[RC20]

When you control the ground under an aerial battle, a lot of the total losses can be recorded.

I don't see that the same as awarded loss. In the case of a bomber action, dozens of German units would have been involved. Equally the same for bombers and allied fighter units.

It would be incredibly complex to try to correlate a claim and a location in the chaos of a fight.

The best source would not be German claims but the records on allied units as to number sent out and number that came back.

While that gets you actual losses, the reason for those losses would be impossible to certify.

What counted was the overall not individual. Huge losses in training that were not claims.

UK should have had pretty solid claims during the Battle of Britain, most intercepts were over populated land. How paper claims aka propaganda and actual claims, you would have to do a day by day and then unit by unit claim count. Where the numbers came from?

No question that some combat was over water or finished over water but those would be a smaller subset. Also losses not recorded but never made it back across the channel (damaged or just crashed for other reasons). The German records in that case would be accurate if you could bring in all the unit reports for a given day.

I will leave it at that.