Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
In connection with that, Grossman, in "On Combat", has some interesting factual material in Section Three, Chapter One (starting at p.125) "Killing Machines: The Impact of a Handful of True Warriors". He starts with "Commando" Kelly and includes Audie Murphy; but the statistics for Allied and German fighter pilots show much more quantitatively that a relatively small percentage of pilots racked up a very large number of kills.
Of course one must also understand that in many cases fighter pilot tactics were designed to effectively "feed" targets to those superior performers. In this I'm referring to the US practice of having wingmen mainly concerned with keeping lead's backside clear. German tactics were slightly different, but still scaled toward protecting the lead pilot.