Art wrote:From my experience it wasn't an exceptional case to count more frags than the real number of Soviet soldiers participating in a battle.
Even at the risk of huge thread drift I am curious enought to learn of a few such cases,
It was entirely normal to overestimate (a) the numbers of the enemy and (b) the effect of own direct and indirect fire upon the enemy. In some circumstances it could therefore be quite unexeceptional to find that the estimates of enemy losses were overoptimistic by a large margin: a concentration of enemy "on the other side" destroyed by artillery, an enemy attack repulsed, a night time raid upon an enemy base etc.
Art wrote:Estimates or counting (whatever you call it) of enemy losses was never particularly reliable and accurate in any army, and the Finnish one was not an exception.
It would appear to me that the difficulty and even the nature of the task of estimating enemy casualties, especially KIA, can vary greatly. In the case of a relatively small-scale engagement in a situation where the battle field is rather a limited area which is left uncontested by the enemy, it would be far easier to conduct an actual count of enemy KIA - and in the event that the enemy had not or had not been able to evacuate its own KIA there would be little need to add any estimate to the count.
