http://www.aviation-history.com/airmen/Erich_Hartmann.htm
This says differently.
P39s are not obsolete, they are pretty dangerous with their cannon and could rip through anything. Yaks were nothing to shake a stick at either.
"Hartmann wasn't a dog-fighter—90% of his attacks were surprise attacks" Imagine flying in formation, minding your own business (but forgetting to constantly watch the skies) when suddenly half of your fuselage or wing is ripped off by cannon fire.
Hans Rudel and Eric Hartmann were a nightmare to the allies as far as the sky went.
P39's were low-level planes. They were far inferior to ME-109's. So were the IL-2's. Look at his kill list. Dude was not mixing it up with the "best of the best".
As I said, and like all other high-kill German and Japanese pilots, the vast majority of their kills were against inferior planes and pilots. That doesn't mean they weren't awesome pilots, it just means they had a lot of easy targets, whereas US pilots later in the war simply didn't have as much to shoot at, nor were their targets flying planes that had no business taking Mustangs/Lightnings/Thunderbolts on.
I read up on his kills, and apparently that one list was possibly incorrect, but regardless, even when he did face Mustangs, it was against inexperienced pilots, based on on US pilot's own account. It was his first dogfight.
But no doubt Hartmann was one bad mofo in a plane. I don't deny that at all, just saying that the kills are super high because of the aircraft he faced, how much longer Germany was in the war, and Germany's policy of flying lots of missions in a day and leaving their aces in combat indefinitely.
edit: Think if the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot in the Pacific went on for years and years, and the US Navy never rotated their aces back to the States to be trainers. Then you'd have Navy pilots with hundreds of kills, too. That's a pretty good comparison to what Hartmann mostly faced in the East.
Just like the high-kill Japanese pilots racked up over in China. They were still great pilots, but wouldn't have had so many kills if they faced US pilots from Day One.
I think personally what the RAF and Luftwaffe pilots did vs. each other was the most impressive, because that was the best vs. the best, pretty much all the time. It wasn't just diving on ground attack planes that weren't trying to dogfight you in the first place. Battle of Britain, that was some superior flying right there.
