[ImJustAnotherOkie]

I guess he was the top Ace for a period of time? Lots of guys got more than 19.

Our pilots pale in comparison to German Luftwaffe aces who scored hundreds of kills. The max being 352. Of course the Luftwaffe didn’t rotate their pilots out.

[Snickering Hound]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vavPDHyvShw

The History Channel’s documentary Dogfights: The Zero Killer. About the F6F Hellcat and has some about Vraciu.

[Boiler Plate]

The US didn't allow pilots to rack up scores as they became too valuable as instructors to new recruits. The biggest problem facing the Japs and Nazis was the loss of experienced pilots that could teach others how to fight. The Turkey Shoot was a clear example of the Japs not having anyone left who knew how to fly.

[Buffalo Head]

"Our pilots pale in comparison to German Luftwaffe aces who scored hundreds of kills."

Yes, but mostly against the Russians who were flying decidedly inferior airplanes.

[puppypusher]

“
Our pilots pale in comparison to German Luftwaffe aces who scored hundreds of kills. The max being 352. Of course the Luftwaffe didn’t rotate their pilots out.”

A lot of the Luftwaffe Pilots had such great numbers of kill since they were flying and fighting in the Spanish civil war.

Also they had very little qualified opposition until they fought the Brits,Russian’s and finally the U.S.

[DesertRhino]

The Luftwaffe pilots were never the equals of the USN. That’s a fact. In basically 3 years, they became the most deadly pilots on planet earth, bar none.

They mastered deflection shooting that the USAAF didn’t even try, and the Luftwaffe never did. As far as the Luftwaffe high numbers, they were fighting from the mid 30s till the end of the war. All the extremely high scores were the eastern front guys. They ran up those scores against barely trained pilots in very low quality planes until later in the war.
Even Hartmann called it “infanticide”.

A USN Corsair and Hellcat was the most deadly airman of the war, even exceeding Luftwaffe skills. Read up on the deflection shooting story, nobody else even tried.

[DesertRhino]

Also USN had an advantage in deflection shooting largely absent in the USAAF and Luftwaffe. The Wildcat and Hellcat was the main fighter for most of the war. Its nose was relatively sort and sloped downwards to facilitate carrier landings.
This made deflection easy to learn and do. The long nose 109s, Mustangs, Spits, etc had a much rougher time visibility wise. Those forces largely used a tail chase and head on.

USN was even widely using a technique where from thousands of feet above they would dive at nearly 90 degrees straight down onto bombers.

[Oatka]

Of course the Luftwaffe didn’t rotate their pilots out.

Adolph Galland - from Wiki: "He flew 705 combat missions, and fought on the Western and the Defence of the Reich fronts. On four occasions he survived being shot down, and he was credited with 104 aerial victories, all of them against the Western Allies."

I remember seeing him interviewed on TV where he mentioned that while the allies rotated their air crews, "We flew until we died."