Why did the German air force lose experienced pilots faster than the Allies, even though they were defending their home airspace?

Question

During the 1940 Battle of Britain, German and British planes shot down each other at roughly a one to one rate. This gave an advantage to the British because all of the surviving German pilots shot down over Britain became prisoners of war, while most of the surviving shot-down British pilots were "recycled," and with greater experience under their belt.

In 1943-1944, the shoe was on the other foot. The "strategic bombing" initiatives featured roughly one to one losses of British and German planes (the Americans did better and inflicted casualties at closer to a two to one rate).

Even so, I would expect the Germans to get a benefit in relative experience from recycling surviving pilots falling in their territory, while Allied pilots became POWs.

Apparently, the Germans did not gain this benefit. That is, relative German experience levels fell, rather than rose over time. Why might that be the case?

Did the Allies do a better job of "destroying" enemy planes (and pilots) as opposed to shooting them down than the Germans in the Battle of Britain? Did the Allies successfully attack e.g. fuel supplies and other infrastructure that the Germans needed for the training of pilots?

Answer 1

The biggest factor was the scale of pilot training. The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan appears to have trained around 110,000 pilots and claimed to have produced a surplus that caused the program to start scaling back in 1944 (RAF Museum link below).

I can’t find exact figures on the American pilot training programs but I assume it dwarfed the British program. The only data point I can find now is that U.S. contracted flight schools produced about 250,000 pilots during the war, but I can’t tell what percentage of the total that was. In any case, it was very sizable.

I can’t find specific figures for the rates of Luftwaffe pilot training. Most sources say there was a shortage of pilots and fuel, but don’t give numbers. On the whole the Luftwaffe bureaucracy was not far-sighted nor very efficient and so training, tactics, R&D and strategy all lagged. It is well known that Germany lacked access to many war-essential materials on the volume necessary for a great war, which impacted the Luftwaffe in terms of production and fuel (Hart). If you read Hart’s excellent book you will find that for most of the war Germany was fighting from a position of scarcity.

Edit: In Hart's book, he states that around mid/late 1944, the Luftwaffe aircraft fuel request for full operation was 160,000 tons per month, asked for a minimum of 30,000 tons per month, and actually got 10,000 tons per month. Some anecdotes say this meant training was essentially stopped.

On the face of it, by 1943 the Allies were dominant in pilot training, aircraft production and had the logistics and resources to make use of them.

In terms of the balance in combat, the couple examples of aerial war of attrition in WW2 point to the trend that both the attacker and defender will be ground down, but the attacker will be ground down at a faster rate unless there is some other factor that is completely out of balance, like relative pilot skill or relative aircraft capabilities. The attacker must seek those key advantages while also relying on a larger scale of combat power in order to survive attrition and remain viable by the time the defender capitulates.

During the Battle of Britain in 1940, the attacker’s committed forces were larger than the defender’s committed forces, but both were grinding each other down at roughly an equal percentage (Price). In other words, both were on track to be depleted at about the same time, despite the quantitative disparity between the opposing forces. The attacker’s pilot losses are greater because they were losing more airplanes per day, and could not recover any pilots lost over the defender’s territory.

The same trends applied during the strategic air war in the West, although the scales became so lopsided in the favor of the Allies that they became dominant in the skies despite losing more pilots in action compared to the defender.

Sources:

• http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/online-exhibitions/taking-flight/historical-periods/second-world-war-flying-training.aspx
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Air_Forces_Training_Command#Contract_Primary_Flying_Training
• Hart, B. H. Liddell. History of the Second World War.
• Price, Alfred. The Hardest Day.

Answer 2

Answer to this question is same with the answer of the question "Why Allies doesn't have fighter aces scoring as high as Germans?"

National policies. German pilots tended to return to the cockpit over and over again until they were killed, while very successful Allied pilots were routinely rotated back to training bases to educate cadet flyers.

Answer 3

The Germans were enormously outnumbered. They were fighting an opponent with over ten times more oil production. At the time, the US was the largest oil producer in the world.

Furthermore, the Allies were the ones focusing on strategic bombing. Germany didn't invest as much resources in air defense because it had a land war in the East going on which was much more threatening.

Answer 4

Because they had the same planes they started the war with and Hitler also insisted that all new types be multifunction airplanes. All had to be able to dive bomb. Our P51D was several generations ahead of the ME109 and FW190.

Answer 5

One reason was a difference in German and Allied air doctrines. The Germans prioritized bombers, and the Allies, fighters.

For instance, the Germans had a very good fighter, the ME 262, by mid-war. But Hitler delayed the production of this fighter in favor of bombers. When they attacked in 1943-1944, the Allies used their best fighters, but the Germans had few M262s. During the whole war, the M262s collectively shot down "only" 542 allied planes, while the Allies shot down tens of thousands of German fighters.

Then there was the issue of battle doctrine. The German fighters were given the (relatively) easy task of shooting down bombers, while the Allied fighters were specifically ordered to chase German fighters, even at the expense of leaving their bombers unprotected. The idea was to gain complete air superiority. The result was that the Allies suffered disproportionately high bomber losses, while essentially all the German losses were fighters. The Allied pilots gained more and better experience fighting the German fighters than the Germans did fighting Allied bombers.

As to the causes of American air superiority, there were several factors. One was, as the question cited, the attacks on oil and other infrastructure that the Germans needed to train their pilots. Another factor was that the Americans managed to inflict casualties at a 2 to 1 rate. Even allowing for the "recovery" of some shot down figher pilots, the Germans were losing them faster than the Americans, especially when one takes into account, that "some" of the American losses were bombers, not fighters.

Answer 6

I believe a lot of truth in the comments BUT there is a scarcity of hard data. The secondary histories and even the autobiographies which came out in the 50-70's did not address the data but generalities and misinformation created a fog that is only being cut through in the past 20 years due to greater access of information for a lot of reasons. One issue may be German Government reticence in allowing German wartime documents to be reprinted making research more difficult. Access is allowed but copying is restricted.

A fascinating YouTube account of a single German squadron (ground attack Fw-190s) taken from 1st person reports written by the actual unit is amazing illustrative over what happened to the Luftwaffe during the first days of Normandy...many of the planes were caught transferring from one field to another, in some cases carrying mechanics in the fuselages (a common German practice) and many were shot down by marauding allied fighters looking for them all over France. This kind of attrition is not covered by the continued reliance of historians covering the stats of Big Week in March which may have been only the tip of the iceberg covering allied and German sorties and small scale actions.

And training aircraft were being found and shot down which must have put a severe limitation on German training. On top of that the fuel shortage was miserable, fuel could be obtained for some operations but there is no way the Germans could expend a lot of fuel for training. And of course the German bureaucracy created a shambles of EVERYTHING when under stress. The Germans were having a hard time training tank drivers for their easily broken tanks that required significant driving skill to remain unbroken.

Answer 7

Pratt and Whitney Double Wasp engine.

All German and British aircraft engines were water cooled...one hit to the cowling and their planes were done. The US Aircraft and their pilots kept being able to be sent back into theater, and given the emphasis on land battle and the vastness of Russia, the entire "air space" of Western Europe was ceded to the Americans. A good primer is how little the United States used its very formidable Navy in World War 1. In the Interwar Years (1919-1941) the USA concentrated on perfecting an air cooled radial engine (Curtis Wright had the other) and then concentrated on building a heavy bomber (the B17) with that engine (a "Superfortress") and then battle trained their "Air Force" in China against the Japanese.

The USA was never under threat of a sea or ground invasion during World War 2.