Bomber Aces?

QUOTE: Originally posted by lpolpo22 I would imagine that with every bomber in a group firing on an enemy aircraft the shoot downs would be hard to authenticate even if these kinds of records were kept.

Right on. Matter of fact, that's exactly what happened; there were GROSS over-claims in enemy a/c shot down because with one Fw 190 getting plastered and twenty gunners doing the plastering... you can see where that would lead to in debriefing.

Records were kept. But, for a time, the exaggerated numbers of claims were allowed to stand. This was one way to battle the decline in morale amongst the bomber crews. With so many bombers going down early on in the war, the USAAF was trying anything it could think of to keep morale up. Not an easy task.

So the records exist, but are they reliable? I think that the records of gunners' kills are even more unreliable than those of the fighter pilots. There's uncertainty in all camps here, and with the daily declining number of folks who were there I'm afraid that we will never know all the facts for sure.


Fade to Black...

The Germans actually kept pretty good records of their pilots during WWII, the trick is finding the records, as most were destroyed.

The only one that comes to mind would be Major Eduard Tratt, credited with 38 kills in a Me-410B. Of course, that's technically a bomber / destroyer, but a bomber none the less.

demono69