st October 1940: 2,698 aircraft downed (all types). German Totalverluste of all aircraft in this period were 1,733 (BArch RL 2-III/950).”

    Thank you for confirming my point. 🙂

    Even over own territory the RAF overclaimed by factor 1.5, the German number over France is 1.1.

    Now compare German claims in the BoB (1940) with RAF claims over France…..

    As there overall claims are an aggregate of individual claims, the very different accuracy of overall claims give you what for the probability of individual claims?

    Most of your issues have been put to rest 40 years ago, you have only to read Edward Sims “The Fighter Pilots”, the author provided a very good grasp for scientific methodology, makes good smell tests and asks relevant questions, e.g. in respect to high German claims in the east.

    If you want to improve the dicussion, you have to offer more than Sims or “pilots” in computer war bands (with hard scientific background). 🙂

    Suggestion, make a t-test and compare relevant numbers:

    a) Get number of German pilots for the east front, get total Soviet losses in air combat, calculate average contribution per pilot. That is a model free hard number we can test against.

    b) Get number of Soviet (US, UK) pilots, get German air losses in the east (west), calculate average contribution per pilot.

    Now you test individual claims against this number and determine the probability they may occur in each airforce.

    Then you divide the probability of Hartmann’s claim with the the probability of the top allied pilots. What do you get?

    Or determine the average claims of the top 10/20/30% of the pilots and test them agsinst the corresponding nation average, then compare the numbers of various airforces….

  5. My impression is that Soviet overclaiming originated from pilots – the pilots indeed claimed such large amount of German planes being downed by them.

    However often they overclaimed even when not suffering losses themselves during an air battle. So from the pilots’ viewpoint it wasn’t always the case of wanting to report more losses than they themselves suffered.

    I suspect (but can’t really prove with data) that the huge Soviet overclaiming was the result of several factors combined. Firstly, the fighter pilots and their regiments felt pressure to show results. Secondly, having results was beneficial for the pilots themselves. This opened the door for very loose following of the confirmation system and buddies confirming each other’s false or ‘maybe’ claims.

  6. I have the distinct impression we are looking at a Soviet casualty reporting metric driven by the NKVD.

    That is, Red Army officers who survived both early combat with the Germans and lethal NKVD punishment of failure learned and passed around the percentage above own losses you had to report in order not to get summarily shot.

    YMMV.

    • I am looking at the Soviet casualty reporting as recorded in the daily reports of the Second and Seventeenth Air Armies, which I have Xerox copies of that we gathered back in the early 1990s from TSAMO (the Soviet military archives) in Podolsk.

      There were the actual reports that these two armies were sending up the chain of command. They were signed the chief of staff and senior political officer. I also have the daily reporting for five Soviet fighter regiments, and they are showing the same inflation.

      It is clear the units were inflating their claims. It is also clear that the personal kill claims were also being similarly inflated.

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