Category Air War on the Eastern Front

he war in the Arctic area, on the border between the USSR and German-occupied Norway and, from June 25, in Soviet and Finnish Laponia, was fought with very limited resources on both sides. Nevertheless, the little-known air war in this area is one of the most inter­esting chapters in the history of air conflict. Here, true dogfights of the same character as over the Western Front in 1917-18 were fought between some of the greatest fighter aces of both sides.

As the only ice-free port in northern Russia, the small town of Murmansk has been of vital strategic impor­tance to the Russians for at least the past two centuries. During World War 11, Murmansk would play a vital role in the shipping of American and British military equipment to the USSR. Prior to the German invasion in 1941, the Soviet leadership, however, was caught in the same dilemma as the Germans would encounter later in the war: Even if gigantic military resources were at hand, the dimensions of the huge country and the long borders along which an enemy invasion could be expected forced a prioritization. Before the war started, the bulk of the Red Army was deployed in the area between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, where the most powerful Axis forces were situated. Apart from this, French plans to launch an attack against the oil fields in the Caucasus in the spring of 1940 called for the concentration of considerable Red Army forces in this area. On top of this, there remained a permanent threat of yet another Japanese invasion in the Far East. The weakest hostile forces, in fact, were in Finland and Norway, where Hitler’s main preoccupation was the fear of a British invasion. Thus only limited Soviet forces were deployed along the Soviet borders with Norway and Finland. The entire Karelian sector from Lake Ladoga, northeast of Leningrad,

to the south shore of the Barents Sea, in the far north— a front of about 600 miles—was covered by only two Soviet armies, the Seventh and the Fourteenth. The bulk of these forces, the Fourteenth Army, was concentrated in the 180-mile border zone to the west of the Kola Pen­insula, with the protection of Murmansk as its main task.

The VVS of the Fourteenth Army, supplemented by the VVS of the Soviet Northern Fleet (WS-Sevemyy Flot, SF), was commanded by an able fighter pilot, Gen­eral-Mayor Aleksandr Kuznetsov. On June 22, 1941, the Soviet air units deployed in defense of the Kola Penin­sula in the Arctic area were:

VVS-Fourteenth Army: 1 SAD, consisting three regiments (137 BAP at Afrikanda Airdrome with thirty – eight SBs (reinforced with eighteen SBs on June 29); 145 1AP at Shonguy Airdrome with fifty-six I-16s; and 147 IAP at Murmashi Airdrome with thirty-four I-153s and nineteen I-15bis.

WS-SF: 72 SAP at Vayenga Airdrome, with four 1-16s, seventeen 1-153s, twenty-eight I-15bis, and eleven SBs (reinforced on June 26 with twelve I- 16s); 118 RAP at the hydro airfield at Guba Gryaznaya, with thirty-seven MBR-2s and seven GSTs; 49 ORAE with ten MBR-2s; and 24 Aviazveno Svyazi with two MBR-2s.

This left the Soviet Seventh Army to protect almost the entire Soviet-Finnish border, between Lake Ladoga and the southern part of the Kola Peninsula. At the out­break of the war, the VVS of the Seventh Army had only one aviation regiment, 72 SBAP/55 SAD.

The invaders possessed equally weak forces in this area, and their troops were badly hampered by huge logistical distances. It was only when the Swedish gov­ernment, following the invasion of the USSR, agreed to allow military equipment to be transferred through their country that these logistical problems could be overcome and any serious attempt to occupy Murmansk could be made. At the opening of Operation Barbarossa, the main task of the German troops in Norway was to secure the long Norwegian coast against any British invasion attempt. Only limited ground and air forces were assigned to the offensive aimed at capturing Murmansk. Having failed in the latter mission, the main task of the Luftwaffe in this area became the permanent interdiction of the Kirov railroad line, connecting Murmansk with the Soviet mainland.

On June 22, 1941, Generaloberst Hans-Jiirgen

StumpfPs Luftflotte 5 comprised a total of 240 aircraft in Norway and a small detachment in Finland. The main units were KG 30,1./KG 26, parts of JG 77, and IV.(St)A LG 1. The units brought up against the Soviet Union before the outbreak of the war were organized in Luftwaffenkommando Kirkenes under Oberst Andreas Nielsen.

On June 22 1941, the following units stood at Oberst Nielsen’s disposal: 5./KG 30 at Banak (northern Nor-! way) with ten Ju 88s; IV.(St)/LG 1 at Kirkenes (north-| em Norway), with thirty-six Ju 87s; 13./JG 77 at Kirkenes; with ten Bf 109s; Stab/ZG 76 at Kirkenes with six Bf 110s; I.(F)/124 at Kirkenes with three Ju 88s; l.(H)/j 32 at Kemijarvi and Rovaniemi (northern Finland) with seven Hs 126s and three Do 17Ps; l./KuFIGr 406at Banak with Нс 115s and Do 18s. Also, two He 11 Is and two Ju 88s of a weather reconnaissance Schwarm and eleven Ju 52s of a Transportstaffel were attached to Luftwaffekommando Kirkenes.

The buildup of the German military forces in this area had been carried out with the support of the Finn­ish government. According to the German-Finnish agree­ment of September 12, 1940, the Wehrmacht was per­mitted to establish strongholds in northern Finland.; During the months preceding Operation Barbarossa, sev­eral thousand German troops were stationed in north­ern Finland. Between June 7 and June 21, 1941, large quantities of German military equipment, vehicles, and troops disembarked in Finnish ports and were deployed to Laponia. Aircraft of Luftflotte 5 were stationed at Finnish airfields.

In fact, the air war in the Far North area started before the official outbreak of the war. On June 17,1941, a lone Ju 88 sweeping over Kola Bay, the entrance to Murmansk, was pursued by two flights of 1-153s and I-16s. Only the superior speed of the German aircraft obviated an exchange of fire. Later that day, more Ju 88s appeared over Ozerko Bay, between the Rybachiy Penin­sula and the mainland northwest of Murmansk. This time they were fired on by AAA. After that, there were daily intrusions by Luftwaffe aircraft. The next day, a Ju 88 of l.(F)/124 was hit by Soviet ground fire over the Rybachiy Peninsula. The flight engineer, Unteroffizier Josef Hausenblas, was killed, probably the first German victim in the conflict with the USSR. On June 19, Starshiy Leytenant Vasiliy Volovikov of 72 SAP/SF attempted to attack an He 111 and a Bf 110 with his 1-153 in the

same area. He was in turn bounced by four Bf 109s. The Soviet pilot managed to escape in a cloudbank.

The mission of Luftwaffen – kommando Kirkenes was to establish con­trol of the air (i. e.. to wipe out the entire Soviet Air Force in this area) and give air cover to the ground troops aiming at the capture of the port of Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula. But while the Luftwaffe struck with tremendous impact on the “main Eastern Front,” most air­craft of Luftwaffenkommando Kirkenes were grounded due to bad weather dur­ing the first days of the war. Only small raids were conducted against Ura-Guba and Kola near Murmansk on June 22.

Unlike their colleagues elsewhere along the front, and contrary to German reports promulgated in histories of the conflict, the VVS and Red Fleet com­manders in the North had dispersed and camouflaged their aircraft on the airfields.

No doubt influenced by wartime German propaganda material, the German historian Paul Carell incorrectly stated, “The Russians left their hundred Ratas unpro­tected and uncamouflaged on the two airfields at Murmansk even after June 22. An attacking German Kampfgeschwader destroyed the majority of the Soviet fight er force."1 In fact, and notwithstanding strong ef­forts by the Luftwaffe, no more than nineteen Soviet aircraft in this region were destroyed on the ground dur­ing the first eighteen days of the war.2

The standard among Soviet airmen in this area was far above the average. Nearly half the pilots had been in active service in Karelia and the Far North for more than two years, and several had experienced combat in the skies of Spain and Khalkhin-Gol, or during the Win­ter War. Among the Soviet fighter pilots on the airfields around Murmansk was a young and rather self-made officer named Boris Feoktistovich Safonov. Royal Air Force fighter pilots who met Safonov later that year re­member him as “a high-profile, photogenic figure.”3 Safonov was the equivalent of the Luftwaffe’s Werner ‘Vati’ Molders, a most talented and aggressive fighter pilot who educated and inspired his proteges. Several of the pilots under his command went on to become aces
themselves. Safonov taught them all a very simple and straightforward maxim: “The main thing is to have faith in yourself and the will to defeat your enemy!” Boris Safonov had both; during the following eleven months he wrould score at least twenty’ personal and six shared victories, thus becoming the first great Soviet fighter ace of the war.

On Tuesday, June 24, the sighting of a lone Ju 88 alerted the airmen at Vayenga Airdrome, northeast of Murmansk. Boris Safonov, at that time starshiy leytenant and commander of a Zveno in 5 Eskadrilya/72 SAP, immediately took off in an 1-16 armed with RS-82 rock­ets. Climbing in the bright sunlight, he caught sight of the twin-engine enemy aircraft at an altitude of 18,000 feet on the approaches to Vayenga. This was a Ju 88 of 6../KG 30, sent out to the area on a reconnaissance mission.

Safonov placed himself up-sun and cocked his weap­ons. The pilot of the Ju 88, Unteroffizier Reinhard Schellern, had no chance of escaping before Safonov had damaged the aircraft with one of his RS-82 rockets.

Unteroffizier Schellern tried to get away in a dive out over the sea, but the Soviet fighter pilot mercilessly followed the damaged Ju 88. The radio operator in the

Junkers warplane, Gefreiter Georg Crecki, opened a des­perate and ill-aimed fire with his two 7.92mm aft machine guns. Without looking back or caring about the badly aimed fire from the twin-engine enemy bomber, Safonov finished it off over Zalentsa Bay with a few precise bursts of his machine guns. The entire crew was killed. The victorious Soviet pilot returned to his base, where he received an enthusiastic welcome. One of the officers under Safonov’s command, Starshiy Leytenant Sergey Kurzenkov, wrote: “He had showed that it was possible to beat the fascists.”4

From the first day of the war, the Ju 88s of KG 30 Adler were committed to incessant raids against Soviet coastal shipping, the Murman railway, and, most diffi­cult, Murmansk itself. The single bomber Staffel attached to Luftwaffenkommando Kirkenes, 5./KG 30, was supplemented by the two other Staffeln of II./KG 30. At Murmansk, the threat from the Soviet concentration
of antiaircraft artillery was added to that of the defend­ing fighters. In 6./KG 30, only one Ju 88 remained undamaged by AAA after the two first missions against Murmansk, on June 23 and 24.5 Murmansk soon earned the reputation among German bomber crews as one of the four major antiaircraft concentrations of the war – the so-called “two L’s” (London and Leningrad) and “two M’s” (Malta and Murmansk). A Ju 88 airman even said, “I’d rather fly three times over London than once over Murmansk!”

On June 25, the bombers of the Red Army’s North­ern Front and VVS-SF went into action against airfields across a huge area between the Gulf of Finland and the Barents Sea, attempting to wipe out the forces available to Luftflotte 5 and the Finnish Air Force.

This Soviet air-base offensive, which would last six days, was due to an order from the staff of the Northern Front. With this followed the inevitable renewed out-

break of hostilities between the USSR and Finland. Although this work is limited to a description of the air war between Germany and the Soviet Union and does not embrace the operations by the Finnish Air Force, this operation deserves to be mentioned.

Both the qualities (obsolete aircraft models and inaccurate bomb aiming) and the size of the attacking force were inadequate to achieve any successes. And the price paid was high. On just the first day of the air offen­sive, twenty-three bombers were lost (the major part over Finland).6 Mladshiy Leytenant Nikolay Gapeyonok of 202 SBAP (based near Leningrad as a part of WS-North – em Front, which was guarding almost the entire Finnish border area until August 23) had a startling experience on his first combat mission of the day. Flying as as the number three with two other SBs, piloted by Starshiy Leytenant Rudenskiy and Leytenant Kuznetsov, men with experi­ence from the Spanish Civil War and the Winter War, Gapeyonok suddenly found himself alone: “An antiair­craft shell directly hit the bomb hatch of the leading SB, seriously wounding Starshiy Leytenant Rudenskiy, who barely managed to reach friendly territory. He was hospital­ized and never returned to the regiment again. Kuznetsov’s aircraft also was seriously damaged and one of the engines was put out of order. Nevertheless, the pilot managed to make an emergency landing in friendly territory.”

Having lost orientation over enemy territory, Mladshiy Leytenant Gapeyonok finally returned to base on the last drops of fuel. During the landing approach, both engines of his SB stopped:

“1 received a stormy welcoming. The fire engine came rushing, it was overtaken by the ambulance car, and people came running to meet me, including the CO, Polkovnik Yefimov. 1 climbed out of the cockpit, soaking as after a Russian sauna, anxious because I had lost two of my commanders. I reported to the CO that the Mladshiy Leytenant had returned. I couldn’t think of anything clever to say.”

”In seven days of raids, the Russians partially suc­ceeded in their objective,” wrote the British historian Jerry Scutts.7 But this is a reverse account to that of Paul Carell, above, here based entirely on Soviet sources. It demon­strates the distorted picture if the version of only one of the belligerent sides is given. This is particularly the case with the Eastern Front. In reality, the Soviets did not succeed in destroying a single Luftwaffe airplane during these rather limited raids, while the Finns counted no more than two slightly damaged aircraft.

Following the costly air-base raids during these first days, the Soviet air units were compelled to turn to the defensive. Soviet bombers and ground-attack planes were

mostly assigned to nuisance raids during the remainder of the year, nonetheless achieving some spectacular successes.

The drive by General Eduard Dietl’s 2nd and 3rd Mountain divisions against Murmansk, heavily supported by the Stukas of IV.(St)/LG 1, provoked the main attention of the Soviet fighters in this sector. These Soviet fighters rose on a large scale on June 27, when the Luftwaffe attacked the air base at Murmashi, southwest of Murmansk. Starshiy Leytenant Leonid Ivanov, who had been credited with his first aerial victory the previ­ous day, led his Eskadrilya of 147 IAP toward the Ju 87s. While several I-15bis fighters under Ivanov managed to break up the German dive-bomber formation, claiming three victories, the 1-16 Ishaks of 145 IAP fought with the escorting Bf 110s.

Meanwhile, some Bf 109s of l./JG 77 set out for a free-hunting mission in the same area. Approaching Murmashi, they saw a group of Soviet fighters landing at the airfield. This was Starshiy Leytenant Ivanov’s Eskadrilya, returning from the hard combat described above. The Messerschmitt pilots immediately fell upon the helpless I-15bis fighters. Three were claimed shot down, and in one of them, Leonid Ivanov w’as killed.

During another encounter that day, Oberfeldwebel Herbert Kern from l.(H)/32, piloting an Hs 126 recon­naissance plane over the front lines, was spotted by two I-16s. Minutes later, the Henschel lay a burning wreck on the ground, the victim of Starshiy Leytenant Boris Safonov and Mayor Georgiy Gubanov, the commander of 72 SAP/VVS-SF.

According to Soviet sources, ten German aircraft were shot down for the loss of six VVS fighters and two bomb­ers on the Arctic front on June 27, 1941. But the only operational losses recorded by Luftflotte 5 on this day were two Hs 126s.8

The limited air forces on both sides continued to do their utmost to influence the war on the ground. Gen­eral Dietl’s XIX Mountain Corps encountered severe problems and met with stiff Red Army resistance during its advance in a wilderness almost without any roads. It was mainly due to the pinpoint attacks by the German dive-bombers against the bunker system on the way to Murmansk that any advance at all was possible during the first days.

Meanwhile, the Ju 88s of II./KG 30 continued to defy the antiaircraft and fighter defenses of Murmansk.

On June 29, considerable damage was wrought upon the shipyards in the port, and the central power plant of the town was destroyed.

But the Soviets also made clever use of their air units, displaying the skills of many of the VVS airmen in this sector. On June 29 and 30, small formations of SB bomb­ers managed to inflict heavy damage on the wharf area and oil storage tanks in German-occupied Petsamo, where a steamer was sunk.

Another mission that had to be carried out by the Ju 88s of II./KG 30 was the severance of the Kirov rail­road, the main route for the transportation of war equip­ment to and from Murmansk. This route was breached more than a hundred times in 1941, but with repair materials stockpiled by the tracks at various points, the Soviets were always able to facilitate quick repairs. While carrying out these sorties, the German bomber crews were taught a healthy respect toward the intercepting enemy fighter pilots. Oberfeldwebel Peter Stahl, a pilot in 6./ KG 30 during this time, recalls: “The Ratas followed us like a bee swarm. They fired against us even if the dis­tance w’as hopeless. Those poor guys that lagged behind stood no chance of escaping unscathed.”9

On July 3, 1941, Starshiy Leytenant Vasiliy Volovikov of 72 SAP/SF shot down a Ju 88 flown by the Gruppenkommandeur of II./KG 30, Hauptmann Eberhard Roeger, who was killed. According to Hauptmann Roeger’s successor, Major Horst von Riesen, II./KG 30, starting with a normal complement of forty aircraft, lost twenty Ju 88s from June to December 1941,10 Based on official Luftwaffe loss statistics, the Finnish his­torian Hannu Valtonen gives the figure as seven Ju 88s of I1./KG 30 shot down (destroyed or severely dam­aged) between June and December 1941," but the Ger­man fighter escort paid the Soviets back in kind.

A taran reported on July 4 is rather dubious. : According to the Soviet version, Mladshiy Leytenant Sergey Tkachev of 145 IAP sacrified his life by smashing his 1-16 into the leading bomber in a Ju 88 formation heading for a Soviet air base on the Kola Peninsula.12 A comparison with German records reveals that Tkachev probably was shot down by a Bf 110 flown by Hauptmann Gerhard Schaschke of Stab/ZG 76, who was credited w’ith twelve kills (numbers two through thirteen) dur­ing this period. Historian Werner Girbig describes the particular method behind Schaschke’s successes: “He de­veloped a personal fighting tactic. Covered by a Bf 109,

he circled above the Russian air bases and struck down on the scrambling fighter flights.”15

A typical “Schaschke mission” was carried out on July 13. Three Bf 109s brazenly flew low over 145 lAP’s base at Shonguy. This was the bait. As a Zveno of three 4th Eskadrilya I-16s, commanded by Ley tenant Ishakov, scrambled after the three 109s, Hauptmann Schaschke’s undetected Bf 110 appeared at treetop level behind the Soviet fighters. Flying at a slow speed, Schaschke had plenty of time to place a burst from his 20mm cannon and 7.92mm machine guns into the belly of the nearest Ishak. As this plane burst into flames, Schaschke gave full throttle, passed beneath Ishakov’s second wingman, and allowed his rear gunner to shoot this Ishak down. Still unaware of what was taking place behind him, Leytenant Ishakov continued to climb straight ahead. Men on the ground saw Ishakov start to turn, but it was too late; the 1-16 caught a full burst from the Zerstorer’s nose cannon. Ishakov bailed out, but he was too low, and his parachute failed to open in time. Schaschke’s twin – engine Messerschmitt executed an outrageous victory roll and turned west, mission accomplished.

Hauptmann Schaschke soon became well known and earned a special hatred among his adversaries. They even
gave him a nickname, “Ryzhyy” (“Red-Hair,” or more correctly, “Carrots”).1”

An important advantage held by the German fight­ers in this area was the assembling of a Freya early – warning radar station. This was quite exceptional, since the main part of the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front operated almost entirely without radar assistance during most of the war. Operating on a 2.4-meter wavelength, the Freya equipment had a range of eighty to a hundred miles. The outcome is clearly mirrored by the fearsome losses suffered on the Soviet side. Of fifty-three Polikarpov biplanes on hand with 147 IAP on June 22, thirty-three had been lost three weeks later.1’

The Zerstorer ace Hauptmann Gerhard Schaschke w’as closely followed by the Bf 109 pilots Oberfeldwebel Hugo Dahmer and Oberleutnant Horst Carganico, both of l./JG 77, who claimed eleven and seven kills, respec­tively, during the first three weeks of the war.

Oberfeldwebel Dahmer developed a fighter tactic, the “wild boar hunting tactic,” w’hich was quite similar to that of Schaschke’s. Flying under guidance of radar at high altitude, he managed to bounce Soviet air formations from above time after time, picking off one plane after another. Having scored his twenty-fifth kill,
on August 1, he became the first pilot of Luftflotte 5 to be awarded the Knight’s Cross.

Dahmer’s Staffelkapitan, Oberleutnant Horst Carganico, a hard-core Nazi, was described by one of his young pilots as unsympathetic and ambitious: “Stubborn, never admits his own mistakes, and in this way as a commander he often becomes unjust.”16

The Messerschmitts never managed to put an end to the Soviet fighter-bombers that continously harassed the XIX Mountain Corps. As the German XXXVI Army Corps got involved in a difficult battle at Salla, about two hundred miles south of General Dietl’s Mountain Corps, most of IV.(St)/LG 1 had to be rushed to this area. Deprived of its close support from the air and with inadequate supplies due to bad communications and Soviet air attacks,1′ the offensive against Murmansk bogged down to a snail’s pace.

The diversion of the attack force against two objec­tives—seizure of Murmansk by General Dietl, and the severing of the Kirov railway by the XXXVT Army Corps—proved to be fatal. The Battle of Salla lasted more than a week. Finally the German dive-bombers managed to break up the Soviet defense lines. Later in July, the dive-bomber unit was deployed a hundred miles to the southeast of Salla, where it successfully supported the combined German-Finnish drive, resulting in the cap­ture of Kestenga. These missions took a terrible toll of lV.(St)/LG 1. Before the end of the year, twenty-two of its originally thirty-six Ju 87s had been shot down. The unit commander, Hauptmann Arnulf “Blasmich” Blasig, was awarded the Knight’s Cross on September 4 after personally executing 130 dive-bombing missions. But iso­lated triumphs did not alter the situation. The rising losses inevitably weakened the striking capacity of the

Hauptmann Arnulf Blasig receives congratulations upon his return from 1 his hundredth dive-bombing mission of the Barbarossa campaign—an | attack against Rovaniemi Airdrome in northern Finland in late summer of j 1941. “Blasmich" Blasig was one of the Luftwaffe’s Stuka pioneers, with j dive-bomber experience dating from 1936. Following action over Poland, I France, and the English Channel, Blasig was appointed commander of IV.(St)/LG 1 in the Far North on July 1,1941. He was posted to a star1 j position in 1942 and survived the war. (Photos: Taghon.)

Stukagruppe. The German offensive against the Kirov ] railway never succeeded in achieving any major break­through. The Soviets managed to halt the invaders at ] Alakurtti, forty miles from the Kirov railroad. With this, j three years of positional warfare commenced.

A few months later, the Kirov railway would be the main supply line on which British and American mili – і tary goods unloaded in Murmansk reached the Red Army. ]

ven if Winston Churchill always had been a stub­born anti-Communist, organizing the British inter­vention in the Russian Civil War two decades previously, his instinct of national self-preservation convinced the British prime minister to come to the Soviet Union’s support shortly after the German invasion. U. S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt would follow in due course.

On July 25,1941, the London government earmarked 200 Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk single-engine fighters to be delivered to the Soviet Union. Before the shipping could commence, Churchill decided to intervene actively in the war in the Far North.

At the end of July, the Royal Navy aircraft carriers Victorious and Furious were dispatched to the northern waters. The aim was to launch an air attack against the

German main supply line to General Eduard Dietl’s mountain troops, as well as the seaborne transports off the coast. The attack would be mounted in cooperation with a simultaneous Soviet counterattack at Ozerko Bay.

On July 30 thirty Fairey Albacore torpedo planes of the Royal Navy’s 827 and 828 squadrons and nine Fairey Fulmar fighters of 817 Squadron took off from the car­riers to undertake an antishipping strike against Kirkenes. The British ran into a fully alerted Luftwaffenkommando Kirkenes. Threatened with the envelopment of the entire XIX Mountain Corps by a Soviet force that had landed in Dietl’s rear, Generaloberst Hans-Jurgen Stumpff had dispatched all available aircraft of Luftflotte 5 to the area.

The entire Soviet-British undertaking ended in disaster. The British airmen were intercepted by Bf 109s and Bf 110s of I./JG 77, which completely broke up the attack formations and claimed seventeen British planes shot down. British Fleet Air Arm statistics show a loss of twelve Albacores and four Fulmars. As a further result of the “Air Battle of Kirkenes,” nineteen British airmen ended up in German captivity. All of this was achieved against only two German losses in the air, one Bf 110 of l.(Z)/JG 77 and a Ju 87 from 12.(St)/LG 1.

Four days later, the Soviet troops were forced to aban­don their positions at Ozerko Bay. The entire force was evacuated.

Another fighter sweep over 145 IAP’s base at Shonguy on August 4 finally settled the fate for Hauptmann Gerhard Schaschke. Led by Kapitan Aleksandr Zaytsev, four of the new LaGG-3s with which 145 LAP had been equipped scrambled against incoming enemy aircraft. The blood in the veins of the Soviet pi­lots froze as they recognized the leading enemy plane as “Ryzhyy’s” Bf 110. Escorted by four Bf 109s and three Bf 110s, Hauptmann Schaschke attacked the enemy “in a head-on pass and scored a number of machine-gun and cannon hits on the LaGG-3 piloted by [Leytenant] M. P. Starkov, who crashed almost immediately. Schaschke then got IStarshiy Leytenant N. V.] Piskaryov.”18 Piskaryov was killed, but Starkov survived with severe bums.

In the middle of the clash, three l-16s that were returning from a mission over Murmansk arrived to the support their comrades. Kapitan Zaytsev took advantage of the surprise attack by the I-16s and directed his LaGG against “Ryzhyy’s” Bf 110. The first burst passed to the left of the Zerstorer. Zaytsev corrected his aim and opened fire. With its starboard engine smoking, the Bf 110 banked sharply to the right and turned to the west while losing altitude. As Schaschke disengaged, the combat contin­ued for another thirty minutes, costing 145 LAP the loss of another LaGG-3 and an 1-16.

Shortly after the duel, the maintenance staff of 145 LAP found “Ryzhyy’s” Bf 110 near Shonguy. Schaschke’s body hung lifeless in the cockpit harness; he had been killed when he hit the dashboard during the crash land­ing. Unteroffizier Michael Widtmann, his gunner, was mortally injured during an exchange of fire with the Soviet maintenance personnel.

Gerhard Schaschke was buried close to the crash site. His flight pistol was handed over to Kapitan Zaytsev by Polkovnik Ivan Turkel’, the C. O. of VVS-Fourteenth

Army.1* One of the side rudders of Schaschke’s Bf 110, displaying nineteen victory marks, was put on display in Murmansk.

Attempting to break the stiff resistance in front of Murmansk, the Germans launched a raid with three destroyers into Kola Bay on August 10. The Soviets dis­patched their bombers against the intrusion and man­aged to hit and damage the destroyer Richard Beitzen. With the aim of holding the VVS down, Luftflotte 5 organized two strong raids against the air base at Vayenga. The pilots of 72 SAP/SF took off and fought vigorously against both raids.

The first attack came at 0345 hours on Saturday, August 9. The attack force was composed of twelve Ju 88s, five Ju 87s, and eight Bf 110s. One DB-3 bomber was destroyed on the ground and another four were damaged. Five I-16s engaged the Junkers, and Kapitan Timofey Razdobudko and Mladshiy Leytenants Vasiliy Doroshin and Konstantin Babiy each claimed one. In return, an 1-153 was shot down and one of the new MiG-3s was damaged.

Three hours later, the second raid, composed of twenty-five medium bombers escorted by nine Bf 109s and three Bf 110s organized in three waves, went in against the air base and shipping in Kola Bay, where the icebreaker Lenin sustained bomb hits. Countering the intercepting 72 SAP, Leutnant Horst Wolter of 14./JG 77 shot down Starshiy Leytenant Viktor Alagurov’s 1- 16. A few seconds later, Mladshiy Leytenant Vladimir Pokrovskiy managed to blast Wolter’s Bf 109 out of the sky, killing the pilot. Downing a Ju 88 from 3./KG 30, gave Kapitan Boris Safonov his eighth personal kill.

According to German loss statistics, four Ju 88s, one Ju 87, and one Bf 109 were shot down in the Arctic combat zone this day, while another Bf 109 was severely damaged. (The pilot later died of his wounds.) Accord­ing to Soviet sources, only two Soviet fighters were shot down.

Without any doubt, Boris Safonov and his 5 Eskadrilya/72 SAP saved the situation in the air for the Soviets during the first difficult stage of the war. Starshiy Leytenant Sergey Kurzenkov dedicated a chapter to this formidable fighter in his war memoirs: “The first months of the year were a very hard time for the fliers of the Northern Fleet. The enemy was numerically superior. Without any regard to losses, [the Germansl attempted
to break through to Murmansk. Safonov and his com­rades flew five, six, and even ten sorties daily. They hardly got any sleep. Using their parachutes as pillows, they slept during short intervals, literally under the wings of their planes, while the ground crews were busy refueling and [reloading the guns]. This took no more than fif­teen to twenty minutes. And then they sat in their cock­pits again and were in the air, attacking the enemy."20

Intercepting yet another enemy raid on August 23, Kapitan Safonov was credited with the destruction of a Ju 88, his ninth kill. This time there are no German records to support the claim, but Luftwaffe records support the daim for a Bf 109 by 72 SAP’s Leytenant Leonid Zhdanov on this day. The pilot of the Bf 109 was Leutnant Hans Mahlkuch (14./JG 77), a sixteen-victory’ ace.

On the last day of August, 14./JG 77 managed to pay back by shooting down five VVS fighters—four 1-16s and one 1-153. On September 7, one of the most daring Soviet fighter pilots in this area, Leytenant Ivan Belov from 147 1AP, was killed in aerial combat. Having par­ticipated in the Winter War with Finland, Belov was
among the first to be appointed a Hero of the Soviet Union in World War II; the Golden Star was awarded to him on February’ 5, 1940.

At this point the Soviets started receiving badly needed reinforcements from the West. With the first Soviet-bound shipping convoy arriving off Murmansk late in August, thirty-nine Hawker Hurricane ІЇВ fight­ers arrived with pilots from the RAF 81 and 134 squad­rons. The Hurricane was hardly the best fighter at that time, having been outclassed by the Bf 109 during the Battle of Britain. An evaluation of New Zealand pilots flying an 1-16 replica in the 1990s in fact has come up with a rather astonishing revelation: “How do [the 1-16s] compare with other World War II fighters? Well, 1 believe, very favourably with some of the other aeroplanes. I had just flown a Hurricane for the first time, a week before the Rata, and sorry to Hurricane afficionados, but I was really surprised and disappointed in the aeroplane’s handling and performance. … I felt that you would be better off fighting in a Rata.”21

Contrary to the picture given in several British

accounts, the Soviet pilots were far from impressed with the Hurricane fighters. Many of them simply loathed this aircraft, feeling that it gave them no chance what­soever against the Bf 109s. But it brought a new advan­tage to the Soviet pilots who were to take over these planes—air-to-air radio equipment. Ironically, the Hurri­cane took part on both sides, because the Finns had pur­chased tw elve from the United Kingdom early in 1940, and the Romanians also had a contingent in service on the Eastern Front.

On September 12, 1941, five RAF pilots of 81 Squad­ron flew a combat mission over the front lines. They bounced five Bf 109s of I./JG 77, which were escorting an Hs 126 of l.(H)/32. In the ensuing action, the Messerschmitt pilot, Leutnant Eckhard von der Liihe, and the Hurricane pilot, Sergeant N. Smith, were both shot down and killed. Nevertheless, Squadron Leader Tony Rook and Sergeants P. Sims and A. Anson claimed to have shot dow-n three Bf 109s and damaged the Hs 126.

The RAF pilots were greatly impressed by the skills of Kapitan Boris Safonov. Starshiy Leytenant Sergey Kurzenkov tells of how on one occasion the British, hav­ing witnessed Safonov’s flying abilities, took the young Soviet pilot on their shoulders after he had landed and shouted with enthusiasm: “All right, Safon! Very good, Safon!”22 On September 15, 1941, right before the eyes of RAF pilots, Safonov had his most successful day. A Schwarm of Bf 110s from l.(Z)/JG 77 was out on an escort mission for Hauptmann Blasig’s Stukas, which w’ere supporting Dietl’s XIX Mountain Corps. Leutnant Heinz – Horst Hoffmann, the pilot in one of the Bf 110s, spotted a lone 1-16 below. Hoffmann, a veteran pilot, put the nose of his tw in-engine fighter down to make an attack.

He didn’t realize the trap until it was too late. A dark green 1-16 with the bold inscription Smert fashizmu! (Death to Fascism!) painted in two-feet-high w’hite let­ters on the side of the fuselage arrowed down from above. It was Boris Safonov’s White 51. Leutnant Hoffmann’s Bf 110 was hit in an engine; the plane made a roll, and fell steeply from a low altitude, exploding on impact three miles west of Zapadnaya Litsa.

Having scored his twelfth victory, Safonov now turned against the Ju 87s. One of them went down in flames, Safonov’s thirteenth victim. Shortly afterward, the Soviet ace caught a third German plane, an Hs 126, and was reported to have shot this down as welL23 In this fight with the l-16s of 72 SAP/VVS-SF, the

Luftwaffe recorded the loss of one Bf 110 and three Ju 87s but no Hs 126. The next day, Boris Safonov re­ceived the highest Soviet award, the Golden Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.

During the first three months of the war, Safonov’s Eskadrilya was credited with forty-nine victories, fifteen of them by Boris Safonov alone. The squadron suffered: no losses. Approximately seventy Luftflotte 5 aircraft were registered as shot down during the same period. In all, 72 SAP/SF was credited with a total of 140 enemy air­craft shot down during 1941.24 While the crack l./JG 77 amassed an impressive victory record, claiming 100; victories during the first three months of the war with the USSR, it had ten of its Bf 109s (almost its total complement outfit at the outbreak of hostilities) shot down and three pilots killed between June and Septem­ber 1941.

Also in action on September 15 was Kapitan Leonid Galchenko’s Eskadrilya of 145 IAP, which claimed four victories. Galchenko’s unit was the most successful squad – j ron of WS-Fourteenth Army. By October 1941 it was credited with the destruction of sixteen enemy aircraft | in the air, including seven by the squadron commander and five by Leytenant Viktor Mironov, both of whom I were eventually made Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Whether it was in an effort to show off against the: Soviets or in good faith is unclear, but it appears that the RAF pilots made unusually high overclaims during their two-month stay in the Murmansk area. Unteroffizier Josef Stiglmair of l./JG 77 actually fell victim to Squad-; ron Leader Rook on September 17, but none of the three Bf 109s reported shot down by the British Hurricane pilots on September 26 can be found in the German loss lists.

Flying I-16s, the Soviet pilots of 72 SAP/VVS-SF in fact achieved far better results than the British Hurri­cane pilots. The most successful mission by 72 SAP/ VVS-SF, and one of the most effective missions by a single aviation unit during the entire war, was carried out on September 28. Between 1705 and 1830 hours, all available aircraft of that unit, twenty-six fighters and nine bombers, were dispatched against the bridge spanning the Petsamojoki River near Petsamo and other targets nearby.25 Close hits by two 250-kilogram bombs near the vital river crossing resulted in a landslide, and three mil­lion cubic meters of earth destroyed the ninety-foot span. This created a flood that drowned complete birch forests

і and swept away all crossings along the entire river. The whole invasion force heading for Murmansk on the east – j Ї em side of the river was isolated for ten days. This single 1f air raid, in fact, dealt a decisive death blow against Ger­man hopes for capturing the vital port of Murmansk. Paul Carell wrote: “Military history has never seen an – I other case like this, that so spectacularly and dramati­st cally cut off the supply lines of an entire front with two Щ divisions.”26

During one of the last major air combats on the Arc­s’ tic Front in 1941, on October 6, the Soviets claimed I eight of twenty-five Ju 88s heading for Murmansk. К According to the loss files of I./KG 30, three Ju 88s were in fact downed, two to enemy fighters and one to f. AAA. Both 72 SAP/VVS-SF and the British pilots of Г 134 RAF Squadron claimed successes during this combat.

During five weeks of “active training” of the 72 SAP/ к WS-SF airmen, the RAF pilots took part in several com – I bats. 81 Squadron claimed a total of twelve confirmed № victories, fourteen probable victories, and seven enemy [: aircraft damaged for the loss of only two Hurricanes,

t Another four victories went to 134 Squadron.

Heavy snowfall and the successively shortened days } prevented much in the way of air operations during the f remainder of the year. The last major air operations in ; this combat zone were flown by lV.(St)/LG 1 on the I Kandalaksha front, in the southwestern part of the Kola I Peninsula, in October. Billets, troop positions, supply I columns, shelters, and rail facilities were subjected to successful dive-bombing raids. But the Red Army held |v, out and prevented the Germans from reaching the |; Murman railway. On October 10, Hitler changed the I; mission for the German Army in the Far North to a J strictly defensive stance.

On October 12 a British-American convoy arrived at Arkhangelsk with 195 Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk fight­ers. From then on, three Murmansk-bound convoys—with the code name “PQ”—would arrive every month. Due to the demands at the front and the unfavorable weather conditions during the Arctic winter, the Luftwaffe was unable to counteract these important shipments until

1942.

Meanwhile, the air war in this area took on a charac­ter similar to the air battles over the Western Front in

World War 1—small dogfights over a literally frozen front line. It is probable that two emerging top aces clashed during one of the few air combats on the Arctic Front in October. On October 24, 1941, at the onset of the long polar night, a young Feldwebel of the Zerstorerstaffel l.(Z)/JG 77 scored his first aerial victory. During a free – hunt mission over the small frozen lakes west of the Litsa River on the Murmansk front, several Bf 110s led by Leutnant Felix-Maria Brandis spotted a formation of Polikarpov fighters. Feldwebel Theodor Weissenberger got on an 147 1AP 1-153 with his twin-engine Messerschmitt, and a burst from the four machine guns and two cannon in the nose of his 110 literally tore the small and fragile biplane apart.27

The next day, two MiG-3s of 72 SAP/SF, piloted by Leytenant Zakhar Sorokin and Leytenant Dmitriy Sokolov, clashed with four Bf 110s in the vicinity of

Twenty-four-year-old Leytenant Zakhar Sorokin was transferred to 72 SAP/ WS-SF in July 1941 and quickly distinguished himself through his aggressiveness in the air. Sorokin spent six days in the arctic cold after being shot down in October 1941, and both of his frostbitten legs had to be amputated. This tragedy did nothing to break Sorokin’s determination, and one year later he returned to front-line service with two artificial legs. Zakhar Sorokin achieved a total of thirteen victories, survived the war, and retired from the service in 1955 with the rank of Kapitan. He passed away in Moscow on March 19,1978. (Photo: Seidl.)

Theodor Weissenberger climbs out of his Bf 110 following a successful sortie on the Arctic Front. Weissenberger was posted to the Zerstorerstafel of JG 77 in September 1941, where he proved to be a most talented fighter pilot; he achieved his first 23 victories piloting a Bf 110 and survived the war with a total of 208 victories—only to be killed in a car race on the Niirburgring on June 10,1950. (Photo: Schmidt via Sundin.)

Severomorsk. Severely hit by the 20mm cannon of a Bf 110, Zakhar Sorokin made an emergency landing on the frozen surface of a lake. The victorious German pilot was either the commander of l.(Z)/JG 77, Oberleutnant Felix-Maria Brandis (already a fourteen-victory ace), or Theodor Weissenberger. Both claimed a Hurricane shot down, but the Staffel did not accept Feldwebel Weissenberger’s claim.28 According to a widespread ver­sion, Sorokin made a belly landing close to a Bf 110, which he had hit w’ith such good effect that this plane also bellied. Following this, Sorokin was reported to have clashed with the two German crewmen on the ground, killing both while sustaining wounds himself. There are no German records of any operational losses of Bf 110s of Luftflotte 5 during the entire period from October through December 1941, nor do Soviet documents men­tion any claims made by Leytenant Sorokin of a kill this day.29 In any case, Sorokin spent six days in the cold wilderness before he was found by a Soviet rescue team.30 By that time he was suffering from gangrene, and both of his legs were amputated. In spite of this, he went on fighting w’ith two artificial legs and subsequently scored thirteen kills.31

Theodor Weissenberger, who may have been Leytenant Sorokin’s opponent in the air, was remarkable in a different way. This young NCO had one of the most nonmilitary attitudes in the fighter unit to which he belonged. He would probably have become a gardener, like his father, and taken up flying only as a hobby, had the war not intervened. He was a constant nuisance to his superiors, frequently getting into trouble due to his defective military discipline. But in the air he had no vices. In the coming years, Theodor Weissenberger would develop into perhaps the most skillful German fighter ace on this front. Between September 1941 and May 1944 he flew 350 combat sorties on the Arctic Front and scored 175 victories. In the summer of 1944 he flew a further twenty-six sorties over Normandy, in France, lead­ing to twenty-five victories. During the last weeks of the war, Weissenberger achieved his last eight kills flying an Me 262 jet.

A severe lapse occurred on November 8, 1941. Knight’s Cross holder Oberst Carl Schumacher, a forty – five-year-old fighter pilot, had been assigned to take com­mand of the German fighter force in Norway. Piloting a Bf 109 with an escort of two other German fighters close to the front, Oberst Schumacher sighted what he assumed was an enemy SB bomber. With a burst from his guns, the fighter leader sent the twin-engine aircraft down to a crash landing. But the joy over his third victory would soon change to fear: the “SB” was in fact a Finnish De Havilland Dragon ambulance plane. Schumacher was quickly removed from his command position.

Another dramatic air combat took place on Novem­ber 29, w’hen the Bf 109-Rotte composed of Oberfeldwebel Gerhard Hornig and Unteroffizier Erich Kersten, of 13./JG 77, attempted to bounce a group of 1-153s that had been reported strafing ground troops in the Kandalaksha sector. A prolonged dogfight ensued. After ten minutes Kersten managed to hit an 1-153 decisively, but suddenly another Chayka came head-on against him.

Having run out of ammunition, Leytenant Pavel Kaykov decided to charge one of the Messerschmitts nose – to-nose. Unteroffizier Kersten’s tracer bullets whistled past Kaykov’s Chayka. The Soviet Leytenant was unable to shoot back, but the 1-153 held its course, forcing Kersten’s Bf 109 to break off in a steep dive. Kay kov immediately flung his agile little fighter after his enemy. The German Unteroffizier suddenly found himself hunted by a most determined adversary. Pavel Kaykov overtook Kersten as the latter leveled out at treetop level, and he splin­tered the tail fin of the 109 with the propeller of his biplane. No doubt, Kersten’s Bf 109 was also hit by

ground-fire immediately afterward. Oberfeldwebd Hornig saw his wingman’s Bf 109 go down almost vertically and hit the ground. Meanwhile, Ixytcnant Kaykov tried to bail out of his damaged 1-153, bur he failed and was killed in the violent crash. He was buried in Murmansk. Six months later, Pavel Kaykov was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union. Having scored his first – and final-victory, Erich Kersten was listed by the Germans as missing.

On December 17, seven Bf 109s met five Soviet Hurricanes in an engagement that ended with Lcutnant Alfred Jakobi being shot down by Boris Safonov—the latter’s fifteenth personal victory. Jakobi was lucky to survive.

To mark the end of 1941, Safonov brought down a K(i 26 He 111 on December 31.

Even if the air war over the Arctic front never involved more than limited forces on both sides, the last six months of 1941 had seen a heavy bloodletting among all the air units taking part. According to historian Rune Rail tip, the VVS of the Northern Fleet and the Four­teenth Army lost 221 aircraft (107 in air combat) by November, 1941.“ Meanwhile, 89 planes of Lu ft (lotto 5 were registered as destroyed or severely damaged due to enemy action in the air (at least 44 by Soviet fighters, 11 by AAA. and 23 to unspecified causes). I timing to the claims made by the lighter pilots on both sides, German pilots w ere credited with 215" aerial victories, while VVS – SF pilots were credited with 206.14 VVS-Karelian Front, composed of the armies responsible for the Soviet l inn ish front, after the division of the Northern Front into the Leningrad and Karelian fronts in August 1941, filed 125 victory claims (105 against German aircraft, 14
against the Finns, and 6 “unidentified”) against 153 com­bat losses in the air during 1941.35

Without exaggeration, it can be said that it was the Soviet Air Force that saved Murmansk. This would prove to be of immense importance. Even if the forces under command of Luftflotte 5 had produced impressive results, it was clear that the Luftwaffe units deployed to this area were too weak to accomplish the tasks assigned. Probably only two or three more Stukagruppen would have been sufficient to open the road to Murmansk to the German Army. The general lack of a planned long-term strategy against the Soviet Union, deriving from the false assumption that the USSR would collapse after a few weeks of war, would prove fatal to the German cause.

From October 1, 1941, until the end of the war, the Western Allies delivered about five thousand combat air­craft, along with thousands of trucks, tanks, and armored vehicles, and large amounts of war equipment and pro­visions to the USSR with the Barents Sea convoys.

Another interesting aspect of the air war in the Arctic area during 1941 is that the British airmen, particularly those carrying out the carrier-launched raid against Kirkcnes at the end of July, fared worse than many of their Soviet colleagues against the fighters of 1./JG 77. This revelation challenges the perspective of the air war on the Eastern Front appearing in most Western accounts.

As the British pilots left for home, their Hurricanes were handed over to Boris Safonov’s unit. In October 1941 the WS-SF formed a new crack aviation regiment, 78 1AP, around Safonov’s Eskadrilya. Apart from the Hurricanes, the pilots of Safonov’s 78 1AP were able to exchange some of their I-16s for the much faster MiG-3 and U. S.-built P-40 fighters. At the same time, the Komsomol raised funds and purchased equipment to completely outfit an Eskadrilya of MiG-3s for 147 1АР/ VVS-Fourteenth Army. W’ith an improved organization, the Soviet fighter pilots were able to inflict growing losses on the small Luftwaffe forces on the Arctic front. W’erner Girbig notes that “the Germans soon were confronted with an intensified antiaircraft and fighter defense.”3*

t the beginning of September 1941, the spearheads of the German Army Group North had reached the outer defense perimeter of Leningrad. These forti­fications became constant targets for Stukas and bomb­ers conducting low-level attacks. To the east of Leningrad, at Schlusselburg, on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, the German Sixteenth Army managed to cut off Leningrad’s last land connection with the rest of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the Bf 110 Zerstorer of ZG 26 contin­ued their air-base attacks to suppress the reviving Soviet air activity. Early on September 5, the detachment from 13IAP/KBF stationed at Nizino, southeast of Leningrad, had just received orders to dispatch an attack against enemy troops at the Volosovo railway station, when the Zerstorem of ZG 26 struck the airfield once again. Petr

Brinko, newly promoted to Kapitan, and his wingman managed to take off before the bombs started to fall. The two 1-16s went after what appeared to be the German leader, but they were immediately attacked by four other Bf 110s. Turning against them, Brinko’s wingman man­aged to shoot down one of the Bf 110s.

At this point more Soviet fighters got airborne. Kapitan Brinko fired at several Bf 110s but failed to score any decisive hits. Having finally run out of ammu­nition, he decided to taran one of the enemy aircraft. With a sharp turn, he placed himself on the tail of a Bf 110, pushed the throttle forward, and the propeller of the 1-16 chewed into the twin tail of the Zerstorer. In the next moment, the Bf 110 fell away. Brinko’s own fighter was still flying, but the engine started to shake rather disquietingly, so he switched it off and made a relatively

safe landing at Nizino. This was Brinko’s twelfth victory. ZG 26 registered three Bf 110s shot down this day.1

The next day, September 6, II./JG 52 lost one of its most successful fighter aces, the Staffelkapitan of 5./JG 52, Oberleutnant August Wilhelm Schumann, credited with a total of thirty victories. It is possible that Schumann was shot down by the MiG-3 pilot Mladshiy Leytenant Afanasiy Okhvat of 159 1AP, who followed a Bf 109 that he had shot down too low in a dive from which he could not recover. Okhvat’s MiG-3 crashed and the pilot was killed.

On the same day, Oberleutnant Johannes Steinhoff, commanding 4./JG 52, brought down two Soviet air­craft. Steinhoff had been awarded the Gruppe’s first Knight’s Cross a week earlier, when his victory score stood at thirty-five.

On September 8, Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann of IV./JG 51 scored his fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth victo­ries against two SBs.2 These were Hoffmann’s last victories on the Leningrad front, for his unit was returned to the central combat zone.

On the night of September 8-9, Luftflotte 1 launched its first major raid against Leningrad in accordance with Hitler’s instruction to “level Leningrad to the ground.” At 1855 hours, twenty-seven Ju 88s started dropping 6,327 incendiary bombs, which caused 183 individual fires, of which the largest were in the Badayevo warehouses, in which Leningrad’s entire sugar reserve of 2,500 tons was set ablaze.

A second raid followed, at 2235 hours.

These raids were the first of several hun­dred to be mounted against Leningrad.

Even if the bomber forces available were considerably smaller than those engaged against London the previous year, the Germans made a great effort to destroy Lenin’s city from the air. The German historian Karl Gundelach, who flew an He 111 in KG 4 during the war, wrote:

“Frequently, the crews are launched twice a night against Leningrad.”3

Most Luftwaffe raids against Leningrad were limited to the hours of darkness. This was mainly the combined result of the heavy antiaircraft concen­
tration in the area and new reinforcements brought in to the VVS during September, including seven fighter avia­tion regiments to bolster 7 IAK.

The most successful Soviet fighter unit over Leningrad during this stage of the war was 13 ІАР/ KBF, which still flew 1-16s. Following the death of Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko in July, 13 LAP’s Kapitan Petr Brinko had emerged as the top ace on the Soviet side.

The air combat over and in the vicinity of Leningrad was some of the harshest during the war on the Eastern Front in 1941, claiming the lives of several of the most skillful airmen on both sides. On September 9 the Staffelkapitan of 5./JG 54, Oberleutnant Hubert Miitherich, was shot down and killed near Leningrad. With forty-three victories to his credit, including thirty – three Soviet aircraft, “Hubs” Miitherich was the most successful Staffelkapitan of JG 54 at that time. On the Soviet side, Starshiy Leytenant Mikhail Bagryantsev, one of the most promising young pilots in 5 ІАР/KBF, was killed in combat when his LaGG-3 was bounced from above by a Bf 109 Rotte. During another encounter that day, 191 LAP’s Mladshiy Leytenant Yegor Novikov was reported to have driven off two German fighters that attempted to machine-gun a Soviet fighter pilot hanging in his parachute harness.

On September 9 and 10, the units of Luftflotte 1 carried out more than eight hundred sorties, mainly against the Leningrad defense lines. On the tenth, four 1-16 pilots from 191 1AP engaged a large formation of Ju 87s and Bf 109s, claiming six victories without loss. Counted among the downed Stuka airmen was Gefreiter Erich Peter, a newcomer in 3./StG 2 Immel – mann, who had achieved considerable success during his first month of first-line service. Peter survived but was seriously injured. On the Soviet side, another air com­bat on September 10 cost the life of one of the most skillful VVS aces in this area, Starshiy Leytenant Aleksey Storozhakov of 154 1AP, who had been cred-

Starshiy Leytenant Aleksey Storozhakov, an ace in 154 IAP with eight personal and three shared victories, was among several Soviet airmen killed in combat on the Leningrad sector on September 10,1941. With the onset of the German offensive against Leningrad, the air war in this combat zone increased in intensity, resulting in a heavy bloodletting in the WS units. One single fighter Eskadrilya, the mainly LaGG-3-equipped 2./5 IAP-KBF, registered eleven fighters shot down and eight pilots killed, missing, or injured during the sixteen-day period from September 8 to September 23,1941. (Photo: Novikov.)

Stefan Litjens was one of the most experienced veteran pilots in ll./JG 53 Рік As in 1941. He was shot down on September 11,1941. He survived but lost his right eye, which did not deter him from returning to first-line service a year later. After gaining another fourteen victories in four months during his second combat tour, Litjens was shot down again, and sustained an injury to his left eye, which forced him to withdraw from first-line service. (Photo: Salomonson.)

The main attack by the German Army commenced on September 11 with ground troops advancing into the breaches created by Luftflotte 1 bombers undertaking 478 sorties. Soviet pilots were brought into constant action from dawn to dusk. The LaGG-3 pilots of 5 LAP/ KBF carried out ten to fourteen combat sorties each on September 10 and 11.

The combined efforts of both air forces on Septem­ber 11 resulted in costly air combat, with JG 54 claiming

seventeen Soviet aircraft shot down, against three losses.4 L1I./JG 27 alone recorded nine victories, including four by Oberfeldwebel Franz Blazytko. But these successes could not outweigh the loss of one of the most outstanding pilots of this Gruppe, Leutnant Hans Richter. Having achieved his twenty-second kill, Richter was attacked from behind by an 1-16. His comrades heard his cry over the radio:

“My engine is hit! I’ll try to force-land!”

The crippled Messerschmitt went down, caught some treetops, and immediately burst into flames. Hans Richter must have died instantly. Oberfeldwebel Stefan Litjens, an ace in II./JG 53 with twenty – four victories, was shot down and badly wounded by another 1-16 on the same day. His injuries cost this daring pilot his right eye. Five 1-16 pilots of 191 IAP/7 IAK claimed a major success during a combat with Ju 87s south of Leningrad, reporting nine Stukas shot down, including two each by Mladshiy Leytenants Yegor Novikov, Ivan Grachyov, and Vladimir Plavskiy, and one by Leytenant Nikolay Kuznetsov.3 Only one Ju 87 loss can be found in the Luftwaffe records.

To the south on this busy September 11, 7./JG 54 clashed with a formation of MiG-3s, possibly from Mayor Konstantin Gruzdyev’s crack 402 1AP, in the vicinity of Staraya Russa. Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann, who had been awarded with the Knight’s Cross for his twenty – nine victories one week earlier, claimed two Soviet planes, while a Soviet fighter pilot shot down Ostermann’s friend, Leutnant Peter von Malapert. It took von Malapert’s captors less than twenty-four hours to persuade the young Leutnant to join their side. Shortly afterward, aircraft from the DBA dropped hundreds of leaflets over JG 54’s base with a personal appeal from Leutnant von Malapert to surrender.6

During another encounter on September 11, Kapitan Petr Brinko, of 13 1AP/KBF, claimed an Hs 126 recon­naissance airplane, his fourteenth. The next day, Brinko bagged a Ju 88. Two days later, Brinko set out against a German observation balloon, from which artillery was being directed. Brinko hit the balloon’s basket with a salvo of RS rocket projectiles, but his Ishak suddenly
received a direct antiaircraft hit and crashed into a power line, killing the pilot. Petr Brinko was the highest-scoring Soviet ace at the time of his death.

At this point, multiple demands along the entire front line placed a heavy strain on all Luftwaffe units. Having breached the first Soviet defense line around Leningrad, the Ju 87s of StG 2 Immelmann were shifted to the Novgorod area, north of Lake Ilmen, where the North­western Front launched repeated diversionary attacks. On September 14, Hauptmann Emst-Siegfried Steen, the commander of IlL/StG 2, scored a direct hit on the large railway bridge over the Volkhov River at Novgorod, the main Soviet supply line in this sector.

The next day, the Stukas were rushed to the north again, because air reconnaissance had spotted three large supply ships bound for Leningrad on Lake Ladoga. Each vessel carried a thousand tons of wheat. StG 2 appeared before the grain had been unloaded and sank two of the ships.

On September 16, StG 2 was sent out over the Gulf of Finland, where heavy Soviet warships were bombard­ing the German troops outside Leningrad. As he led thirty Ju 87s, Hauptmann Steen spotted the battleship Marat off Leningrad. He immediately radioed an attack order

and commenced diving. The crew of the Marat was caught totally unaware. Before the antiaircraft guns could open fire, a 500-kilogram bomb struck the ship. The Marat steamed into the naval fortress island of Kronstadt to be repaired. Meantime, intercepting Soviet fighters claimed to have shot down four Ju 87s and one Bf 109 escort. StG 2 and JG 54 each registered one loss.

Responding to calls from the ground troops exposed to intensified Soviet air raids, especially the German spear­head and supply columns on the Leningrad-Luga high­way south of Krasnogvardeisk, Major Johanns Trautloft decided to shift his JG 54 from escort missions to fighter sweeps over the Leningrad combat zone on September 17. The evening entry’ in the combat diary of 7./JG 54 notes: “A really successful day.”7 One pilot of this Staffel, Feldwebel Karl Kempf, brought home five victories, his nineteenth through twenty-third. Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann and Unteroffizier Johann Halfmann claimed another two MiG-3s. That day, Soviet ace Mladsbiy Leytenant Yegor Novikov, of 191IAP/7 IAK, was killed in action over the Krasnoye Selo area. He possibly fell prey to Ostermann or Halfmann.

Friday, September 19, was one of the worst days experienced by the inhabitants of Leningrad. The Luftwaffe launched at least six raids against the city it­self, between 0814 and 2300 hours. Soviet fighters and antiaircraft artillery claimed seventeen German bombers shot down, whereas the Kampfgeschwader of Fliegerkorps I recorded two Ju 88s lost, StG 2 lost three Ju 87s, and ZG 26 lost a Bf 110.s On the ground, 442 people were killed or injured when a hospital was hit by two bombs. Two days later, another German bombing raid hit the destroyer Steregushchiy in Kronstadt.

Meanwhile, the declining number of serviceable Ger­man fighters and the increasing demands from the Stukas and Ju 88s for escorts to counter the stiffening Soviet fighter resistance left the VVS in control of the skies over the Leningrad battlefield.

On September 22 Major Trautloft visited the army front lines. Suddenly a soldier next to the JG 54 com­mander cried: “Achtung! Tiefflieger at ten o’clock! Take cover!” Trautloft and the artillery officers dived for the ground as two sections of 1-16 fighters came roaring in at treetop level, spraying the German trenches with ma­chine-gun bullets. Unhurt but covered with mud, the shocked German fighter commander spontanously exclaimed: “Where in hell are our fighters?”9 Just so!

The experience of weathering the plight of the German soldier on the Eastern Front had caused Trautloft him­self to express one of the most common questions in the German language on the Eastern Front during World War 11.

Not least due to the relentless VVS strafing attacks, the Red Army managed to force Hitler to abandon his plans to capture Leningrad. General Erich von Manstein, one of the ablest German Army commanders, who had led LYT Panzer Corps through the Baltic states, was posted to the south to assume command of the German Elev­enth Army for the assault on the Crimea. Panzergruppe 4 and Fliegerkorps VIII were transferred from the Leningrad front to the central combat zone, where they were intended to participate in the upcoming offensive against Moscow’.

Another major cause for the German setback was the bombardment from the warships of KBF based in Kronstadt. To neutralize this threat once and for all, StG 2 Immelmann remained in the northern combat zone until the end of September.

Loaded with 1,000-kilogram armor-piercing bombs, StG 2 took off for Kronstadt at 0845 on September 23. Intense antiaircraft fire, “virtually blackening the entire sky,” according to Oberleutnant Hans-Ulrich Rudcl of IlI./StG 2, met the dive-bombers and their escorts as they approached at 15,000 feet flight altitude. While attacking the cruiser Kirov, Hauptmann Steen’s Ju 87 received a direct hit and crashed into the water just beside the ship. Nevertheless, the remaining Stuka pilots defied all opposition and pressed home their attack. Oberleutnant Lothar Lau, the StG 2 technical officer, dove straight against the battleship Marat and managed to place his bomb directly on the deck, causing a huge fire. Another bomb caused the ammunition of the 30.5cm forward turrets to explode, with the result that the entire forecastle was blown off the great ship. Next, Oberleutnant Hans-Ulrich Rudel scored a direct hit, caus­ing an enormous explosion that put the 23,600-ton battle­ship out of action for several months. And Leutnant Egbert Jaekel scored a direct hit on the flotilla leader Minsk, causing it to sink. Apart from this, the destroyer Steregushchiy and submarine M-74 were sunk, while other bomb hits damaged the battleship Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya and the destroyers Silnyy and Grozyashchiy.

As they turned away from the antiaircraft zone after the raid, the German planes were intercepted by large

formations of Soviet fighters. In the ensuing dogfight, the Soviet pilots claimed ten enemy aircraft shot down, " but 13 OIAE/KBF lost two pilots killed and one wounded. Soviet antiaircraft batteries claimed another five German planes destroyed, but German loss statistics note that six Luftflotte I aircraft were shot down on September 23, 1941—two Ju 87s, two Ju 88s, one Bf 109, and one Bf 110. On the other hand, JG 54 reported seventeen victories this day.

The Battle of Leningrad had reached a decisive point, requiring the last resources of both sides. On September 24, Leytcnant Vasiliy (iolubev and Mladshiv Leytenant Dmitriy Tatarcnko, the only pilots remaining of the group of six from 1 З OIAE that had been stationed on Komendantskiy Airfield in Leningrad eight days earlier, each carried out eight sorties. Led by Starshiy Leytcnant Aleksandr Avdcyev. a formation ol fighter-bombers from 153 1AP fell upon an enemy motorized column on the eastern outskirts of Leningrad and shot up more than ten vehicles.

With the Germans making only slight progress out­side Leningrad, the main effort of the VVS was shifted to the area south of bike Ilmen, where the Northwest­ern Front was tied up in a desperate fight to defend the main supply route from Moscow. On September 24 at least forty-one Soviet aerial attacks were mounted against the 8th Panzer Division, forcing it: to retreat.

Countering these air at tacks, 11L/JG 27 suffered yet
another heavy loss on September 25: “Ratas and ground-attack aircraft were attacking,” wrote Hans Ring and Werner Girbig in the chronicle of JG 27. “The Gruppe is airborne to meet the enemy. As the Messerschmitts land following this combat, Oberfeldwebel | Franz 1 Blazytko is missing. Later, it was found out that this outstanding airman and victor in twenty-nine aerial combats had fallen into Russian captivity.”11 The Soviet fighter pilot Vasiliy Golubev describes what most likely was Franz Blazytko’s last fight. On September 25, Leytcnant Mikhail Klimenko led two 11-2 Shturmoviks (the only aircraft remaining of an entire ShAP) on a ground-attack mission in the Ivanovo area. Fighter protection w as pro­vided by the “last two” Ishaks, which w’ere piloted by Leytenant Vasiliy Golubev and Mladshiv Leytenant Dmitriy Tatarenko, of 13 OIAE/ KBF. The Shturmoviks flew – at treelop level, with the I – 16s positioned roughly a thousand feet above them as top cover. Suddenly four Bf 109s fell upon them.

The German fighters split into Rotten, one attacking the fighter cover and the other going after Klimenko’s Ilyushins. Mladshiy Leytenant: Tatarcnko was presented with an easy target as the latter Bf 109s came diving just beneath him. The first burst from his guns was a direct hit. The leading Bf 109 never pulled out of its final dive and hit the ground.

Having seen their leader shot down, the three remaining Messerschmitts left the Il-2s and turned against the I-16s. A sudden AAA barrage saved Tatarenko and Golubev. Meanwhile, the Shturmoviks were able to reach the target area and started attacking. This was enough to persuade t he German fighter pilots to disengage and leave the scene as fast as they could. The antiaircraft guns, however, were not altogether a blessing to the Soviets. Leytcnant Klimenko’s 11-2 received a near-miss and later belly-landed in friendly territory’.12

While the Soviets strengthened the defenses in the northern combat zone day by day, the return of Fliegerkorps VIII to Luftflotte 2 considerably weakened the striking capacity of the Luftwaffe in the northern combat zone. The last unit scheduled to leave the Leningrad area was StG 2, u’hich in the meantime con­tinued to appear daily over Kronstadt from September

25 to September 28. Hauptmann Ernst Kupfer, of I./StG 2, displayed an almost fanatical determination to destroy the Soviet naval vessels during these final raids. After Kupfer scored a hit on a cruiser on September 28, his Ju 87 was attacked by Soviet fighters. His airplane was badly shot up and he made a forced landing at the fighter airfield at Krasnogvardeisk. A few hours later,

Kupfer returned to Kronstadt in another Ju 87. This time, his aircraft was hit by AAA and he had to make a second forced landing. On his third mission against the same target that day, Kupfer’s Stuka received a direct hit in the engine. The dive-bomber crashed in a forest, and the pilot and radio operator were seri­ously injured. Two months later, Ernst Kupfer was awarded the Knight’s Cross, and following eight surgical operations, the stubborn Stuka pilot returned to front-line service and flew a total of six hundred dive-bomber missions before he was finally killed in a flying accident. Fol­lowing the shift of II./JG 53 from Luftflotte 1 to Luftflotte 2, the entire responsibility for fighter cover in the northern combat zone fell to Major Johannes Trautloft’s JG 54 Grunhcrz.

Thus the last daylight bombing raid against Leningrad was carried out on September 29. During a combat between I-153s and I1I./JG 54 over Leningrad on September 30, Major Trautloft lost one of his most able Gruppenkommandeure,

Hauptmann Arnold Lignitz, of I1I./JG 54, victor in twenty-five engagements. It is believed that an RS-82 rocket fired by an 1-153 hit Lignitz’s Bf 109. Lignitz bailed out and was taken pris­oner, but he did not survive his captivity; he became one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the German hun­ger blockade against Leningrad during the coming winter.

According to Hans-Ekkehard Bob, who flew as an Oberleutnant with JG 54 in 1941, combat morale remained “sky high” among the Griinhcrz pilots. On the first day of October, Oberleutnant Wolfgang Spate, the Staffelkapitan of 5./JG 54, knocked down two

Philipp and Spate stood at the peak, closely followed by Leutnant Josef Pohs, who had forty-three, and Hauptmann Franz Eckerle, Oberleutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann, and Oberleutnant Hans-Ekkehard Bob, each with thirty-seven.

Stubborn air combat over Leningrad continued daily for the next two and a half years. From July to Septem­ber 1941, the Soviet fighter pilots assigned to the defense of Leningrad were credited with the destruction of 333 German aircraft.

The airmen of General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov’s WS-Northwestern Zone had put up an impressive dis­play while almost being bled white. During the first stage of the war there were more self-sacrificing cases of taran in this area than in any other sector. According to VVS statistics, 2,692 Soviet aircraft had been lost in the North­western Zone by September 30, 1941.

With a growing emphasis placed on the defense of other sectors, the Stavka had allocated only limited replacements to the air units in the North­western Zone. In spite of numerous losses, WS-North western Front had received only 450 replacement aircraft by the end of September, including approximately 100 Il-2s and 90 LaGG-3s. Having regis­tered a total of 1,283 combat losses (in­cluding 749 in the air and with an addi­tional 211 aircraft receiving serious battle damage by September 30), WS-North – western Front was reduced to the equiva­lent of only slightly more than a Diviziya, mustering a mere 191 aircraft on Sep tember 22, 1941.” In 7 1AK/PVO, the number of pilots went down from 445 on July 1 to only 88 on October I. M Con­trary to the buildup taking place in the central combat zone, there were obvious signs of withering combat morale among the Soviet airmen in the Leningrad area during the fall of 1941. Due to accumu­lated losses during three months of unre­mitting combat activity, and with fight­ing spirit diminishing among the surviv­ing airmen, no fewer than eleven avia­tion regiments of W’S-Leningrad Front had to be with­drawn from combat for rest and refitting during Septem­ber. Two complete Aviadivizii, 2 BAD and 41 BAD, were virtually annihilated by the end of the month.

n late September 1941, the situation looked grim for the Soviet Union. Most of the Red Army had van­ished from the Earth. Millions of soldiers had been lost, 2.5 million of them ending up in German prison camps, where hundreds of thousands would perish dur­ing the coming months. According to German sources, the Red Army had lost 19,000 tanks (of which 8,000 had been captured by the Germans) and 30,000 artillery pieces (of which 11,000 had fallen into enemy hands). (These figures are largely supported by official Soviet records, according to which the Red Army lost 20,500 tanks and an astonishing 101,000 artillery pieces and mortars.) By September 30, Luftwaffe claims had mounted to 14,500 Soviet aircraft destroyed, of which approximately 5,000 had been shot down in aerial com­bat. At this point Hitler launched what his Soviet coun­terpart had feared most since July: the final major offen­sive against Moscow.

Before opening the powerful offensive against Mos­cow on September 30, 1941, the German Army Group Center had been considerably strengthened, the bulk of tank units on the Eastern Front having been hastily trans­ferred to its command. Luftflotte 2, back at full nominal strength with the return of Fliegerkorps VTI1 from the Leningrad sector and reinforced by units from Luftflotte 4, was tasked to provide the ground-assault forces with air support. The operation was given the illustrative code name Typhoon (Taifun).

Operation Typhoon was planned to take place in two stages. During the opening stage, Panzergruppcn (soon to be renamed Panzer armies) 3 and 4, covered by the infantry of the Fourth and Ninth armies, were placed

on the highway to Moscow to attack to the north and south of Smolensk, aim­ing at the city of Vyazma, in the hope of surrounding the entire Soviet Western Front. At the same time, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 was to strike from the Konotop-Romny sector, in the south, and advance in a northeast­erly direction. The aim of this operation was to envelop General-Leytenant Andrey Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front, which had been severely crippled by Guderian’s troops in the Battle of Kiev.

Following the planned annihilation of the Western and Bryansk fronts,, the second stage of Operation Typhoon was to be aimed at the direct capture of Mos­cow. The ancient city’ was not only the Soviet capital, it was also he most impor­tant Soviet communications hub. The Germans assumed that the seizure of Moscow would deal a death blow to Soviet morale and ability to organize resistance and from which the USSR would not be able to recover.

Severely handicapping the Germans were time and resources. The unexpectedly prolonged and costly battles in the Ukraine, the Baltics, and White Russia (Belorus) had placed the attackers in a most difficult situation. The Wehrmacht had suffered half a million casualties between June 22 and the end of September.

A total of 1,603 German aircraft had been destroyed, and a further 1,028 had been damaged on the Eastern Front between June 22 and September 27. Indeed, the Luftwaffe’s losses during the three first months of Operation Barbarossa were higher than during the Battle of Britain, where it sustained 1,385 combat losses from July to October 1940.15 Recently, a number of Luftwaffe units had been pulled out of action due to the severe losses. Among them were the two Zerstorergruppen of ZG 26 and the Bf 110-equipped SKG 210. These units had achieved impressive results: ZG 26 claimed to have destroyed about 1,000 Soviet aircraft in the air and on the ground, plus 300 vehicles and 250 tanks; and SKG 210 was credited with the destruction of 519 Soviet air­craft, 1,700 vehicles, and 83 tanks. But their own losses rendered these Gruppen unbattleworthy after three months of combat. The loss of the Bf 110 units would be detrimental to the close-support missions of the Luftwaffe.

Even though Luftflotte 2 had been reinforced by Stab, II., and IH./JG 3, plus a fresh Jagdgruppe (l./JG 52) brought in from the western Europe, the replacements did not make good the accumulated losses. At the open­ing of Operation Typhoon, the strength of Luftflotte 2 had dropped from 1,200 aircraft in June 1941 to 549, of which no more than 158 were bombers.

The situation was even worse on the Soviet side. As Operation Typhoon was about to commence, only 800,000 soldiers and 770 tanks stood at the disposal of the Soviet Western, Reserve, and Bryansk fronts, while the Germans attacked with 1.5 million soldiers and 1,100 tanks. The only—and not unimportant-advantage held by the defenders was the time they had bought. Opera­tion Typhoon was opened just ahead of the notorious Russian fall, with its heavy rainfall, which would make most roads almost impassable, thus creating a terrible obstacle to any major military operation. The Germans were fully aware of this and hence rushed the commence­ment of Typhoon, thus providing the forces allocated to it with too little preparatory time.

The offensive was initiated by heavy Stuka and bomber attacks against Red Army installations. Concen­trated tank spearheads roared through the thin defense lines at full speed, advancing on dry roads in sunny weather. This was Blitzkrieg at its worst. Wherever any serious resistance was made, Stukas swarmed from the skies. The entire Soviet defense collapsed during the first
forty-eight hours. During the first day, Generaloberst Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 advanced fifty miles south of the city of Bryansk.

The Soviet commanders called in all the air support available. The air was the only field on which the Soviets could compare numerically to the Germans. Five days prior to the offensive, the commander of the Western Front, General-Polkovnik Ivan Konev, had desperately asked the Stavka for reinforcements, because all that remained of the VVS in this sector following the intense commitment of his air force during the battle of Yelnya were 373 planes. His badly mauled air units immediately were backed up by five DBA Divizii and several aviation regiments from the Moscow Military District, detached from the 6 ІАК/PV’O and special GKO reserve air groups. By this time the GKO had formed half a dozen reserve air groups, each consisting of four to six aviation regiments, directly subordinate to the Stavka. Thus, on October 1, the number of VVS combat aircraft opposing Army Group Center had been brought up to 863 (578 bombers and 285 fighters), of which 301 bombers and 201 fighters were serviceable.16

During these desperate days, the VVS provided its enemy with a series of unpleasant surprises, including what would become a benchmark of the Eastern Front, the flying night intruders: “From October 1, special night – bomber regiments equipped with obsolete machines were formed in accordance with GKO instructions. Of the first night-bomber regiments planned and prepared for operations in October and November, seventy-one were equipped with the fragile U-2 biplanes, thirty-two with R-5 and R-Z light-bomber biplanes, and five with SB bomb­ers. Eventually the U-2 (Po-2) was to become the stan­dard workhorse of the night-bomber regiments, with pilots making their way individually to the designated target area at heights of between 400 and 800 meters with engine throttles back to shower grenades or small bombs on any light or sign of activity.”1′

The efficiency of these nocturnal intruding U-2s— nicknamed "sewing machines” due to their characteristic engine sound—was proven not only by the diversion of Luftwaffe fighters to night operations but also by the fact that the Germans later plagiarized this tactic on the Eastern Front, forming the Nachtschlachtgruppen,

“flying museums” equipped with obsolete aircraft such as Fw 58s, Ar 66s, He 45s, and He 46s.

In daylight, the Soviet aircraft launched formations of three to six aircraft in incessant low-level attacks against the Panzer spearheads. Already, after the first day of the offensive, the German fighter bases had been left too far behind the forwardmost Panzer spearheads. This was one of the Blitzkrieg dilemmas: To sever the enemy’s retro­grade supply lines, the tank columns had to rush far ahead of the infantry, leaving large numbers of Red Army units behind in a far-from-cleansed area.

The VVS was quick to exploit this situation, striking at the advancing tank formations at places where there were no German fighters present and making a quick escape before the Bf 109s appeared. Flying in at altitudes of 75 to 150 feet, these aircraft climbed from 300 to 600 feet shortly before arriving at their target, and then car­ried out swift diving attacks.

The new Soviet twin-engine Pe-2 bomber; its heavy fighter version, the Pe-3; and the 11-2 Shturmovik began appearing in large numbers over the front area for the first time. In the Pe-2, the Soviets possessed a modern bomber quite comparable to the best German types. Josef Stalin once stated that “the 11-2 is as essential to the Red Army as air and bread.”

One of the first successful air strikes by U-2s on the Moscow front was carried out by 74 ShAP when four of its pilots surprised a motorized column on the road from Orel to Mtsensk, and destroyed fifteen armored vehicles and three gasoline trucks in a low-level bombing pass. As a result of incidents such as this, the Second Panzer Army, having reached Orel on October 3, filed sore complaints with the Luftwaffe: “Own fighter escort lacking due to too large distance.”18

The 11-2 Shturmovik also gave the Soviet ground – attack pilots a completely different chance in air combat. Unteroffizier Walter Todt of 1./JG 52 describes the 11-2’s ability to withstand even heavy cannon fire: “Dur­ing a return flight from the front area, Lcutnant [Karl] Rung and I came across a lone 11-2. We attacked and the Ivan dived in the direction of Moscow. He was too low to permit us to attack him from below’, where we could have hit his Achilles heel, the radiator. We fired from both sides, aiming at the tailfin, which flew apart. But the 11-2 kept flying! Suddenly, light antiaircraft fire was thrown up against us, and we had to disengage at tree – top level. These birds were a most difficult target. W’hen you attacked them from behind, the shells simply bounced off their springy plywood fuselage. And the pilot was seated in an armored tub!”19

As the Soviet lines of communication broke down following the rapid advance of the Panzer units deep into the Soviet lines and the devastating blows by the Luftwaffe, the Red Army came to rely completely on air reconnaissance. Early on October 2, Soviet reconnaissance aircraft spotted heavy concentrations of German armored columns ten to fifteen miles to the west of Belyye Berega, southeast of Bryansk. This was the German XXIV Army Corps, advancing toward Orel, threatening to cut off the Bryansk Front from the Southwestern Front At noon, forty Pe-3s of 95 IAP and sixty fighters of 27 IAP and 120 LAP were dispatched against this target. The twin – engine Petlaykovs struck first, followed by rocket-firing 1-153 Chaykas. The entire raid, lasting no more than thirty minutes, caused outrage among the German troop commanders—even if the Soviet claims of thirty trucks and forty-three tanks destroyed by the Pe-3s were exag­gerated. All the Soviet planes managed to escape before German fighters appeared.

On October 3, one of the major aces of JG 51, Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann, with sixty-three con­firmed victories, was missing following an air engage­ment near Shatalovo. It is possible that he fell prey to 233 IAP’s Starshiy Leytenant Sergeyev, who claimed a Bf 109 (his first victory) in the same area.20 In total, 233 LAP was credited with seven aerial victories—three Ju 88s, three Ju 87s, and one Bf 109—on October 3.21

The harshest strikes from the air were dealt by the Luftwaffe. On October 3, the units under command of Luftflotte 2 conducted 984 combat sorties and reported the destruction of 679 enemy vehicles and the serious disruption of movements by Soviet troops. Early on Oc­tober 4, forty-eight Stukas and thirty-two medium bomb­ers were dispatched against rail lines and troop move­ments in the Sumy-Lgov-Kursk area, where they severed communications between the Bryansk and the South­western fronts.

Despite having sustained paralyzing blows during the first days of the Moscow offensive, Soviet resistance mounted on October 4. On that day, the famous com­mander of the Second Panzer Army, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, narrowly escaped death in a strafing attack by Pe-3s. Meanwhile, the German Second Army, operating

on the northern flank of Guderian’s force in a pinccr movement aimed at surrounding the Bryansk Front, was confronted with a powerful counterattack from armored forces with strong air support. A total of 152 dive-bomber and 259 medium bomber sorties were carried out against this counterattack. These raids were followed up by strikes by 202 Stukas and 188 medium bombers against long supply columns in the Bryansk-Spas-Demensk area. The Luftwaffe airmen claimed the destruction of 22 tanks (including 4 of the very heavy KV type), 450 motor vehicles, and 3 fuel depots, and they completely routed the Soviet counteroffensive.

The full dimension of the impending disaster was not discovered by the Soviets until it was too late. On October 5, a Pe-2 reconnaissance crew-discovered a ten – mile-long German tank column—the main body of the Fourth Panzer Army—moving eastward on an axis south of Vyazma, halfway betw’een Smolensk and Moscow. Although two further reconnaissance missions from 120 LAP confirmed this report, it was dismissed as “false” by the Soviet High Command. Polkovnik Nikolay Sbytov, the VVS commander in the Moscow’ Military District, who had forwarded the report, was interrogated bv the NKVD and accused of being a “panic-monger.” Under “pressure” brought to bear upon him on instructions by Peoples Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrenty Beria, Polkovnik Sbytov eventually withdrew his report. On the following day, October 6, German troops swarmed into the city of Yukhnov, 110 miles southwest of Mos­cow, without encountering any ground opposition. Sud­denly the Stavka realized that the pincers were closing behind the bulk of the Red Army forces charged with defending Moscow.

All VVS units were launched to this sector to com­pensate for what the ground troops had failed to do. Early on October 6, U-2, l-15bis, and R-5 night intruders took off in the fog and attacked the German Fourth Army in the Yukhnov sector. Later that day, 1-153s of 120 1AP, SB-2s and Pe-2s of 173 BAP and 321 BAP, R-5s of 606 LBAP, and Il-2s of 502 ShAP continued the attack. The Soviet airmen managed to destroy a bridge over the Ugra River, but they wrere met with strong enemy fighter opposition. By now the complaints from the German front-line troops had compelled the Ger­man fighters to use advance airstrips in areas not com­pletely cleared of Soviet ground troops. These forward bases were used for landing and takeoff during daytime, and supplies w’ere brought in by air. Before dusk, the fighters returned to their main base in the rear again.

Following the capture of Orel on October 3, strong fighter units were deployed to the large air base there. The nine Jagdgruppen of Luftflotte 2 soon were able to regain control of the skies. Hauptmann Gordon Gollob’s ll./JG 3 was particularly successful against the new’ Pe – 2s, claiming four of 173 BAP’s Petlaykovs on October 6, of w’hich two fell before the guns of Hauptmann Gollob’s Bf 109-his fifty-second and fifty-third victories. The 215 ShAP 11-2 piloted by Leytenant Aleksandr Novikov reportedly carried out a “fire taran” against German ground troops after it was shot down in flames.2i

On October 6 and 7, Luftflotte 2 launched nearly 1,400 sorties. Attacks on October 7 alone resulted in (according to German sources) the destruction of 20 tanks, 34 artillery pieces, several bunkers, and 650 vehicles of various kinds.

Just as during the two previous deadly threats against Russia in history—from the Swedes in the eighteenth century and the French in the nineteenth century— the invader reached the pinnacle peak of his success exactly at a point when a shift in weather caused a major deterioration to his situation. During the night of Octo­ber 6-7, the first snow’ fell in the Moscow area. Early on

One of several thousand Soviet aircraft shot down in 1941. This II-2 Shturmovik, which fell prey to Hauptmann Gordon Gollob of ll./JG 3, descends toward earth with its oil tank fully ablaze. It is obvious that the pilot of this aircraft was not experienced enough to protect the vulnerable belly of the II-2 by flying at extremely low altitude. Caught from below, the II-2 was easy prey to Luftwaffe fighter pilots. (Photo: Gollob.) the seventh, the ground was covered with a white coat­ing. A few hours later, a thaw set in, turning the dirt roads and front-line airstrips into muddy quagmires.

But the Soviet Western Front could not be saved. On October 7, the German Third and Fourth Panzer armies linked up in the vicinity of Vyazma, thus sur­rounding General-Polkovnik Konev’s Western Front to the east of Smolensk. Konyev was immediately relieved of command and General Armii Georgiy Zhukov, one of the outstanding Soviet military commanders, was brought from Leningrad to take command of the Western Front.

The WS of the Soviet Fifth Army, in charge of the Mozhaysk defense line on the highway to Moscow to the east of Vyazma, was hastily reinforced with 41 IAP and 172 IAP, equipped with MiG-3s, LaGG-3s, and Yak-ls. But they could not prevent the disaster, nor were they able to drive away the large formations of Luftwaffe air­craft or protect their own bombers. Despite deteriorating weather, with low clouds and ground fog that prevented any major operation by the Luftwaffe—only 139 sorties were carried out on October 9—the southern flank of Army Group Center managed to close the pincers behind three armies of the Bryansk Front during the following days.

Between October 2 and October 10, 1./JG 52 recorded fifty-eight aerial victories against seven losses.23 Counted among the Soviet losses on October 10 was one of the most daring pilots in 11 IAP/6 LAK, Kapitan Konstantin Titenkov, credited with six kills, including one taran.

Practically the entire Red Army in front of Moscow – 40 percent of the entire Soviet military—had been envel­oped and threatened with annihilation. During the following days, weather proved to be a not altogether reliable ally of the Soviets. W’ith clear skies on October 10, Luftflotte 2 was able to mount 537 sorties against forces of the Western Front that attempted to break out. During these strikes, 450 vehicles and 150 artillery pieces were reported destroyed.24

Reinforced by four bomber regiments from the Cen­tral Asian Military District on October 10, the Moscow Military District launched an all-out air-base offensive from October 11 to October 18. The Soviet air offensive was initiated just at a point when Luftflotte 2 was becoming successively weakened. Early in October, 11. and Ill./JG 53 had been pulled out of combat for rest and recuperation. Shortly afterward, 1I./JG 3 was trans­ferred to the Crimean sector, in the South.

General Armii Georgiy Zhukov was one of the ablest Soviet army commanders of World War II. He served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and rapidly rose to high command. In 1939 he led the successful operation at Khalkhin-Gol, which prevented the Japanese from occupying Mongolia. In January 1941 Zhukov was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army. When he was assigned to organize the defense of Leningrad in September 1941, the transport aircraft that flew him into the beleaguered city narrowly escaped being shot down by Bf 109s of JG 54. Shortly afterwards, Zhukov assumed command of the Western Front and led the successful counterattack that relieved the capital from German threats. Zhukov prepared the Stalingrad operation in 1942- 43 and finally directed the attack on Berlin in 1945. He received the German capitulation and was appointed Minister of Defense of the USSR in 1955. Two years later, however, he was unexpectedly removed from his post. Zhukov passed away in 1974, at the age of seventy-eight. Apart from the two leading fighter aces, Aleksandr Pokryshkin and Ivan Kozhedub, Georgiy Zhukov was the only man awarded as a Hero of the Soviet Union three times during World War II. (Photo: Authors’ Collection.)

On October 11, despite poor weather conditions, 74 ShAP dispatched twelve Shturmoviks—all that remained of that unit—against the large forward German air base at Orel. Kapitan Georgiy Zimin, one of six fighter pilots of 42 LAP acting as fighter cover, described the raid:

Six MiG-3s of 42 IAP took off on a mission to escort twelve Il-2s. The Shturmoviks were tasked with a strike on the airfield near the city of Orel. The fighter’s had to escort them, and if opportunity should arise, to participate in the strike. The cover en route was organized as follows: One fighter sec­tion led by Kapitan Morozov formed a close escort group to the Shturmoviks, while the section led by the group leader, the author of these lines, formed an assault group and flew in front of and higher than the Shturmoviks, in order to detect the main concentration of the enemy aircraft and direct the Shturmoviks by diving in this direction.

I saw the main concentration on the airfield – more than 200 bombers, standing wing to wing— and signalled “attention” and then started diving. The Shturmoviks reformed in right echelon and formed a circle turning to the left, heading toward the mass of the enemy aircraft, and started to at­tack them one by one, aiming individually. Dur­ing the first pass, the Shturmoviks^ dropped their bombs, during the second they fired rockets while diving, and during a third pass they attempted to destroy the remaining planes with cannon fire, pulling out of the dive at extremely low altitude.

As the main group of our aircraft approached the airfield, four Me 109s were scrambled. Our escort fighters attacked and destroyed them dur­ing takeoff. At this moment, I noticed five Ju 52s approaching the airfield from the south at an alti­tude of 200 meters. We bounced them and were able to shoot down all five.”25

Also on October 11, Soviet aircraft raided the air­field at Dugino-just as the inspector of the Fighter Air Arm, Oberst Werner Molders, arrived for an inspection.

During these operations, the Soviets had the advan­tage of raiding air bases where they themselves had been stationed only a few weeks earlier. Hence the attacking air crews had a good picture of the targets they were sent against. An NCO from the ground crew of 1./JG 52, stationed at Dugino during these days, wrote bitterly: “October 12. . . . Several Russian bombers attacked us today again. They set fire to a fuel depot, and this in an outrageously brazen manner which clearly showed that they were well acquainted w’ith our airfield.”26

Apart from a few’ lucky strikes and some attacks by particularly skillful pilots, the majority of these raids w’ere characterized by poor bomb-aiming—the direct and indi­rect results of the punishment the VVS units had taken at the hands of German fighters. This is clearly illus­trated in the following German account

Someone cries: “Air raid! Take cover!” Drow’sy

with sleep, we abandon the truck and rush toward a piece of woodland, w’here we seek cover from the Russian bombers. We watched as they opened their bomb bays. Their ‘blessings from the sky" went down several hundred meters away. This scene was repeated over and over again on this day. . . .

Airfield Kalinin-North. . . . Suddenly, there’s another attack by a large formation of bombers and Ratas. Everyone ran into cover. 1 searched for refuge in one of the destroyed hangars. A number of German aircraft were airborne, and they frus­trated the entire raid. Several bright fireworks in the sky told us that our fighters did a good job.27

The air-base offensive brought further heavy losses to already crippled VVS units. Among the airmen killed was Mladshiy Leytenant Dmitriy Kokorev, of 124 IAP, who had four victories to his credit, including a Bf 110 brought dow’n by ramming on the first day of war. He was shot down on October 12. On that day, the MiG-3 fighters of 16 IAP/PVO had a difficult encounter with the Bf 109s of Hauptmann Karl-Heinz Leesmann’s 1./ JG 52. As they charged a group of Ju 88s, the Soviet pilots were bounced by I./JG 52. Mladshiy Leytenant Ivan Shumilov, one of the Soviet pilots participating in this engagement, later recalled: “Suddenly two

Messerschmitts approached our formation___ [Mladshiy

Leytenant Ivan] Zabolotnyy singled out one of [the Ju 88s] and attacked. But the Germans always took the advantage of such single attacks. They charged him from behind with blazing guns. Although Zabolotnyy managed to destroy one of the German planes, he was himself se­verely hit and had to bail out. He returned to the unit three days later. The victory he had scored—it was in the vicinity of Kamenka, close to Maloyaroslavets—was his first.”28 Also on October 12, an 11-2 pilot hit a Bf 109 with his guns in the air east of Medyn. The German fighter lost one wing and crashed, burning on impact, and kill­ing the pilot, Leutnant Joachim Hacker of 7./JG 51. Hacker was credited with thirty-two aerial kills.

October 12,1941, also saw’ the American-built Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk single-engine fighter draw its first blood on the Eastern Front. The first P-40s delivered to the USSR were shipped directly to 126 IAP, a crack unit operating in the Moscow combat zone. But, just as with the British Hurricane, the Tomahawk was far from an excellent fighter plane. Although superior to the

Hurricane and roughly equivalent to the Bf I09E, it proved inferior to the Bf 109F. Not least due ro frus­trating technical and logistical problems, the equip­

ment transition of 126 IAP from MiG – 3s to Tomahawks resulted in a decline in morale.

By October 13, the Western Front in the northern pocket had been almost completely annihilated by Luftwaffe attacks/" The confused battle to the west, northwest, and southwest of Moscow during these days made an appraisal of the combat situation almost impossible. A state of almost total chaos reigned. The entire area was a huge battlefield with­out any fixed front lines.

On October 13, the commander of 180 LAP, Kapitan A. P. Sergeyev, and his adjutant, Starshiy Leytenant Khlusovich, landed their Mi(»-3s at Mikhailovo Air­drome—which was occupied by the enemy. Khlusovich managed to take off at the last minute, but the commander failed to do so and was killed.

Oberlcutnant Friedrich Lang, the Staffelkapitan of l./Std 2, recalls a rare incident, at his billeting during one of these days:

The construction of a runway had been begun by the Russians. The half-completed w ork blocked much of the airfield for takeoffs and landings.

The f rsl U. S.-buiit Curtiss P-4C1 Tomahawk fighters to reach the Soviet Union arrived with a Murmansk-bound convoy iff the fall of ‘9^1 and were immediately de ivered to 125 IAP cf 6 .‘AK/PVO for in tne defense of Moscow. (Photo; Seidl.)

Well hidden under the trees of a Russian forest, a U-2 light bomber undergoes maintenance. The Soviet decision to deploy U-2 trainers and R-5- and R-Z biplanes in the role of harassment bombers over German rear areas at night proved to be quite successful. The Polikarpov U-2 (later redesignated Po-2) was nicknamed ‘Sewing machine" by the Germans due to its characteristic engine sound. The U-2 was one of the most-produced aircraft in the world, In all, 32,711 U-2s/Po-2s were delivered by the Soviet aircraft industry between 1929 and 1949. Additional numbers were manufactured on license by Poland under the designation CSS-13. More than half pf the 19,993 U-2s/Po-2s produced during World War II were delivered from State Aircraft Production Plant No, 169 in Kazan. (Photo: Grubich.)

Mounds of earth and mud were severe obstruc­tions to the operations of our aircraft. . . .

We were billeted into some small wooden houses in a village around three kilometers from the airfield. We, the officers of the 1st Staffel, took possession of such a house, which was made up of an anteroom, a large room with a baking stove, a smaller room, and a chamber. The grandmother of the house slept in the stove room together with her four to eight kids. . . .

During one of the last days of our stay at this house, we returned from the airfield earlier than usual because of a heavy snowfall. The woman came to meet us and seemed more excited than ever. From the flow of words that came over her lips, we could understand that her dear husband, who definitely was no Communist, had returned

home. He had been left in the Vyazma pocket and had made it through the woods until he arrived at his village. We barely had made the woman understand that we understood her before she flung the door open. A man dashed into the house, threw himself on his knees, and attempted to kiss my tunic. To us, his flow of words appeared as nothing but an incomprehensible sound effect. We adopted ourselves to the shining faces of the family and I patted the man on his shoulder and said some­thing, which he didn’t understand anyway. The per­formance was over and he dashed out of the room, in the same way as he had arrived, beaming with joy, followed by his family. We never saw him again.30

On October 18, the Soviets lost another of their most experienced airmen on the Moscow front: Starshiy

Leytenant Vasiliy Khitrin, who was credited with seven vitories. When his 1-16 was damaged by antiaircraft fire over the front lines, Khitrin attempted to bring it back to base at low altitude. But during the return flight, one of the Ishak’s wings broke off. The airplane plunged to the ground, and Khitrin was killed.

The annihilation of the two southern pockets of the Moscow front on October 17 and 20 was the climax of Operation Typhoon. The German armies rounded up 673,000 prisoners and sent them to a confinement from which few would return alive. The total losses sustained by the armies of the Soviet Western, Reserve, and Bryansk fronts between September 30 and December 4, 1941, numbered 514,300 soldiers killed, wounded, missing, or captured. Nevertheless, instead of leading to a German victory, which could have been expected, these encircle­ment battles in fact marked the turning point of the Battle of Moscow.

The dirt roads where heavy tank units had passed soon became almost impassable streams of deep mud. Advance tank units found themselves almost completely cut off from supplies in a sea of mud. While supply col-: umns were stuck on the roads between Orel and Tula, south of Moscow’, rations had to be air-dropped by Luftwaffe units.

Not the w’inter, as is widely believed, but the sleet and the mud—the notorious Russian rasputitsa, for which j the German armies were not equipped—w’ere w’hat saved the Soviet capital. The snow and rain brought the Get-; man offensive to a halt at the last moment.

ven as the main focus of the war in the USSR once again had been shifted to the central combat zone, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army

Group South was engaged in a wide-scale campaign over a huge area to the east of the Dnieper River. Following the Battle of Kiev, von Rundstedt was compelled to dis­perse his forces against three main targets: the Crimea; ‘ Rostov; and the Soviet industrial center in Kharkov and. the Donets Basin, in the eastern Ukraine. Seizure of the latter was one of Operation Barbarossa’s main strategic objectives.

1 Here the Soviets defended their position with bitter

tenacity and with strong air support. Even before resis­tance in Kiev was overcome, most of VVS-Southwestern Front had been shifted to this area. Reinforced with 1 RAG and 4 RAG from the Bryansk Front, WS-South-

western Front had doubled in strength since early Sep­tember and had launched heavy attacks against the advancing German troops. In the absence of its com­mander, General Leytenant Fyodor Astakhov, who had been entrapped in the Kiev encirclement and who would make it back to Soviet lines only in November, VVS – Southwestern Front was headed by the able General – Mayor Fyodor Falaleyev.

On September 22 an 1-153 piloted by Leytenant Grigoriy Kotseba from Kapitan Farit Fatkullin’s famous Staff Eskadrilya of 44 IAD managed to set fire to the construction equipment and pontoons intended for the German engineer bridge over the Orel River, a tribu­tary to the Dnieper. This delayed a crossing by consider­able German army forces.

Since Flicgerkorps V had to give up most of its fighter units to Luftflotte 2 at the prospect of the final offensive against Moscow, the task of clearing the skies of Soviet aircraft in this area was given to only one Jagdgruppc, Ill./JG 52. This unit included skillful young men such as Feldwebel “Ede” Duhn, Oberleutnant Giinther Rail, Leutnant Hermann Graf, Leutnant Adolf Dickfeld, Unteroffizier Gerhard Koppen, Unteroffizier Heinrich Fullgrabe, Unteroffizier Leopold Steinbatz, and Unteroffizier Alfred Grislawski, all of whom would start their real “Experten” careers during the fight for air supremacy over the Kharkov area. Any Soviet airman who came across the Messerschmitts piloted by these hotspurs was lucky if he survived.

On September 24, the_Rotte composed of Oberleutnant Rail and Unteroffizier Koppen scrambled against an incoming Soviet bomber formation, nine SBs escorted by four MiG-3s. Afterward, Unteroffizier Koppen filed the following report on his eighteenth and nine­teenth victories: “I immediately attacked the MiG-3 sec­tion that flew astern of the formation and opened fire against a fighter that flew with its undercarriage down. The MiG pulled up, caught fire, and fell down over its right wing, descending vertically with a black plume of smoke. It crashed to the ground, exploding on impact. As the second MiG climbed away, 1 charged an SB posi­tioned on the right flank of the bomber formation. My first burst turned the SB into a ball of fire. It went down and crashed five kilometers east of Chudovo."31

In response to the menace from the air, between Sep­
tember 25 and September 27, General Robert Ritter von Greim, the commander of Fliegerkorps V, dispatched his medium bombers against the bases of WS-Southwest – ern Front. According to German figures, forty-three aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Moreover, by September 28, Ill./JG 52 claimed to have shot down fifty-eight Soviet planes in the Kharkov area, against only one loss.

On October 2 four pilots of 9./JG 52 conducted a surprise low-level attack against a Soviet fighter base east of Kharkov. Two I-I6s were claimed destroyed on the ground, both by Leutnant Graf. On the return flight, the German fighters spotted a formation of twenty enemy fighters. Leutnant Graf and Unteroffizier Grislawski blew two 1-16s out of the sky, and all the German fighters returned to their base without having suffered any damage.

On the Soviet side, Mladshiy Leytenant Vladimir Garanin, a six-victory’ ace in the 1-16-equipped 254 IAP, was severely wounded in a combat during which he claimed to have downed two Bf 109s, including one through ramming. Nevertheless, between October 3 and October 14, 1941, Ill./JG 52 was credited with more than fifty’ aerial victories without suffering any losses.

On one occasion, ten of Ill./JG 52’s Bf 109s caught a squadron of 1-153 fighter-bombers and blew all but one of the Soviets out of the sky. The 1-153 that was left from this carnage managed to get off only due to the supreme flying skills of its pilot. Even if no correspond­ing Soviet accounts have been found, it is possible that

was the first one there, and right away he got onto the tail of an Ivan. How­ever the Russian shot past him, only to be caught by Hauptmann | Franz| Hornig. The enemy biplane caught fire and crashed in a bright red ball of fire not far from the German trenches. 1 was unable to take part in the action, as my guns had jammed. Damned mess! The air was filled with tracers.

A bullet whistled through the cockpit behind me, in the left side and out the right. Plexiglas splinters struck my neck and blood trickled down my collar. Close call! After what couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, there were about a dozen of our com­rades from the other side burning on the ground. Only one Ivan was left. Obviously an outstanding pilot, he simply refused to go down. Six Messerschmitts swirled around him, but he escaped every attack by elegantly half-rolling and diving away.

I had to admire the fellow. Not quite sure of what drove me to it, I pressed the transmit button and called to the others, “Don’t shoot him down, don’t shoot him down. Let him live, we’ll escort him home.”

Seconds later the air battle ended. The Ivan immediately dropped down to just above the ground and turned east. Remaining above and behind followed the Russian. Repeatedly, he turned his head to look at us, not believing his “freedom." However, his machine was just too slow; even with landing gear and flaps down, we were still too fast to stay with him. So we waved fare­well and left him to return in peace, home to his airfield.”*2

The dogfights in the air over Kharkov during these days are quite illustrative of the air war over the entire Eastern Front during 1941. Even if Kapitan Farit Fatkullin and the experts of his Staff Squadron of 44 IAD prob­ably were of the same caliber as the aces of IIl./JG 52,

their frail and slow 1-153s did not allow them to meet the enemy fighters on equal terms.

Meanwhile, the Soviets started dismantling the fac­tories in this area and opened a huge operation to trans­fer them farther to the east. A race developed between the advancing German armies and Soviet workers and technicians dismantling the production facilities and send­ing them eastward. Since the bad condition of the Russian roads made them unsuitable for the large-scale evacuation of an entire industrial area, these transports came to rely totally on the rail lines.

To halt these movements, the bomber forces of Fliegerkorps V were committed to their interdiction. But an astounding Soviet capacity to repair and improvise frustrated these efforts. The almost complete isolation of the battlefront created by the same German bomber units during the Battle of Kiev could not be repeated. Fre­quently, a rail line that had been completely destroyed was operational again in no more than a few hours. According to Soviet sources, the railway lines in the vicinity of the front were subjected to 5,939 air attacks between June and December 1941. On average it took no more than five hours and forty-eight minutes to put a severed railway back in operation.

As a consequence, Fliegerkorps V turned the atten­tion of its bombers to destroying the rolling stock, par­ticularly railway engines. KG 55 Greif was selected for this task. From its airfield at Kirovograd, west of the Dnieper Basin, the He-11 Is of this unit w’ere assigned to individual “free hunting” against Soviet rolling stock all across the huge area between Kursk in the North and Stalino in the South. Since the He-llls lacked equipment for successful attacks at night, only day missions were flown. The “rail hunting” missions were flown at treetop level. The only device for target-finding was eyesight. Any train spotted was attacked with 50-, 250-, and 500-kilogram bombs, dropped from only sixty feet. Two extra nose-mounted 20mm automatic cannon also were employed by the He Ills.

During the first weeks of the effort, considerable successes were achieved.

Within a short time, however, the Sovi­
ets shifted all raihvay movements in this area to nights, j or to days with adverse weather. In addition, strong. AAA j concentrations were deployed at key points such as Kupyansk (sixty miles east of Kharkov), Valuyki (forty j miles to the northeast on the same railroad line), and Svoboda (farther to the northeast). The German pilots learned to avoid these areas, which known as “the death zones” to the airmen of KG 55. Soviet fighters were only a minor problem, since most WS aircraft in this area < were committed to low-level attacks against the advanc – j ing German ground forces. Thus German losses during j the rail-hunting missions were very limited; KG 55 lost no more than two aircraft on railway attacks during! October 1941.

Although severe losses were inflicted on the Soviet j rolling stock around Kharkov—KG 55 was credited with the destruction of 222 trains, including 64 locomotives53-! the evacuation of industrial goods, machines, and even j goods from Kharkov and the Donets Basin could not be prevented.

During this period of intense rail interdiction, other і tasks assigned to the Luftwaffe were neglected. This enabled the aircraft in VVS-Southwestern Front to be j launched in “increasing attacks that often severely inter – j fered with the maneuverability of German ground:]

forces.”34 The exhausted German troops could make only slow progress.

On October 5, the bombers and ground-attack planes of WS-Southwestern Front were in action all along the German Seventeenth Army’s front. Against the LV Army Corps alone, forty-two air raids involving about 250 air­craft were made. The next day, five I-153 Chaykas, led by Levtenant Boris Biryukov from the Staff Squadron/ 44 IAD, attacked crossings at the Berestovaya River. While Biryukov managed to destroy the bridge by a direct bomb hit during the first attack, his wingmen strafed the enemy troops on the bank, putting one truck and an antiaircraft gun out of commission/

Contrary to the aim of seizing, the industries in Kharkov and the Donets Basin, the Luftwaffe resorted to some of their rare strategic bombing missions on the Eastern Front. On the night of October 6, 1941, three He II Is of 9./KG 55 Greif were launched against the large tank factory at Kramatorskaya, between Stalino and Slavyansk in the northern Donets Basin. One of the He 11 Ls was badly hit by antiaircraft fire over the target area, and the flight engineer lay helplessly bleeding to death on the return flight. But the bombs were dropped with utmost precision, completely wiping out the plant and killing or maiming hundreds of workers. Two weeks later, the same Staffel raided Aircraft Factory 18 Znamia Truda at Voronezh, where ll-2s were manufactured. The results were devastating.

On October 9, the 195th Infantry Division of the German Seventeenth Army was hit by forty-three aerial attacks along the front lines, nearly eighty miles south­west of Kharkov, The Soviet air attacks were so intense that the entire Seventeenth Army was forced to take cover and could not continue advancing for the entire day. On October 12, the Seventeenth Army reported 200 soldiers and 238 horses killed in air raids.36 Step by step, the Soviets in this sector were improving their posi­tion in the air.

On October 14, Unteroffizicrc Alfred Grislawski and Heinrich Fiillgrabe of 9./JG 52 encountered two of the heavily armored 11-2 Shturmovik ground-attack planes north of Poltava.

Grislawski recalls that it took five attacks, in which he fired almost all of his 20mm ammunition, to bring down one 11-2, confirmed as his sixth victory. That af ter­noon, Leutnant Hermann Graf and Unteroffizier

Fiillgrabe ran into four Yak-1 fighters, which were some­thing completely different from the Chayka biplanes the two were used to engaging. During an exhausting thirty – minute combat, the two German pilots had to fly for their lives, only narrowly escaping being shot down by the Soviet flight leader. Turning head-on at the onset of the combat, the Mcsserschmitts managed to destroy two Yakovlevs; then all hell seemed to break loose, as Graf later described in his diary:

Fiillgrabe is in deep trouble. The Russian flight leader proves to be most skillful. 1 rush to my wingman’s assistance. The second Russian has had enough and disengages. I order Heinrich to get out of my way. And then the nicest and most dangerous air combat I have ever encountered starts. We wrung the most possible of man and machine: wide loopings with a radius of more than three thousand meters, and sharp, 180-degree turns, time after time. My body soaks with sw’eat. My adversary is at least as good as 1 am. It’s amazing how he repeatedly tries to outwit me. One sharp turn follows another. Over and over again, we meet nose-to-nose. Both fire their guns. He jumps over me in the last moment, and then he comes after me again. On one occasion we almost rammed each other.

Suddenly the second Russian fighter reap­peared. I just had a few free seconds and was able to fend off his attack. The Soviet wingman tries to escape in a dive. A quick glance backward tells me that my main enemy is sitting on my tail, although at a distance of more than four hundred meters.

So I aim and open fire against his wingman. The Russian fighter is thrown upward, then it starts falling—and doesn’t stop until it hits the ground. I must have hit him in the head.

Fiillgrabe informs me of this over the radio. I had no time to watch. Seeking revenge, the expert is clinging on to me. In the meantime, he has approached to a distance of two hundred meters.

I dive to the deck. I quickly glance at the speed­ometer: six hundred kilometers per hour! That’s enough. Now—“rise with the Daimler-Benz”—and I reach 1,200 meters altitude. Behind me, the Rus­sian is at 1,000. It’s a climbing race! W’e reach 3,000 meters. Then we start circling again.

Another ten minutes have passed. Each attack made by the enemy fills me with respect. This lias to be their top ace. Fortunately, 1 have practiced this kind of flying for years; had it not been for this, 1 would already have been dead.

Heinrich Fullgrahe reports that he must leave. His aircraft is running out of fuel.

Another five minutes, then my red warning lamp starts twinkling. That means I’ve got no more than twenty minutes’ flight time left. And we are fifty kilometers behind the front line. I ought to disengage. But my pride doesn’t permit me to do so. That would give my adversary at least a sym­bolic victory. And, anyway, he still is on my tail, hunting me toward our own lines.

We start turning on each other again and come rushing head-on. During one of these nose-to-nose encounters, 1 try to turn past him instead of climb­ing above. By coincidence, he undertakes the same maneuver. We pass by each other with only a few meters left between us. Now what will he do? Will he let me pass by, and then turn around and give me the final hit? I never let him out of my eyes.

Then the incredible occurs: He continues fly­ing to the east—and 1 to the west. 1 return literally on the last drops of fuel. During the landing, my propeller stops.

My whole body is shivering as I climb out ( the cockpit. What an enemy! I am hardly aware c the congratulations to my two victories. My hea is filled with thoughts of the Russian fighter pilo I would have liked to sit down and chat with hiir He must be a nice fellow. I wonder what he migh be thinking of me.”57

Hermann Graf was one of the most skillful Gerr fighter pilots. Less than a year after this aerial duel, was the highest-scoring ace in the Luftwaffe, with m than two hundred kills to his credit.

Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Reichenau’s C man Sixth Army finally seized Kharkov on October. but the Germans found the industrial area in the Don Basin filled with empty factories. Between July and i" vember 1941, 1.5 million wagonloads of industrial n chinery, tools, material, and personnel were carried ea ward on the Soviet railway system. No few’er than 1,5! factories, installations, and research establishmeni including 85 percent of Soviet airframe and acroengii production facilities, were evacuated.

Kapitan Farit Fatkullin’s Staff Eskadrilya of 44 1A1 was one of the main contributors to delaying the Germa offensive against the Donets Basin. Since the mountin

crisis in the Crimean sector had forced the Germans to transfer lll./JG 52 to this area on October 22, the field was left open to Kapitan Fatkullin’s daring pilots.

On October 25, as the German Sixth Army was cross­ing the Donets River, three 1-153s, led by Mladshiy Leytenant Yevgeniy Chistyakov, struck a German troop column in the vicinity of Kirovo and destroyed one tank and eight trucks. Three days later, Chistyakov destroyed six trucks and four pontoons in the same area.38

On October 30 Leytenant Petr Kudar and Serzhant Ivan Zinchenko of Staff/44 LAD fell upon a column of German motorized infantry in the Sakhnovshchina area. This time they were confronted with heavy antiaircraft fire. Serzhant Zinchenko, who was out on his second combat mission, had his 1-153 hit, so he broke off and returned to base. Left alone on this, his 155th combat mission, Kudar decided to defy the German AAA. Mak­
ing one run after another against the ground targets, his Chayka was hit again and again. Finally Petr Kudar turned toward his own airfield. He managed to cross the front line, but eight miles from the airfield, the engine stopped. The 1-153 crashed during an attempted forced landing, and Kudar was killed. On November 20 he was posthu­mously appointed Hero of the Soviet Union. Indeed, as an acknowledgment of the important role played by the pilots of this unit (which on November 4 was redesignated 92 IAP), seven of its pilots, including the commander, Kapitan Farit Fatkullin, also received this honorary title on November 20.

Among the most successful pilots in Fatkullin’s unit during the air campaign to delay the German advance into the Donets Basin, were: Leytenant Boris Biryukov, who was credited with the destruction of 6 tanks and 112 trucks between August 6 and October 31, 1941;

Leytenant Arseniy Stepanov, credited with the destruc­tion of 3 tanks, five trucks, and 8 motorcycles between September 8 and November 3; Mlaclshiy Leytenant Yevgeniy Chistyakov, credited with the destruction of 3 ranks, 60 trucks, and 4 artillery pieces (Chistyakov’s Eskadrilya, 2/92 1AP, carried out 4.32 combat sorties in two months, claiming 17 tanks, 24 artillery’ pieces, and 730 trucks); and Mladshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Perepelitsa, who was born in the area, and who report­edly put 6 tanks, 4 artillery pieces, and 32 trucks out of commission from August 6 to October 31, while the flight he commanded destroyed 8 tanks, 5 artillery pieces, and 98 trucks in two months.

The race for the Soviet industrial area is illustrative of the entire war situation on the Eastern Front from the fall of 1941 onward. Even if the Luftwaffe crews scored impressive individual achievements, the resources of the attackers were by far insufficient for the enor­
mous and growing tasks. The Red Army, on the other hand, showed an astounding ability to sustain almost any military disaster without losing its ability to per­form a still and effective defense. The entire founda­tion to this lasting ability was laid during the impres­sive shift of the nation’s main industrial area from the Kharkov and the Donets Basin area to the east during this period.

“1 remember these days with pride,” wrote Soviet aircraft designer Aleksandr Yakovlev. “Only three weeks after the arrival of the transported goods, we were able to relaunch serial production. After another three months we were producing more than before in Moscow. Eleven months went bv, and our production % ures were two and a half times greater than prior to the evacuation.”

The preconditions of these large-scale operations were created only through the will to fight to the last—at any cost—displayed by the ground troops and the airmen of

UnterofRzier Alfred Grislawski (r.), shown next to his Bf 109F, Yellow 9, was one of the up and coming aces of 9,/JG 52 who roamed the skies over the Ukraine in the fall of 1941. Grislawski, the son of a miner, is regarded as one of the toughest fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe. During most of his missions in 1941 he flew as the wingman of the famous Leutnant Hermann Graf. Grislawski would survive the war with a total of 133 victories. (Photo: Grislawski.)

the Southwestern Front, immediately after the annihila­tion of the core of this army group at Kiev. Another important factor was the immense performance made in the production lines in the midst of the evacuation. In fact, the production of Yak-1 and LaGG-3 fighters rose from 335 and 322, respectively, during the first six months of 1941 to 1,019 and 1,149, respectively, during the June- to-December period of 1941. Of 1,549 11-2s delivered in 1941, 1,293 were produced after June.

This stamina on the Soviet side had not been antici­pated by Hitler and his generals as they prepared Opera­tion Barbarossa. Of this, historian Heinz A. F. Schmidt wrote: “This fantastic technical performance, which had not been anticipated by the Fascist leadership, was made possible by the massive heroism displayed by Soviet industrial workers. They struggled under grim circum­
stances, with poor food rations, in cold and snow under the open sky, working twelve to fifteen hours each day to resume aircraft production.”39

Total output figures from the Soviet aircraft indus­try during the last six months of 1941 reached 9,780. However impressive this was, losses exceeded output during the first six months of the war with Germany. Even if reinforcements poured in from other parts of the USSR, the number of VVS front-line aircraft dropped considerably from midsummer to fall 1941. Neverthe­less, eventually it would be the Soviet stamina and industrial output that finally put an end to the Third Reich. Thus the battle for the eastern Ukraine, fought with relatively small forces on both sides during the fall of 1941, would prove to be one of the most decisive military campaigns of World War II.

rom the latter half of September 1941, Luftflotte 4 became widely dispersed, engaged on four major battlefields—the annihilation battle at Kiev, the encirclement of Odessa, the offensive by the German Seventeenth Army toward the industrial center of Kharkov, and the somewhat premature offensive against the Crimea. From an operational point of view, this wide dispersement of forces was most unfortunate, but strate­gically it was inevitable.

He who controls the Crimea is master of the Black Sea. It was mainly from the Crimea that the Soviets launched their most disturbing air raids against the Romanian oil fields. Even if these raids had been carried out by weak forces, the threat remained that a reinforce­ment of the units allocated to the air offensive against Romania could lead to severe and lasting damage to the

Romanian oil fields, the main fuel source of the entire Wehrmacht.

As soon as he arrived from the Leningrad sector to assume command of the German Eleventh Army on September 18, General Erich von Manstein attempted to launch a surprise strike against the Crimea, but his air support proved to be totally inadequate. The only Luftwaffe unit fully assigned to support the initial drive toward the Crimea, KG 27, was at one-third of its origi­nal operational strength. The Ju 88 crews of KG 51 were divided among missions against shipping in the Black Sea, against Odessa, and against the Perekop Isthmus. In the chronicle of the latter unit, Wolfgang Dierich wrote: “The weak forces—the Staffeln seldom possessed more than three or four planes—were spread out against numerous targets and with only limited results. . . .

Missions were carried out against road intersections, road junctions, rail lines, and troop columns.”40

Despite heavy losses during the past three months, the Soviets were able to concentrate strong forces in the area fac­ing von Manstein’s force. The units of VVS-Southern Front, and particularly VVS-Black Sea Fleet, would play a deci­sive role in this sector during September and October 1941. On September 18 the Zveno fighter-bombers of 32 IAP/ChF destroyed the Dnieper bridge at Zaporozhye, thus cutting off the Wehrmacht supply lines to the. front, which in turn delayed a German flank­ing attack from the north.

As the spearheads of the Eleventh Army entered the Perekop Isthmus, which connects the Crimea with the mainland, they were subjected to intense air attacks by the 200 fighters and 130 bombers of 62 IAB and 63 BAB of VVS-ChF that were stationed in the Crimea. On September 21 alone, one of the divisions of the Eleventh Army was forced to withstand twenty-two air attacks. Moreover, the He 11 Is of KG 27, committed to difficult low-level attacks against the Soviet ground fortifications, were opposed by aggressive Soviet fighter attacks. I.(J)/LG 2, 11. and IIl./JG 77, responsible for the fighter protection, became involved in large daily air combat. On September 21, twelve Soviet aircraft were claimed shot down, mainly fighters and fighter-bombers.

Contingents of StG 77 were brought in from the Kiev sector, and these wrought havoc on the defense positions on the Perekop Isthmus. But heavy VVS attacks prevented the German ground troops from tak­ing any advantage of this development.

On September 24 the Soviet Ninth and Eighteenth armies opened a counteroffensive with strong air sup­port against the left flank of the German Eleventh Army- northeast of the Perekop Isthmus. All attempts by Gen­eral von Manstein to seize the Crimea in a swift strike failed. Only with difficulty could he prevent his army from being sealed off.

Having fought back the Soviet counterattack, von Manstein made yet another attempt to seize the Perekop Isthmus, on September 26. On that day, German fighter
pilots in this area claimed twenty-seven Soviet aircraft shot down, five of them by Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hackler of IIl./JG 77. On September 30 the deputy’ com­mander of 11 IAP/ChF, Kapitan Ivan Volosevich, who was credited with four aerial victories, was shot down by a pilot of JG 77 on Volosevich’s sixty-ninth combat sortie.

Participating in the aerial clashes on September 30 was Kapitan Ivan Lyubimov’s 5 Eskadrilya/32 IAP/ChF, which was equipped with by far the best Soviet fighter plane of the time, the Yak-1. Upon intercepting a pair of Bf 109s from 4./JG 77 Herzas over the Crimea, Kapitan Lyubimov scored decisive hits on the Messerschmitt of Unteroffizier Julius Dite. Then one of Lyubimov’s pilots, Starshiy Leytenant Mikhail Avdeyev, closed in to deal the final blow. Avdeyev, who would develop into one of the major aces of the VVS-ChF, recalls: “1 approached the descending, burning Me 109 from the side. 1 decided to wait and see if the Fascist would jettison his canopy and bail out. But to my astonishment, having jettisoned the canopy with ease, he pulled up his aircraft slightly and then pushed his stick forward. The machine banked downward. I saw the pilot—tall and slim, dressed in gray overalls—pop out of the cockpit. Hastily, he opened his parachute.”

Julius Dite was taken prisoner and handed over his

Mikhail Avdeyev is one of the most renowned Soviet naval fighter pilots of World War II. Having earned his wings in 1934, Avdeyev was one of the most experienced pilots of the VVS-ChF as the War with Germany broke out. He proved to be an excellent marksman and a most talented unit leader. Piloting a Yak-1 of 32 ІАРЛ/VS-ChF, Starshiy Leytenant Avdeyev was one of the toughest opponents to the Luftwaffe in the air over the Crimea. By the end of the war he had flown 498 sorties, taken part in 141 aerial combats, and earned credit for 17 kills. Avdeyev died on June 22. 1979. (Photo: Seidl.)

pistol, which bore an inscription telling that this was an award for his distinguished feats during the capture of Crete, to his captors. On February 3 this young Austrian perished in a Soviet POW camp. His pistol, however, remains on display in the Central Navy Museum in St. Petersburg.

On October 1, JG 77 took revenge on 32 I. AP/Y’VS – ChF. A large formation of Bf 109s intercepted a ground – attack formation consisting of I-15bis and I-16s from 3 Eskadrilya/32 IAP, led by Kapitan Konstantin Denisov, and the 11-2 Shturmoviks of Kapitan Aleksey Gubriy’s 46 OShAE. Ten Yak-ls of 5./32 IAP, which were pro­viding escort, turned into the Messerschmitts. An uneven combat followed. The Yakovlevs managed to escape without suffering any losses-Starshiy Leytenant Mikhail Avdeyev even managed to shoot down a Bf 109— but they could not prevent the Herzas aces from tearing up the formation of ground-attack aircraft. 3 Eskadrilya/ 32 IAP lost three l-16s, all three Ishaks credited to fighter aces of III./JG 77: Oberleutnant Kurt Lasse, scoring his thirty-eighth victory; Oberleutnant Kurt Ubben, scoring his thirty-ninth; and Feldwebel Robert Helmer, scoring his seventeenth. 11./JG 77 claimed two of 46 OshAE’s Shturmoviks.

Both sides leaped from one crisis to another, continously utilizing their air forces as the decisive fac­tor. Supported by the bulk of Fliegcrkorps V, Panzergruppe 1 turned to the southeast from the area east of Kiev, toward the Sea of Azov, during the last week of September. The plan was to surround and de­stroy the Soviet Southern Front north of the Sea of Azov, between the northern tip of the Crimea and the city of Rostov. Next, Rostov would be captured, opening the gates to the Caucasus oil fields. This sudden armored strike from the north compelled the Soviets to withdraw forces facing the northern flank of the German Elev­enth Army, which in turn enabled the Germans to con­quer most of the Perekop Lsthmus. Nevertheless, further intensified Soviet air attacks halted the Eleventh Army’s advance. The TB-3s of 63 BAB even undertook some Zveno missions in this area. During an attack by 1-16 fighter-bombers launched from two TB-3s escorted by three I-15bis fighters of 8 IAP/VVS-ChF, three German artillery batteries were destroyed.

The entry of Panzergruppe 1, advancing rapidly from the north, created an entirely new strategic situation. A new’ encirclement battle unfolded to the north of the Sea of Azov. The Soviet Ninth and Eighteenth armies found themselves threatened w’ith being sealed off in the Mariupol area, betw-een the Sea of Azov and the Dnieper bend, so all units of VVS-Southem Front were immedi­ately throw’n into action against the spearheads of Panzergruppe 1. Even though VVS-Southern Front could muster only seventy-nine operational fighters, forty-two bombers, and thirteen Il-2s by October 1,41 it managed to use these scarce resources effectively. On October 5, the German High Command noted: “Heavy air attacks against Panzergruppe 1. Reconnaissance missions can only be undertaken with strong fighter escort.”

Although Luftflotte 4 had been released from the Battle of Kiev, its operational area was too vast for the limited available air units. With I. and II. Gruppen pulled out of combat due to severe losses, III. Gruppe of KG 51 was nevertheless still divided among operations over Odessa, over the Black Sea, and against Perekop and the battlefield to the north of the Sea of Azov. KG 55 was concentrated to support the offensive against Kharkov, in the north; and KG 27 was covering the Crimea and the northern shore of the Sea of Azov. The Ju 88 crew’s of KG 54 Totenkopf w’ere rushed between both flanks of Army Group South, used as a flying fire brigade.

Nevertheless, the German tactic of reconcentrating
air units in one area after another provided excellent results. Heavy air raids virtually paralyzed Soviet troops at Dnepropetrovsk and on the railway line from Dnepropetrovsk to Stalino, which removed the threat against the northern flank of Panzergruppe l. Air attacks against the rail lines leading north from Mariupol, Taganrog, and Rostov further delayed the transfer of Soviet troops and materiel.

On October 5 the German ground troops reached Mariupol, where considerable portions of VV’S – Southern Front were stationed. Leytenant Aleksandr Pavlichenko of 210 BBAP describes the panic-stricken situation from the Soviet point of view:

A staff aircraft landed at our airfield and a Polkovnik jumped out, crying: “You who are sit­ting here. The Germans have broken through and are only six kilometers (four miles] away! Hurry up and depart or destroy your planes!" Everybody was up on і heir feet and started running. All ser­viceable aircraft started taking off. Since our Su-2 was damaged I rom a combat mission on the previ­ous day. I helped pilots from other regiments try to set fire to unserviceable planes. But we didn’t know how to do it. Then one soldier put two barrels of gasoline under the w ing of our plane. He opened the barrels and then we threw a torch at the fuel.

The panic was awful. We made it to the main­tenance base at Krasniy Luch. We found several aircraft parked there, mostly U-2 liaison planes, We were informed of the whereabouts of our 210 BBAP and reached our new base in a U-2. We received a warm welcome. Everyone had expected that we had been killed

The Bf 109s of l.(J)./LG 2 and II. and IH./JG 7 shifted to the battle area north of the Sea of Azov, inte fered violently against Soviet aircraft in this area. Starsh Leytenant Aleksandr Pokryshkin of 55 IAP had a ma unpleasant encounter with some of these lighters о October 6. During an armed reconnaissance mission і the company of wingman Leytenant Stepan Komta in MiG-3s armed with RS-82 rockets, Pokryshkin wa bounced by a Schwarm from 1L/JG 77. One of theBi 109s aimed at Komlcv’s MiG, but Pokryshkin cametc his assistance and fired one RS-82 at the enemy plane, This Messerschmitt broke off to evade the rocket, but the German wingman continued the attack on Komley. Without taking notice of the remaining enemy Rotte, Pokryshkin fired his second rocket, which also missed, and then gave the Messerschmitt on Leytenant Komlevy tail a long burst with his machine guns. At that moment a well-aimed burst hit Pokryshkin’s plane.

Aleksandr Pokryshkin managed to bring down his

badly damaged MiG-3 in a no-man’s-land. He was terri­bly shocked and blinded in one eye, but he managed to get out of the cockpit seconds before the Messerschmitt came down to rake the wreck with machine-gun fire. There followed the most terrible week in “Sasha” Pokryshkin’s life. Trapped in the vast no-man’s-land, he managed to join some Soviet soldiers of the scattered Eighteenth Army who planned to reach the Soviet lines in a truck. The fighter ace persuaded them to load his damaged MiG-3 on the truck during the following night. After playing cat-and-mouse with Romanian and Ger­man ground units for several days and nights, the dismal group finally managed to reach Soviet-held territory. Aleksandr Pokryshkin returned to his regiment, but his nerves were in such a bad shape that he was taken off front-line duty for a month.

Support from the Luftwaffe enabled troops from the SS Brigade Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler on October 6 to capture most of the staff of the Soviet Ninth Army. The army commander was able to escape in an aircraft at the last moment. On October 7 the Soviet Eighteenth Army was sealed off north of the Sea of Azov. Three days later, that army ceased to exist. Another sixty-five thou­sand Soviet soldiers marched into German confinement.

Even before this battle was settled, Ill./JG 77 was hurriedly shifted back to Chaplinka and the Perekop area, where the VVS had increased its activity. The
pilots of this unit were immediately involved in large – scale combat with determined Soviet airmen. On Octo­ber 8, Oberleutnant Kurt Lasse, with forty-one victories to his credit and thus the top ace of JG 77 Herzas, was killed in combat with two MiG-3s over the Perekop Isthmus.

On October 9, Soviet airmen made repeated attempts to destroy the Chaplinka Airdrome. This cost them dearly. At the end of the day, Ill./JG 77 had claimed fourteen victories. Oberleutnant Kurt Ubben ran his personal score up to forty-five by shooting down four Pe-2s. The largest air combat of the day resulted in, according to German figures, the destruction of at least nine Soviet aircraft without any German losses. In this battle, 5 Eskadrilya/’ 32 1AP, ChF, suffered heavily; two of its aces, Kapitan Ivan Lyubimov and Mladshiy Leytenant Allakhverdov, were counted among those shot down. With the engine in his Yak-1 hit by a well-aimed burst from a Bf 109, Kapitan Lyubimov belly-landed in friendly territory. But the victorious Bf 109 pilot was determined to finish his kill. The German strafed the downed Yak-1, and a machine-gun round tore off one-third of Lyubimov’s left chin.

In his combat report from this day, Serzhant Nikolayev of 5./32 IAP, ChF (who also was shot down by a Bf 109), described how Mladshiy Leytenant Allakhverdov was lost: “Having belly-landed in the Munus-Tatarskiy region, I saw three Me 109s chasing
my flight commander, Allakhverdov, at treetop level. In the air above Kir-Aktachi his aircraft burst into flames. He made a vertical climb, fell down over the wing, and tore into the ground. Both man and machine perished in the flames.”42

At this point, the commander of WS-Southern Front directed the bulk of his units, including two 11-2 regi­ments, 4 ShAP and 210 ShAP, to attack the left flank of the newly redesignated First Panzer Army. After the disastrous annihilation of the Soviet Eighteenth Army, there were only weak and dispersed Red Army units available to defend the road to Rostov. The Soviet air­men were called in to delay the advance of the German tank army while a new defensive position was being established along the Mius River west of Rostov.

On October II, at least three hundred sorties were carried out against the SS Brigade Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. Intercepting these raids, II./JG 77 claimed four Soviet bombers and one MiG-3, but Oberfeldwebel Rudolf Schmidt was shot down and wounded shortly after achiev­ing his thirty-third kill.

The next day, the bombers of Fliegerkorps IV mounted an extensive series of raids against Soviet air­fields north of the Sea of Azov and in the Crimea. At just one Crimean air base, the Luftwaffe bombers reported twelve aircraft destroyed on the ground.

Even if pressure from the air was mounting, adverse weather conditions became the main obstruction to the German offensive toward Rostov. Heavy rain showers suddenly turned the roads in the area into quagmires. What the Luftwaffe had carried out against the Soviet supply system was dealt to the Germans by the weather. The columns transporting supplies to Army Group South hundreds of miles on nothing but dirt roads were succes­sively stuck in deep mud. With inadequate supplies and while sustaining intense pressure from the air, the ad­vance of the First Panzer Army slowed to a snail’s pace.

Shortages in fuel and spare parts caused the number of sorties by Luftwaffe units in this area to plummet. These shortages particularly affected the twin-engine bomber units.

Despite the weather and the shortages, the few avail­able fighters in the Jagdgruppen committed to the Mius – Rostov area—I.(J)/LG 2 and II./JG 77—nevertheless took a heavy toll on the raiding Soviet aircraft. On October 14 the Germans reported sixteen Soviet aircraft downed, plus seven by AAA.43 Counted among the Soviet victims

Gordon Mac Gollob is one of the most controversial unit leaders of the German Fighter Arm in World War II. He was known as a harsh commander and was not popular among all his subordinates, but in contrast to other ambitious fighter aces who cared little about their wingmen, Gollob only lost one wingman—without any personal fault—during all of his 340 combat missions. On September 18, 1941, he was awarded with the Knight’s Cross for forty-two victories, and by the time he received the Oak Leaves on October 26, his tally had risen to eighty-five. Ten months later Gollob became the first fighter pilot to reach the 150-victory level. Following that achievement, Gollob served in staff positions and ended the war as the third and last inspector of the Fighter Arm. Gordon Gollob passed away in Solingen, Germany, on September?, 1987. (Photo: Gollob.)

were the commander of an Eskadrilya in 551AP, Starshiy Leytenant Konstantin Ivachyov, and his wingman. The next day, the two Jagdgruppen claimed thirteen Soviet aircraft, without loss.44 During a single combat with a Bf 109 Rotte near Taganrog on October 15, 55 IAP lost yet another of its veterans, Leytenant Kuzma Seliverstov, credited with five personal and two collective victories. Farther to the west, in the skies over the Perekop Isth­mus, Oberleutnant Wolf-Dietrich Huy, the Staffelkapitan of 7./JG 77, scored his twentieth victory on October 16 when he downed two 1-153s and a DB-3.

The disturbing Soviet dominance in this area com­pelled the Germans to shift air units from other sectors.

Il./JG 3, commanded by an ambitious fighter ace, Hauptmann Gordon Gollob, was moved from the cen­tral combat zone to cover renewed attacks on Perekop on October 18. Gollob had made his reputation during the July-to-September air battles over the Ukraine, in which he raised his score from seven to forty-eight. Known as a hard-core Nazi and a harsh commander, Gollob was quite unpopular. Even if some of his subordinates thought he was “picking mainly easy targets” in the air, Gollob alone would play a significant role during the battle for air superiority over the Crimea.

At dawn on October 18, Hauptmann Gollob shot down two MiG-3 fighters, his personal victories sixty – two and sixty-three. Again, at about 1000 hours, he claimed five MiG-3s in a single combat. And finally, in the afternoon, he destroyed two more MiG-3s, a total of nine MiG-3s for the day. In total this day, Il./JG 3 and HL/JG 77 claimed eighteen aerial kills. While the fighter pilots sent one Soviet aircraft after another burning to
the ground, bombers and dive-bombers from both Fliegerkorps IV and Fliegerkorps V fell upon the Soviet ground positions and supply lines in the Crimea.

Withal, the Luftwaffe’s considerable efforts in the southern regions proved to be inadequate. While some Soviet bomber and fighter-bomber formations were ripped apart by Bf 109s, others slipped through and forced the attacking ground troops to keep their heads down. The Soviet airmen even managed to strike hard against the Jagdgruppen themselves. During the dark hours early on the morning of October 19, a Pe-2 regiment, heavily laden with bombs, took off from its airfield. The Petlaykovs flew at treetop level straight toward Chaplinka, north of the Perekop Isthmus, where they carried out a surprise attack just before sunrise. The falling bombs were con­centrated across the runway. Partly as a result of this telling raid, the Red fliers were in almost total control of the air over Perekop for the next two days.

Drawing a conclusion on the first phase of the Battle of the Crimea, Oberst Hermann Plocher, of Fliegerkorps V, wrote:

The Russians employed their air forces—actually for the first time in a point of main effort—over the narrow, completely level, steppelike isthmus. The treeless and bushlcss terrain offered no cover for the attacking troops of the Eleventh Army against the continous attacks by very strong Soviet bomber and ground-attack units. General von Manstein, commanding the Eleventh Army, stated that the Soviet Air Force dominated the sky, and with its bombers and fighters attacked every target sighted….

Low-level attacks by Soviet ground-attack planes, and medium-level attacks by Soviet con­ventional bombers, were carried out around the clock against German infantry, which was wearily fighting its way through the numerous, fortified defense lines. At night, Soviet air attacks succeeded in penetrating far behind the German front lines.45

During an entire month, the weakened Soviet Army and Navy air forces had shown evidence of an effective striking capacity for raiding German ground troops. Soviet sources claim 104 tanks, 700 trucks, fifty-four armored cars, eight infantry battalions, ten motorcycle columns, ten bridges, forty’ artillery pieces, and twenty – four antiaircraft guns destroyed by the air forces in the southern sector during twenty days in October 1941. Nevertheless, the price paid for these achievements had been extremely high. Even if reinforcements poured in from all sides, the WS units in the region were worn down at a frightening pace.

With increasing demands from the Moscow sector, where the new German offensive had created a serious crisis, the defense of the Crimea lost out in priority. In mid-October it was evident that the Crimea could not hold out much longer. Hence, preparations for the de­fense of the vital port of Sevastopol were strengthened.

To Hitler and his generals, it was evident that they had miscalculated, not least about Soviet endurance and the geographical and nature-related limitations on war­fare in the Soviet heartland. Problems related to both these factors would grow to immense proportions dur­ing the following months.

days of the war was met in the southern combat zone, where the first mission of Luftflotte 4 was to attack and destroy the Soviet Air Force in this area. Fliegerkorps V—with the Bf 109s of JG 3 as the main fighter unit – operated on the northern (left) flank. Fliegerkorps IV— to which the Bf 109s of JG 77 and I.(J)/LG 2 w’ere assigned—was given the task of achieving air superiority on the Soviet-Romanian front.

Stalin had concentrated the strongest defense forces and the best equipment in this area. At the same time, this was the sector given the lowest priority by Hitler. Here the Soviet early warning system worked much bet­ter than farther to the north. The NKVD border troops were alerted and offered frantic resistance. The entire area was covered with dense forests and crisscrossed with numerous rivers and creeks. On top of this, most roads here were in even worse shape than those to the north.

While the VVS on the central combat zone was more or less paralyzed on June 23 by the crippling blows dealt by the Luftwaffe on the first day of the war, the Soviet Air Force in the southern combat zone managed to main­tain a high level of activity, mainly due to the quality of the air force commanders in this area. On the first day of the war, General-Mayor Yevgeniy Ptukhin, commander of VVS-КОVO/Southwestern Front, had instructed his bomber and ground-attack units to concentrate all efforts against the advancing enemy columns and the airfields of the enemy. The fighter regiments received orders to protect the Soviet troops at the front from Luftwaffe attacks.

The advancing German troops found that all bridges across the rivers in the border area had been blown up by the retreating Soviets, and as soon as the Germans constructed new bridges, Soviet aircraft arrived in scores to destroy them.

“Ivan came buzzing in huge masses” according to Hauptmann Hans von Hahn, who flew with T./JG 3 over the spearheads of Panzergruppe 1 during the first days of the war. I./JG 3 was credited with the destruc­tion of nineteen enemy aircraft, all SB – and DB-3 bomb­ers, in the air on June 23 alone.

Nowhere did the Luftwaffe encounter as strong opposition in the air as did Fliegerkorps IV on the So­viet-Romanian border. Of 827 first-line aircraft in WS-

Odessa Military District/Southcrn Front, more than one hundred were MiG-3 fighters. In this area some of the most skillful VVS fighter pilots were active. Noteworthy were Starshiy Leytenants Aleksandr Pokryshkin and Anatoliy Morozov and Kapitans Petr Kozachenko and Afanasiy Karmanov.

Having shot down a Soviet Su-2 bomber on the first day of the war, Starshiy Leytenant Pokryshkin, of 55 TAP, claimed his first “real” aerial victory against a Bf 109 on June 23.

That day, twenty Bf 109s of Stab and II./JG 77 attacked the Soviet airfields in the Kishinev area in Soviet-occupied Moldavia. They claimed eight aircraft destroyed on the ground and were involved in a diffi­cult fight with the MiG-3s of 4 IAP. Карі tan Afanasiy Karmanov, a squadron leader in 4 IAP, claimed to have shot down three Bf 109s in this combat. Karmanov, who was one of the most experienced Soviet test pilots, had achieved his first two victories (a Ju 88 and a Bf 109) on the previous day. At most, one of his claims can he veri­fied with German loss records—the Bf 109 piloted by Fcldvvcbcl Hans lllncr of 4./JG 77.

Having landed at Revaka Airfield in the vicinity for refueling his aircraft, Karmanov saw four Bf 109s approaching the airfield. Immediately, almost without fuel and ammunition, he trxrk off and attacked them. He was shot down and hailed out, but his parachute did not open and he fell to a certain death. Possi­bly this brave pilot fell victim to Ill./JG 77!s Oberleutnant Kurt Lasse, who claimed his fourth victory.

Over the same area, 249 lAP’s Kapitan Petr Kozachenko, one of the most: experienced Soviet fighter pilots, with fifteen victories over Japanese and Finnish aircraft, also scored his first vic­tory in the Russo-German war on June 23. Intercepting twelve Нс 112B fighters of the Romanian FARR ’s Grupul 5 Vanatoare that attempted to raid Bolgrad southern Moldavia, Kozachenko, who was leading a forma­tion of seven 1-І 53s, shot down the He 112 piloted by Adjutant Aviator Anghel Codnit before leading his group home without losses.2 ’

Meanwhile, the Soviet DBA and the

air force of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet (ChF) subjected Germany’s ally Roma­nia to the heaviest Soviet strategic bomb­ing raids made during the entire war.

These raids were nevertheless flown un­der very primitive conditions, with inad­equate planes, poor navigation equip­ment, and ill-aimed bombing. The port of Constanta was the main target.

Locotenent Aviator Horia Agarici of FARR’s Escadrila 53, equipped with Hur­ricane fighters, managed to down three DB-3s out of a force of seventy-three SBs and DB-3s that raided Constanta on June 23. The next day the Soviets fared better during the first raid of the day, in which eighteen SBs and eighteen DB-3s were able to drop 178 bombs over the airfield and oil fields at Constanta without loss.

Attempting to follow up this success later that day, a formation of thirty-two SBs and DB-3s lost ten bombers, nine of them to the Bf 109s of III./JG 52.

On June 24,55 IAP’s Starshiy Leytenant Pokryshkin was in “hot air” again, scoring his second “German” vic­tory, yet another Bf 109, possibly piloted by 1I./JG 77’s Feldwebel Otto Kohler, who was killed in the air above the Soviet-Romanian border area in the vicinity of Iasi.

Starshiy Leytenant Konstantin Oborin of 146 IAP achieved the first nocturnal taran of the war during the night of June 24-25. While in the vicinity of Odessa, Starshiy Leytenant Oborin slammed his MiG-3 into a He 111 of 4./KG 27. The Heinkel went down over Soviet – held territory, but a second aircraft of the same Staffel landed close to the crash site, picked up the surviving and unhurt crewmen, and left for home before any Soviet soldiers appeared. The seriously injured MiG pilot managed to land his crippled fighter, but he died from his injuries on August 18, 1941.24

Even if they were encountering the best the VVS could field, the units of Luftflotte 4 proved to be vastly superior in the air. On June 25, a Schwarm of four Bf 109s led by Oberleutnant Walter Hoeckner of I1./JG 77 ran into a formation of twelve SB bombers escorted by the MiG-3s of 55 IAP. When the combat was over, ten SBs had been destroyed, of which Oberleutnant Hoeckner had lagged eight. Devastating blows were dealt to the Soviet Air Force on the ground even in this area.

Between June 22 and June 25, Fliegerkorps V on the left flank alone was credited with destroying 774 Soviet air­craft on the ground and 136 in the air.

After June 25, the main task of Fliegerkorps V was shifted from air-base raids to tactical support of the Ger­man Sixth Army and Panzergruppe 1 in the drive on Kiev. This was particularly important because Generaloberst Ewald von Kleist’s Panzergruppe 1 had run into large numbers of Soviet T-34 and KV tanks that effectively blocked any further German progress in the Novograd Volynskiy region, halfway to Kiev. The tank battle would last almost a week. Here the Soviets managed to achieve local superiority on the ground. The Germans were able to hold out only due to Fliegerkorps V. Covering the sky above the troops of Panzergruppe 1, JG 3 and I.(J)/LG 2 claimed to have shot down more than a hundred Soviet aircraft, the majority of them DB – 3 and SB bombers, during two days of large-scale air battles on June 25 and June 26. With one of the six Bf 109s downed in these battles, Hauptmann Lothar Keller, the twenty-victory ace commanding I1./JG 3, was lost.

On the Soviet-Romanian border, the MiG-3 pilots of Mayor Viktor Ivanov’s 55 LAP experienced a dishearten­ing struggle—as was the case with all Soviet front-line aviation units during this period. On June 26, Starshiy Leytenant Pokryshkin claimed two Hs 126 reconnais­sance aircraft (or, according to another source, one Hs 126 and one PZL P.24) in the Beltsy region, but he lost

his wingman, Mladshiy Leytenant Petr Dovbnya. On the following day, six MiG-3s, led by Mayor Ivanov, attacked a lone Hs 126. The regimental commander shot up the Henschel, but while attempting to finish off the flaming airplane, Ivanov’s wingman crashed and was killed.

The five remaining MiGs strafed an enemy truck column in the same area and suddenly were jumped by eight Bf 109s of II./JG 77. Pokryshkin turned to meet the enemy, but he found that none of his comrades had followed him; Mayor Ivanov and the rest simply escaped! The German fighter pilots split into two groups, four planes pursuing Ivanov’s fleeing formation and four entering com­bat with the lone MiG-3. Having failed in his first attack, Pokryshkin made a quick half loop and sought refuge in a thick cloud. Coming out of the cloud, he was lucky to find one Bf 109 diving just
in front of him. The Soviet ace pulled out of his dive and fired at the “Messer" from short distance. In the next second, tracers came whistling close to his own aircraft. Only by using all his skills, Pokryshkin managed to evade the attack­ing Messerschmitts during the following minutes. Realizing that this “Ivan" was too much for them—or simply because they were running out of fuel—the Bf 109s finally disengaged.

Returning to the airfield, Pokryshkin learned that one MiG-3 of Ivanov’s group had been shot up and force-landed. In 5./JG 77, Feldwehel Rudolf Schmidt claimed one MiG-3 as his fifteenth victory.

Shortly afterward, as a formation of enemy bombers approached Kishinev, Pokryshkin, Mladshiy Leytenant Leonid Diyachenko, and Mladshiy Leytenant Nikolay Lukashevich scrambled in the three MiG-3s that remained serviceable. They spotted seven Ju 88s, of which Pokryshkin and Diyachenko each shot down one. Then they were in turn bounced by four Bf 109s. Sasha Pokryshkin managed to escape, but Diyachenko was shot down, probably by Unteroffizier Hans Esser of 5./JG 77. Lukashevich re-

turned to base with the claim of one Bf 109. 5./JG 77’s Unteroffizier Loy made a successful forced landing near Iasi.

During the first week of the war, Aleksandr Pokryshkin claimed to have shot down six enemy air­craft-three Bf 109s, one Ju 88, and two Hs 126s. Unfor­tunately, all the 55 IAP documents were lost during the retreat, and most of these claims were never officially registered.

Having flown a number of raids against Constanta during the first days of the war, the Soviet bombers expanded their target list to include Bucharest and Iasi. Lacking fighter cover and performed mainly by the vulnerable SB bombers, these raids were tantamount to suicide.

On June 26, a large bomber formation attempted to cover a warship raid against the Romanian coast. During the approach flight the Soviet bombers were intercepted by Bf 109s from 8./JG 52 and III./JG 77. Each of the eight pilots of 1U./JG 77 participating in this combat returned to base with claims, including Leutnant Emil Omert and Oberfeldwebel Reinhold Schmetzer, who each
claimed five. The Staffelkapitan of 8./JG 52, Oberleutnant Gdnther Rail, comments: “It was a very – easy game, since the Russian bombers appeared without any fighter cover.”2:> In total, the Soviets registered nine bombers lost, all SBs from 40 BAP/ChF. In addition, the flotilla leader Moskva was sunk by a mine, and coast artillery damaged the flotilla leader Kharkov.

In the context of strategic air raids, the Romanian FARR carried out one of the most decisive strategic bomb­ing missions in history during these days. On June 26, 1941, three P.37 Los bombers of the Romanian Grupul 4 Bombardament were sent on an ultrasecret mission: Posing as “Soviet” planes, they dropped thirty 50-pound bombs on the Hungarian town of Kosice with the inten­tion of provoking Hungary to declare war on the USSR. Thirty-two people were killed and 280 injured.26 The sinister planning is revealed by the fact that one unexploded bomb (intentionally unarmed?) carried wTit – ings in Russian. The plot worked, and Hungary joined the war on the German side. On only the next day, the first sorties were flown by the Hungarian Air Force (Magyar Kiralyi Honved Legiero) against the Soviet

city of Stanislav, north of the Hungarian border.

Magyar Кігйіуі Honved Legiero con­sisted of 530 combat aircraft, mainly rela­tively obsolescent models. One Fiat CR.42 from Fighter Squadron 2/3 was shot down during Hungary’s first day at war.

The pilot, Sergeant Laszlo Bardossy, was captured by the Soviets.

This action provoked a limited Soviet air raid against the Hungarian rail­way station at Csap two days later. The CR.42 fighters of Captain Zoltan Kiss’s Fighter Squadron 2/3 rose to intercept and claimed three SBs out of an attack­ing force of seven.

Meanwhile, the medium-bomber units of Fliegerkorps V—KG 51, KG 54, and KG 55—were involved in continous low-level attacks against the strong Soviet tank forces that blocked the way of Panzergruppe 1 on the road to Kiev. Other mis­sions were flown against Soviet reinforcements in the rear. This resulted in the decisive delay of the Soviet XV Mechanized Corps. On June 26 the corps headquarters
was hit by an air attack in which the commander, Gen­eral-Mayor Ignat Karpezo, was badly wounded.

Between June 22 and June 30 the Luftwaffe claimed to have destroyed 201 tanks in the southern combat zone, mainly in front of Panzergruppe 1. This onslaught finally permitted the German ground forces to break

through. On June 30 the Stavka decided to pull back the Southwestern Front.

The first nine days of the war in the southern com­bat zone had revealed that even the best forces the Sovi­
ets could field were not comparable to the qualitative force of the Wehrmacht. The most decisive part was played by the Luftwaffe, which had put large parts of the WS out of action on the ground, shot down scores

The high losses sustained by the Luftwaffe during the first phase of the war on the Eastern Front had not been anticipated by the German commanders. Seen in this photo are four damaged Bf 109s waiting to be transported to be refurbished by the aircraft industry in Germany. (Photo: Grislawski.)

of the modern MiG fighters, and made any serious Soviet attempt to hold a defense line impossible. Among such grievous losses, WS-Southem Front registered fifty- eight of its new MiG-3 fighters lost between June 22 and July l.2′ At the same time, the inabilities of the Soviet “strategic” bombers stood clear. The first air raids against Romania had been disasters, although only weak fighter forces opposed the attackers. Only due to a later radical change in tactics were the Soviets able to continue these raids on a scale larger than a nuisance level.

After only two weeks, victory seemed to be in sight for Hitler. But to those who knew the Soviet Union, things looked different. Hitler’s Luftwaffe had played a major part in inflicting unprecedented losses on the Red Army. But air strategists were already raising their voices in warning. Not only had the number of serviceable Ger­man aircraft at the front fallen dramatically—by June 30, the operational strength of the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front had dropped to 960 aircraft—it could also be clearly seen that the Luftwaffe was becoming little more than a complement to the army.

In general, the main doctrine of the Luftwaffe was tactical and operational—to act in immediate support of the Blitzkrieg ground forces. This had been one of the most important keys to the rapid victories over Poland in 1939, France in 1940, and the Balkans in the spring of 1941. This Blitzkrieg doctrine also was a dominant reason for the German success during the initial stages of Operation Barbarossa. But as the German Army con­tinued its march into the Soviet Union, increasing losses in combination with the vast operational area soon created a situation in which the strung-out German divisions became totally dependent on close support from the air. At the same time, the daily rate in attrition caused a rapid decrease of the number of aircraft available to the Luftwaffe combat units. After only a few days, the medium bombers—originally intended to strike at supply columns, airfields, bridges, and other targets in the enemy’s rear—had to be used in close-support missions in the immediate front-line zone. With this, the Luftwaffe was gradually reduced more or less to what can be described as a “flying artillery” force. This in turn badly affected the ability of the Germans to isolate the Soviet front lines from the rear area, not to mention that it obviated any strategic bombing missions.

In 1941 the Germans were ill prepared to sustain the losses inflicted by the tenacious Soviet resistance. After nine days of war, 699 German aircraft, including 286 bombers, had been lost. It is highly remarkable that the Soviet claims during the same period—613 German air­craft shot down by fighters and 49 by AAA—are so close to the actual Luftwaffe losses.28 While this process of attrition continued, the Soviets manufactured the mass quantities of war equipment that would eventually bring down Hitler’s Third Reich.

n mid-October 1941, overextended supply lines and inadequate replacements deprived the Wehrmacht of much of the striking capacity it had enjoyed in the previous four months. On top of this came the difficul­ties created by the almost impassably muddy roads. At this point the major offensive along the entire Eastern Front had withered to a number of restricted advances of limited scope.

With respect to Army Group North, the objective had shrunk to merely strangling Leningrad. For this pur­pose, during the latter half of October an offensive was launched across the Volkhov River, which connects Lake Ladoga with Lake Ilmen. The goal of this operation was the city of Tikhvin, on the main supply road to the Soviet forces holding the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. If achieved, a decisive strike would also be dealt against the DBA transport aircraft force charged with supplying Leningrad from the air. Despite the destruction of many of these transport planes, the fighters of JG 54 had failed to put an end to this small but crucial aerial supply line.

KG 77, Ill./JG 54, and a reconnaissance Staffel were assigned to support the impending German ground offensive. Assembled into Luftwaffenkommando Tichwin and commanded by Oberst Hans-Joachim Raithel, these units managed to pave the way for the German XXXIX Panzer Corps through stiff resistance in dense fir forests.

On the Soviet side, slightly more than a hundred aircraft of VVS-Leningrad Front (of which seventy-three were operational on October 17) were assembled at air­fields near Tikhvin and Volkhov in order to counter the German offensive. Later these units were reinforced by 2 RAG from the Stavka reserve. Even though the Bf

109s of 1II./JG 54 maintained air superiority, this Soviet aerial force managed to disrupt the advance on the ground with “small, but often very troublesome attacks upon the divisions, the bridge sites, headquarters, and rear supply services. They were usually carried out in low-level flight by three to five twin-engine aircraft.”1 Also, while con­ducting low-level close-support missions of their own, the Ju 88s of Luftwaffenkommando Tichwin were sub­jected to fierce ground fire, w’hich resulted in severe losses.

Hauptmann Dietrich Peltz, commander of I1./KG 77 and one of the most successful German bomber pilots, responded sharply to the increasingly difficult situ­ation: “Almost the entire generation of prewar-trained officers was lost in combat. The loss rate in the bomber units increased with each month. Unrest started spread­ing, first of all among the most experienced young offic­ers. Hauptmann Peltz spoke out with the commanding general. He mentioned the urgent need for some particu­lar changes, including personnel changes, but mainly the need for a change in tactics. Peltz’s frankness led to his dismissal from first-line service at the end of October.”2

German troubles aside, it was the battered aviation units in the Soviet Northwestern Zone that took the worst punishment. On October 29 the Soviets lost another of their precious fighter aces in the air over Leningrad. On that day a group of Soviet fighters led by Kapitan Leonid Grekov’s 169 1AP was scrambled to intercept an incom­ing German air raid. The opposing forces clashed right
over the burning city. Kapitan Grekov was able to claim two victories, while Starshiy Leytenant Krasnogub and Leytenant Kovalyov claimed other Ger­man aircraft. Luftflotte 1 recorded the loss of five aircraft—four Ju 88s of KG 1 and KG 77 and one Bf 109 of l./JG 54. Just as the combat was drawing to a close, a Schwarm of Bf 109s attacked Grekov from behind. His fighter in flames, Grekov bailed out but was killed by a machine-gun burst from one of the Bf 109s as he hung in his harness. Kapitan Leonid Grekov, who was credited with four individual and ten group victories, was named a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously.

The next day, October 30, it was the turn of one of the most famous Griinherz pilots to be shot down. During a free-hunting mission over the Volkhov River, the Staffclkapitan of 9./JG 54, Oberleutnant Hans-Ekkehard Bob, encountered an 1-16. Closing in from behind and certain that he w’ould score his thirty-eighth victory in seconds, Oberleutnant Bob saw the 1-16 make a swift 180-degree turn. In the next moment, Bob’s Bf 109 caught the full burst from the I – 16’s guns. Hit in the radiator, the Bf 109 was doomed. Oberleutnant Bob made a belly landing behind enemy lines—for the second time during the Eastern Front cam­paign. He was fortunate to evade capture in the dense forests and marshlands, and he eventually managed to reach the German lines.

One week later, Oberleutnant Bob was back in the air again. This was on November 6, as the Soviets at­tempted to prevent a major Luftwaffe raid against Leningrad. During the week preceding the celebration of the Russian Revolution, on November 7, Generaloberst Alfred Keller had instructed the bombers of Luftflotte 1 to drop leaflets over Leningrad, “the cradle of the Revo­lution,” with promises to celebrate the anniversary with large-scale bombing raids. The command of VVS – Leningrad Front decided to forestall these raids with heavy strikes against the German bomber bases. When aerial reconnaissance reported a concentration of forty Ju 88s, thirty-one Bf 109s, and four transport planes at Siverskaya Airdrome, an order was issued to 174 ShAP and 125 BBAP, equipped with II-2s and Pe-2s

respectively, to launch an attack in three waves against the base.

Major Hannes Trautloft recalled that the raid came totally unexpected. Led by Kapitan Sergey Polyakov, a veteran from the Spanish Civil War and the Winter War, the Shturmoviks of 174 ShAP claimed the destruction of eleven enemy planes on the ground. KG 77 and KGr 806 registered seven Ju 88s lost, and a large part of the fuel depot was burned down. The scrambling Bf 109s claimed two Soviet airplanes shot down. With the first, the total score of JG 54 reached fifteen hundred. The other was filed as Oberleutnant Bob’s thirty-eighth personal victory.

Mladshiy Leytenant Anatoliy Panfilov’s 174 ShAP 11-2 was missing in this attack. In fact, Panfilov bailed out over enemy-held territory and was killed in an exchange of fire with Ger­man soldiers.

The Soviet air-base raid could not prevent Generaloberst Keller from carry­ing out his threat, although the forces at his disposal were too weak to completely fulfill the promise of a large-scale raid.

Vera Inber, who survived the siege of Leningrad, wrote in her diary on Novem­ber 7: “Outside the night was pitch-dark and we could hear the sound of sirens, the antiaircraft fire and aircraft engines in the darkness….”

Following a bitter struggle, Tikhvin fell into German hands on November 10. In conjunction with the fall of Tikhvin, the small air transport fleet aiding Leningrad was also lost.

With the completion of this event, exhaustion on both sides froze the Leningrad front in place. In the besieged city, the worst starvation set in.

Another blow to the weakened Soviet air units of VVS-Leningrad Front was dealt on the last day of November, when three Bf 109s of JG 54 shot down and killed Starshiy Leytenant Luka Muravitskiy of 127 LAP. At the time of
his death, Muravitskiy was among the most successful Soviet fighter aces. On October 22, he had been recog­nized as a Hero of the Soviet Union for achieving four­teen personal and collective victories.

The air war on the northern sector of the Eastern Front between June and November 1941 was character­ized by both a vast qualitative superiority and limited resources on the German side. In aerial combat the Bf 109s were peerless. Between June 22 and November 8,

1941, JG 54 Granherz claimed more than eleven hun­dred kills against approximately seventy Bf 109s shot down (including forced landings) and twenty-seven pilots lost.5

The chronic lack of close-support air units in Fliegerkorps 1 had compelled the commander of Luftflotte 1, Generaloberst Alfred Keller, to divert large portions of his twin-engine bombers to costly low-level attacks in the immediate vicinity of the front. As has been demon­strated, this makeshift tactic resulted in heavy losses and caused discord among the bomber crews.

KG 77 had taken a particularly heavy beating, regis­tering seventy Ju 88s shot down between June 22 and October 31.4 Despite having suffered almost equal losses, morale remained high in JG 54, mainly due to the large victory toll it achieved. The two other Geschwader in Fliegerkorps 1, KG 1 and KG 76, registered thirty-nine and fifty-three Ju 88s shot down or lost due to other causes, respectively, between June 22 and October ЗІ.’ Thus Fliegerkorps I registered a total of roughly 250 aircraft shot down or lost due to other causes during combat missions through October 31, 1941. To these losses should be added those of Fliegerkorps VIII, in the northern combat zone, and of Fliegerfiihrer Ostsee. Nevertheless, the total number of Luftwaffe combat losses in the northern combat zone from the period June to October 1941 did not exceed 400.

The temporary’ shift of the close-support command,

Fliegerkorps VIII, to this area had improved the situa­tion. The Stukas and Zerstorer of this command played a decisive role in breaching the Soviet fortifications along the Luga River, which enabled Army Group North to reach the outskirts of Leningrad.

Nevertheless, due to the combat attrition in combi­nation with overextended lines of supply, the operational strength of both Fliegerkorps I and Fiegerkorps VIII diminished rapidly, with the result that the striking power of the air forces became diffused among multiple tasks along the front line. Tremendous blows were dealt the Soviets, such as the attacks against Kronstadt, wherever Luftwaffe planes were present in force, but in other areas, reinforced Red Army forces increased pressure on the exhausted German ground troops. Following the with – drawal of Fliegerkorps VIII, Luftflotte 1 in practice shifted to the defensive. The Tikhvin operation in October and November 1941 was the last offensive effort by Army Group North during Operation Barbarossa.

On the Soviet side, the air forces in the Northwest­ern Zone were led by perhaps the most able VVS com­mander during the entire war, General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov. Under his command, Red aviation displayed great skill in adapting to new situations. There is no doubt that the incessant Soviet pressure from the air markedly delayed the German offensive toward Leningrad, even if it was at a terrible cost to participating Soviet airmen.

n the northern combat zone, Luftflotte 1 had crippled WS-Northwestern Front badly during the fateful days in June. Records reveal that between June 22 and June 30, WS-Northwestern Front lost 425 aircraft during combat missions, 465 destroyed on the ground, and 187 with serious battle damage. Out of 403 SB bombers at hand on June 22, 205 had been shot down, 148 destroyed on the ground, and 33 damaged by June 30. Fighter losses included 1101-153s, 81 I-16s, and 17 MiG – 3s in the air.1

By July 1 the German Army Group North had reached Daugava River, which cuts Latvia in half, on a broad front and was prepared to launch a major offen­sive across the river. All Soviet attempts to halt the enemy at this point were futile. A renewed Soviet effort to coun­terattack, involving strong tank forces, was stymied by heavy air attacks undertaken by the medium bombers of Fliegerkorps I and about forty’ Bf 110 Zerstorern of ZG 26, recently brought in to Daugavpils from Luftflotte 2. More than 250 tanks were reportedly destroyed.

As the bomber units of the Northwestern Front, the WS of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet (KBF) and the DBA’s 1 BAK allocated to this sector were heavily damaged, the Stavka ordered the air force of the Northern Front (located along the Finnish border and in the Leningrad sector) to deploy strong bomber forces against the Ger­man Panzergruppe 4. Shifted from Staraya Russa to the Velikaya sector, 2 SAD carried out the first raids against Daugavpils on July 1. Due to intense antiaircraft fire the operations met only limited success. 1I./JG 53 claimed ten and JG 54 claimed two victories on this day.

Early the next morning, Panzergruppe 4 attacked

from its bridgeheads east of the Daugava River and ad­vanced in a northwesterly direction toward the old Rus­sian border. The bomber units of WS-Northem Front were slow to fulfill their new mission to interdict the Daugava crossings, and heavy rains and low cloud ceil­ings hampered much of the planned air activity on July 2. Nevertheless, JG 54 claimed twelve victories in this area alone.

One of the Soviet planes brought down by the Grunherz fighters was the SB piloted by Starshiy Leytenant Pavel Markutsa of 44 SBAP, VVS-Northern Front. While on a reconnaissance mission west of the Daugava River, Markutsa’s lone bomber was bounced by five Bf 109s. The tail gunner claimed to have shot down one of the enemy fighters but w’as immediately after­ward thrown out of his cabin by a large explosion caused by a full salvo of 15mm shells hitting the fuselage and wings. With the fragile Tupolev bomber on fire, the pi­lot decided to force-land behind enemy lines. Leaving his dead navigator in the cockpit of the crashed and burning bomber, Markutsa managed to make contact with a large group of Red Army soldiers of 749 Rifle Regiment, which had been left behind enemy lines during the retreat. Fol­lowing five days of repeated skirmishes with enemy troops in the area, the Soviet bomber pilot and 312 of 749 Rifle Regiment’s soldiers managed to break through to the Soviet lines. Two weeks later, Markutsa was awarded with the Golden Star as a Hero of the Soviet Union. Back in action, he would not survive the year.

At this point the Soviet air commanders in this sec­tor encountered the same problems with widely dispersed units that their German counterparts soon would run into. With the entrance of Finland into the war on the German side on June 25, WS-Northem Front had to divert some of its units, including 5 SAD and 41 BAD— both from WS Twenty-third Army—to the Gulf of Fin­land, considerably weakening opposition to Luftflotte 1 in the air.

The cream of 13 1AP/KBF—4 Eskadrilya and part of 1 Eskadrilya, supplemented by Kapitan Aleksy Antonenko and Leytenant Petr Brinko of the regimen­tal staff—formed an aviation group assigned the task of providing the beleaguered garrison at Hanko with air support. Situated at the northwestern mouth of the gulf, the naval base of Hanko had been conquered by the Soviets after the Winter War. To neutralize this strategic point was a common interest of the Finns and the Ger-

Thirty-year-old Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko of 13IAP/KBF was one of tie most skillful Soviet fighter pilots when the war broke out. As a former flight trainer he participated as a fighter pilot against the Japanese at Khalkhin-Gol, where he achieved six shared victories. He was awarded with the Order of Lenin during the Winter War against Finland. On the morning of June 23,1941, Antonenko arrived at 13 IAP/KBF at Laksberg near the Estonian capital, Tallinn, as a pilot inspector. During lunch a Ju 88 reconnaissance plane appeared over Laksberg. Antonenko quickly scrambled without his flight cap or parachute and managed to shoot it down, thus scori ng the KB F’s first victory of the war. According to a Soviet account, Antonenko calmly finished eating his plate of soup. In the following weeks, he successfully teamed with Leytenant Petr Brinko over the beleaguered naval base at Hanko in the Gulf of Finland. (Photo: Seidl.)

mans. But the KBF’s 13 IAP was an experienced, crack unit, counting some of the finest Soviet fighter pilots at that time. Notable among them were Aleksey Antonenko and Petr Brinko. Both would develop into the leading Soviet fighter aces in a matter of weeks. Equipped with 1- І 6s and 1-153s, this unit fought vehemently to defend Hanko against the Finnish assault forces. Leytenant Brinko opened his scoring record by claiming one fighter on July 3 and a Ju 88 on July 4.

In the Baltics, the units under command of Fliegerkorps I, were moved forward to bases in the

Pet’ Brinko started his career in the Soviet Navy Air Force in 1935. By the time the war with Germany and Finland commenced in 1941, Brinko had already amassed considerable combat experience as a fighter pilot at Lake Khasan and Khalkhin-Gol, as well as in the Winter War. On July 2,1941, the commander of 13 IAP/KBF transferred the team of Antonenko and Brinko to Hanko with the special aim of intercepting enemy reconnaissance planes. Brinko opened his World War II victory list by claiming a Finnish Bristol Bulldog over Hanko on July 3. Next day, Brinko and Antonenko together blew a Ju 88 out of the air in the same area. On July 14, Brinko and Antonenko were both listed as Heroes of the Soviet Union. At the time of his death on September 14,1941, Petr Brinko was the top-scoring Soviet fighter pilot, with a total number of fifteen victories. (Photo: Kabanov.)

Daugavpils-Riga area. “We were transferred to Mitau, an airfield littered with Soviet bomber wrecks, the remnants of an enemy unit that recently had been completely wiped out during a raid by our II. Gruppe," recalls Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker of 1I1./KG 1. These Kampfgruppen shifted their operations mainly to the interdiction of Soviet retrograde movements.

Particularly effective attacks were carried out by KG 1 Hindenburg. For two days, Soviet air activity remained very limited in this area. The pilots of JG 54 flew all day­long on July 3 without sighting any enemy aircraft The Ju 88 piloted by Leutnant Friedrich Kohl did not have the same fortune. The radio operator of this aircraft later reported to a Luftwaffe officer: “We came under attack from six enemy fighters. Our left engine was set on fire and we had to force-land in hostile territory. The Soviets captured three members of the crew. An Unteroffizier was strangled, and 1 don’t know what happened to the pilot and the other Unteroffizier. I was able to hide in a rye field, and later I could break through to German territory during constant fire from both sides. It is a pure miracle that I am still alive.”2

Reconnaissance crews of 5.(F)/122 reported the concentration of large Soviet air units to the east of the Russian-Latvian border. This was the buildup of General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov’s VVS-Northern Front. At 0500 hours on July 4, the Ju 88s of KG 76 and KG 77 were dispatched against air bases at Idritsa and Opochka. Major Hannes Trautloft, the Geschwader – kommodore of JG 54 that escorted the bomber mission,

wrote in his diary: “The bombs were dropped with precision at Opochka and several aircraft were seen burn­ing on the ground. At Idritsa the bombs went down across the runway without inflicting any considerable damage. Some l-18s scrambled. Our fighters shot down one of them in flames.”

Raiding an air base near Dno, farther to the north, ZG 26 lost a Bf 110 in a taran conducted by a MiG-3 piloted by Mladshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Lukyanov of 159 1AP/2 SAD. During renewed air-base raids later in the day, the raiders were repeatedly intercepted by small groups of scrambling fighters from 2 SAD and 39 1AD. Oberleutnant Hans Philipp, the Staffelkapitan of 4./JG 54, returned from one of these engagements with his thirty-first, thirty-second, and thirty-third confirmed vic­tories.

Late in the afternoon of July 4, the situation in the air completely changed as Novikov’s bombers were launched for the first time en masse against the advanc­ing Panzergruppe 4. The Bf 109s of Fliegerkorps I rose in full scale, and the carnage above Daugavpils on the last day of June was repeated. At the end of the day the German fighters had claimed forty-six Soviet aircraft, mainly bombers. During a single engagement, Messerschmitts bagged twenty of twenty-five Soviet bomb­
ers attempting to attack the advancing German tanks. Another fire taran was conducted by Kapitan Leonid Mikhailov, piloting an SB at the head of an Eskadrilya from 10 SBAP/41 BAD.

On July 5, Army Group North established a bridge­head over the Velikaya River at Ostrov, south of Lake Peipus, having advanced 225 miles in only three days. The Soviet Northwestern Front mounted a heavy coun­terattack in this area, but it was met by effective attacks carried out by the Ju 88s of KG 1, KG 76, and KG 77. The German bombers were concentrated against three main targets: close-support missions at Ostrov, inderdiction raids against retrograde movements at Pskov in the north, and the airfields of the VVS. The successes were immense. Against only two homber losses, 140 Soviet tanks were destroyed, virtually all Soviet supply lines to the Ostrov sector were cut off, and 112 Soviet aircraft were claimed destroyed on the ground.

Scrambled against new’ large waves of incoming Soviet bombers, Il./JG 53 and JG 54 Griinherz were credited with a further twenty-one Soviet aircraft destroyed in aerial combat on July 5. Hauptmann Arnold Lignitz, the Gruppenkommandeur of 11I./JG 54, and his Leutnants Max-Hellmuth Ostermann and Hermann Leiste contributed to these successes by downing three Soviet planes each.

During one of the intense air com­bats on this day, Hauptmann Lignitz’s Gruppe encountered the new Soviet Yak – 1 fighters of 12 1AP. Starshiy Leytenant Pavel Tarasov of the latter unit was cred­ited with the destruction of three Bf 109s, the last brought down in a taran that Tarasov was fortunate to survive.3 Pavel Tarasov went on to claim a total of 25 aerial victories in 235 combat sorties before he was killed three years later.

The Soviet attempt to halt the Ger­mans at the “Stalin Defense Line” on the old Russian border with the Baltic states w’as a complete failure. On the other hand, the task of Luftflotte 1 to block the Soviet retreat—and thus create the conditions for surrounding the troops of the Soviet Northwestern Front-failed. 1 Even if large amounts of Soviet materiel ■; were destroyed during these missions, the
main bulk of the Northwestern Front managed to escape to “old Russia” through a rapid retreat.

At this point, Panzergruppe 4 advanced swiftly toward Leningrad. General-Mayor Novikov had no other option but to sacrifice his savagely beaten air units in renewed attacks for the third day running, this time against the Velikaya bridges at Ostrov. According to German sources, seventy-three Soviet bombers were dis­patched, few of which would return. JG 54 had another field day on July 6, claiming fifty-seven victories against five losses. By bringing down three, Oberleutnant Hans – Ekkehard Bob of 9./JG 54 increased his total score to twenty-nine.

Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann of 7./JG 54 achieved his nineteenth and twentieth kills, but he also witnessed how two of his fellow pilots were shot down in a row. Three 1-16 pilots led by Starshiy Leytenant Aleksey Storozhakov of 154 1AP claimed an extraordi­nary success during what might have been the same com­bat in which 7./JG 54 lost Leutnant Helmut Biederbick and Unteroffizier Theodor Steinwendtner. Covering a formation of SBs against nine intercepting Bf 109s, the three 1-16s claimed three German fighters shot down without losses.

The bombers of Fliegerkorps 1 made a major attempt to thwart Novikov’s attempts on the ground, striking at several airfields between Lake Peipus and Lake Ilmen. While raiding an air base in the vicinity of Lake Ilmen, Unteroffizier Willi Bukowski’s ju 88 of 6./KG 1 was destroyed in a ramming by Mladshiy Leytenant Afanasiy Okhvat’s MiG-3.

A final attempt by the Soviets to disturb the German threat against Leningrad through mass attacks by me­dium bombers on July 7 resulted in another forty-six planes claimed shot down by JG 54—including the 750th victory of the Geschwader. With two of these planes, Oberleutnant Hubert Miitherich, Staffclkapitan in 5./JG 54, became next to reach his personal twentieth victory.

In total, the VVS carried out 1,200 sorties, dropping 500 tons of bombs against the German armored columns in the Ostrov sector between July 1 and July 10. But the large-scale air raids in the first week of July almost com­pletely obliterated the VVS bomber units in the north­ern combat zone Between July 4 and July 9, 2 SAD and 41 BAD alone registered sixty aircraft losses.4

In order to improve command and control, the Stavka implemented a centralized structure on July 10. Three new supreme commands were created: the Northwest­ern Zone, comprising the Northern and Northwestern fronts; the Western Zone, comprising the Western Front; and the Southwestern Zone, comprising the Southwest­ern and Southern fronts.

Overall command of the army air forces in the Northwestern Zone was entrusted to General-Mayor Novikov. Novikov, who would rise to command the entire WS within a year, soon drew conclusions regarding the bitter defeats in the air produced by the use of unescorted medium bombers operating in large formations in day­light. The bomber missions were mainly shifted to night operations, a far less hazardous business due to the lack of effective German night fighters. In daylight, all bomber missions were to be provided with fighter escort. In gen­eral, Novikov placed an increasing reliance on his fighter units. He called for a more aggressive stance against enemy aircraft. On top of this, the VVS fighter units were called on to carry’ out incessant, swift, low-level harassment attacks against the German ground troops.

By July 10 the battered WS-Northwestern Front was left with only 102 aircraft of the 1,142 it had on hand at the outbreak of the war. But together with the air forces of the KBF and the Northern Front, the North­western Zone nevertheless could muster a total of 1,300 combat aircraft, including a force deployed along the Finn­ish border. Luftflotte 1, down to about 350 aircraft in mid-July, was once again up against a numerically supe­rior enemy.

After the victory at Ostrov, the Germans ran into a gradually stiffening Soviet resistance. The advance of Army Group North slowed down considerably, particu­larly in the marshlands between Lake Peipus and Lake Ilmen, where Panzergruppe 4 struggled to the northeast, toward Leningrad.

The shift in the WS tactics was increasingly felt among the German ground troops. The slow-moving motorized columns were subjected to incessant low-level air raids, particularly from 41 BAD and 39 LAD. Already on July 8 and 9, the German XXVI Corps com­plained to Luftflotte 1 about increased Soviet air attacks. In Estonia, the advance from the south by the German Eighteenth Army was severely handicapped by Soviet fighter patrols, which made Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights extremely hazardous.

On the other shore of the Gulf of Finland, the Red

General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov, the commander of VVS-Northem Front, was the only VVS commander in the western regions of the USSR to survive the wave of purges that followed on the disaster of June 1941. Under his proficient command, the Soviets were able to regain their strength in the air prior to the German attack against Leningrad. In 1942, Novikov rose to command the entire WS. (Photo: Novikov.)

Banner Baltic Fleet’s 13 IAP, in Hanko, put up a gallant Fight against both Finnish and German air intrusions. On July 8, Leytenant Petr Brinko bagged a Do 17 from 3.(F)/10. The aircraft was salvaged by the Soviets and put on display in the central square of Hanko.

Here the Finnish fighter group LeLv 6 launched a modern variant of the “Trojan Horse" when two 1-153s captured during the Winter War were used on recon­naissance missions over the western part of the Gulf of Finland. On July 10 a Soviet 1-153 and a MiG-1 attacked these two war trophies north of Hanko, resulting in the death of Finnish Yliluutnantti (Senior Lieutenant) V. Kallio, piloting the 1-І53.’

While the bombers of Luftflotte 1 were employed mainly against Russian rail traffic in the Estonian terri­tory and on the Moscow-Leningrad railroad, the Soviet fighters grew’ increasingly troublesome to the Germans.

On July 10 a Ju 88 formation from KG 1 Hindenburg was intercepted by six I-16s from 154 IAP, resulting in Leytenant Sergey Titovka bringing down the bomber piloted by Feldwebel Paul Kcmpf, through ramming. In total, 154 IAP claimed sixteen victories this day, while KG 1 registered three Ju 88s lost. The missions on July 11 cost KG 77 three Ju 88s. The next day, Leytenant Mikhail Antonov of 19 LAP destroyed the Ju 88 piloted by Feldwebel Hans Figge of 3./KG 76.

Even though Fliegerkorps I claimed that it had shot down 487 Soviet planes in the air and destroyed 1,211 on the ground between June 22 and July 13, resistance in the air was mounting. On July 11 and 12, Soviet air­men claimed to have put fifteen tanks and ninety armored vehicles out of commission and destroyed two bridges in the area southeast of Lake Peipus. This aggres­siveness on the part of the Soviet aviation units com­pelled the Germans to return repeatedly to new air-base raids.

While escorting Ju 88s against a Soviet airfield in the Novgorod region near Lake Ilmen on July 13, Oberleutnant Gerhard Ludwig of l./JG 54 collided with Leytenant Aristotel Kavtaradze of 38 LAP, and both pilots were killed. Enemy air rammings became a particu­lar preoccupation to the airmen of Luftflotte 1 during this period of the war. In fact, more than half of the forty-nine tarans registered by the VVS during the month of July 1941 were carried out in the northern combat zone alone.

While General Helmuth Forster, the commander of Fliegerkorps 1, concentrated the bulk of his fighters to the area east of Lake Peipus, VVS-KBF made a skillful use of its weakened bomber forces over the Gulf of Riga, in the west, on July 13. Eighteen DB-3s and five Ar-2s (the dive-bomber version of the SB bomber) struck against a large German seaborne supply convoy, claiming one transport vessel sunk and eight damaged.6

In mid-July the exhausted tank soldiers of Panzergruppe 4 reached the Luga River, sixty miles from Leningrad. On July 14, as the town of Soltsy, to the west of Lake Ladoga, was seized, the Germans were beset by some of the heaviest Soviet air attacks encountered so far. General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov had concentrated ] a force of 235 aircraft, including units from VVS – ] Northwestern Front, 2 SAD of the Northern Front, and ^ 1 BAK of the Long-Range Air Force, in this sector. All ■ of these units were dispatched in continous attacks against j

enemy troops, tanks, and artillery batter­ies in the Soltsy region. This was the pre­lude to the counteroffensive mounted by General-Leytenant Aleksandr Matveyev’s Soviet Eleventh Army on July 14.

With its supply lines strung out, this surprisingly heavy attack forced the deci­mated Panzergruppe 4 to halt its offen­sive. The battle around Soltsy raged for four days, during which the VVS car­ried out fifteen hundred close-support sorties. The long distance from their air­fields considerably handicapped German fighters in this sector. Despite the strong commitments by Ju 88 and Bf 110 crews in this area, the Germans were pushed back twenty-five miles, with severe losses to the 8th Panzer Division.

On the right flank of Panzergruppe 4, the German Sixteenth Army advanced eastward to cut off the communications between Leningrad and Moscow, but it also ran into fierce resistance, which made every step forward difficult.

The Blitzkrieg in the northern combat zone had ended. Resistance was sharpening, both on the ground and in the air. The VVS was becoming increasingly ac­tive and aggressive, even though the Luftwaffe maintained its qualitative su­periority.

The Soviet air forces of the North­ern and Northwestern fronts claimed to have destroyed 628 enemy aircraft between June 22 and July 22. Even if this figure includes all claims, in the air as well as on the ground, along the entire combat zone from Murmansk in the Far North to the East Prussian bor­der in the South, it must be regarded as a manifold exaggeration. JG 54 Griinherz had scored impressively, achieving 500 victories between June 22 and July 18.

This figure roughly matches the actual WS losses of 372 aircraft in WS-North – ern Front from June 22 to July 22, and 563 shot down in VVS-Northwestern Front through the end of July. To these figures should be added the losses suffered by the KBF and the DBA. During the same period, June 22 to July 18, more than thirty Bf 109s, around one-third of the entire Jagdgeschwader, had been shot down. In the bomber units of Fliegerkorps 1, KG 1 registered sixteen
losses, KG 76 registered nineteen, and KG 77 lost twenty – four Ju 88s.7

The combat attrition rapidly wore down the strength of the Luftwaffe units. Improvisation—even if it meant breaking some rules—was imperative. Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker, the technical officer in 1I1./KG 1 at this time, told the authors: “The burden laid on a techni­cal officer in a flying unit on the Eastern Front was very heavy. The supply lines grew more extended and it grew increasingly difficult to receive spare parts. Every force – landed aircraft had to be plundered of useful parts (even if this, of course, was not allowed!), but my task was to bring serviceable aircraft into operation. I continually flew my Me 108 (Taifun) or took a car to most of the bellied Ju 88s, indicated the way to the ecash site to our techni­cians, and earmarked reserve spare parts.”

Under able command, the VVS now proved to be able to adapt itself to new situations with a flexibility uncharacteristic of Stalinist policy. The new stress on Soviet fighters rapidly provided the invaders with mount­ing difficulties. This became a main preoccupation to the German ground troops, who became subject to continous strafing and bombing from fast-flying fighter-bombers dropping out of the clouds. This would become an important benchmark of the entire war on the Eastern Front. This dominant ground-support air doctrine, in fact, emerged spontaneously from the shortcomings of the Soviet light and medium bombers during the initial weeks of the war.

Higher quality on the German side had produced impressive results, but it could not overcome the supe­rior Soviet resources in the long run.

The most spectacular result of the war in the north­ern combat zone during the first four weeks of hostilities was that Army Group North had succeeded in one important operational goal—seizure of the Baltic states— without achieving its main strategic goal, annihilation of

This WS starshiy leytenant, posing in front of an 1-15bis, symbolizes the determination with which the Soviet airmen fought in the difficult days of 1941. The 1-15bis proved to be more or less a "flying coffin" during the air war against modern Luftwaffe aircraft types. Burdened with fixed landing gear and powered by a 750-hp M-25V engine, it could fly not faster than 234 mph. Although vulnerable to hostile fire, it was used extensively in the ground-attack role. The normal bomb load, however, did not consist of more than four 25-kg or 32-kg bombs mounted in four underwing racks. (Note the plain upper wing, without the gull-like struts that characterized the 1-153.) (Photo: Seidl.)

the Soviet Northwestern Front. The withdrawal of an entire Soviet army group from an area with a mainly hostile population without being surrounded by the rap idly advancing German armored units was a remarkable feat.

n the southern combat zone, the Soviets still blocked the entrance to the Crimea. During October, Hitler’s concern over this matter grew. The seizure of the Crimea, the “permanent aircraft carrier” from where Soviet bombers threatened the Romanian oil fields, was of immense importance to the German strategic position.

The main obstacle to the German offensive was the strong VVS forces allocated to this area. JG 77 (to which I.(J)/LG 2 was assigned while I./JG 77 operated on the Arctic front) had originally been allocated to this area. But the demands in the Rostov sector, two hundred miles to the east, had left III./JG 77 as the only Gruppe of JG 77 in the skies over the Crimea. For this reason, IL/JG 3 had been shifted from the central combat zone to the Crimea. This force did not suffice to break the back of the VVS-Black Sea Fleet, and it was evident that further fighter reinforcements had to be brought in. Although there was mounting Soviet air activity that considerably delayed the advance of the northern wing of Army Group South toward the industrial area in the Donets Basin, the only fighter unit in this sector, III./JG 52, was trans­ferred to the Crimean front.

On October 23 three Jagdgruppen—1I./JG 3, 111./ JG 52, and III./JG 77—took off from the air base at Chaplinka, north of the Perekop Isthmus, to clear the Crimean skies once and for all. Oberst Werner Molders, the new inspector of the Fighter Air Arm, took personal charge of these German fighter operations.

The Soviet airmen wrere shocked at the sudden onslaught by such large groups of aggressive enemy fight­ers. Dozens of Soviet aircraft fell prey to the merciless fighter attacks from above. Finally, Soviet superiority in the air over Perekop was broken.

October 23, 1941, brought a brutal end to the Soviet piggy-back Zveno tactic. 63 BAB/Y’VS-ChF launched two TB-3s escorted by eleven I-15bis and eight 1-153s against artillery positions near Perekop. As large num­bers of Bf 109s suddenly appeared ahead of the target area, the 1-16 fighter-bombers were jettisoned. Kapitan Arseniy Shubikov, the able commander of 2 Eskadrilya of 32 ІАР/ChF, led the four l-16s against a tank con­centration below. At the same time, a swarm of Bf 109s from III./JG 77 pursued them. Several Messerschmitts attacked the escort with terrifying effect, downing five of the eight l-15bis and 1-153 biplanes of 8 ІАР/ChF. Leutnant Emil Omcrt and his wingman went after the diving l-16s. Closing in at high speed, Omert brought down two, his thirty-third and thirty-fourth victories. In one of the 1-16s, Kapitan Shubikov plunged to his death.

The pilots of 1I./JG 3 and HI./JG 77 shot down eleven MiG-3s, eight Polikarpov I-15bis, and three I-16s without suffering a single loss. The Gruppenkommandeur of ll./JG 3, Hauptmann Gordon Gollob, who had increased his victory tally from seventy-six to eighty-one the previous day, claimed four. An additional eleven Soviet aircraft were claimed shot down by the pilots of III./JG 52 and AAA gunners.

The only loss suffered by the participating Jagdgruppen was a Bf 109 of III./JG 52. This was this unit’s first day of combat over the Crimea, and the pilot lost was the leading ace in 9. Staffel, Feldwebel Ewald “Ede” Diihn. In the air over the Brom factory, I1I./JG 52 fell on six Pe-2s escorted by four Yak-ls of 5./32 IAP/VVS-ChF. According to the Soviet loss list, all six Pe-2s and one Yak-1 were shot down. Shortly after send­ing his twenty-third victim, a Pe-2, to the ground, Ede Diihn was last seen pursuing another bomber at low level.

Following the October 23 massacre, the Soviet avia­tion regiments in the Crimea were in complete disarray. Several experienced airmen had failed to return from the missions this day, and others were hospitalised with bad injuries. Apart from the large numbers of aircraft destroyed, there were damaged aircraft in need of repair before they could be used again. But the greatest blow was dealt to the fighting spirit of the airmen. What dis­couraged them further were the replacement aircraft brought in from the mainland. Proud Yak-1, MiG-3, and Pe-2 pilots found that they had to fly obsolete aircraft models again—I-16s, l-153s, and SBs. The bulk of the new modern aircraft emerging from the factories was earmarked for the defense of Moscow.

Feldwebel Johann Pichler of 7./JG 77 scored his fifteenth victory against one of the 1-15s” (probably l-15bis) shot down during the massacre on 32 ІАР/ChF over Perekop on October 23.1941, Later that day, Pichler proudly took this photo of his victory markings on the rudder of his Bf 109. One of the two ships painted above the victory markings indicates the bomb hit that Pichler scored on the British battleship Valiant north of Crete on May 22,1941. Pichler was in almost constant front-line service from August 1940 to August 1944, flying about seven hundred sorties and scoring a total of seventy-five victories. On August 30,1944, he ended up in Soviet confinement when Bucharest, where he was hospitalized, was seized by the Red Army. (Photo: Pichler via Norrie.)

On October 24 the Soviet presence in the air was weaker than ever in the Perekop skies. Faced with Bf 109 fighters, the Soviet bombers jettisoned their bombs and banked away. Next, it was the turn of the Soviet ground troops to feel wrath from the air. Large numbers of Stukas and horizontal bombers broke up the Soviet defensive positions. German shock troops did the final job with flamethrowers and hand grenades. Three days later, the entire Crimean front collapsed.

According to German sources, 140 Soviet planes were shot down during the final battle over the Perekop front, from October 18 to 24: 124 by German fighters and 16 by ground fire.

Suffering heavy losses during the next days and with no available replacements, the number of Soviet aircraft in the Crimea diminished rapidly. During the last seven days of October, 5 Eskadrilya/32 IAP/VVS-ChF lost fifteen of the seventeen Yak-ls it had on the evening of October 23.1II./JG 52, claiming more than forty victo­ries during this period, w’as responsible for almost all of these losses. The group’s Leutnant Hermann Graf alone w’as credited with five “1-6Is” between October 24 and 28. Fighting back desperately, Soviet Leytenant

Konstantin Alekseyev was credited with three victories during a ten-day period.

On October 25, 5./32 IAP/VVS – ChF was left with only four Yak-ls to escort a group of Pe-2s against the ad­vancing German troops. This elite Soviet squadron, led by Starshiv Leytenant Mikhail Avdeyev following the loss of Kapitan Ivan Lyubimov in September, was challenged by fourteen Messer – schmitts from 9./JG 52, including one piloted by Hermann Graf. And Oberst Werner Molders himself directed the air combat by radio from the forward trenches. “The hated, yellow-bellied Bf 109s flew higher than us,” recalls Mikhail Avdeyev. Nevertheless, the Yakovlev pilots managed to put up a gallant fight.

Oberleutnant Dieter Zehl’s Bf 109 was shot down, its pilot listed as missing. But the “1-61” claimed by Hermann Graf (his seventeenth victory’) probably was Mikhail Avdeyev’s Yak-1, which returned to base with thirty-two bullet holes. A week later, 5./32 LAP was pulled out of combat for three weeks so its pilots could journey to pick up new airplanes.

On November 1 the Germans captured Simferopol and shortly afterward were in control of most of the Crimea, except for Sevastopol, which was to hold out for another eight months.

As a finale to the Battle of the Crimea, one of the largest tragedies at sea in history occurred on November 7, 1941. Luftwaffe bombers hit and sank the passenger steamer Armeniya, which was evacuating soldiers and refugees from Sevastopol, in the Black Sea south of Yalta. Of an estimated five thousand people on board, all but eight perished in the sea.

The air battles during the struggle for the Crimea were some of the hardest fought on the Eastern Front during 1941. Between mid-September and the end of October, the Messerschmitt fighters of Fliegerkorps IV claimed approximately three hundred victories against eighteen pilot casualties in the Crimean skies: II./ JG 3, with sixty-seven victories for one pilot killed and one wounded; III./JG 52, with sixty victories for two pilots killed or missing; II./JG 77, with forty-

four victories for three pilots killed or missing, plus two captured and two wounded; IIL/JG 77, with an amaz­ing one hundred fifty-eight victories for three pilots killed and one wounded; and I.(J)/LG 2, with at least six vic­tories for two pilots killed or missing and one wounded.

That the main port of Sevastopol, the greatest bait in the Crimea, remained in Soviet hands was mainly due to the efforts of the Soviet airmen. As the balance sheet was drawn, it showed that they had held the Germans back for as long as it took to build up the defenses of Sevastopol.

The achievements of the Luftwaffe to a large extent relied on a dozen or so skillful fighter aces against whom most Soviet airmen stood little chance.

The Jagdgruppen assigned to the Battle of the Crimea had fought virtually to the “last round." At the end of the battle, the lack of reinforcements and vital supplies such as spare parts and fuel had brought down the Luftwaffe forces in this area to a mere handful of planes. The situation was so grave that some units were actually grounded for several days simply because there were no supplies.

At the end of October, all that remained of the Staffeln of Il./JG 3 were tw’o or three serviceable Bf 109s each.6 A few days later, Il./JG 3 was pulled out of combat and transferred to Germany for two months of rest and recuperation.