"Immediately following the war, the claims of Sabre superiority were overstated. Against 792 claimed MiG kills, the U.S. Air Force officially conceded just 58 Sabre losses. The Soviets, in turn, admitted MiG losses of around 350, yet have always claimed to have downed an improbable 640 F-86s—a figure that represents a majority of the entire deployment of Sabres to Korea. “All I can tell you is the Russians are damned liars,” says Sabre pilot Cleveland. “At least, in this instance they are.” In the 1970s, an Air Force study called “Sabre Measures Charlie” upped the Sabre losses directly attributed to MiG combat to 92, which cut the F-86 kill ratio to 7-to-1. Later, with the dissolution of the USSR, the archives of the Soviet air force became available to scholars, whose studies have since pegged Soviet MiG-15 losses in Korea at 315."
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Sources
Stephen Joiner, “The Jet that Shocked the West”, Air & Space Magazine, (December 2013).
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Korean_War
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