Category Air War on the Eastern Front

Endurance in the South

I

n the southern combat zone, the medium bombers of General Robert Ritter von Greim’s Fliegerkorps V had played a decisive role in enabling Panzergruppe 1 and the German Sixth Army to advance despite effective Soviet resistance against Kiev on the left flank of Army Group South.

A Soviet counterattack on July 1 against Panzergruppe 1, aimed at covering the withdrawal of the Southwest­ern Front toward Kiev, was completely routed by Fliegerkorps V. On this day the Ju 88 and He 111 bomb­ers of KG 51, KG 54, and KG 55 reported the destruc­tion of 220 motor vehicles of all kinds, including 40 tanks, west of Lvov.

To block the movements of Soviet troops in the rear area-transports that were mainly undertaken by rail due to the adverse state of the dirt roads in this area—the He 11 Is and Ju 88s of the entire Luftflotte 4 initiated a large-scale railway-interdiction offensive in a huge area to the west of the Dnieper River. The main mission of the Bf 109 pilots was to seek out and destroy any enemy aircraft encountered in the air. The main tactic used was a series of constant free-hunting missions in small groups of Bf 109s over the vast battle area and the closest Soviet rear areas. A prolonged ridge of high pressure created clear skies, which provided the fighter pilots with the best possible conditions.

The first ten days of intense air activity had left no more than a few hundred VVS aircraft remaining in the entire southern combat zone. General-Leytenant Yevgeniy Ptukhin, a veteran of Spain who commanded VVS-Southwcstern Front, was made scapegoat for the failure. On July 1 he was relieved from command and eventually fell victim to a firing squad. The first task of the new commander, General-Leytenant Fyodor

Подпись: Throughout July and August 1941 the bombers of Fliegerkorps V mounted unremitting attacks against Soviet transport facilities in the Ukraine. Here, a Ju 88 of KG 51 Edelweiss is warming up its engines before another combat sortie. (Photo: Hofer.) image65Подпись: Walter “Guile" Oesau has been characterized by fighter ace Johannes Steinhoff as “the toughest fighter pilot of the Luftwaffe.” Serving under command of Werner Molders in JG 51, Oesau placed himself among the top scorers in the Battle of Britain. He assumed command of III./JQ 3, which he led during the opening phase of Operation Barbarossa. After achieving a total of 123 aerial victories on approximately 300 combat missions, Oesau was finally killed in combat with U.S. Army Air Forces fighters on May 11, 1944. This photo shows Oeasu during the celebration for his 100th kill, while he was Geschwaderkommodore of JG 2 in October 1941. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.)

Astakhov, was to organize air support for the hard-pressed Red Army units in the Lvov area. Six aviation divisions of the Southwestern Front and two bomber corps from the Long-Range Air Force were employed. Their mission was divided into three main tasks: The bomb­ers of 4 BAK/DBA were assigned to attack the advancing enemy columns; other bombers and ground-attack air units were instructed to provide the retreating army with close support at the front; and fighter units were directed to cover the retreating army from air attacks. A main obstacle to all of these tasks would remain the Jagdwaffe.

One of the toughest fighter pilots of the entire war, Hauptmann Walter “Guile” Oesau, the commander of III./ JG 3, roamed the skies in this area. On July 1 he scored his fifty-second to fifty – fourth victories by downing three SB bombers. Total claims by the fighters of Luftflotte 4 on the first day of July were seventeen Soviet aircraft shot down against only two losses.

The front along the Sovict-Romanian border had remained relatively calm during the first days of the war, the German and Romanian armies await­ing the encirclement of the Soviet Southwestern Front by the advancing troops on the left (northern) flank. But on July 2 the German Eleventh Army, on the right flank, attacked toward Mogilev Podolskiy on the Dniester River. StG 77—the first Stukas to participate in Luftflotte 4’s Soviet campaign—had been deployed from the central combat zone to strengthen air cover for this new offensive. At the same time, the Roma­nian Third Army started advancing toward Chernovtsy to the north. On its left flank, the Hungarian Army crossed the Soviet border, a most significant result of the Romanian fake “Soviet” air raid six days earlier.

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К Following their first hostile encounters with the FARR, the Soviet pilots reported that the Romanian airmen lacked the experience of Luftwaffe К tiers and thus were an “easier’ enemy. The Romanian Air Force suffered heavy losses, and most of its units were withdrawn from first-line ■ sen-ice after a couple of months. This He 112, piloted by Adjutant Aviator Aldea Cherchez of Grupul 5 Vanatoare, was brought down behind I the Soviet lines near the Moldavian village ofVulcanesti on July 2,1941. This TASS photo was published in Leningrad Pravcfe on August 13, §• 1941. (Photo: TASS/Leningrad Pravda.)

Resistance in the Moldavian skies was fierce during the first days of July. On July 2 Oberleutnant Kurt Lasse, Oberfeldwebel Erwin Riehl, and Feldwebel Wilhelm Baumgartner of 9./JG 77 had an encounter with seven MiG-3s led by the famous Starshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Pokryshkin of 55 1AP, which were escorting nine SBs. Baumgartner shot down Mladshiy Leytenant Stepan Komlev’s MiG-3 (the pilot bailed out and survived), while his comrades claimed three Soviet bombers. (Soviet sources show the loss of two SBs.) Pokryshkin made an unsubstantiated claim of a Bf 109. Altogether on this day, the Jagdgruppen of Luftflotte 4 claimed another fifty-six victories against three losses.

Given the uneven odds they faced, the achievements by the Soviet airmen are impressive. On July 3, the sec­ond day of the Romanian ground offensive against Moldavia, the FARR lost eleven aircraft, including four

British-manufactured Bristol Blenheim bombers, against a reported eight Soviet aircraft shot down.

The next day, General-Mayor P. S. Shelukhin, the commander of VVS-Southern Front, dispatched all his bomber units in a major effort to block the advance by the German Eleventh Army in Moldavia. The Bf 109s of 1II./JG 77 had a field day, claiming seventeen SBs and DB-3s in this area.

According to Soviet sources, the defenders lost 1,218 aircraft in the Ukraine during the first two weeks of the war. In spite of bloody losses, the fighting spirit among the VVS airmen never swayed. An example of this is Mladshiy Leytenant Dmitriy Zaytsev of 2 LAP of 36 LAD/ Kiev PVO, who on July 4 directed his 1-16 right into a Ju 88 above the city of Kiev.

One of the most successful Soviet fighter pilots in the Moldavian battle zone was Starshiy Leytenant

Anatoliy Morozov of 4 IAP, who scored seven personal and two collective aerial victories before the end of July 1941, and eight other planes destroyed on the ground. During a melee with He 11 Is of I./KG 27 escorted by eleven Bf 109s of IIL/JG 77 in the air over Moldavia on July 7, Morozov shot down one bomber and, with no ammunition left, rammed a fighter with his MiG-3. He successfully bailed out and even managed to capture the German fighter pilot, Oberfeldwebel Georg Bergmann of 9./JG 77. 2./KG 27 registered one He 111 shot down.15 During another engagement that day, 55 lAP’s Leytenant Kuzma Seliverstov attacked six Bf 109s and claimed to have shot one dow’n.

During these days, reinforcements were hurriedly brought in from the Soviet Far Past to the VVS on the southern combat zone. The strength of the WS in this sector rapidly increased to more than 1,000 operational aircraft, of which 671 belonged to VVS-Southern Front. Between June 22 and July 9, VVS-Southern Front car­ried out more than 5,000 sorties in the Romanian border area, claiming 238 enemy aircraft shot down.

Mcanw’hile, the Luftwaffe units were rapidly w’om down by the daily rate of attrition. In the beginning of July, many units in Fliegerkorps IV and V were already dow-n to one-third of their original strength.

It is obvious that the German airmen did not have the same “morale fiber” as their Soviet counterparts. Even if they inflicted considerable losses to the enemy each day—on July 5 alone, Fliegerkorps V claimed the destruc­tion of eighteen trains and more than five hundred trucks—the German airmen continued to experience te­nacious and never-ending resistance wherever they ap­peared. The men in the Luftwaffe bomber units simply could not grasp this. After the first ten days of combat, a feeling of despair had spread within the Kampf- geschw’ader. In the air, new Soviet fighters manned by aggressive pilots appeared each day. From the ground, the He Ills and Ju 88s w’ere constantly subjected to intensive fire, not only from antiaircraft artillery and machine guns but also from small arms. The Red Army directive to its soldiers to open fire with any arms at any enemy aircraft sighted proved to have a tremendous psy­chological effect if not always a material one. In the chronicle of KG 51, Wolfgang Dierich noted that the mood among the personnel dropped considerably. “The first worn-out, physically and psychologically exhausted crews w’ere withdrawn from combat and transferred to Germany.”16

But the Luftwaffe still dominated the skies, mainly due to the efforts of its fighter pilots. By July 9, rail; traffic west of the Dneiper River had been substantially blocked.

On July 10, as Marshal Semyon Budyonny arrived to assume command of the new’ Red Army Southwest-] em Zone—as supreme commander of the Southwestern and Southern fronts—the Soviet situation had grown increasingly desperate. The new supreme commander of | the army air forces on the Southwestern Zone, General j Mayor Fyodor Falaleyev, ordered TB-3 heavy bombers j into action against the German advance against Kiev on i the northern flank of Army Group South. During a late, afternoon mission in the Zhitomir area on Thursday, July 10, the Rotte composed of Oberleutnant Franz Beyer] and Unteroffizier Werner Lucas of ll./JG 3 came across | twelve of these “dinosaurs” from 14 ТВАР. The Soviet bombers flew without any fighter escort, and the two German pilots claimed five of them shot down.17 In fact,’ Soviet sources show that seven TB-3s were downed, though the bomber gunners claimed one Bf 109 de-; strayed.14 Franz Beyer would eventually amass a total of 81 confirmed victories. His wingman, Lucas, would even j surpass him, reaching a total score of 106.

If the men of the Kampfgeschwader felt despair, the combat spirits of the Jagdflieger stood at their peak. What counted here were aerial victories, and the German fighter] pilots had never previously experienced such rich hunt-1 ing grounds. On the same day as Beyer and Lucas of II/ j JG 3 butchered the TB-3s, Hauptmann Walter Oesau of 1II./JG 3 blasted five Soviet planes out of the sky, fora total of sixty-eight victories. Further to the south over Moldavia, on July 10, II1./JG 77 claimed twenty-onei kills, including nineteen DB-3 bombers.

At 1530 hours on July 12, Hauptmann Oesau and his w’ingman, Oberleutnant Georg Michalek, spotted a formation of SB bombers escorted by three I-16s while on a free-hunting mission over the forward tank spear­heads of Panzergruppe 1. Oesau radioed his wingman to start w’ith the fighters. Oesau’s Bf 109 came out of the sun. A short burst, and the first 1-16 fell in flames. Before the two remaining Ishak pilots realized w’hat was happening, the 20mm rounds from Oesau’s nose can­non tore them both apart. Oberleutnant Michalek 1 confirmed Oesau’s victories to a total of seventy-five. 1 Walter Oesau’s war-time biographer, Friedrich Griese, j described w’hat followed: “Then the bombers are left alone j with Oesau and his compatriot. They attack one by one: |

Endurance in the South
first Michalek, followed by Oesau, then Oesau again. After twenty minutes, seven enemy aircraft lie burning on the ground. The two fighter pilots only disengaged when they simultaneously had emptied their ammuni­tion. The hunting was over.”19

When Hauptmann Oesau was posted as a Geschwaderkommodore to occupied France two weeks later, his total score stood at eighty-six, of which forty – four had been achieved during the past five weeks.

On the same day as Oesau and Michalek ripped the Soviet bomber formation apart, the medium bombers of Luftflotte 4 extended their rail-interdiction campaign to the east of the Dneiper River to prevent the arrival of Soviet reinforcements. Army Group South recorded that Luftflotte 4 had managed by July 13 to prevent any possibility of a large-scale Soviet counterattack by destroy­ing the railroad system.

The VVS responded by renewing its aerial offensive

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Soldiers from a Waffen-SS unit examine a downed Bf 109 F of JG 53 Рік As. The Luftwaffe encountered some of the stiffest Soviet resistance during Operation Barbarossa in the air over the Ukrainian capital Kiev. (Photo: Roba.)

 

against Romania, with the primary aim directed at forcing Luftwaffe units to be withdrawn to this area from the front. The first among these new attacks was crowned with success. During the after­noon of July 13, six Soviet bombers raided the Romanian Astra, Romana, and Orion oil refineries on the southern outskirts of Ploesti. The attack destroyed seven­teen lubricating oil storage tanks and twelve loaded railway tanker wagons, with a total of 9,000 tons of oil set ablaze. The Unirea oil refinery would remain on fire for three days. Nevertheless, this was not sufficient to force a withdrawal of German or Romanian fighter units from the front line. Only two of the attack­ers against Romania on July 13 made it back to base; the other four were shot down by fighters. From mid-July, the Soviet bombers—DB-3s from WS-ChF and 4 BAK—resorted mainly to noctur­nal raids against objectives in Romania.

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On the main front in the Ukraine, the Soviet troops continued to withdraw in the direction of Kiev. Some of the best VVS units were concentrated in this sector, a fact that was soon noticed by the German fighters. On July 14 Hauptmann Walter Oesau ran into unexpect­edly stiff opposition during an aerial encounter in the Kiev area. His Bf 109 was badly shot up, and the Ger­man ace barely managed to return to base. The medics at his airfield removed small splinters from his face, some a few inches from his left eye. Afterward Oesau confessed that during the return flight he had almost fainted out of fear of having to land in enemy-held territory.

The next day, one of Oesau’s most promising young pilots, Oberfeldwebel Hans Stechmann, achieved three vic­
tories in the same area. With one of them, JG 3 had reached its thousand-victory mark.

Leutnant Franz Schiess of the Stabsschwarm of JG 53 recorded a bitter engagement with a pair of Soviet biplane fighters over Kiev in his diary on July 15,1941: “We encountered two I-15s and an SB. The Kommodore shot down an 1- 15 and the bomber in a few minutes. I grappled with the second fighter. He flew very skillfully, and I never got a chance to fire. Whenever 1 approached to about 100 meters, he turned against me. Hav­ing gone through this with the fellow sev­eral times, by which time I was already east of the Dnieper, I chose to disengage.”20 During the second mission that day, the Stabsschwarm/JG 53 challenged a for­mation of lshaks. The Bf 109 flown by the Geschwaderkommodore, Major Gunther Freiherr von Maltzahn, was hit in the ra­diator and the pilot made a forced landing. The events on the southern combat zone during the first four weeks of the war stood in contrast to the central and northern combat zones. Here, the best-equipped Red Army units, led by some of the most experienced commanders, had succeeded in con­siderably slowing the German armored offensive. Hav­ing suffered severe losses Army Group South failed to achieve more than a breakthrough and a slow advance toward Kiev on the left (northern) flank. The main fac­tor in the limited German success in this sector had been the effective use of Fliegerkorps IV and V. To Marshal Budyonny and his WS commander, General-Mayor Falaleyev, it stood clear that the main threat to the Ger­man advance had come from the air.

Mud and Shturmoviks

B

y late October 1941, both sides had virtually ex­hausted their first-line strength. Having obliterated practically the entire Red Army in the Moscow sec­tor, the worn-down units of Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center had then gotten stuck in thick mud. Luftflotte 2, supporting the Moscow offensive, was at the end of its tether.

According to Soviet sources, five hundred German planes were destroyed during the air-base raids between October 11 and 18.10 This figure has absolutely nothing in common with reality and was probably aimed at cov­ering up the dismal state of the Soviet front during this period of the war. Nevertheless, the Soviets noted a con­siderable reduction in the enemy’s presence in the air during the latter half of October. The authoritative Soviet Air Force in World War Two states: “As the result of the blow – against enemy aircraft both on the ground and in the air, the effectiveness of enemy air power in the zone of the Western Front was reduced by three-fourths.”11 This observation was true, but the main reason was the general war situation.

Luftflotte 2 was successively weakened, but not only through accumulated losses and logistical problems. New – critical situations in other w’ar theaters forced the Ger­mans to divide their forces. Late in October and early in November, the entire Fliegerkorps II, including half the units in Luftflotte 2, received orders to transfer to the Mediterranean area. British naval and air units oper­ating from Malta were threatening to completely sever the seaborne lifeline to General Erwin Rommel’s Afrikakorps in North Africa. A radical strengthening of the Luftw-affe in this area was imperative. Thus five

Подпись: With its landing wheels safely dug into the soil on an airdrome in Soviet Union, this Bf 109's guns are being calibrated by the “Black Men" of a Luftwaffe fighter unit. With the strength of the Jagdgruppen diminishing to only the equivalent of a Schwarm in strength, the ground personnel of the Luftwaffe units on the Eastern Front were heavily overstaffed by fall of 1941. Subsequently, large levies of the staff personnel from such units were sent on a well-deserved home leave. (Photo: Norrie.)

veteran Kampfgruppen, one Stukagruppc, and two Jagdgruppen left the Eastern Front.

Next, having suffered twenty-seven combat losses since June 22, KG 2 was withdrawn from the Eastern Front on November 1 to participate in a revived air offensive against the British Isles. Further, increasing resistance in the air in the Leningrad sector led to the transfer of I./JG 51 to Luftflotte 1. Other units, includ­ing I. and lli./JG.3, were completely worn down and had to be pulled out of combat for rest and recuperation.

Of nine Jagdgruppen supporting Army Group Cen­ter at the onset of Operation Typhoon, only five—II., III., and IV./JG 51, and I. and II./JG 52—remained to take part in the final offensive against the Soviet capital. After a month, the Luftwaffe could muster no more than fifty to a hundred fighters to fend off the increasing numbers of Soviet aircraft deployed against German ground troops in this area. In fact, one-quarter of the
personnel in JG 51 were sent on home leave in the beginning of November—simply because the small num­ber of operational aircraft did not require a full person­nel staff.12

On top of all these disturbing and disheartening elements were the effects from deteriorating weather con­ditions. The historians Jochen Prien and Gerhard Stemmer describe Orel Airdrome, the main Luftwaffe air base at the Moscow front during this time, as “a to­tally soggy and bottomless field.”1 ’

Meanwhile, strong Soviet reinforcements were pour­ing into the area. Almost without any interference from the Luftwaffe, General Armii Georgiy Zhukov was able to rebuild the Moscow’ defense forces in an astound – ingly short span of time. New recruits arrived, as did army divisions from the Far East. The latter had defeated the Japanese at Khalkhin-Gol two years earlier, and they were convinced that they would do the same to the Ger­
mans outside Moscow. The high morale of these soldiers was sorely needed, and soon it inspired the men of other units. Most of these transports managed to reach the front without any interruption from enemy aircraft, although not undetected. As German historian Cajus Bekker points out: “In these days, long-range reconnais­sance air crews of Luftflotte 2 reported large-scale trans­port movements on the railways converging on the capi­tal from the east, especially at Gorkiy and Yaroslavl.”14 In fact, one of the main reasons behind the Soviet air­base offensive in October had been an assumption by the Stavka that the Luftwaffe was planning massive strategic air raids. This fear had been triggered by the raid in which three He Ills of 9./KG 55 Greif destroyed the tank factory at Kramatorskaya on the night of October 6, 1941. But the Stavka’s anxiety’ was without basis.

The Luftwaffe launched a few sporadic strategic air raids on the Eastern Front during the war, but in gen­eral, the main emphasis of the Kampfgeschwader in the USSR lay on tactical support, often even close support directly at the front lines. This was the Luftwaffe’s main doctrinal basis, and it would remain so during the entire war. Herbert Wittmann, w’ho flew an He 111 as Hauptmann and commander of the Stabsstaffel of KG 53 during this time, realized this fundamental weakness, as did many Luftwaffe airmen: “Why are we not sent against the enemy’s rear area? We find it incredible. It was wrong to concentrate on tactical close-support mis­sions. It would have been tactically more sound if we had been launched with all force against railway stations, airfields, depots, industrial plants, etc., instead of bomb­ing artillery positions, tank concentrations, and bridge­heads in the front area.”15

Much has been said and written concerning the lack of a German strategic bomber fleet. But this “what if” disregards the fact that the whole Blitzkrieg concept origi­nated from Germany’s economic situation—mainly its lack of strategic raw materials—which provided no alterna­tive beyond a short and decisive war. Hence, to lay full weight on tactical missions for the bomber force was, after all, most rational from the perspective of Germany’s prime strategic imperative.

The decimated WS units in this area also received strong reinforcements, including two Aviadivizii from WS-Northwestern Front, one BAP equipped with the new Pe-2 bombers, two Shturmovik regiments, five avia­tion regiments from 6 RAG, a light-bomber regiment flown by instructors and trainees from flight training schools, and even SB and TB-3 regiments brought in from the Central Asian Military District.

While the Luftwaffe operated under primitive con­ditions, entrapped in a logistical nightmare, the Soviets enjoyed the advantage of fighting at the nexus of all Soviet rail and road communications. Also, a chain of well-equipped, AAA-protected air bases stood at the dis­posal of Soviet air units.

During the lull before the battle for Moscow, the maintenance crews of the VVS made a feverish attempt to improve the strength of the air units. Brigadnyy Inzhener T. G. Cherepov, in charge of ground mainte­nance of the Moscow PVO air units, formed thirty-six mobile assembly plants. During the battle for Moscow these units assembled 150 new aircraft at the front and repaired 250 damaged planes. Due to this improvement in ground maintenance, Mayor Fyodor Prutskov’s 16IAP, 6 IAK/PVO was able to carry out 172 ground-attack missions in October 1941, claiming the destruction of 231 trucks, 18 tanks, and 6 bridges and river crossings.

In the days after the encirclement battles at Vyazma and Bryansk, the German situation deteriorated day by day. A gradually mounting resistance was encountered— in the air as well as on the ground. Around Teploye, some thirty-seven miles south of Tula, two Soviet cav­alry’ divisions and five infantry divisions, plus one ar­mored brigade, suddenly threatened to cut off the Sec­ond Panzer Army. While the German tanks had difficul­ties moving in the deep mud, the Soviets deployed T-34 tanks, which had been designed for such conditions.

The Luftwaffe was alerted, and even though the weather was so bad that the aircraft ran the risk of col­liding with trees on the many small hills in the area, a large number of bombers was deployed in treetop-level attacks. Despite heavy losses, the German bombers man­aged to destroy several T-34s and forced the Soviets to withdraw.

Northwest of Moscow, a Soviet counteroffensive was launched against the German Ninth Army and the Third Panzer Army in the Kalinin area. Directly from the Kalinin factories, a strong workers’ militia reminiscent of the Russian Civil War was thrown against the invaders. As a result, the 1st Panzer Division became surrounded in this sector on October 19.

As the pressure at Kalinin increased, the commander of Fliegerkorps VIII decided to redeploy strong Luftwaffe forces to Kalinin Airdrome. Covered by the Bf 109s of 1. and 1I./JG 52, the Ju 87s of Stab and l./StG 2, and the ground-attack aircraft of Hauptmann Otto Weiss’s I1.(S)/ LG 2 were dispatched from Kalinin on October 21. Launching relentless dive-bombings and low-level attacks during the following days, they managed to break up the Soviet forces that had isolated the 1st Panzer Division. The bloody losses inflicted on the Red Army by the Hs 123 biplanes under the command of Hauptmann Weiss rendered this able commander the honorary nickname “The Lion of Kalinin” among the German ground troops. Wearing the Knight’s Cross since the Battle of France in

1940, Otto Weiss was awarded the Oak Leaves as the first Schlachtflieger of the Luftwaffe on December 31,

1941. Weiss was the best-known Schlachtflieger of the war, but he was also a very harsh and often ruthlessly demanding commander. Among some of his subordinates he became known by the unflattering nickname “Weiss the Butcher.”16

On October 22 the Luftwaffe attempted to raid Moscow’ in broad daylight. Due to improved weather conditions, Luftflotte 2 managed to launch 481 sorties

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The Hs 123 ground-attack biplane to a large extent earned a place on the | fighting front as the Luftwaffe’s last resort during the difficult Fall of 1941 3 on the Eastern Front. Due to its wide stance and sturdy undercarriage ti® j Hs 123 was able to operate from loamy airfields where other aircraft simply! got stuck in the mud. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.)

this day. But Soviet fighter opposition was so intense I that no bombers were able to penetrate to the Soviet! capital.

Подпись: A LaGG-3 armed with RS-82 rocket projectiles taxis out on a snow-covered airfield. During the period of the final German advance against Moscow, repeated nightly snowfalls, followed by rises in the temperature and resultant thaws, posed an enormous problem for Luftwaffe units operating from primitive airstrips close to the front line. In stark contrast, the WS enjoyed the advantage of operating from well-equipped airdromes with concrete runways. (Photo: Voronin.)

Unteroffizier Walter Todt of l./JG 52 recalls "the | final battle” in the air over the approaches to the Soviet!

capital: “Just as we had left the second antiaircraft bar­rage behind us, Ratas and MiGs attacked our formations from all directions. A fierce dogfight followed. The AAA stopped firing. The fighter attack came as a total sur­prise, and the aerial combat developed into a chaotic ‘catch – as-catch-can.’ All hell broke loose on the R/T: ‘Break off!’ ‘There’s one on your tail!’ ‘Victory!’ ‘Did you see that?’ ‘Watch out!’ etc., etc. Several Stukas did not return from this mission. Later 1 noted that no more daylight raids were made against Moscow following this combat.’1′

34IAP alone put up fifty-nine sorties on October 22 and claimed twelve enemy aircraft shot down. The heavy losses forced the Luftwaffe to refrain from further at­tempts to attack Moscow in daylight..

Counted among the victims on October 22 was Oberfeldwebel Robert Fuchs, who, with twenty-three kills, was the most successful pilot of 7./JG 51 following the death of Leutnant Joachim Hacker ten days earlier.

The next day, 7./JG 51 lost another of its few’ remaining Bf 109s when Unteroffizier Giinther Schack had to bail out of his burning plane, and in l./JG 51, Oberfeldwebel Heinz Schawaller, credited with twelve victories, was killed in combat. Also on October 23, KG 53 lost five He 111 crews on one mission, including the commanders of both 7. and 8. Staffel, Oberleutnant Oswald Gabler and Major Willi Hasten18

The toughest adversaries the Luftwaffe faced in air combat were the crack fighter units of the Moscow PVO. Starshiy Leytenant Gerasim Grigoryev of 178 IAP scored his first victory, an He 111, on October 24. 178 IAP was equipped with LaGG-3s, which by all accounts was not a very successful fighter. But Grigoryev had learned to handle the weaknesses of the LaGG-3. Realizing that it was a “slow climber," he utilized a superior flight altitude to jump and down one German aircraft after another.

During another encounter on October 24, six MiG – 3s of 16 IAP reportedly shot down six German planes out of a formation of eighteen Ju 88s escorted by ten Bf 109s in the Naro-Fominsk area. One of the MiG pilots, Mladshiy Leytenant Ivan Golubin, got into a cloud fol­lowing a combat turn during this melee. As he emerged into clear sky, he saw a lone Ju 88 in front of him. He gave it a quick burst, and the German bomber started to smoke. Golubin followed the Junkers, which attempted to escape in a dive, and kept firing at his prey until it finally tore into the ground. This was his first victory.’.

During the following two months, Golubin achieved another six personal and two shared victories in only nine combats. (Ivan Golubin and a few other skilled pilots in 16 IAP became famous for specializing in the use of RS-82 rockets in air combat. This unit claimed to have brought down six enemy aircraft with RS-82s in October 1941.)

But the Soviets also paid a high price for their victo­ries on October 24. In 16 LAP, two pilots were shot down and had to bail out. A third pilot was wounded, and the MiG-3 piloted by Leytenant Aleksandr Suprun, the brother of the famous ace Podpolkovnik Stepan Suprun, was severely damaged, returning to base with 118 bullet holes. Stab/JG 3 claimed five MiG-3s this day. With one of them, the Geschwaderkommodore Major Gunther Liitzow became the second German fighter pilot to sur­pass the 100-victory mark.

On October 27, the famous “night-taraner” of 177 IAP, Mladshiy Leytenant Viktor Talalikhin, a Hero of the Soviet Union, was killed in action, having achieved a total of five victories including the famous night taran over Moscow in August 1941. On that same day, the Staffelkapitan of 7./JG 51, Oberleutnant Herbert Wehnelt, bounced a group of ll-2s that was beating up a German tank column. With a total of nineteen kills to his credit, Wehnelt belonged to the JG 51 elite, and espe­cially of 7. Staffel. Despite having his wingman shot dow’n—for the second time in two weeks—Oberleutnant Wehnelt attempted to pursue a pair of retreating Shturmoviks on his own. As W’ehnclt aimed at one of the Shturmoviks, a second 11-2 sprayed the German fighter with bullets. With its rudders shot to pieces, the Bf 109 was seen diving into a small wood. The badly wounded Wehnelt was eventually rescued. Thus the Soviet fliers had struck hard against the 7. Staffel of JG 51, depriving it of three aces—Leutnant Joachim Hacker on October 12, Oberfeldwebel Robert Fuchs on October 22, and Oberleutnant Herbert Wehnelt on the October 17. The morale among the survivors in 7./JG 51 dropped con­siderably. This can be read in the results table of the Staffel, which shows only four victory claims for the whole November-December 1941 period.

At Kalinin, from which Hauptmann Otto Weiss directed his pilots into combat, the German airfield proved to be a trap in itself. The Hs 123s were soon involved in self-defense missions against Soviet tanks attacking the base. Once again, II.(S)/LG 2 managed to ward off the ground attacks, but its pilots could not prevent Soviet artillery, hidden in the deep woods, from subjecting the airfield to constant shelling. Oberfeldwebel Kurt Warmbold, a member of the ground crew’ of I./JG 52 in Kalinin, wrote in his diary: “October 29: This is the dark­est day during our entire Eastern Campaign. The Rus­sians have covered our airfield with systematic artillery shelling since early this morning…. The Gruppe Weiss lost seventeen aircraft in today’s heavy shelling.”19

Martin Reiner, who led a draft of groundcrewmen from StG 2 committed to ground combat at Kalinin Air­drome, later recalled: “A large number of dead soldiers, Germans and Russians next to each other, lay on both sides of the road, just as they had fallen. Russian women searched among the dead for their beloved husbands, who recently had been mobilized for the defense fight from the factories in Kalinin. Several were in civilian

clothes or half uniformed—— There was no time to bury

the dead.”20

The deteriorating state of the Luftwaffe was reflected in the mounting successes among the VVS fighter pilots. 16 LAP’s Mladshiy Leytenant Ivan Golubin had his most successful day on October 29, when he claimed one Ju 87 and one Bf 109 in a morning melee, followed by two Bf 109s near Vorob’i at noon. On that day the Luftwaffe registered a total of nineteen German aircraft destroyed or heavily damaged in combat on the Eastern Front. One of the losses, a Bf 110 of 3./ZG 26, might be the Bf 110 claimed taraned by Mladshiy Leytenant Boris Kovzan of 42 1AP. After “cutting down” the German heavy fighter with the propeller of his MiG-3, Kovzan made a forced landing near a collective farm. There he actually repaired the damaged propeller in the farm’s forge and managed to fly back to base. At the base, his commamnder, Kapitan Georgiy Zimin, established that Kovzan had expended only half of his ammuniton against the Bf 110. Asked why he had taraned, Kovzan shamefacedly admitted, ‘1 don’t know how to shoot.” Kovzan, who had previously been a liaison pilot flying U-2s, had neither flown a fighter nor practiced aerial gunnery before being posted to 42 IAP. This story clearly portrays the inadequate standard of VVS airmen during the early years of the war, not to mention the do-or-die mentality that saved the USSR in this critical time. Boris Kovzan not only survived this air – to-air ramming, he emerged as the “top taraner” of the entire war, with four successful aerial rammings.

image169

Boris Kovzan would develop into one of the legendary Soviet fighter pilots of World War II. When posted to 42 IAP as a Mladshiy Leytenant, he had never received any gunnery training. His first victory, on October 29,1941, was achieved through ramming. A month later, Kovzan was shot down, but he once again survived unhurt. On February 22 and June 8,1942, Kovzan performed his second and third tarans. Following his fourth taran— during which Kovzan suffered severe injuries—he was appointed Hero of the Soviet Union on August 24,1943. With this, Boris Kovzan became the highest scoring air-to-air rammer of World War II. He passed away in Minsk on August 31,1985. (Photo: Zimin.)

Another taran claimed by the Soviets on October 29 also saw the pilot, 176 lAP’s Starshiy Leytenant Sergey Kotorov, survive.

Following the renewal of intense shelling on Octo­ber 30, during which eight Bf 109s of II./JG 52 were put out of commission, the Germans decided to abandon the forward airfield at Kalinin. Kurt Warmbold wrote: “I couldn’t even finish loading all the equipment into one of the Ju 52s, because the pilot was in a hurry to take off due to the increasing artillery fire. 1 was very happy as the aircraft shortly afterward left the ground and within thirty minutes brought us to safety in Staritsa.”

image170"Подпись: The workhorse of the Luftwaffe, the old, reliable Ju 52, was affectionately known as Tante Ju"—Auntie Ju. It provided the Wehrmacht with the majority of its airborne supplies during the entire war. The Kampfgruppen zu besonderen Verwendung (KGrzbV) equipped with Ju 52s had suffered heavy losses during the airborne assaults against the Netherlands in 1940 and Crete in May 1941. Another 126 Ju 52s were lost on the Eastern Front between June 22 and December 31,1941. This photo shows a minesweeping device that was mounted on some Ju 52s. The metallic ring, with a diameter of about 30 feet, created an electromagnetic field that detonated the mines from an altitude of 30 to 35 feet. (Photo: Hofer.)During the hasty evacuation, one Ju 52 received a direct artillery hit and was completely burned out. Several others were damaged.

Growing Soviet resistance and mounting losses put a strain on the Ger­man troops and airmen on the Eastern Front. As in the case of 7./JG 51,

Luftwaffe airmen manning all the units on the Eastern Front started to lose their self-confidence and fighting spirit. While some of the aces kept scoring, others showed alarming signs of battle fatigue, as pictured in the following account from JG 51: “These men no longer dared to fly over the front line. They had great respect for the fierce resistance put up by the rear gunners of the Russian bombers and turned away, having fired only a few bursts from a great distance. They would even, if possible, evade getting picked for a flight as soon as permission [for leave] was granted.”21

Four pilots of 16IAP—Leytenants Nikolay Semyonov and Aleksandr Suprun, and Mladshiy Leytenants Ivan Golubin and Ivan Shumilov—each claimed five to nine personal and shared victories between September 30 and October 31, 1941. The loss ratio of this unit can be read by the fact that the maintenance unit of the regiment restored forty-two damaged MiG-3s during October and November.

In total, WS-Western Front claimed to have shot down 120 German aircraft in October.

On November 6, 16 lAP’s Starshiy Leytenant Ivan Zabolotnyy fought a very difficult combat with a Ju 88, eventually bringing it down, but not before his own air­craft had sustained 127 bullet hits.22 That same day, a severe blow was struck against the German fighter units in this area when the commander of l./JG 52, Oberleutnant Karl-Heinz Leesmann, was shot down near Klin, northwest of Moscow. His staff Schwarm was re­turning from a combat sortie and had just begun landing when they came under heavy Soviet machine-gun fire. The lead Bf 109 was hit from below through the cock­
pit. A bullet splintered the bones in Leesmann’s right forearm. He barely managed to land and never returned to the Eastern Front. As he was a Knight’s Cross holder and victor in thirty-two aerial combats, the loss of such an outstanding fighter pilot was irreplaceable. Neverthe­less, the pilots of his Jagdgruppe took a bloody vengeance on the enemy, claiming thirty-five Soviet aircraft shot down from November 4 to 15.

On the Soviet side, Starshiy Leytenant Gerasim Grigoryev of 178 IAP bagged one Ju 88 on each on No vember 9, 15, and 27.

Even if increasing hardships and battle fatigue put a heavy strain on the Luftwaffe airmen at this time, the solid core of fighter aces remained a factor to be reck­oned with, not least in Werner Molders’s old JG 51, which scored 289 victories during October 1941. The most successful individual pilot during this period was Oberfeldwebel Edmund Wagner of 9./JG 51, who claimed 22 kills in October. On one occasion Wagner was attacked by five Soviet fighters, of which he shot down four. Nevertheless, a total of fifty-seven victories, all but one against the WS, was not enough to spare Wagner. He was killed in air combat on November 13,

Подпись: Nicknamed "Black Death" by the German ground troops, the 11-2 Shturmovik produced increasing terror among Wehrmacht soldiers on the Eastern Front from the winter of 1941 on. (Photo: Authors' collection.)

1941, while pursuing a formation of Pe-2s at treetop level over the front lines. His Bf 109 was raked by machine – gun fire from a Soviet rear gunner. The soldiers of a German antiaircraft battery1 watched as Wagner’s airplane plunged into the ground, exploding on impact and leav­ing a thick black cloud of smoke. The ace never had a chance.

Meanwhile, 11-2 Shturmoviks and other ground – attack aircraft fell upon the mired German invasion army. In an early account of the Red Air Force, Swedish Air Force General Stig Wennerstrom wrote: "It was mainly due to the performances of this effective ground-attack aircraft [the 11-2) that the Russians were able to make use of the German dilemma outside Moscow in 1941, as their ‘summer army’ was halted by the sudden and unex­pected cold spell. Their army was stuck and became sub­ject to incessant attacks from the aggressive 11-2 airmen. According to Russian reports, they destroyed 406 Ger­man tanks, about 2,000 motor vehicles, and 42 artillery pieces during the period November 1-November 11.

The assessment of the role played by the Shturmoviks
during the Battle of Moscow, however, has to be regarded with care. In general, there is something like a Soviet “Shturmovik myth” surrounding this battle. In fact, the actual number of ll-2s remained relatively low during the winter of 1941-42.

The fighter aviation regiments still carried the main burden of tactical air support, even if Shturmoviks un­doubtedly accomplished some of the most successful air strikes.

Historian Albert Seaton gives the following account from the point of view of the German soldiers harassed by the Soviet pilots during these difficult days: “Infantry companies, twenty’ men strong, led by second lieutenants or sergeants, were bearded and filthy, not having bathed or changed their clothes for months. Tormented by lice, they lay all day cramped and stiff in the narrow weapons pits filled with water, their feet so cold that they had lost all feeling. Sickness and cold caused more casualties than enemy action. Rain fell incessantly and the Luftwaffe seemed unable to cope with the Red Air Force fighters and bombers which dropped out of the low clouds, bomb­ing and machine gunning.”24

Encirclement in the Ukraine

Unremitting Luftwaffe raids against the Soviet retrograde rail movements in the Ukraine played an increasingly sinister role, seriously disrupting the Soviet supply lines. On July 16 the combat situation took a dramatic turn as Panzergruppe 1 captured Biylaya Tserkov, southwest of Kiev, and started turning toward the south, where the German Eleventh Army captured the Moldavian capital, Kishinev, on the same day. Suddenly a large-scale encirclement battle began to take form in the Vinnitsa – Uman area in west-central Ukraine. General-Polkovnik Kirponos, commander of the Southwestern Front, urgently phoned General-Leytenant Astakhov, the com­mander of the front’s aviation: “Take all you’ve got and throw it against the tank columns in the Biylaya Tserkov area and northeast of Kazatin! Keep on attacking! This is your main task!”

The next day, the bulk of Astakhov’s bombers and ground-attack aircraft were airborne against this threat. A shift in the weather, which had brought heavy low pressure with low clouds and rain showers, prevented the German fighters from interfering effectively.

Although considerable damage was wrought upon the German armored columns by the attacking Soviet airplanes, the drive by Panzergruppe 1 could not be halted.

In the South, the situation was different. General Shclukin’s units of VVS-Southern Front were in disar­ray due to losses and disorder in the ground organiza­tion due to the retreat from Moldavia. The German Elev­enth Army reached the Dniester River at Mogilev Podolskiy, on Moldavia’s northern frontier with the Ukraine, almost without interference from the Soviet

image72

Adol* Hiller Gene-al euhar Kurt 3fli, gbei and Genera cbers: Alexander Lohr during =r inspect on of KG 27 Eoelcke <url РЛидЬе Гао neera combat pilot during World War I. In the late 1920s he underwent secret training at Lipetsk in the USSR. He led Fliegerkorps IV of Luftflotte 4 between 1940 and 1943 and ended the war as commander-in-chief of Luftflotte 1. Pflugbeil died on May 31,1955. Bom in Croatia, Alexander Lohr served with the Austro-Hungarian General Staff during World War I. He commanded Luftflotte 4 during the invasions of Poland, Yugoslavia. Greece, and the Soviet Union. On April 6,1941, he led the extensive Luftwaffe raid against Belgrade, Operation Punishment. The end of the war saw him in chargeof Army Group E in the Balkans, where he fought side by side with his fellow countrymen of the notorious Croatian Ustasha. After the war, Lohr was put on trial by Yugoslavia and executed on February 16,1947. (Photo: Roba.)

Air Force. While the Stukas of StG 77 held the defend­ers down, the German troops were able to cross the river on July 17.

Adverse weather conditions limited aerial combat during the following days, but on July 20 three 1-153 Chaykas led by 66 ShAP’s Politruk Petr Bityutskiy, returning from a strafing mission, were bounced by three Bf 109s. One 1-153 was hit and the third Chayka pilot made a quick escape. Petr Bityutskiy barely survived the ensuing combat, but he finally managed to shoot down one Bf 109. His opponents in this engagement probably were from Major von Maltzahn’s Stabsschwarm of JG 53, which came out with three victory claims, including von Maltzahn’s fortieth, after an attack against Soviet aircraft strafing German troops.

A surprise attack on July 21 by eight DB-3s against the large Moldavian air base at Beltsy—previously occu­pied by 55 1AP—put fourteen German aircraft out of commission, including eleven Ju 87s of StG 77. The next day, the notorious SD leader Reinhard Heydrich was shot down and force-landed in Moldavia. Heydrich had volunteered to fly a couple of combat missions against the Soviets together with I1./JG 77. Following this un­pleasant experience, Heydrich made a quick return to safety in his headquarters in Germany.

On July 24, JG 77 met 55 1AP on at least two occa­sions. Shortly after 0600, a Bf 109 Rotte escorting an Hs 126 reconnaissance plane in the Beltsy sector were inter­cepted by two MiG-3s. Following a stiff dogfight, Oberleutnant Erich Friedrich shot down and killed Mladshiy Leytenant Leonid Diyachenko and drew off his section leader. A few hours later, another Rotte of I1./JG 77 ran into nine Su-2s that attempted to dive – bomb the Dniester crossings at Mogilev Podolskiy,

According to Soviet sources, two Su-2s were shot down over the German lines. Nevertheless, one of the Su-2 pilots succeeded in making a makeshift repair of his air­craft and took off from a field and returned to base. The Bf 109s became involved in a stiff dogfight with the dive-bombers’ escort, two I-16s and four MiG-3s— the latter from Il./JG 77’s old acquaintance 55 IAP. Leutnant Siegfried Freytag claimed an 1-16 (a loss that is confirmed by Soviet reports), while Starshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Pokryshkin’s MiG-3 was severely damaged by antiaircraft fire. The Soviet ace nevertheless was able to bring his damaged airplane back to make a forced land­ing in Kotovsk. This was the second time in a few days that Pokryshkin had been brought down by enemy fire. The first time, he had crashed in enepiy-held territory but managed to reach Soviet lines after a day’s and a night’s running.

The next day, it was JG 77’s time to suffer at the hands of attacking 55 IAP. While strafing the Soviet fighter unit’s base at Mayaki, Oberfeldwebel Friedrich Blaurock’s Bf 109 was hit by antiaircraft fire and crashed on the runway. Aleksandr Pokryshkin gives the follow­ing account of the crash site: “The cockpit was totally squeezed together. An Iron Cross was pinned on the chest of the dead pilot. According to the markings on the rudder of the plane, he had shot down six aircraft and sunk two ships.”21

In rain and low’ clouds, the bombers of Luftflotte 4 maintained their continuous interdiction operations against the Soviet railway system in the area. Generaloberst Alexander Lohr, the commander of Luftflotte 4, had decided to concentrate the bulk of his air units to sever the Soviet rear communication lines leading to and from the Uman area. On July 25 Marshal Budyonny sent the Stavka a dejected wire: “All efforts to withdraw the Sixth and Twelfth armies to the east and to the northeast are fruitless.” The ring had closed around the Soviet armies in the Uman area. The next encirclement battle took place.

As this happened, the skies cleared, once again set­ting free the full fury of the Bf 109 fighters. The results for July 26 are symptomatic of this stage of the war. While the fighters of JG 3, Stab, and 1./JG 53 and JG 77 daimed forty-nine victories, Luftflotte 4 recorded eleven of its own aircraft shot down.

During these days, the Romanians became acquainted with a completely new Soviet bombing tactic, the Zveno method. Zveno was a Tupolev TB-3 heavy bomber carry­ing two 1-16 fighters, each loaded with two 250-kilogram FAB bombs. The 1-16s were released at high altitude between ten and thirty miles from the target to carry out a high-speed diving attack. Since they were much smaller and faster than conventional bombers, the 1-16s could strike with surprise and evade enemy AAA fire and fight­ers. Having effected the attack, the I – 16s returned home on their own.

The original idea of the Zveno tactic came from designer Vladimir Vakhmistrov. At first it was intended that the two fighters carried by a TB-3 would be launched to ward off attacks—a flying aircraft carrier in effect. This proved impracticable but gave birth to the concept of a “piggyback” dive-bomber. Six 1-16s were modified for dive – bombing and redesignated I-16SPB. A special unit was set up with these aircraft, the 2 Eskadrilya of 32 ІАР/ ChF. Together with three TB-3s converted for the new role, the planes were based at Yevpatoria in the Crimea early in the war, and training commenced immediately.

The first Zveno raid was carried out on July 26,1941. Two TB-3s released four I-16SPBs led by Kapitan Arseniy Shubikov about thirty miles from the Romanian coast. Two of the fighter-bombers attacked oil plants near Constanta, while the other two raided the floating docks in the harbor. Despite being intercepted by the Bf-109s of Ill./JG 52, all the Soviet aircraft successfully returned to base.

While the bulk of Army Group South was involved in the Battle of Uman in the South, the German Sixth Army was given the task of advancing from the west toward Kiev. More or less leaving the skies above the Uman area to the Luftwaffe, the supreme commander of VVS-Southwestern Zone, General-Mayor Falaleyev, directed the main efforts of VVS-Southwestern Front against the German Sixth Army approaching Kiev. VVS – Southern Front was concentrated around the Dnieper bend to the south.

The chief of staff of Fliegerkorps V, Oberst Hermann Plocher, recalls that the lack of fighter cover for the Sixth Army in the Kiev sector in these days caused discord between the Sixth Army and Fliegerkorps V’. “The Rus­sians were extremely active in the air,” wrote Plocher. “Their efforts to concentrate air power in the area was clearly noticeable.”22 Finally, Generaloberst Lohr decided to provide the Sixth Army with a provisional groupment of Luftwaffe units—Nahkampffiihrer Nord.

Подпись: The Zveno concept was originally intended as a way to extend the operational radius of escort fighters for strategic bombers. As early as in 1930, the Soviet aircraft designer Vladimir Vakhmistrov launched the idea of letting the strategic bombers “carry along their own fighter escort." This idea eventually developed into carrying two 1-16SPB fighter-bombers beneath the wings of a TB-3. This photo was taken during the Zveno experiments in the summer of 1938. The 1-16 is a Mark 5 with closed canopy. The TB-3 is the 4m-34RN version, outfitted with 970-hp M-34RN engines and four-blade propellers. The Zveno sorties in 1941 were carried out by TB-3s of this version. (Photo: Authors’ collection.)
Led by the Geschwaderkommodore of JG 3, Major Gunther Liitzow, Nahkampffuhrer Nord was comprised of IlI./StG 77,1. and 1IL/JG 3, Stab, and L/JG 53. Here, Soviet aces such as Politruk Petr Bityutskiy, Leytenant Aleksey Artamonov, and Leytenant Vasiliy Demyenok were violently confronted with German top guns such as Oberleutnant Kurt Sochatzy of 11I./JG 3 and the Geschwaderkommodoren of JG 3 and JG 53, Major Gunther Liitzow and Major Gunther Freiherr von Maltzahn.

“Franzl” Liitzow and “Henri” von Maltzahn were among the most famous personalities in the German fighter arm. During the Battle of Britain, they had devel­oped as great leaders. They were of similar character, but Kurt Sochatzy was more of a fighter. Twice shot down over Soviet territory, he had managed to return both times. Since the outbreak of hostilities with the Soviet Union, Oberleutnant Sochatzy increased his victory score from one to thirty-eight.

On July 28, Politruk Petr Bityutskiy of 66 ShAP
found himself attacked by three Bf 109s. This time he was himself shot down, but not before having claimed one Bf 109 destroyed and one that crashed into the ground while pursuing his damaged fighter-bomber at treetop level. Possibly these losses are included in the July 29 loss report of I1I./JG 3, which listed three Bf 109s lost in air combat and no more than three victories. On that day, a flight of three Soviet fighters from 168 IAP/45 SAD, led by Leytenant Aleksey Artamonov, attacked sixteen “Junkers bombers.” Leytenant Artamonov claimed two shot down, while his wingman destroyed a third. Meanwhile, Major von Maltzahn, at the head of JG 53, achieved his forty-fifth victory by downing an SB bomber.

The next day, IIl./StG 77 launched a pinpoint at­tack against Marshal Semyon Timoshenko’s living quar­ters in Kiev. The Stukas ran into strong and well-aimed antiaircraft fire that hit one of the four escorting Bf 109s, On the return flight, Major von Maltzahn reported the destruction of two Soviet bombers.

image74

[ Kapiton Arseniy Shubikov is wearing the leather coat of World War I I inspiration, which was common in the VVS in 1941. Serving with 32ІАР/ f. ChF, Shubikov was one of the most outstanding fighter pilots of the Black

I Sea Fleet’s WS. A few months before the German invasion he was instructed to form the first Zveno unit, which he led with considerable I success during the first months of the 1941 war. He was killed in October

[ 1941 in combat with one of the aces of JG 77 Herzas. (Photo: Denisov.)

On August 1, 1941, six Pe-2s of 40 ВАР/ChF I undertook a swift attack against the harbor and rail mar – I shaling yards of Constanta. The ship Amarilis was sunk I and the Durostor was damaged, six train cars were dam­aged, six people on the ground were killed, and four were injured.

On August 2 the next Zveno mission was launched I by three ТВ-3s with six M6SPBs. This time Bf 109s I bounced the TB-3s before they had released the fighter – I bombers. The fighter-bombers were jettisoned, and the heavy bombers turned away from a hopeless encounter. The German fighters concentrated on the 1-16s. Later, four 1-16 pilots landed at Odessa Airdrome. Two of their I comrades had fallen victim to the Messerschmitts.

I On August 3, 63 BAB and 2 Eskadrilya/32 1AP r dispatched the third Zveno mission from Odessa Air-

jj drome: An escort of two MBR-2 flying boats was

. furnished the two TB-3s. Released ten miles from the target, the fighter-bombers spread out and struck an oil

Black Cross / Red Star

refinery, an oil storage depot, harbor installations in Constanta, and a hydroplane base on the Black Sea coast. All Soviet planes returned home. Thirty-two Soviet me­dium bombers that flew against the same target on that day fared worse. They ran into the entire l.(J)/LG 2, which claimed eleven shot down without any losses. The Gruppenkommandeur, Hauptmann Herbert Lhlefeld, single-handedly knocked down six, bringing his victory tally to fifty-three.

In the air over Kiev, Oberleutnant Kurt Sochatzy of III./JG 3 was brought down through a taran on August 3 and was captured by the Soviets. Having achieved thirty – seven aerial victories, plus a further twenty-seven air­craft destroyed on the ground, on 150 sorties since June 22,1941, Sochatzy was among the most successful pilots in 1L1./JG 3 at that time. Since no taran is registered in Soviet sources on this date, it may be assumed that Sochatzy was knocked down by 168 IAP’s Leytenant Artamonov, who was reportedly killed in a taran in the same area on July 30.25

At the beginning of August, Stab and L/JG 53 were withdrawn from the Eastern Front and transferred to Germany. They were replaced by 1II./JG 52, which was released from its duty of providing the Romanian oil fields with air cover.

On August 7 the Soviets launched a surprise attack in the Kanev area, to the north of the German troops advancing southward toward Uman. Encountering only weak German forces, the Soviets made a rapid advance and threatened the entire operation against Uman. At this point General Robert Ritter von Greim took the initiative to launch every aircraft available in his Fliegerkorps V against the Soviet attack force. Despite adverse weather conditions of rain showers and a cloud ceiling of less than 250 feet, von Greim’s units achieved excellent results in ‘foiling attacks.” While the Ju 87s of StG 77 severed the Soviet supply lines by blowing up the bridges at Kanev, the bombers of KG 51, KG 54, and KG 55 reportedly destroyed 148 motor vehicles and 48 tanks in the Kanev area between August 7 and 9, bring­ing the offensive to a halt. Fighting in the skies above this battlefield, III./JG 52 scored its hundredth victory’ on August 7. One of the main contributors to this suc­cess was 9./JG 52’s Oberleutnant Werner Fernsebner, a veteran of earlier campaigns. Having achieved his fif­teenth victory, he was shot down and killed over the Dneiper on August 9.

image75Подпись:

Meanwhile, the units of Fliegerkorps IV carried out systematic attacks to help annihilate the encircled Soviet Sixth and Twelfth armies in the so-called Uman Pocket. “Rolling aerial attacks” against Soviet troops attempting to escape the encirclement provided vital preconditions for the destruction of the entrapped forces. On August 10 alone, the bombers of Luftflotte 4 reported the destruction of 300 Soviet trucks and 54 tanks. During the battle of encirclement, Fliegerkorps V claimed to have destroyed 420 motor vehicles, 58 tanks, and 22 artillery batteries.

On August 11, Major Gunther Lutzow’s JG 3 claimed
thirty-six victories but lost seven Bf 109s in aerial combat. 66 SliAP’s Politruk Petr Bityutskiy sacrified his life to bring down one of them.

The Battle of Uman came to a cruel end in which 103,000 Red Army soldiers : ended up in German confinement. It had displayed, for the first time in history,] the ability of a superior air force to com-: pletely “surround an army from the air.9 The intensive aerial bombardment had brought virtually all major Soviet troop; movements to the west of the Dnieper River to a halt. At the same time, the Bf 109s had made huge claims in air com­bat. But the large successes had not been achieved without encountering hard opposition and relatively high losses oi the German side as well.

In the Kanev sector the Soviets started retreating across the Dnieper oi August 13. StG 77 was called on to carry out unbroken dive-bombing raids against the Kanev bridges, where it met stiff S» viet fighter opposition. While covering | the Stukas, Major Gunther Liitzow, the commander of JG 3, shot down two 1-16s, killing Mladshiy Leytenant Ivan Novikov of 88 IAP,vho had survived a taran on July 23.

On August 14, I./JG 3 tangled with a formation of very skillfully piloted 1-16s over one of the Dnieper bridges Kanev south of Kiev. Hauptmann Hans von Hahn recalled: “All previous air com­bat had been a children’s game compared to what w encountered above the Dnieper bridge at Kanev. We mt six Ratas. . . . Before you had even started thinking of attacking them, the Russian pilots quickly turned around and met us head-on, shooting and laughing cold-; bloodedly.”

Hauptmann von Hahn’s opponent in this combat was 88 IAP, which included the eight-victory ace Leytenant Vasiliy Demyenok. I./JG 3 claimed three I-16s in this melee—of which 88 IAP actually recorded two lost—against two Bf 109s shot down. The Staffelkapitan of 1. Staffel, thirty-five-victory ace and

image76

Oberleutnant Robert Oljenik, the Staffelkapitan of 2./JG 3, scored the Luftwaffe’s first aerial victory during Operation Barbarossa, early on June 22, 1941. During the following seven weeks, Oljenik increased his victory tally from six to thirty-five, almost exclusively against Soviet medium bombers, and thus became the most successful ace of I./JG 3. On July 27,1941, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross. Oljenik was shot down on August 14, 1941 .possibly by the Soviet ace, Leytenanl Vasiliy Demyenok, in an encounter with the И 6s of 88IAP. Unlike Demyenok, Oljenik survived. In 1945 he flew jet fighters and finished the war with 41 victories to his credit. (Photo: Oljenik via Prien.)

 

image77Air raids against Soviet lines of supply played a significant role in German successes in the Ukraine during the summer and early fall of 1941. According to Oberst Hermann Plocher of Fliegerkorps V, some one thousand railroad cars, many of them waiting in stations and loaded with ammunition, were destroyed during the Luftwaffe’s railroad interdiction operations east of Dneiper River. The to the left photo shows the meager remnants a Soviet ammunition train that was destroyed by German bombers during the summer of 1941. (Photo: Baeker.)

image78Herbert Ihlefeld scored his first nine victories with the Condor Legion in Spain, and he was already one of the most successful German fighter pilots as he led l.(J)/LG 2 against the Soviet Union. From June 1941 to July 1942, Ihlefeld was one of the deadliest opponents to the aviators of VVS – Southem Front and VVS-ChF. He then served as Geschwaderkommodore in the Air Defense of Germany and ended the war commanding the first He 162 jet fighter unit. By then, he had amassed a total score of 132 victories. (Photo: Salomonson.)

According to Soviet archival material. VVS-South – em Front registered 204 aircraft—including 113 during combat missions (eight of those due to AAA)-as “total losses" between July 1 and August 1, 1941/24 Other So­viet aviation commands operating in the same combat zone as JG 77 included VVS-ChF and units of the DBA. Thus the rate of overclaiming by the pilots of JG 77 appears to have been very limited during this period. On the other hand, the victory claims by WS-Southern Front
during the same period, 154, exceeded reality by two or three to one.

The combat strengths of VVS and Luftwaffe units і were in a steady decline. On August 1 the number of 1 operational aircraft in VVS-Southern Front had dropped ; from 671 a month previously to 258.23 Meanwhile, most j units in Luftflottc 4 were down to one-third or less of j their original strength.

General Winter

T

he Russian winter arrived in mid-November, mak­ing the soggy roads freeze and become passable again. On November 15 the badly crippled Army Group Center resumed Operation Typhoon. With Moscow nearly in sight, the German commanders nurtured a hope to seize the Soviet capital with the last remaining offen­sive capacity of their air and ground forces.

Improved road conditions in the southern sector enabled Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South to renew its attack against Rostov, the gateway to the oil fields in the Caucasus, on Novem­ber 17. The Soviet Southern Front responded by launch­ing a powerful counterattack from the northeast. The airmen of VVS-Southern Front supported the offensive with nearly four hundred sorties on the first day alone. This threat could be sealed off mainly through the vigor­ous action by StG 77 and the He Ills of KG 27 that were rushed in from Fliegerkorps IV. Despite a 500-foot ceiling and snowfalls, the few remaining Ju 87s in StG 77 were in incessant action, blowing up any Soviet attempt to resist. On November 20 the exhausted Ger­man troops reached Rostov. The next day the city’ was in German hands.

With the capture of Rostov, Army Group South had exhausted its last strength. On the Soviet side, fresh reinforcements were brought in to the north and east of Rostov.

Farther to the north, the drive to the east by the German Sixth and Seventeenth armies was bogged down at Severniy Donets, southeast of the city of Kursk. A parallel situation developed along the entire Eastern Front. The physically and psychologically weakened German

Volume I: Operation Barbarossa, 1941

troops had lost the energy and the material requirements to withstand the upcoming wave of renewed Soviet coun­terattacks.

As a symbolic finale to the German victory march on the Eastern Front, the Luftwaffe’s number-one ace, Oberst Werner Molders, left Chaplinka Airdrome on the southern combat zone aboard an He 111 from KG 27 early in the morning of November 22. Molders had been ordered to Germany to take part in the funeral of the late chief of supply and procurement of the Luftwaffe, Ernst Udet, who had committed suicide five days earlier. But Molders never reached his destination. The aircraft crashed near Breslau.

In the German underground resistance movement, a witness account was circulated -that gave a version dif­ferent from the official story: A body had been seen fall­ing from the He 111 in which Molders traveled. It is highly unlikely that this version is correct, but what is
true, although it has escaped widespread publicity, is that Molders turned against the Nazi government shortly before his death. The violations against men and women of the Catholic Church who spoke up against the atroci­ties in Germany had upset the Catholic Werner Molders. Having heard about the arrest of the Bishop of Munster, who had criticized the Nazis, Molders wrapped up all his decorations and his Nazi party membership card and sent the package to Nazi Party headquarters together with a protest letter in which he explained that he henceforth refused “to carry the insignias of this heinous regime.” In October 1941 Molders left his office in Berlin and trav­eled to the Eastern Front, where he found refuge among his fellow fighter pilots at Chaplinka. Some photos of Molders during these days clearly confirm that he wore no decorations or Nazi symbols whatsoever.

image172
During the last days of his life, Molders turned his back on events in Germany and even on his appoint-

image173

The Soviet all-metal Pe-2 bomber was quite comparable to the best German aircraft of the day, but relatively few were manufactured in 1941 due to a shortage of aluminum and the rapid evacuation of the Soviet industrial center. The Pe-2s that were completed in 1941 were deployed to the defense of Moscow. (Photo: Authors’ collection.)

 

ment as inspector of the Luftwaffe Fighter Arm; he just happily flew some unauthorized combat sorties with or­dinary front-line fighter pilots. He even scored a number of “unofficial” victories to be added to his official score of 115.

The loss of the incredibly popular “Vati” Molders struck the German airmen on the Eastern Front, espe­cially the fighter pilots, as a bad omen.

In late November 1941 the Wehrmacht on the East­ern Front was a mere shadow of what it had been five months previously. Losses had brought down the strength of army and Luftwaffe units to 30 or 40 percent, or even less, of their original strength. The veteran front-line sol­diers were marked with strong battle fatigue after five months of intense, incessant combat. Another major prob­lem was the overextended supply lines, where columns
traveling hundreds of miles on primitive roads ran the constant hazard of partisan ambushes. At this point the Germans faced the stiffest Soviet resistance so far encountered.

The temperature drop—at first welcomed by the Ger­mans—continued. During the afternoon of November 27, the temperature fell to 40 degrees Celsius below the freez­ing point. “General Winter” struck the final blow against the strength of long since battle-weary German soldiers and airmen.

Luftwaffe operations were severely hampered by stiff­ening engine oil in the cold on the primitive front-line airfields. Having stood parked outside in minus- 40-dcgrce-Celsius w’eather all night, the engines of many Messerschmitts, Junkers, and Heinkels simply refused to start on many a gray winter morning. The Red Air Force came off far better on their well-equipped airfields. The

Reinforcing the VVS

W

hile Germany had entered the war with only very limited reserves and most of the armed forces com mitted to frontal zones in all corners of Europe, the USSR had deployed only slightly more than half of its twenty thousand available combat aircraft on June 22,1941, along the western border. At this time 23 per­cent of the strength of the WS was allocated to the Far East areas, 10 per cent to the southern borders of the USSR, and 14 percent to the interior military districts. Although a large portion of these aircraft had to remain in place in case the enemy opened a new offensive, this meant that the Soviets retained a large number of reserves, untouched by the destructive force of the Luftwaffe.

As losses rapidly drew down the strength of the VVS in the front sector, these reserves became the main source

of the gradual recovery of the Soviet Air Force in the late summer and fall of 1941. Among of the first avia­tion units to arrive from the “peace zones” were one fighter and two bomber aviation regiments of Polkovnik Sergey Rudenko’s 31 SAD, transferred from the Far East to the Smolensk combat zone during the first week of July 1941.

Other sources of reinforcements were the more than one hundred flight training schools. The flight training school at Borisoglebsk alone formed two fighter aviation regiments for the front during 1941. Even if the quality of the aircraft from the flight training schools was terri­bly low, these units nevertheless constituted a welcome reinforcement for the battered VVS in the war zone.

The third main source of VVS replacements and reinforcement was the aviation industry. During 1941, most first-line aviation regiments were completely wiped out after only a brief period of combat activity. These were withdrawn from first-line service to be outfitted with new planes, frequently of higher quality. Thus 95 SBAP, equipped with Pe-2s, first arrived at the Western Front on July 6. Having lost almost all its aircraft, the unit was pulled back, equipped with newly manufactured Pe-3s, and brought back to operations at the end of Au­gust. 9 SBAP (equipped with SB bombers) was completely obliterated during the first four days of the war, was then pulled out of combat and returned a few weeks later with an outfit of Pe-2s. Having lost fifty-five SBs and thirty-eight crews, 208 SBAP was withdrawn to the reserve at the end of July. Based around the regiment’s surviving crews, three regiments, each composed of two Eskadrilya, were formed. One of these regiments, retain­ing the old designation 208 SBAP, was relocated to the front after being outfitted with twenty Pe-3s.

In 1941 the German war industry could not com­pete with the Soviets in terms of output numbers. Against about twelve thousand aircraft manufactured in Germany during 1941, the Soviet output figure was nearly sixteen thousand, of which about ten thousand left production plants after the German invasion.

Nevertheless, out of more than twelve thousand com­bat aircraft available to the USSR in the fall of 1941, fewer than one-third were deployed to the front areas. This was partly due to the fear of a Japanese or Turkish “stab in the back,” which compelled the Stavka to keep considerable air forces in the eastern and southern parts of the USSR. Another reason was the rapid rate of attri­tion suffered by the aviation units in combat. Frequently; fresh VVS regiments arriving for front-line service were; almost completely annihilated in three to six weeks. Then the unit had to be pulled back to be reequipped, a task that took at least one month. Thus during the late sum­mer and fall of 1941 no less than half of the aircraft and pilots of the VVS intended for the front were in reaf areas.

The dominant reason for the VVS’s frightening losses was the decreasing quality of pilot training. The exten­sive network of flight training schools could maintain a steady flow of personnel reinforcements, but only at the price of abbreviated training cycles.

And even if the sources mentioned above managed! to fill some of the gaps created by the onslaught of the Luftwaffe, at a pace never anticipated by the attackers, it must be emphasized that it took the VVS several years before it had fully recovered numerically from the! extreme losses of 1941.

The Soviet Counteroffensives

I

n the southern combat zone, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, the commander in chief of the Red Army’s Southwestern Zone, had brought forward strong Red Army reinforcements against the northern flank of the German First Panzer Army in Rostov. These forces were launched in an energetic counteroffensive during the last days of November 1941. The German lines immediately crumbled. The commander of Army Group South, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, decided to pull back his weakened units to a defensive position along the Mius River. Although this saved the First Panzer Army from being surrounded, it cost von Rundstedt his command.

The liberation of Rostov on November 30, 1941, was the first major success in the war with Germany. Contrary to the situation on the Moscow front, the VVS in the South could play only a minor role during this campaign. With the cream of the modern production program allocated to the defense of the capital, the Soviet airmen in the South were largely left with obsoles­cent aircraft models, such as the SB bombers, 1-16 fight­ers, and Polikarpov biplanes used in the ground-attack role. This inevitably resulted in considerable losses.

By early November Feldwebel Gerhard Koppen had scored the four-hundredth victory of Ill./JG 52. Four weeks later, Leutnant Adolf Dickfeld boosted the total past 500. During November, III./JG 52 registered only six Bf 109s lost with three pilots killed and one injured in this area. JG 77 contributed another sixty-five victo­ries, against seven Bf 109s shot down in the Rostov sector during November. According to Soviet figures,

VVS-Southern Front recorded ninety aircraft as “total losses” in combat between November 1 and December l.2 The attrition of one of WS-Southem Front’s units, 590 ShAP, is typical of the overall situation. Equipped with eighteeen 1-153s on November 1, of which twelve were serviceable, this regiment registered nine aircraft totally lost and another severely damaged during combat missions in November.5 The units of VVS-Southwestem Front and the DBA regiments allocated to this sector suffered equally high losses. This fairly substantiates the German claims, whereas the claim of sixty-five Ger­man aircraft brought down by VVS-Southern Front during the same period must be regarded as some­what exaggerated.

Nevertheless, the dogfights were not always one-sided. On November 28, 1941, Oberleutnant Gunther Rail, the Staffelkapitan of 8./JG 52, was shot down and badly wounded by an 1-16 lshak to the west of Rostov. At the time, Rail had been credited with thirty-eight victories. After returning to his unit less than a year later, Rail would rise to become the third-ranking fighter ace of World War II.

The weakness of the VVS in the southern combat zone is one of the main reasons why the Germans man­aged to hold out at the Mius line, fending off all Soviet attempts to break through.

On the Moscow front, the German Army made a final effort to seize the Soviet capital on December 2. Troops from the 258th Infantry Division actually man­aged to penetrate the Moscow suburb of Khimki, only – six miles from Red Square. General Armii Georgiy Zhukov dispatched all available forces, and bitter fight­ing raged on the ground and in the air above the battle­field.

On December 2 Soviet fighter pilots reported seven­teen enemy aircraft shot down during forty aerial encounters in this area. Counted among the victims on the German side was the Staffelkapitan of 5./StG 1, Hauptmann Joachim Rieger. Bounced by Soviet fighters, Rieger’s wingman made a rash evasive maneuver and rammed his Staffelkapitan.4 Both Ju 87s went down. In 4./JG 52, Feldwebel Georg Brey was shot down and killed while strafing a Soviet truck column. In total, no more than four Luftwaffe aircraft were registered as lost during these combats, but the inflated claims made by the Soviet aviators during this period can be seen as a

image174

Serving as an Oberleutnant and Staffelkapitan of 8./JG 52, Gunther Rail was one of the most skillful fighter aces on the Eastern Front. After shooting down his first Soviet aircraft as part of the air defense of Romania, Rail took an increasing toll of the VVS over the Ukraine in late summer and fall of 1941. On November 28,1941, he was shot down and badly injured. Although considered unfit for flying for the rest of his life, Rail struggled to regain his strength, and he returned to his unit in less than a year. When he left JG 52 to assume command of II./JG 11 in March 1944, Rail’s score of 273 victories put him in the first place among all fighter aces in the world. Shortly afterwards he was seriously injured in an aerial duel and ended the war as the world’s third ranking fighter ace, with a total of 275 victories. (Photo: Rail via Salomonson.) reflection of the high fighting spirit among the men in the VVS.

Northwest of the capital, the 11-2 Shturmoviks of 65 ShAP fell upon the columns of German troops retreat­
ing from Yakhroma, claiming nearly a hundred vehicles destroyed on December 2. With their supply columns destroyed by repeated air attacks, Generaloberst Erich Hoepner’s and Generaloberst Hans Reinhardt’s Third and Fourth Panzer armies were forced to halt their offensives due to lack of fuel and ammunition—at a point not more than ten miles northwest of the Soviet capital.

In the air over the Kalinin battlefield, the MiG-3s of 129 IAP intercepted a Ju 88 formation on December 5, claiming five victories.

South of Moscow, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian’s Second Panzer Army had to discontinue its offensive against Tula on December 5, and it withdrew behind the upper Don River. The troops under Guderian’s com­mand found themselves subjected to fierce aerial attacks, as described by historian Von Hardesty: “In the airspace around Tula, the WS frontal aviation under the com­mand of another talented leader, [General-Mayor Fyodor] Falaleyev, made a forceful appearance. Here the WS targeted as its major goal the destruction of Guderian’s Second Panzer Army, now in retreat. In the Tula sector, the Stavka deployed a concentration of ground forces,
drawn from the Western and Southwestern fronts, which included the Fiftieth and Tenth armies plus some cav­alry units. . . . Soviet air units made a valiant effort to destroy Guderian’s tanks.’’5

Generaloberst Guderian entered the following lines in his journal: “The offensive on Moscow has ended. All sacrifices and efforts of our brilliant troops have failed. We have suffered a serious defeat.”6

On December 6 both General-Polkovnik Konev’s Kalinin Front and General Armii Zhukov’s Western Front were pursuing the retreating enemy in what developed into a powerful counteroffensive.

As Hitler’s offensive against the Soviet capital suc­cumbed under the hammer blows of counterattacking Red Army units, the Soviets were still numerically infe­rior to their enemy on the Moscow front—except in the air. The Soviet air superiority proved to be one of the most decisive factors. On December 6 the Soviets mus­tered 1,376 aircraft on the Moscow front, against fewer than 600 in Luftflotte 2/ But according to Zhukov, the main factor in the Soviet victory at Moscow was “the

image175

This MiG-3, which is warming up on an airdrome near Moscow in the winter of 1941-42, is equipped with R/T, which until well into 1943 was quite uncommon in Soviet combat aircraft. (Photo: Seidl.)

image176

A 514 BAP Pe-2 being refueled at Makarovo Airdrome. The appearance of large numbers of Petlaykov’s modern dive-bomber over the battlefields outside of Moscow was of vital importance to the success of the Soviet counterattack. (Photo: Igashov/United State Museum of Tatarstan GOM RT.)

fantastic combat morale among the troops.” He wrote: “Our forces were absolutely convinced that they were going to defeat the enemy at the gates of Moscow."

This conviction was obvious not least among the Soviet airmen. A completely new fighting spirit appeared in the VVS units on the Moscow front. Von Hardesty wrote: “Despite poor weather—low’ clouds, fog, and snow’ storms—the WS covered the Soviet advance in force.”8

During these days, the modern Pe-2 bomber appeared in larger numbers over the front lines than ever before. The Pe-2-equipped 28 BAD launched ninety to a hun­dred sorties daily. On December 9 two Pe-2s of 23 SAD put ten enemy vehicles out of commission during three low-level attacks against a motorized column retreating from the Moscow Channel. The German Army Group Center fell back in disorder.

In air combat as well, the Germans ran into deeper trouble than ever previously on the Eastern Front. “The

Russian fighter pilots flew with a skill and courage that never had been experienced before,” notes the chronicle of JG 51.9 The loss rate in JG 51 of 32 percent during December 1941 reached its highest level since the out­break of the war.

61AK/PVO claimed 170 German aircraft destroyed in November and another eighty in December. On December 13, five fighters of 43 SAD intercepted a bomber formation with fighter escort and shot down three German planes without any losses. On the same day, other Soviet aircraft struck the airfield at Klin, to the west of the Moscow’ Channel, where they destroyed a large number of Luftwaffe aircraft on the ground, in­cluding seven Bf 109s from II./JG 52.10

The entire Army Group Center was threatened with collapse. The contours of a total breakdown of combat spirit started to emerge. Generalleutnant Ferdinand Schaal, commanding the 56th Panzer Brigade, wrote: “A

growing number of soldiers started walking westward on their own initiative. . . . Victims of the aerial attacks weie no longer buried…. All kinds of equipment were abandoned in the general confusion.”

Unteroffizier Walter Todt of JG 52 describes the scene at Klin Airdrome during the disorderly retreat of I. and I1./JG 52 and a Ju 88 Staffel: “All of our aircraft, plus a Ju 88, and all fuel barrels were put together. An 8.8cm antiaircraft gun fired into the heap. Then the AAA was also blown up [becausel the engine of its towing vehicle refused to start. All German soldiers on the air­field entered the road to Russa on foot.”11

While inflicting severe losses on the Second Panzer Army, the Soviet Western Front advanced more than eighty miles in ten days. On December 16 Hitler issued his famous “halt order,” calling for a “fanatical resistance” without retreating another step. He fired both the head of OKH, Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Brauchitsch, and the commander of Army Group Center, Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock, and took the former’s place personally while filling the latter vacancy with Generalfeldmarschall Hans Gunther von Kluge. The Fuhrer attempted to implement the same fear of repris­als among his army commanders as reigned on the Soviet side. Shortly afterwards he even dismissed the brilliant Panzer commander Generaloberst Heinz Guderian.

Hitler initiated hectic activity, turning to the Luftwaffe as the only remaining means to save the situation. The air force was lucky to escape changes in the command structure. On the contrary, it received immediate and
considerable reinforcements. Il./KG 54 Totenkopf was brought back from W’estem Europe along with three newly activated He 111 groups, forming KG 100 Wiking. Also rushed in from afar were the Zerstorer of I. and 1I./ZG 26, plus four air transport Gruppen with more than a hundred Ju 52s. One transport Gruppe was also transferred from Luftflotte 4. It was a last-minute effort, and it worked.

While the air transport fleet managed to improve the supply situation at the front, horizontal bombers, Stukas, and Zerstorer began to strike back at the advanc­ing Soviet troops with a vengeance. On December 17, when the temperature had warmed to a mere minus – 1 З-degrees Celsius a large formation of Ju 87s surprised Zhukov’s spearheads west of Tula and reportedly de­stroyed thirteen tanks and about two hundred motor vehicles. A Ju 88 crew’ was even reported to have made a suicide attack against a lock gate in the Moscow Chan­nel.12 The VVS still had numerical superiority; on De­cember 18 it claimed the destruction of 340 trucks, 11 artillery pieces, 100 ammunition carts, and 3 trains. But merely seeing the reinvigorated Luftwaffe in the air over­head gave an imperative moral boost to the battered German ground troops. The Luftwaffe kept attacking the Soviet troops daily during the remainder of Decem­ber, claiming four tanks and fourteen motor vehicles on December 18, seventy-five motor vehicles on December 21, four tanks and sixty’ motor vehicles on December 22, and two tanks and fifty’ motor vehicles on Christmas Eve.

image177

Подпись: Oberleutnant Hans-Ekkehard Bob’s 9./JG 54 Bf 109, Yellow 1, at a German forward airfield in the winter of 1941-42. Note the thin clothing worn by the mechanic next to the aircraft, The Wermacht was completely unprepared for the unusually cold winter, with temperatures ranging down to below minus-40 degrees Celcsius. During the first three months of the first winter of its war with the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht reported 112,000 frostbite casualties. (Photo: Bob.)

The challenge from the Soviet Air Force was met with airfield interdiction attacks. For example, Yeletz

Airdrome was bombed on December 23, and Aleksin Airdrome was hit on December 23, 24 (when two air­craft were destroyed on the ground), and 29 (when four aircraft were destroyed on the ground).

According to German sources, 119 Soviet and 33 German planes were shot down from December 15 to 30. Italian fighter pilots of Regia Aeronautical 22 Gruppo contributed by claiming twelve Soviet planes shot down between December 24 and December 26 for the loss of a single Mc.200 Saetta. On the Soviet side, VVS fighters on the Moscow battle scene claimed sixteen aerial victo­ries between December 17 and December 26.l! On Christ­mas Eve PVO ace Starshiy Leytcnant Gerasim Grigoryev of 178 IAP claimed a Ju 88 with his LaGG-3, which raised his total score to eleven personal and two shared victories.

Within two weeks, the destructive blows from the air managed to take the wind out of the Soviet counter­offensive. But the wind of Operation Typhoon had also subsided definitively. By New Year’s Eve the prime objective of the Soviet counteroffensive—to throw back the threat against Moscow—had been achieved. Opera­tion Barbarossa was dead.

It had been a swift and dramatic turning. From November to December 1941, the major task of the W’ehrmacht on the Eastern Front shifted from an offen­sive aimed at the destruction of the USSR to a defensive mode aimed at saving itself from collapse. The air forces of both sides played a significant role during the Battle of Moscow in December 1941.

Even if inadequate supplies, short resources, and battle fatigue on the German side wrere the main factors behind the Soviet victory, the contributions of the VVS itself should not be underestimated. According to Soviet sources, VVS units mounted roughly 16,000 combat sor­ties in the Moscow area between December 6, 1941, and January 7, 1942.14 It is clear that the Soviet Air Force was a major contributor to the German defeat outside Moscow. In spite of the heavy commitment, the Soviet losses in the air decreased remarkably during this period. The loss rate dropped below 1 percent for the first time in the war. According to VVS statistics, no more than 140 Soviet aircraft were lost during the Moscow offen­sive from December 5, 1941, to January 2, 1942.15

General Armii Zhukov later wrote: “Our air units – those belonging to the [Western] Front, as well as those of the Air Defense and the Long-Range Air Force—gave an important contribution to our counteroffensive at Moscow – in December 1941. The airmen put up a skillful and courageous fight. For the first time since the out­break of the war, our fliers deprived the enemy of his superiority in the air. Our air force maintained a system­atic pressure against artillery positions, tank units, and command posts. And as the Nazi armies started retreat­ing, our aircraft attacked and bombed the withdrawing troops without interruption. This resulted in all roads to the west becoming littered with equipment and vehicles abandoned by the Germans.”16

Even if they were better trained and better equipped, the once proud Luftwaffe airmen simply had lost the war of exhaustion with their Soviet counterparts. Wolfgang Dierich gives the following account of the situ­ation in KG 51 at this time: “In their medical journals, the air force medics Dr. Denkhaus (1./KG 51) and Dr. Ott (III./KG 51) repeatedly noted ‘severe nervous exhaustion’ among the airmen, with symptoms such as crying attacks, extreme sensitivity and even epileptic attacks.”17

For all that, the Luftwaffe had been able to maintain its role as the trump card of the W’ehrmacht. Hitler’s “halt order” and the increased Luftwaffe activity saved Army Group Center from complete annihilation in December 1941.

It is highly questionable that the seizure of Moscow really would have ended Soviet resistance (which was what the German High Command—and to a certain de­gree, even several Western historians today—anticipated). Nevertheless, the rescue of Moscow wras of enormous im­portance to the entire Soviet population and created the psychological preconditions for the extended defensive battles during the following difficult year, which in turn would lead to the final strategic turning point of the war.

Deadlock Before Moscow

D

uring the latter half of July 1941, the German Army Group Center was occupied in a huge battle in the Smolensk-Rogachev area. Smolensk had been cap­tured, and twenty Soviet divisions had been surrounded in that area. But the Smolensk pocket had not been closed tightly, and the desperate Soviet forces escaped to the east through a narrow gap east of the city. Parts of Luftflotte 2 fell on these forces, with devastating results. Terrible scenes were displayed on the ground, with pan­icked Soviet troops fleeing to the east, in any vehicle or by foot, passing scores of dead and wounded, subject to incessant Luftwaffe dive-bombings or strafings. Never­theless, more than ten thousand Soviet troops managed to escape from the Smolensk pocket, mainly at night. At Yelnya, fifty miles to the southeast, a new Soviet coun­terattack pushed back the 10th Panzer Division. To the west of Smolensk, at Orsha and Mogilev, other large, surrounded contingents of Soviet troops fought to the bitter end.

With fewer than four hundred aircraft remaining in first-line service in the central combat zone, there was little the VVS could do to support these doomed troops. The bulk of these air forces was concentrated in close – support missions at Yelnya.

At this point the German High Command decided that the time was right to divert a large part of its bomber fleet to terror attacks against the Soviet capital. Already, on July 8, Hitler had ordered Hermann Goring to level Moscow and Leningrad to the ground—“to make sure that there will be left no inhabitants that we will have to supply during the winter.”1 The final order for the imple­mentation of these terror raids came with the Fuhrer’s

Подпись: An He 111 from KGr 100 is loaded with bombs before another nocturnal sortie over the Eastern Front. In mid-July 1941 this unit was hastily transferred from operations over the British Isles to Soviet Union to take part in the bomber offensive against Moscow. (Photo: Batcher.)

Order No. 33 of July 19, 1941. Bomber units, including KG 4, KG 28, and KGr 100, were brought in from west­ern European to strengthen the attack force.

But the plan to devastate Moscow from the air be­came a large failure, quite comparable to the air offen­sive against Great Britain the previous year. The Soviet defense forces simply were too strong. As the air offen­sive against Moscow was initiated, General-Mayor Mikhail Gromadin’s Moscow Air Defense District (Moskovskaya Zona PVO) had 585 fighters at its disposal (170 MiG-3s, 95 Yak-ls, 75 LaGG-3s, 200 I-16s, and 45 1-153s). The fighters alone were divided among twenty-nine fighter regiments in 6 IAK/PVO, commanded by Polkovnik Ivan Klimov. Furthermore, General-Mayor Gromadin had concentrated 1,044 AAA guns and 336 antiaircraft ma­chine guns in and around the Soviet capital.

The fighting spirit of Moscow’s defenders was even more important than the material strength. “I swear to you, my country, and to you, my native Moscow, that I will fight relentlessly and destroy the Fascists,” read the
oath sworn by the fighter pilots assigned to the capital’s PVO. Such patriotic manifestations should not be un­derestimated in a country with a population subjected to a constant deluge of propaganda based on “revolution-і ary unselfishness,” as was in the young Soviet republic. In fact, the first significant Soviet victory of the war was achieved in the air over Moscow.

The initial air raid against the Soviet capital was launched during the evening on Monday, July 21, when 195 bombers—Ju 88s from KG 3 and KG 54; He Ills from KG 53, KG 55, KG 28,1I1./KG 26 and KGr 100; and Do 17s from KG 2 and KG 3—were concentrated against Moscow. They immediately encountered a strong defense composed of 170 Soviet fighters sent to inter­cept the raiders. Heavy air fighting took place in the Searchlight Concentration Zone in the Solnechnogorsk – Golitsyno area northwest of Moscow. The first kill was scored by Starshiy Lcytenant I. D. Chulkov of the MiG 3-equipped 41 1AP. Chulkov claimed an He 111 at 0210 hours. The Do 17 piloted by Leutnant Kurt Kuhn of
9./KG 3 was brought down by the famous test pilot Kapitan Mark Gallay. When captured Kuhn attempted to hide the fact that he had bombed Moscow claiming that his bomber had carried no bombs.

Nearer Moscow, the German bombers were met by heavy AAA fire. In total, the antiaircraft guns of I Korpus PVO reported the expenditure of 29,000 artillery- shells and 130,000 machine-gun bullets during this raid. “The night raids against Moscow – w-ere the most difficult mis­sions that I carried out on the Eastern Front,” recalls Oberleutnant Hansgeorg Batcher, the Staffelkapitan of L/KGr 100. “The antiaircraft fire was extremely intense, and the gunners fired with a frightening accuracy.” Batcher would survive more than 650 bomber sorties between 1940 and 1945, a higher number than any other German bomber pilot. Most of these sorties were flown on the Eastern Front.

At the cost of six or seven aircraft shot down, 104 tons of high explosives and 46,000 incendiaries w-ere dropped by the attackers during this first raid. These caused heavy losses among the civilian population. But the real aim of the mission—to burn the Kremlin to ashes— failed completely. The bombs simply could not penetrate the thick, seventeenth-century roofs on the main build­ings in the Kremlin.

The attack was repeated with 115 bombers the fol­lowing night. While the 1-16 pilots of 27 IAP claimed three Ju 88s shot down, Mladshiy Leytenant A. Lukyanov of 34 IAP managed to bring down his second bomber in Searchlight Concentration Zone 5. The Germans admit­ted to the loss of five bombers during this raid.

Due both to the strong Soviet defense and the diffi­culty of keeping such a large portion of the declining German bomber force away from the growing difficul­ties at the front, the number of aircraft participating in each raid decreased from 100 on the third night to 50, 30, and finally no more than 15 on successive missions. Within a short time the trumpeted Luftwaffe offensive against Moscow had been reduced to mere nuisance raids.

The most successful Soviet fighter pilot during the brief “Air Battle of Moscow” was Kapitan Konstantin Titenkov, who scored one bomber on each of the first four raids, for which he was decorated with the Order of Lenin and the Golden Star as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

By this time the bomber units of Luftflotte 2 w-ere launched both day and night against Soviet troop col­umns and lines of communication in the rear of the

image80

Oberleutnant Hansgeorg Batcher was appointed Staffelkapitan of 1./ KGr 100 in July 1941. On July 21,1941, he flew against Soviet troop concentrations in the Yelnya Bulge. On the following night, he participated in the first air raid against Moscow, Operation Klara Zetkin (ironically named after a famous German Communist leader). Batcher would survive a higher number of combat missions than any other Luftwaffe bomber airman in World War II, and today lives a quiet life near Hannover. (Photo: Batcher.)

Smolensk Front, as well as in close-support missions. Par­ticularly heavy raids were flown against the Dnieper bridges at Smolensk to create the preconditions for sur­rounding Red Army troops in the area.

A gradual recovery – of the VVS was noticed during the second half of July. Reinforcements brought in in­cluded 120 bombers of 3 BAK/DBA and 153 aircraft from General-Mayor Boris Pogrebov’s VVS-Reserve Front At the same time, a new Red Army command, the Cen­tral Front (incorporating an air force mustering merely seventy-five aircraft) w-as assembled between the West­ern and the Southwestern fronts. WS-Western Front received more than 900 aircraft during July. 47 SAD

image81(including 129 IAP, equipped with the modern MiG-3 fighters, and 61and 215 ShAP, both equipped with Il-2s) and reinforcements to 43 IAD were located close to the front.

Obviously, the Soviet bo mix: r force had not learned their lesson completely yet. An Eskadrilya from 411 ВАР/ OSNAZ arrived to the front with ten Pe-2s on July 22 and carried out its first mission early the next day, when five Pe-2s were sent out to attack Shatalovo Airdrome between Smolensk and Rosiavl. Intercepted by Bf 109s, all the Pe-2s were shot down.2 Two Pe-2s were claimed by Feldwebel Kurt Hoppe and Unteroffizier Hans Fahrenberger of 8./JG 27 north of Yartscvo at about 0500 hours. Later that day, the remaining five Pe-2s of the 411th went for Shatalovo again, this time escorted by four LaGG-3s from 239 LAP. Three Pctlaykovs were lost, two of them recorded as the forty-third and forty – fourth victories of IV./JG 51’s indefatigable Leutnant Heinz Bar. Finally, on the morning of July 24, the last two Pe-2s of this unit were dispatched against German troop columns. Despite the presence of four escorting LaGG-3s, both Pe-2s were shot down by Bf 109s, and one of the Il-2s was possibly the twenty-third victory of Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann of IV./JG 51.3

With the arrival at the front of Mayor Anatoliy Zhukov’s 32 1АР/43 LAD, equipped with thirty-six 1-16s, another Soviet fighter ace entered the battle, Mladshiy Leytenant Akimov. 32 LAP immediately started hunting the single-engine Messerschmitt fighters in the area, and not without success. In three days—on July 22, 25, and 26—Akimov scored four personal and two col­lective victories.

The new Soviet Reserve Front—comprising six fresh armies—launched a strong but inadequately prepared counteroffensive against Generaloberst Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2, to the east and southeast of Smolensk on July 25. This immediately drew the full attention of General von Richthofen’s Fliegerkorps VIII, whose Stukas and ground-attack aircraft conducted highly successful missions in this area on the following days. As the demands for air support from the ground forces increased, von Richthofen supplemented his ground-attack units with close-support missions carried out by his medium bombers. The Do 17s of L/KG 2 and IIL/KG 3 report­edly destroyed forty Soviet vehicles in the Belyy area, about eighty miles northwest of Smolensk, in a single day.4

Oberleutnant Johannes Steinhoff was the most successful pilot of IUJ 52 during Operation Barbarossa. Having scored eight victories overtl English Channel, he increased his tally to thirty-five by the end of Augu 1941. He was awarded with the Knights Cross on August 30,194 Steinhoff survived the war with a total of 176 confirmed victories and seiv; as the commander in chief of the Bundesluftwaffe before retiring on Ap 4,1974. He died on February 18,1994, in Bonn. (Photo: Steinhoff.)

The Soviet air support for the counteroffensive wr mercilessly butchered by the Bf 109s of Luftflotte 2.0 July 26, III./JG 27 claimed fifteen and IIL/JG 53 Pi As claimed twenty-one Soviet aircraft shot down (ii eluding five by Leutnant Erich Schmidt), most of thei DB-3 bombers. During one engagement this day, a whd Pe-2 Eskadrilya was wiped out. Seven Pe-2s from 5 SBAP, escorted by MiG-3s from 122 IAP, were out on bombing mission as ten to twelve Bf 109s attacked froi out of the sun. Within minutes, six Pe-2s and one Mi( 3 had been shot down. The seventh Pe-2 escaped wit severe battle damage but crashed on landing. A claii made by Oberleutnant Johannes Steinhoff, th Staffelkapitan of 4./JG 52, on July 26 for “Vultee V-ll

image82Подпись: The Bf 110 Zerstorer became one of the most successful German ground-attack aircraft on the Eastern Front in 1941. Increasing demands from the German ground troops during the fighting in the Smolensk sector compelled the close-support units of Fliegerkorps II and VIII lo deploy as close to the battlefront as possible. I./SKG 210 even occupied the airdrome at Orsha before German Panzer spearheads reached the base. (Photo: Galland.)probably was one of the new 11-2 Shturmoviks of the badly mauled 4 ShAP.

The pilots of 32 1AP claimed to have shot down five Bf 109s on July 26. Luftflotte 2 actually recorded eight Bf 109s lost—two each from 1I./JG 52 and 1I.(S)/LG 2, three from JG 51, and one from 1I1./JG 53. Among the personnel losses was Feldwebel Gerhard Gleuwitz, a twelve-victory ace from 6./JG 52. Gleuwitz was injured in a forced landing near Lassma. In total, the Luftwaffe filed no few’er than twenty-eight of its own aircraft as shot down on the Eastern Front on July 26.

During the last week of July, the battle in the central combat zone was similar to a naval battle. Throughout the Roslavl-Velikiye Luki-Smolensk triangle, German and Soviet troops were involved in fierce fighting without any clear front lines. At this point the close-support units of Fliegerkorps II and Vlll had been brought forward to airfields in the immediate vicinity of the battlefield. They were thus able to intervene within minutes as soon as new critical situations arose on the battlefield. One of the most successful among these units was SKG 210, which claimed to have put 823 Soviet aircraft, 2,136 motor vehicles, 194 artillery pieces, 52 trains, and 60 locomotives out of commission on the ground between June 22 and July 26. Due to the confused scene on the ground, Stukas and ground-attack planes frequently raided German troops.

The location close to the front posed great problems for the Luftwaffe ground-support units. Obsert Hermann Plocher noted, “The ground situation changed so often
that the Luftwaffe units generally did not know when they took off whether they would be able to land at their old fields after the sortie.’” Time after time, the ap­proach of Red Army ground forces com­pelled the close-support air units to de­fend their own bases.

On July 26, Panzergruppe 3 managed to isolate the attacking Soviet Sixteenth and Twenty-first armies northeast of Smolensk. With the simultaneous fall of the Mogilev and Orsha pockets, the Ger­mans were able to move considerable in­fantry forces forward. At this point the Germans reported that 185,500 Soviet soldiers had been captured in the battle in the Smolensk area.

Fighting the increased presence of the VVS in the air, 1I1./JG 53 Рік As tore up three successive bomber formations on July 27, shooting down fourteen twin – engine aircraft. The pilots of III./JG 27 downed another nineteen. Returning in greater strength, the Soviet bomber units lost ten more planes on July 28. On July 29, IV./ JG 51’s Leutnant Heinz Bar reached the fifty-kill mark when he blasted a DB-3 and an SB out of the sky.

While the Stukas and ground-attack aircraft were directed to annihilate the surrounded Soviet forces in the Smolensk pocket, the bomber units of Luftflotte 2 concentrated on roads and railways leading from the east to the Bryansk-Vyazma-Velikiye Luki line. During the final days of July, the Kampfgruppen of Luftflotte 2 reportedly destroyed 126 trains and 15 bridges during interdiction missions. On July 30 the important railway junctions at Orel, Korobets, and Stodolishche were sub­jected to heavy Luftwaffe raids.

Day in and day out, the Soviet fighters were in action over the battlefield to relieve pressure on the ground forces. Most engagements ended to the disad­vantage of the VVS, but at least the crack 43 LAD man­aged quite well, but at a high price. On July 30, four of 32 LAP’s I-16s came across sixteen Bf 109s and claimed three shot down. Possibly counted among the victims of 321AP was Leutnant Hans Joachim Steffens, a 5./JG 51 ace with twenty-two victories to his credit. As the I-16s were returning from this mission, a lone Bf 109 struck the 1-16 quartet, shooting down one 1-16 and killing its pilot, and then making a quick escape.

image83That evening, the new commander of the crack 401 IAP, Mayor Konstantin Kokkinaki, appointed after Podpolkovnik Stepan Suprun’s death, led three MiG-3s on a fighter sweep over the front area. They were bounced by Bf 109s, and one MiG-3 pilot was shot down and killed while Kokkinaki and his wing man barely man­aged to escape with severe battle damage to their planes.

On July 31, Luftflotte 2 was concentrated against three main targets: Soviet columns in the area between the Smolensk-Roslavl rail line and the highway to Vyazma; an attempted counterattack at Shatalovo, thirty-seven miles southeast of Smolensk; and the railway junctions mentioned above. Returning Luftwaffe crews reported that the Soviet casualties from these attacks could not be accurately estimated, but in reality they put seventy-three trucks, twenty-two tanks, and fifteen rail cars out of commission. l./KG 53 Legion Condor had two He Ills shot down by fighters near Vyazma, while an He 111 from 7./KG 53 force-landed with battle damage. Dur­ing another engagement on July 31, the crack 401 IAP claimed two Bf 109s shot down against two MiG-3s dam­aged and one pilot injured.

All in all, 43 LAD, to which 32 and 401 IAP belonged, carried out 4,638 combat sorties between June 22 and August 2, 1941, claiming 167 aerial victories, with the loss of 89 aircraft.

The intensity of the air war during the Battle of Smolensk is clearly displayed by the number of sorties carried out by the belligerent air forces on this sector between July 10 and July 31—12,653 German and 5,200 Soviet.

Between July 29 and August 4 the airmen of Luftflotte 2 were credited with the destruction of 100 Soviet tanks, 1,500 trucks, 41 artillery pieces, and 24 antiaircraft batteries in the Smolensk sector alone. On August 5 the battle of annihilation at Smolensk ended, and another 310,000 Soviet soldiers marched into captivity.

While the Soviets continued to strengthen their de­fenses on the road to Moscow, Hitler issued a new direc­tive on July 30. The new orders suddenly called for shift­ing the next main objective of Operation Barbarossa to the seizure of Leningrad.

Even before the battle of Smolensk had been com­pleted, Fliegerkorps VIII was transferred from Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 in the central combat zone to join Luftflotte 1, to the north.

Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, who commanded Luftflotte 2 from № 1940 to 1943. “Smiling Albert” Kesselring was one of the best known and ; 6: ablest Luftwaffe senior commanders during World War II. He passed away ‘! К on July 16,1960, at the age of seventy-five. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.) 1

Luftflotte 2 was thus divided in half, with Fliegerkorps j К II remaining as the only German air cover in the central | | combat zone.

When the Soviet commanders noticed the dimin – j | ished enemy presence in the air, they took the oppor – 1 § tunity to step up WS activities. The large German air j I base at Shatalovo, between Smolensk and Roslavl, was s [ subjected to intensive and repeated Soviet air raids dur – 1

ing the first days of August 1941, but the fighters of JG 1

51 were able to score considerably against these raiders. j On August 2, Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann, one І [ of the most successful aces in IV./JG 51, brought down J I three R-5s, one 1-15, and two R-10 bombers, bringing his і S personal score to thirty-three.6

Meanwhile, a serious crisis arose in German com – ] I
mand circles. Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, and his two Panzer generals, Guderian and Hoth, wished to continue straight toward Moscow, but Hitler hesitated. The stiff Soviet resistance in the Smolensk sector had made the Fiihrer cautious. It took Hitler three weeks to make up his mind. During this time Army Group Center was left without any major strategic goal.

In this period the bomber offensive against Moscow also was ended. Returning vvithsmall forces against the Soviet capital on the night of August 6-7, I1I./KG 26 lost an He 111, which probably fell victim to a taran carried out by Mladshiy Lcytenant Viktor Talalikhin of 177IAP. Vasiliy Garanin, then a young Starshiy Lcvtcnant of the Moscow PVO, still has a vivid memory this spec­tacular nocturnal taran, which he viewed from the ground:

Everything happened very rapidly. Suddenly 1 saw

fire in the dark sky and a descending aircraft. 1

couldn’t judge whether it was one of ours or a German plane. The soldiers cried: “Parachute! Para­chute!” 1 watched and saw the pale cloth of a para­chute. I immediately ordered a vehicle to the place where the pilot would come down.

Suddenly a huge explosion was heard. Stunned, we could see a large pile of fire at the wall of a monastery. An enemy bomber had crashed only 100 to 150 meters from our staff position.

“It’s one of ours! One of ours!” We gathered around the pilot. He was injured in one of his hands. It appeared that he was from a PVO regi­ment stationed not far from us. We quickly brought him to safety.’

Подпись: This bonbed-up He 111 of KGr 100 is taxiing out for yet another sorie against he Soviet Union. A characteristic of German twin-engine bombers were the neavy bomb load with which they could be armed. Abie to carry a 4.000-lb bomb oad BOO mi es, the He 111 H-16 could almost be considered a heavy oomber, cespite its being outfitted with only two 1,340-hp Junkers ^umc 211 D engines. (Photo: Batcher.)

Mladshiy Leytenant Talalikhin had survived by bail­ing out. He inspected the crash site of the Нс 111 together with Starshiy Leytenant Garanin and a group of Soviet soldiers early the next morning. The bomber had buried itself six feet into the ground right next to

the monastery. Garanin recalls how Talalikhin picked up something from the ground and put it into his pocket as a memento. According to one Soviet source, the victo­rious Soviet pilot found the body of a dead lieutenant colonel among the dispersed remains of the bomber. Also according to this source, a corkscrew and a package of pornographic pictures were found in the pockets of the dead man’s uniform.8 According to German records, there was no Oberstleutnant aboard the downed bomber.

With the task of providing air support along nearly five hundred miles of the front, Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring realized that he could not afford to divert his precious bomber units to nuisance raids against Moscow. He decided to concentrate the bulk of his only remain­ing air corps, Fliegerkorps II, to the southern wing of Army Group Center, at Gomel, where Guderian’s tank units encountered two Soviet armies. Here the planes were deployed mainly against troop and supply trans­ports in the Soviet rear area. One of the prime targets was the railway junction at Bryansk. Mustering only sev­enty-five operational aircraft by August 10,4 WS-Cen – tral Front in this area was not able to do much against this. In large part due to Fliegerkorps П, Generaloherst Guderian succeeded in cutting off twenty-three Soviet army divisions in the Gomel area by August 9. The battle lasted eleven days and resulted in the capture of 84,000 prisoners.

Meanwhile, the weak Luftwaffe forces remaining on the left flank of Army Group Center were opposed by increasing VVS activity. During air combat over the bor­der area between Army groups Center and North at Velikiye Luki on August 8, 29 1AP claimed eight Messerschmitts and Junkers shot down. Downed by Soviet fighters, a Stuka pilot, Unteroffizier Siegfried Fischer of 6./StG 1, bailed out over enemy territory near Velikiye Luki. Despite severe burns, he managed to return to German lines.

On August 9, JG 51 claimed nine bombers shot down during a Soviet air raid against Shatalovo Airdrome. Leutnant Heinz Bar, who contributed three DB-3s to this latter success, was awarded with the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross five days later. But most raids man­aged to evade German interception because the costly daylight raids by Soviet medium bombers were supplanted by low-level attacks by fighter-bombers or Shturmoviks. The regiments of 47 SAD and 43 LAD were divided into elements consisting of one or two Eskadrilyas, which made it possible to increase the number of flights. “We simply had no measure to counter these sudden attacks,” wrote Aders and Held. “The Russians learned from their losses: They climbed shortly before they arrived over the air­field, dived down on us, and gained such speed that the Rotte on duty’ was unable to catch them.”10 The brunt of the VVS attacks was concentrated against the German Ninth Army on the main road from Minsk to Moscow.

Obserst Hermann Plocher later wrote: “Especially troublesome were the continuous attacks upon the Ger­man front lines by Soviet ground-attack planes. Although these attacks were generally of relatively slight effect, they nevertheless influenced the morale of the ground forces. . .. The struggle against these ground-attack air­craft was very difficult because they approached from afar and at low level, flying singly, in two-plane forma­tions, and in weak squadron strength; dropped their bombs on the front lines; and immediately turned back toward their own territory. Scrambling German fighters usually arrived too late to block the attack, and their pursuit of the Soviet ground-attack aircraft, which were retiring at low altitudes, was too costly for the unarmored German fighters because of the strong Soviet ground fire.”11

For the first time, the German fighter units lost con­trol of the air. The combined effect of the sudden weak­ening of the Luftwaffe and the reinforcement of the VVS in this area can be read in the following laconic note from August 11 in the war diary of the German High Command: “Report from the Ninth Army. . . . The enemy enjoys air superiority in the whole army area."*’

Kesselring responded by launching He 11 Is, Ju 88s, and Do 17s in a series of renewed raids against the So­viet airfields in the area. Once again, a large number of Soviet aircraft was destroyed on the ground, which brought a temporary decrease in the VVS raids. On the other hand, the concentration of the Luftwaffe bombers against the Soviet airfields also came as a relief to the Soviet lines of communication, which made it possible for the Soviets to bring forward new troops and equip­ment to the front lines.

On demand from the High Command, the Luftwaffe dispatched yet another nuisance raid against Moscow on the night of August 11. This time the bomber crews encountered a new menace, twin-engine Petlaykov Pe-2s acting as night fighters. These Pe-2 bombers had been equipped with powerful searchlights to locate the enemy

Подпись: Heavy losses and increasing demands at the front compelled the Luftwaffe to halt its organized bomber offensive against Moscow. This He 111 from KGr 100 barely managed to return to base with heavy damage from hostile fire. Between August and November 1941, KGr 100, which was normally allotted about forty He 111s, registered fourteen of its bombers as total losses and another five as seriously damaged. These losses are comparable to the unit’s losses during the Battle of Britain a year earlier. (Photo: Batcher.)

bombers in the dark. The original intention was to use the Pe-2s as “flying searchlights” to assist the single­engine night fighters, but once the German aircraft were sighted, the eager Pe-2 pilots pressed home their own attacks with vigor. The success was immediate. Four German bombers were brought down by the Petlaykov night fighters on their first night out. Following this raid, the Germans decided to cancel the bomber offensive against Moscow.

More air raids would follow against the Soviet capi – tal-a total of eighty-seven took place between July 21, 1941, and April 5,1942—but the systematic air offensive had ended. Of seventy-six air raids during 1941, fifty – nine were carried out with no more than between three and ten planes. According to Soviet sources, air raids against Moscow’ through October 1, 1941, cost the Luftwaffe 173 aircraft (110 shot down by fighters and
60 by AAA, with another three destroyed in collisions w’ith the steel wires of the barrage balloons). This w;as a humiliating blow’ to the prestige of the Luftwaffe, par­ticularly as it occurred just at the time when Soviet bombs w’ere starting to fall on the Reich’s capital itself.

Symptomatic of the soaring combat spirits among the Soviet airmen on the Moscow Front during this period was the success claim made by 129 LAP over the Yelnya bulge on August 20—nine German aircraft shot down. Farther to the north, Leytenant Luka Muravitskiy of 29 LAP claimed two Ju 88s shot down in a single engage­ment on the same day. A week later, Muravitskiy scored his tenth victory.

On August 23 Hitler finally made up his mind regarding Army Group Center. He ordered Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 toward Kiev to support Army Group South. In two months’ time, Army Group Center had

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Volume I: Operation Barbarossa. 1941

image86Подпись:image87

Подпись: Increasing Soviet air-base raids forced the Luftwaffe to pay close attention to camouflaging its aircraft based on the frontline airfields. (Photo: Hofer.)

been reduced from the main force of Operation Barbarossa to a mere supple­ment to the two other army groups. Inas­much as most of Fliegerkorps II remained with Guderian to the south, only limited German air units were left in the central combat zone.

At this moment the Red Army in­creased its pressure against the German Second Army in the bulge at Yelnva, to the south of the main Moscow-Minsk highway. The German fighters left in the central combat zone were totally outnum­bered in the air. During one of these battles, on August 25, JG 51 lost one of its most outstanding pilots, Hauptmann Hermann-Friedrich Joppien, victor in sev­enty aerial combats. On August 30 two armies from General Armii Georgiy Zhukov’s Reserve Front launched a pow­erful counterattack at Yelnya. “Heavy Red air activity” was reported to the Gentian Army Staff: “Unequivocal Russian air su­periority in the sector of the Second Army.”15 On September 1,1I./JG 51 was severely hit by a bombing raid against Shatalovo. One bomb struck the quar­ters of 4 Staffel, killing five and injuring many others. The next day, Unteroffizier Anton Hafner (6./JG 51) entered the following lines into his diary: “At six sharp, six biplanes (Curtiss) strafe us.

Подпись: The heavily armored 11-2 Shturmovik became known to the German fighter pilots as the "Cement Bomber.1' Nevertheless, this 11-2 crashed at the German-occupied Konotop Airdromre in the northeastern Ukraine. {Photo: Balss.)

Feldwebel IRichard) Quante managed to shoot down two before he was himself brought down by machine – gun fire. He went down in occupied territory. Shortly afterward, another six bombers arrive at low level. Nine bombers dive out from the clouds. Our AAA fires with everything available. We couldn’t get any breakfast. The 8.8cm Flak force eight bombers to turn away. Then fight­ers attack from the side. We have to remain in the shel­ters. The sky is filled with Russian aircraft. Fifteen Rus­sians are shot down.”

It took the Soviets no more than a week to push the German Second Army out of the Yelnya bulge and back across the Desna River. The immediate threat to Mos­cow was thus removed.

During two months of fierce air battles the VVS had displayed a remarkable capacity to withstand extreme losses. According to Soviet sources, 903 VVS aircraft were lost in the Smolensk-Yelnya sector between July 10 and September 10,1941.14 Even if the Bf 109s shot down rows of aircraft each day, the surviving Soviet fliers were back in the air again the next day. Without this stamina, the Soviet air forces would not have been able to give the air support that contributed decisively to bringing Hitler’s first offensive toward Moscow to a halt.

“The Red Air Force has not been defeated,” noted the war diary of JG 51 on the same day as Hauptmann Joppien was missing. By bringing in aircraft from other
parts of the USSR, replacements from aviation industry, and eleven hundred obsolescent planes from the flight­training schools, the VVS was able to increase the number of first-line combat aircraft to thirty-seven hundred at the end of. August. Even if this was far below the impressive resources available at the front at the outbreak of the war, it meant that the VVS once again had managed to gain at least a numerical superiority in the air.

Nevertheless, the allocation of large numbers of inadequately trained airmen resulted in continued mas­sive losses on the Soviet side. The deployment of better aircraft could not outweigh this crucial fact, which is clearly displayed by the records of the first 11-2 unit to see combat, 4 ShAP. By the end of August, 4 ShAP had carried out 427 combat sorties and lost 60 aircraft,15 a frightening loss rate of 14 percent. Despite massive re­placements, the number of operational aircraft at hand in 4 ShAP dropped from fifty-six at the outbreak of the war to only two in late August. Handing these planes over to 215 ShAP, the surviving pilots of 4 ShAP were pulled out of combat.16 But to the Luftwaffe airmen – and not least, the German front-line ground troops—it would soon be clear that the fight with the Red Air Force had only begun.

By August 31, the accumulated losses sustained by the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front had reached 1,320
combat reconnaissance planes destroyed and 820 damaged. In addition, 170 Army aircraft were destroyed, and another 124 were severely damaged. Ninety-seven transport, liaison, and other non-combatant aircraft were also lost.

After the disheartening defeats in June and July, optimism soared in Moscow. The inhabitants of the Soviet capital, who had lost 736 killed and 3,513 injured to bombing raids between July 22 and August 22, began to hope that the worst crisis was over. In their triumph, they noted the humiliating inability of the vaunted

Luftwaffe to maintain the air offensive against their city. They were aware that German ground forces stood fewer than 200 miles away, but at the same time they felt tran – quilized by the obvious fact that the Blitzkrieg along the road to the east had stopped. Many started to hope for an imminent turning point in the war.

For now, most Soviet and German observers turned their attention to the outcome of the Battle of Lenin­grad, selected by Hitler as the new prime objective of his invasion.

Conclusions

T

he war on the Eastern Front in 1941, in the air as well as on the ground, has few rivals in terms of its sheer bitterness. It was fought between the two most motivated armies in the world at the time. Ideology played a central role in this conflict. Just as Hitler’s Germany was permeated with the Nazi ideology’, creating a chau­vinist mentality that should not be underestimated, the traditions of early Bolshevism marked the entire Red Army down to the simple private, creating a determina­tion described by some as fanaticism.

Much has been said and written about the objective circumstances that caused the defeat of the German in­vasion army in the winter of 1941-42. But it should not be forgotten that it was the bottomless stamina of the Soviet soldiers and airmen that had laid the foundation for this situation. The Red Army had been pushed back­ward step by step since June 22, 1941, suffering enor­mous losses, yet it was able to force the invaders to fight bitterly at every point on every day. The accumulated effects of this incessant fighting among the invaders finally bore fruit at the very gates of Moscow’.

Both sides put up a skillful and bold fight. Even if the Luftwaffe relied mainly on its technological and tac­tical superiority, the courage and vigor of the German airmen are indisputable. Facing an enemy with a tre­mendous numerical advantage during the opening days of the war and an unflagging resistance following the first onslaught, the airmen of the Luftwaffe never stopped attempting to fulfill the increasingly overinflated demands of the situation until they were either killed or com­pletely worn dowm.

The bombers, Stukas, and Zerstorer displayed a high

efficiency in causing high material and personnel losses to the enemy. By neutralizing the potential threat from thousands of Soviet aircraft, providing the advancing armies with decisive close support, and disrupting com­munications on a grand scale in the rear of the Red Army, the crews of these aircraft played a key role to the by-then-unparalleled series of German victories in the summer of 1941. For instance, between June 22 and No­vember 22, II./StG 77 recorded the destruction of 140 Soviet tanks, 45 artillery pieces and 43 antiaircraft artil­lery pieces, and its aircraft sank 10 ships.

Air reconnaissance provided the German command­ers on all levels with detailed and frequently decisive tactical information.

The Jagdflieger achieved air supremacy’ and domi­nated the skies wherever they appeared and were accorded well-deserved respect from the Soviet airmen. The word for the Bf 109, Messer, spread as a nimbus throughout the entire VVS. The Jagdgeschwader deployed on the Eastern Front claimed more than 7,000 victories during Operation Barbarossa: JG 3 posted 1,287 victories; JG 27 had 270 victories; JG 51 had 1,820 victo­ries; JG 52 had approximately 800 victories; JG 53 posted 775 victories; JG 54 posted 1,185 victories; and JG 77 (including l.(J)/LG 2) achieved approximately 1,250 victories

Two fighter pilots, Oberst Werner Molders of JG 51 and Major Gunther Liitzow of JG 3, each surpassed the hundred-victory mark during these combats. And both of these Jagdgeschwader could boast two other of the
top aces at that time, Hauptmann Gordon Gollob ofjG 3, with a total score of eighty-five kills at the end of 1941; and Oberleutnant Heinz Bar of JG 51, with eighty’ kills. Also, in JG 54, Oberleutnant Hans Philipp had a score of seventy-three as 1941 drew to a close.

Among thousands of Soviet airmen who fell prey to the superiority of the Bf 109 fighters in 1941 were expe­rienced pilots such as the famous test pilot Podpolkovnik Stepan Suprun of 4011AP; the Zveno ace Kapitan Arseniy Shubikov; 127 lAP’s Starshiy Ley tenant Luka Muravitskiy, who had fourteen personal and collective kills; 154 IAP’s Starshiy Leytenant Aleksey Storozhakov, with eight personal and three collective kills; and 19 IAP’s Mladshiy Leytenant Yegor Novikov, with ten personal and five collective kills. Among the missing was the vet­eran female bomber pilot Starshiy Leytenant Yekaterina Zelyenko of 135 BAP.

According to Soviet statistics, at least 21,200 aircraft were lost, including 10,600 in combat, between June 22 and December 31, 1941.1 The combat losses included 5,100 fighters, 4,600 bombers, 600 ground-attack aircraft, and 300 other types. To these figures should be added the “unaccounted decrease” of 5,240 VVS aircraft between June 22 and July 31. The corresponding overall figure given by the Luftwaffe—17,745 Soviet aircraft destroyed by December 19—is thus not far from reality.

Подпись: Contradicting the German leadership’s propaganda regarding Soviet technical proficiency, the early Yak-1 fighter bore deadly witness as to the USSR's ability to produce equipment comparable to the best in the Third Reich’s arsenal. (Photo: Stockton.)
This was the inevitable outcome of a clash between the world’s most skillful and best-equipped air force on the one hand and an air force hobbled by Stalinism. If early Bolshevik traditions had revolutionized the combat

spirit of the Soviet soldiers, the autocratic Stalinist rule had created a numerically vast army with equally vast qualitative deficiencies. Command structures, doctrines, tactical thinking, the training standards, and equipment technology marked the Red Army with the fatal stamp of a conservative and ruthless bureaucracy.

The harsh lessons of the first six months of the war compelled the WS to carry out a complete reappraisal of most of its doctrines and theories. This new thinking particularly influenced the bomber fleet of the VVS, where inadequate equipment demonstrated that prewar strategic bombing doctrines had been a mere dream. During the course of the long war, the Luftwaffe would force the VVS to abandon all of its erroneous prewar tactics and doctrines and, indeed, to adopt Luftwaffe methods and structures.

Even if the Soviet airmen of 1941 wrere forced to fight from an inferior position regarding most qualita­tive aspects, they gave proof of an impressive courage and made enormous personal sacrifices. Western post­war accounts tend to underestimate the performance of the VVS airmen during these first difficult months of the war. But in reality, any German soldier fighting on the Eastern Front would be able to testify to the unre­mitting pressure from the air, from the first day of the war to the last. Any airman in the Luftwaffe would tell of how the Soviet fighter pilots forced their counterparts to wage a permanent fight for air supremacy.

There is a great disparity between Soviet claims and registered Luftwaffe losses. Even if the Luftwaffe loss lists have proved to suffer from gaps, it is indisputable that the Soviet airmen, on average, made higher overclaims than their German counterparts. This may be the result of several factors. The humiliating losses at the hands of a hated invader could be regarded as one of the main explanations.

Contradictory to the overall air-combat situation and its actual results, the combat records of most VVS fighter units show’ a good victory-to-loss ratio. For instance, the combat records for Kapitan Aleksandr Khalutin’s 249 1AP (equipped mainly with 1-16s, l-15bis, and I-153s) between June and October 1941, w’hen the unit was with­drawn from combat on the southern sector of the front, show claims of twenty-five enemy aircraft destroyed in the air. The same unit also was credited with the destruc­tion of twenty enemy planes, more than fifty trucks, and about twenty tanks in ground attacks. The losses for all of this apparently did not exceed ten airplanes and six pilots.

The logbook of 158 LAP, now in the files of the Russian Central Military Archive TsAMO, shows sixty – nine victory claims against fifty-two aircraft lost between June 22 and October 22, 1941. These include forty-nine aircraft lost during combat missions and three on the ground.

For the period June 22 to December 15, 7 ІАК/ PVO claimed 313 aerial victories against a recorded com­bat loss of 307 aircraft—286 in the air and 21 on the ground.2

The pilots of VVS-Southem Front were credited w’ith 42 aerial victories against 89 combat losses, including 43 fighters in October; and 65 aerial victories against 92 combat losses, including 42 fighters, in November 1941.* Fifty-three single-engine German fighters (46 Bf 109s and 7 ‘‘He 113s,” a frequent misidentification of Bf 109F) were claimed destroyed in air combat, by AAA units, and on the ground by VVS-Southern Front units in October, and 54 were claimed in November 1941.4 The Luftwaffe registered only 15 Bf 109s lost in this sector during October and 16 in November.’ In fact, the total number of single-engine German fighters claimed de­stroyed by VVS-Southern Front alone between June 22 and December 22, 1941—450 of a total of 1,072 claims overall6—is about half the figure of all Bf 109s registered as lost or damaged on the entire Eastern Front.

The claims made by the most experienced pilots, how’ever—and naturally—display a better accounting. For example, of Kapitan Boris Safonov’s sixteen individual victory claims in 1941, only seven can definitely not be found in the far-from-comprehensive loss list of Generalquartiermeister der Luftwaffe.

As a comparison, RAF Fighter Command pilots did not come any closer to the truth regarding their claims during the Battle of Britain. Official VVS claims amount to 3,879 downed in aerial combat and 752 downed by ground fire in 1941. As several Axis aircraft listed as “severey damaged”—most having made forced landings – could justifiably be acknowledged as “shot down,” the overclaim ratio is nearly 2:1. On the other hand, regard­ing results of air-base raids, Soviet airmen proved to be most optimistiq they claimed 3,257 Axis aircraft destroyed on the ground in 1941.

There is no doubt that most VVS fighter units in

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reality suffered more losses than successes in air combat during 1941. Starshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Pokryshkin of 55 LAP recalk “the hard times in 1941” characterized by “uneven combats with the Messerschmitts, which rarely led to results to our favor.”7 During 1941 the WS fighter units in reality managed to bring down perhaps fifteen hundred enemy aircraft of all types in aerial combat, at a cost of approximately three thousand fighters (excluding losses to ground fire and aircraft lost on the ground).

Despite inadequate equipment, several Soviet fighter pilots had shown considerable skill and had developed into aces. Oberleutnant Hansgeorg Batcher, who flew with l./KGr 100 on the Eastern Front from late July 1941, reflects the general view on the Soviet aviators held by the Luftwaffe airmen when he says, “They were very courageous. They were only handicapped from an obsolete equipment.” Top scorers in the WS during this stage of the war had been Kapitan Boris Safonov, with sixteen kills, and Kapitan Petr Brinko, with fifteen, most of which had been scored while flying the 1-16 Ishak. The evolution of such proficient individuals contradicted the Nazi propaganda relating to “Russian subhumans,” which had a widespread influence at all levels of the Wehrmacht.

Counted among the German airmen who had fallen prey to the WS airmen in 1941 were brilliant fighter pilots such as the seventy-victory-ace Hauptmann Hermann-Friedrich Joppien of JG 51, sixty-three-victory’ ace Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann of JG 51, fifty – seven-victory ace Oberfeldwebel Edmund Wagner of JG 51, forty-three-victory ace Oberleutnant Hubert Mutherich of JG 54,thirty-eight-victory ace Oberleutnant Kurt Sochatzy of JG 3, and twenty-nine-victory ace Oberfeldwebel Franz Blazytko of JG 27.

The remarkable stamina of the soldiers and airmen of the Red Army and the efforts by Soviet industry were two further factors never anticipated by the planners and organizers of Operation Barbarossa. The fact that the WS survived disastrous losses in the summer of 1941 and was able to regain numerical superiority against the Luftwaffe by the end of 1941 is unparalleled in the history of war.

The shift in numerical balance in favor of the WS naturally depended both upon Soviet reinforcements and Luftwaffe losses. The successes by the Luftwaffe should not obscure the fact that it suffered higher losses during Operation Barbarossa than during any previous campaign.

According to the Luftwaffe’s own records, 2,093 German aircraft (758 bombers, 568 fighters, 170 dive-
bombers, 330 reconnaissance aircraft, and 267 miscella­neous types) were completely destroyed on the Eastern Front between June 22 and December 6, 1941. Another 1,362 aircraft (including 473 bombers and 413 fighters) received battle damage of varying degrees. Of 4,653 Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed or damaged in front-line sendee from June 22 to December 31, 3,827 were lost on the Eastern Front. As Hitler launched bis offensive against what he portrayed as “Russian subhumans,” no one on the German side could have anticipated such high losses. At the end of 1941 it was clear that neither aircraft pro­duction nor the flight training schools could keep pace with such heavy attrition.

If the material losses were hard to replace, the per­sonnel losses were impossible to replace. From June to December 1941, the Luftwaffe lost 13,742 men, includ­ing ground personnel, on the Eastern Front. Of these, 3,231 were killed, 2,028 were missing, and 8,453 were injured.

In spite of all its material successes and the high price it paid, the Luftwaffe failed to fulfill its primary mission during Operation Barbarossa—providing the Wehrmacht with preconditions to completely bring down the USSR. The effects of the numerical achievements during the opening months of the war were considerably mitigated by the failure to stifle the reconstruction of the Red Army through the destruction of the Soviet war industry. The predominant tactical doctrine of the Luftwaffe and the lack of equipment to undertake a strategic-bomber offen­sive proved to be the fatal flaws of Operation Barbarossa. As a result, the air war against the Soviet Union devel­oped into a situation similar to what Oberst Werner Molders’s successor as General der JagdfHeger, Oberst

Adolf Galland, described as “attempting to blot out an anthill by stamping on one ant at a time.”

As the front line grew’ increasingly extended at the same time as accumulated attrition was rapidly bringing down the number of serviceable Luftwaffe aircraft, the overall efficiency of the combat arm dropped successively. After less than a month of war, it stood clear that Hitler had launched an invasion with a totally inadequate num­ber of combat aircraft. There was not only a lack of stra­tegic bombers. Shortages in fighters enabled the Soviets to achieve air supremacy over the central combat zone in August, over the Crimea in September, and on the Mos­cow front in November. Inadequate numbers of close – support aircraft—Stukas and ground-attack planes—com­pelled the Germans to deploy their twin-engine medium bombers in costly close-support missions. Throughout the campaign, calling in strong concentrations of air forces repeatedly solved serious crises at the front. Within a short time, the thinly spread Luftwaffe units on the East­ern Front were turned into a pure fire brigade.

In reality, the Luftwaffe lost its independence on the Eastern Front, in practice involuntarily adopting the doc­trine of its enemy. It was, as Oberst Hermann Plocher remarked, “the beginning of the death of the Luftwaffe.”-1 In December 1941 it was obvious to anyone who wished to see that the war with the USSR marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Reich. But the road to the downfall of the Third Reich would prove long and lead to immense hardships. The Luftwaffe air­men had not yet said their last word. They would not only adopt the doctrine of the Soviet Air Force, they would also learn to fight with the same stamina as the Soviet airmen. The largest air war in history had merely begun.

І T

o the south of the Pripyat Marshes, along the 750-

mile front entrusted to Generalfeldmarschall Gerd

von Rundstedt’s Army Group South, with air cover provided by Generalobcrst Alexander Lohr’s Luftflotte

4, the situation was completely different from that to the і north of the Marshes. Von Rundstedt opened his offen-

У sive by launching the German Sixth and Seventeenth armies, together with Panzergruppe 1 on the left flank, v between the Pripyat Marshes and the Hungarian- ! Slovakian border. These forces were intended to strike in an eastern and a southeastern direction, while the Romanian Third and Fourth armies and the German *, Eleventh Army were held back along the Soviet-Roma – nian border. The purpose of this operation was to en – R drcle and destroy most of the Red Army troops west of ; the Dnieper River.

The strongest opposition in the air during the first

[1] ers and managed to shoot down the precious LaGG-3— I his twenty-third personal victory. Kapitan Khalutin at – B tacked a Bf 109 w ith his 1-16, giving it a long burst with I his machine guns. The enemy fighter exploded violently, ■ spreading burning shrapnel over a large area. К Oberfeldwcbcl Heinrich Brenner, in the cockpit, had no і chance of survival. Less than two minutes later, the So – f viet fighters and fighter-bombers were gone.

According to the Soviet report, ten enemy aircraft і were destroyed on the ground,13 but 249 IAP failed to № put JG 3 out of commission. On the other hand, the air – І base raids by the Kampfgruppen of Luftflotte 4 in the 1 same operational area did not meet with better success. В Contrary to the German assessments, Soviet reports show і that only a limited number of VVS aircraft were В destroyed on the ground. At this point the Soviets I regularly dispersed and camouflaged their planes on the в airfields.

The Slovak 12 Letka (squadron), equipped with Avia B-534 single-engine biplane fighters, saw heavy action

Toward the Gates of Leningrad

I

n the Baltic States, the German Army Group North had made considerable territorial gains during the first three weeks of the war but failed in its aim of sur­rounding large Soviet troop forces. Panzergruppe 4, con­stituting the central thrust of Army Group North, advanced in a northeasterly direction toward Leningrad. The Eighteenth Army, on its left wing, rolled into Esto­nia, and the Sixteenth Army, on the right, advanced in the direction of the area south of Lake Ilmen. Having penetrated more than four hundred miles into Soviet – held territory, the exhausted Panzer troops had reached a point sixty miles southwest of Leningrad at the Luga by mid-July. By this time, General Erich von Manstein’s LVI Panzerkorps had lost half its tank equipment and ran into heavy counterattacks with strong air support. A pause was inevitable. During the following weeks, Army

Group North concentrated on securing the flanks of the tank spearheads. By mid-July the Eighteenth Army had reached Dorpat while the Sixteenth had advanced fifty miles into “old Russia.”

The Ju 88 bombers of KG 1, KG 76, and KG 77 were assigned mainly to attack the heavy Soviet rail traf­fic in Estonia, with the hope of preventing the Soviet Eighth Army from escaping eastward over the narrow strip of land between Lake Peipus and the Gulf of Fin­land at Narva.

Having brought the Soviet medium-bomber raids to an abrupt end, the Bf 109s of I1./JG 53 and JG 54 were tasked to suppress the upsurge in Soviet fighter and fighter-bomber activity along the entire front line of Army Group North. The VVS fighters were particularly suc­cessful in the western sector, in the skies above Estonia

and the Gulf of Riga. In mid-July the German High Com­mand noted that enemy fighters made air reconnaissance difficult in Estonian airspace.1′ Major Johannes Trautloft, commanding the Jagdgruppen in Fliegcrkorps I, sent his pilots out on regular search-and-destroy free-hunting missions. A favorite tactic among these Bf 109 pilots was to circle above the enemy’s fighter bases to provoke him into the air.

On the afternoon of July 19, 1941, Leutnant Walter Nowotny of 9./JG 54 took off on a fateful free-hunting mission to the island of Osel in the Gulf of Riga together with his wingman. The two Messerschmitt pilots posi­tioned themselves above a Soviet air base with the aim of provoking enemy fighters into the air.

The Soviet 153 IAP launched four I-153 Chaykas led by Starshiy Lcytenant Aleksandr Avdeyev against the German aircraft. Later, Nowotny wrote: “The Bol­shevik fighter base was located near Arensburg. As we started circling in the air above the airfield, ten fighters were scrambled. Two Curtiss 1-153s became my first two victims. . . . Moments later, I noticed a white-nosed aircraft on my tail’ Some of the planes of 153 IAP had their spinners painted white. Similarly, some Bf 109s of JG 54 had white spin­ners. Casting only a short glance at the aircraft behind him—noticing the white nose but not the double pair of wings – Nowotny assumed it was his Kaczmarek or “Wooden Eye” (Holzauge), as wingmen were called in Luftwaffe slang. Instead, it was the Chayka piloted by Starshiy Leytenant Avdeyev. According to a Soviet source,18 Avdeyev attacked the lead Bf 109 and shot it down with a long burst. Then he suddenly felt a hard strike and his cockpit was filled with smoke. Avdeyev found himself attacked from behind.

Avdeyev’s flying skills and the ma­neuverability of the 1-153 made it impos­sible for his pursuers to finish him off. Suddenly another Bf 109 appeared, just in front of him. The German pilot was making a combat turn. Aleksandr Avdeyev immediately pulled up his Chayka and fired a long burst Smoke started pouring out of the 109. The Soviet pilot pressed the trigger again and saw the Bf 109 go down.

Walter Nowotny recalled: “It was not until bullets slammed into my aircraft that I became aware of my fundamental mistake. Unfortunately, by then it was too late. I managed to revenge myself by sending this false wingman to the ground as today’s number three, but then my engine stopped.”

While Starshiy Leytenant Avdeyev bailed out of his 1-153 and landed in friendly territory’, Leutnant Nowotny directed his crippled Bf 109 to the south, out over the sea, in a desperate effort to bring it to the coast of Ger­man-occupied Lithuania. Nowotny failed, and spent three

image90days and nights in a rubber dinghy in the Bay of Riga before finally reaching the shore near Mikelbaka on the northern tip of the Lithuanian mainland.

: As a car arrived to bring Nowotny to the hospital,

the young pilot insisted that he should drive! Noting Nowotny’s exhausted state, the driver objected, but the Leutnant used his higher rank to push his will. The result was that Nowotny lost control over the car and collided with a tree, giving him a concussion. Finally returning to his unit, Nowotny found that his belong­ings had been packed and were about to be sent to his parents.

“As I started flying combat missions again, 1 had a very unpleasant feeling as soon as I had water below. I couldn’t get rid of this feeling until fourteen days later, as I managed to shoot down a Russian bomber exactly on the same spot as I had gone down.”19

During the rest of his combat career, the supersti­tious Nowotny always wore the trousers that he had car­ried during those three days in the Gulf of Riga—with exception of one mission, his last sortie, at Achmer on November 8, 1944, when he was killed flying an Me 262 jet fighter.

Avdeyev later became one of the top Soviet fighter aces, but he was killed in action thirteen months after this encounter with Walter Nowotny.

On the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland, other famous Soviet fighter aces were operating from the beleaguered naval base at Hanko. On July 23, Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko and Leytenant Petr Brinko of 13 IAP/KBF took off from Hanko together with nine I-153s on a mission against Turku Airdrome in south­western Finland. Since no Finnish aircraft were found there, the Soviet airmen decided to look at the harbor instead. As the formation arrived over Ruissalo Seaplane Station in Turku, they were met with heavy antiaircraft fire that blew one of the biplanes apart. Nonetheless, the two well-known aces pressed home their attack, claiming two seaplanes destroyed. According to German sources, nine Soviet aircraft attacked Ruissalo, where one He 114 and an He 59 were damaged by machine-gun fire.20

But the odds during the Battle of Hanko were too uneven, as 13 lAP’s airfield came under constant artil­lery shelling. While Antonenko was landing after a com­bat mission on July 25, an artillery shell exploded right behind his 1-16. The shock wave overturned the airplane,

In the summer of 1941, twenty-four-year-old Starshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Avdeyev experienced the German onslaught on the USSR as a pilot in 153 IAP, which was equipped with 1-153 and 1-16 fighters. In 1942 this unit was one of the first to receive American-built Bell P-39 Airacobra fighters. On August 12,1942, Avdeyev was killed ramming a Bf 109 of II./ JG 77, his thirteenth aerial victory. On February 10,1943, Avdeyev was posthumously appointed Hero of the Soviet Union. {Photo: Novikov.)

and Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko, the formidable fighter and victor in eleven aerial combats, was thrown out of the cockpit and killed instantly.

The death of his friend shocked Petr Brinko. The commander of the Hanko aviation group saw this and decided to transfer him from Hanko to Tallinn, in north­ern Estonia. In the latter sector, the situation for the Soviet Eighth Army was deteriorating day by day. Squeezed toward the northern coast of Estonia by the German Eighteenth Army, it was in danger of being sealed off by the advance of Panzergruppe 4 to the Luga River, in the east. Leytenant Brinko arrived to join the air forces of KBF and Northern Front that were brought in to relieve pressure on the Eighth Army with aerial assaults against the enemy ground troops.

image91

On July 23 1941. nine 1-153s led by Kapitan Leonid Beiousov and the two 1-16s pilotec by Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko and Leytenant Petr Brirkc—all frorr tie detachment of 13IAP/KBF at Hanko—set out against the Finn sh airfield at Turku. Flying in over the nearby seaplane station at Riissalo. the Soviets found two hydroplanes. Antonenko and Brinko attacked them with machine-gun f re and destroyed both, an He 114 and an He 59, pmbably from Fernaufklarungsgruppe 125. This photo shows the He 59, ‘DK+BS,’ shortly after the Soviet deadly duo’s unwexome visit. {Photo: Matti Poutavaara via Valtonen.)

On the other side of the hill, the Germans shifted the task of the bombers of Luftflotle 1 to an offensive against the supply lines leading to Leningrad, a move intended to prepare the upcoming offensive against that city. On July 25 and 27 the important rail junction at Bologoye, on the Moscow – Le n і ng r a d line, was hit decisively.

Intercepting a formation of Ju 88s over Krasno – gvardeysk, the old czar residence southwest of Leningrad, on July 27, Mladshiy Leytenant Vladimir Zalcvskiv of 157 І. ЛР/7 IAK reportedly brought down one bomber by ramming it with his 1-16. The successful Soviet рік* survived, unlike Leutnant Gerhard ZicImVs crew from 7 / KG 76, which was listed as missing in the same area.21

Having destroyed the remnants of three surrounded Red Army divisions west of the Nevel River, on the right flank of Army (Troup North, the German Sixteenth German Army mounted an offensive on July 28 against the railway junction Velikiyc Luki, a hundred miles to the east of the Russian-Lal vian border. A close-support
mission in this area on the first day of the attack claimed the life of Hauptmann Johannes Freiherr von Richthofen, the St affcl kapitan of 6./ZG 26. Badly hit by enemy fire, his Bf 110 crashed into woods, exploding on impact and creating a violent: forest fire/2

During these days, ZG 26 was followed by the remaining units of Fliegerkorps VIII, as this command was shifted from Luftflotte 2 to Luftflotle I. Bringing in four Stukagruppen and three Jagdgruppen meant a sig­nificant strengthening of the Luftwaffe forces available for support of the upcoming offensive against lxningrad.

Assembled in the Velikiye Luki sector, IIl./JG.5.1 achieved JG 53’s thousandth victory on July 29. On the last day of July, the famous Slarshiy Leytenant Petr Ryabtsev (12.5 IAP), who had been one of the first successful air-to-air rammers on the first day of the war, was shot down and killed by a Grunherz fighter. On the following day, Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann achieved the Grunherz Gesehwader s thousandth victory.

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The rate of attrition in the Soviet air units is clearly – depicted by the losses sustained by VVS-North western Front. Unable to count more than approximately 150 aircraft on July 1, 1941, VVS-North western Front alone registered 189 planes lost in combat (including 132 on combat missions, with a further 4 receiving heavy battle if damage) in July.2′ Even this figure is incomplete, since the number of Il-2s listed as lost according to this source I is 19, while the unit records of 74 ShAP/VVS-North – | western Front lists 25 Il-2s lost in July 194124—a fear – some loss rate. After the first month of the war, the I strength of VVS-Northwestern Front had been reduced

■ to only 88 aircraft, including just seventeen SB bomb – P ers.25 A total of 184 aerial victories credited to the fliers

of WS-North western Front during the same period was a poor consolation.

To the costly aerial combat were added the crippling blows dealt by the Luftwaffe against the Soviet air bases, г Responding to complaints from the German Eighteenth I Army about the increased VVS activity in Estonia, ZG -■ 26 was called on to launch a raid against the large air

■" base at Tallinn. The low-level “Hun rides” against air – ; fields deep inside enemy territory were specialities of the Bf 110 crews of ZG 26. This Zerstorergeschwader was І credited with the destruction of 620 Soviet aircraft on і the ground or in the air between June 22 and July 31, ‘ 1941.

ZG 26 managed to catch the Soviets і at Tallinn Airdrome by surprise on August 2. The Bf 110 crews returned home with claims of about forty enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground. In aerial combat with Soviet aircraft, the heavy Ї Zerstorer planes were able to score far t better than during the Battle of Britain.

; t The Soviet naval fighter ace,

[; Levtenant Vasiliy Golubev, recalls a very unpleasant encounter with the Bf 110s ofZG 26. Early one morning, 13 OIАЕ/

KBF was scrambled just as two forma­tions of twin-engine German planes came in to raid the airfield. Leytenant Golubev l’- decided to attack what he assumed to be

■ four Ju 88 bombers head-on and was sur – i prised that the enemy pilots made no at­tempt to evade his attack. Having the

Л enemy leader in his gunsight, Golubev

was just about to press his trigger when the nose of the enemy aircraft seemed to explode. Instantly, 20mm shells slammed violently into the Ishak’s engine and large flames erupted. Golubev instinctively pushed his stick forward, and the enemy aircraft flashed by above him. Only then did Golubev realize that they were Bf 110s equipped with powerful nose armament, and not Ju 88 bombers

Fortunately for Golubev, the airfield was right below, but the Zerstorer pilot came back to finish his kill. At this moment, Golubev’s faithful wingman, Leytenant Dmitriy Knyazev, got on the Bf 110’s tail and hit it with his four machine guns. While Golubev made a quick belly landing, Knyazev continued after the Bf 110, which, with smoke pouring out of one engine, had become sepa­rated from its flight. Knyazev finished it off in the vicin­ity of Narva.26

Meanwhile, the bombers of Fliegerkorps II and VIII continued striking at the Soviet rear area. On August 4, German bombers managed to completely destroy the rail­way station at Toropets, reporting four trains with about eighty railway cars destroyed. Obviously these missions were carried out without the bomber crews being much troubled by the Soviet fighters in this sector. According to Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker of IIL/KG 1: “Early on August 5 we flew against troop columns near Staraya Russa, and during the afternoon an ammunition depot

image93

On August 6,1941, Oberleutnant Reinhardt Hejn, staffelkapitan of 2./JG 54, went down over Soviet territory and was captured. Nine days later, these photos appeared in Leningrad Pravda. In the center, Red Army soldiers are seen examining Hein’s belly-landed Bf 109 F-2. To the right is Oberleutnant Hein, who has received first aid, with armed guards. A close comparison of German and Soviet documents shows that it is highly likely that Hein was Starshiy Leytenant Andrey Chirkov’s seventh victory, reportedly achieved in the vicinity of Lake Samro, about twenty miles from Narva. According to Soviet sources, the German pilot, an Oberleutnant, was interrogated in the headquarters of 158IAP. (Photos: TASS/Leningrad Pravda.)

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at Luga was our target. During all of our missions we had to deal with Russian antiaircraft fire, and sometimes also fighters, mostly Ratas. The latter didn’t trouble us very much when they attacked separately. But the Rus­sian antiaircraft fire was effective and dangerous at all flight levels.”

To counter the appearance of Fliegerkorps VIII, four new Soviet aviation regiments arrived as reinforcements to the Northwestern Zone. Starting on August 3, the

Soviet Air Force intensified its air assaults against all sectors of Army Group North. The German Eighteenth Army in Estonia sustained particularly heavy losses.

On August 6, ZG 26 returned to Estonian airspace on another “Hun ride,” reportedly completely annihilat­ing the entire aircraft park at a KBF seaplane station. Probably on the same day, 158 IAP/39 IAD, equipped with Yak-Is, suffered a severe setback as Bf 109s of I./ JG 54 shot down an entire formation of three fighters in a single dogfight. Starshiy Leytenant Andrey Chirkov, with seven victories to his credit at this time, survived a forced landing in friendly territory after bring­ing down one Bf 109. The German pi­lot, Oberleutnant Reinhardt Hein of 2./ JG 54, was slightly injured and subse­quently captured.

On August 7, 1II./KG l’s Haupt­mann Gerhard Baeker experienced a stag­gering example of the strengthened Soviet fighter force in this area:

I was supposed to raid the airfield at Nizino, southwest of Leningrad, together with two aircraft of the 9th Staffel. The weather was bad, with a cloud ceiling of only 150 to 300 feet above our base. The Jagdgruppe com-

manded by Hauptmann Dietrich Hrabak [II./JG 54J was supposed to escort us, but it couldn’t take off due to the adverse weather conditions, so l was tasked with the mission of a solo flight.

1 took off at 0825 and immediately sought refuge in the clouds. To the east of the Luga River, the cloud ceiling rose slowly to 6,000 feet. 1 remained close beneath the clouds so that I would be able to disappear into the haze in case of a fighter attack. Just ahead of the target the clouds dispersed, and all that was left were a few cloud mountains at an altitude of between 3,000 and 6,000 feet. I approached the airfield at 7,500 feet flight level, but just as 1 was about to launch my bomb load 1 found a huge cloud between myself and the tar­get During my second approach flight, 1 noticed that the Soviet fighter defense had been alerted, so I made a quick dive-attack and then climbed into the closest cloud. As I came out of the cloud, 1 was met by three Ratas (IT 6). 1 gave full throttle and attempted to reach the cloud cover at 2,000 feet altitude to the west. The Ratas had difficul­ties in following me, but suddenly nine modern fighters approached—low-winged planes with retracted undercarriage (MiG-Is?). Realizing that 1 had no chance of reaching the clouds, I put the nose of my Ju 88 down, but before I had even commenced my dive the nine fighters were on me. I found myself in the midst of a flood of tracers. Parts of my aircraft were torn off. My left aileron no longer responded and I found it very difficult to move the side rudder. One thought went through my mind: "It looks as though you’re go­ing to be shot down.” But I soon came to my senses. My engines were still running and 1 was diving. The first attack was over. I managed to pull my Ju 88 up and headed for the west at treetop level. None of my crewmen had been injured.

Next, the Soviets made one single pass after another. 1 flung my head in all directions, to watch the ground, to check behind, to follow’ the attack­ing enemy fighters with my eyes. The Russians committed a decisive mistake—they all attacked sin­gly, below and to the left. As long as I could see the muzzles of their arms, nothing happened to me, and when they attempted to fire with the necessary aiming off, I pushed the controls of my

image95

Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker served as technical officer in III./KG 1 Hindenburg during the first two months of Operation Barbarossa. On August 19,1941, he was severely injured in a forced landing due to engine failure on his 132nd combat sortie. Returning to front-line service in 1944, he flew four-engine He 177s with KG 1 and ended the war as Gruppenkommandeur II./JG 3. (Photo: Baeker.)

damaged rudders to the right. This went on for about thirty minutes, until we reached Luga. There, the last Soviet fighter made a final attempt to fin­ish me off just as I had to pull up in front of the steep river bank. But I was prepared, and he failed to hit me. The Luga River was the front line. By now I was over friendly territory, and the last Soviet fighter disengaged.

As long as I had remained high, my gunner, Feldwebel Hein Bruns, fired below to the rear and my radio operator, Unteroffizier Hans Jager, fired above to the rear. At low level, only my radio operator was able to fire with his MG 15. He met

every attack with well-aimed bursts. The gunner and my observer, Feldwebel Zens, handed him new magazines as he emptied one after another at a rapid pace. Within a short time he had expanded all our ammunition magazines. There were only a few rounds left. Only when the situation became precarious did he give the enemy a pair of short bursts. Three Soviet fighters were shot down. One Rata was caught in the air current of my propel­lers at low altitude and crashed into the ground. Two MiGs were shot down by my crew.

After we landed successfully on one wheel at our base at Sabarovka, we counted five cannon and seventeen machine-gun hits in our Ju 88. The fuel tanks had been shot through, but they remained functional due to the self-sealing device. The antenna above the cockpit was also shot through, and the left aileron was severely damaged.

On the evening of August 7, bombers of KBF raided the German supply port at Pamu, in southwestern Esto­nia. A few hours later, the Soviets stunned their enemy by dispatching an air raid against Berlin.

The idea of raiding Berlin was promulgated by the commander of naval aviation, General-Leytenant Semyon Zhavaronokov, in July 1941. Having drawn up the tech­nical plans for the raid, he introduced the plan to the

image96

Polkovnik Yevgeniy Preobrazhenskiy, the commander of WS-Red Banner Baltic Fleet’s 1 MTAP, was one of the ablest Soviet naval aviation regimental commanders in 1941. In January 1942, 1 MTAP-KBF was among the first naval aviation regiments to receive the honorary title “Guards Regiment’. (Photo: Author’s collection.) commissar of the Soviet Navy, Admiral Flota Nikolay Я Kuznetsov. According to Zhavaronokov’s plan, all bomb Я ers in VVS-KBF would participate. The main problem ■ was that only one air base, at Osel Island, permitted the ■ bombers to reach Berlin. Kuznetsov presented the plan I to Stalin. The Soviet dictator accepted, but only agreed Я to the use of two Eskadrilyas of 1 MTAP.

General-Leytenant Zhavaronokov was put in charge Я of the Berlin raid. On July 30 he arrived in Bezzabotnoye Я Airdrome, where he met the commander of 1 MTAP/Я KBF, Polkovnik Yevgeniy Preobrazhenskiy.

The call for a Berlin raid did not come as a surprise* to Preobrazhenskiy. A few days earlier, he had instructed I his regiment’s chief navigator, Kapitan Petr Khokhlov, Я to investigate the possiblities of launching a mission against Я the German capital. The total distance from Osel to Вег – Я lin and back again was more than eleven hundred miles, Я which implied a flight duration of seven hours for the Я DB-3T bombers. This allowed no more than twenty-five Я minutes of fuel reserve.

Polkovnik Preobrazhenskiy ordered twenty DB-3Ts Я to be prepared for the mission. Some of these aircraft underwent certain technical improvements, including the j installation of powerful radio transmitters. Five planes j had their engines exchanged. The best and most expert j enced crews were singled out and interned in a closed zone two miles from the air base, with strict orders that prohibited any contact with outsiders.

At 2300 hours on August 4, fifteen DB-3Ts (the remaining five were still waiting for engine exchanges) і took off from Bezzabotnoye. After a flight of 375 miles, j they landed at Kagul/Osel Airdrome. On August 7, ] weather recce flights to the German Baltic Sea coast were J undertaken by some daring fliers in Che-2 aircraft from j the same airfield. Despite reports of adverse weather 1 conditions-low clouds at 2,500 to 3,000 feet in altitude, 1 and rains—General-Leytenant Zhavaronkov decided to launch the raid that very evening.

At 2100 hours, thirteen bombers started taking off against Berlin. With the exception of one aircraft, which ] carried a 1,000-kilogram bomb load, each DB-3T carried j two 100-kilogram ZAB incendiary bombs and six 100- kilogram FAB high-explosive bombs.

The approach flight was carried out at an altitude of 18,000 feet, the crews having to endure temperatures j of 37 degress Celsius below zero. After three hours, the first ] bombers arrived over Berlin. According to the Soviet ver – 1

Подпись: TheDB-3F was a version of Sergey Ilyushin's DB-3 medium bomber equipped with more powerful engines than its predecessor, but its main advantage was that its structure was composed of pressed profiles rather than pipes, as was the case with the DB-ЗА. This new technology led to a considerable ; decrease in the labor intensity required to manufacture this airplane. Thus, the DB-3F required only half the construction lime of the DB-ЗА, an Б important step toward the recovery of the VVS. The torpedo version of DB-3F, DB-3T, served with mine-torpedo regiments such as 1 MTAP, and took part in the first Berlin raids. The DB-3F was later redesignated II-4. (Photo: Balss.)

[ sion, Polkovnik Preobrazhenskiy dropped the first bombs. 1 He then radioed Osel: “Target Berlin, mission accom­plished!" 1 MTAP reported six bombers arriving over j the German capital, with the remainder dropping their bombs on targets of opportunity.

In his chronicle of the Berlin raids during World War II, historian Werner Girbig gives the German ver – [ sion: “The Russians dispatched a small group of Ilyushin [. Il-4s [DB-3Ts|, which reached the Berlin area but never undertook any real attack. Only one single aircraft ap­pears to have dared enter the airspace over the city’ itself. I Approximately forty minutes after the alarm was sounded,

I several searchlight beams caught the twin-engine Rus­sian aircraft. The pilot maintains his course stubbornly, I without making any evasive maneuvers. The antiaircraft К artillery opens fire. After a few minutes the 11-4 is cov­ered with flames. It goes down in a steep dive and crashes I somewhere in the outskirts of the city. On the following day, the widespread wreckage of the Soviet bomber is I examined closely by air force specialists.”27

According to the Soviet version, all aircraft returned, F though one DB-3 crashed at the airfield due to poor I ground illumination. After the landing, the Soviet airmen I celebrated with a whole box of brandy. 1 MTAP carried out I two more raids against Berlin during the following nights.

The air activity reached a new climax along the en­tire northern combat zone after August 8, when Panzergruppe 4 opened the final offensive against Leningrad on the Luga front, southwest of the city. On the first day of the offensive, heavy rain hampered most air activity. General-Leytenant Markian Popov, the com­mander in chief of the Northern Front, called for large – scale airstrikes against the German area of deployment. This was a difficult task, because his battered air force was widely dispersed. Of 560 aircraft available on August 10, 142 were deployed along the Finnish border and farther north, in the Murmansk area. VVS-KBF was engaged supporting the Soviet Eighth Army in northern Estonia. General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov, the supreme VVS commander in the Northwestern Zone, decided to shift 2 BAD from the area south of Lake Ilmen and 7 IAP/5 SAD from the Karelian Isthmus to the Luga sector.

With clearing skies on August 10, the air forces on both sides launched all available aircraft in close-support missions in the Luga sector. The impact was terrible. On this day alone, 1,126 Luftwaffe sorties and 908 VVS sorties were logged. The German airmen claimed to have destroyed ten tanks, more than two hundred vehicles,
and fifteen artillery batteries on August 10.28 On the Soviet side, 288 ShAP claimed large successes in low – level attacks against concentrations of enemy motorised troops.

By the end of the day, the Luftwaffe counted fifty – four Soviet warplanes shot down.24 The participating German fighter units suffered only three losses, one of them through a ramming by a MiG-3 piloted by Kapitan Ivan Gorbachyov of 71 LAP/KBF. According to Soviet figures for August 10, VVS-Northern Front shot down twenty-three German planes against eleven of its own planes lost.30

The air strikes enabled Pansergruppe 4 to penetrate the Soviet defense positions on August 11, initiating the drive toward Leningrad. But despite the heavy Luftwaffe air strikes, the Soviet resistance continued to be very hard. The Panzergruppe was only able to move forward slowly in the marshlands on the way to Leningrad, fight­ing bitterly for every step ahead.

The largest Soviet aerial effort against Berlin took place on the night of August 11. It involved both Podpolkovnik Preobrazhenskiy’s naval aviation regiment and aircraft from DBA: DB-3s and DB-3Fs from 200 BAP at Osel; plus eight TB-7s from 432 BAP/81 AD; and three Yer-2s from 420 BAP/81 AD based at Pushkin, near Leningrad. The four-engine TB-7 bombers were personally led by the commander of 81 AD, Kombrig Mikhail Vodopyanov, a veteran and Hero of the Soviet Union.

The mission was a complete failure. One TB-7 crashed during takeoff. Since the KBF had not been informed of this mission, two other TB-7s were mistak­enly shot down by friendly antiaircraft batteries, while a third was downed by a KBF 1-16. Two other TB-7s returned home with heavy AAA damage sustained over enemy territory, and both were destroyed in crash land­ings. One Yer-2 was listed as missing. Only three TB-7s and two Yer-2s managed to reach Berlin.

Kombrig Vodopyanov’s own experiences are quite telling. During the approach flight, bis TB-7, Blue 8, found itself bounced by a group of 1-16s, but it luckily managed to escape without getting hit. Having strayed off course, the crew of the bomber managed to locate Stettin, eighty miles northeast of Berlin, where it ran into a heavy anti­aircraft barrage. Despite one engine out of action due to damage, the crew succeeded in bringing the plane to the Berlin area, where the bombs were salvoed somewhere in the northern outskirts shortly after midnight. Twice hit by antiaircraft fire again, Vodopyanov’s TB-7 went! down in a forested area in German-occupied southern Estonia. After a two-day walk, the crew managed to reach the Soviet lines, only to learn that Vodopyanov had been; relieved of his command and replaced by Polkovnik Aleksandr Golovanov, who later rose to command the entire Soviet strategic bomber force.

These minor Soviet raids naturally had no influence. on the general war situation. The defenders of Leningrad! saw the enemy approach closer day by day. Despite tena – cious efforts by the ground troops and the airmen of the Red Army, the advance of the enemy tank spearheads seemed to be slowed but not entirely halted. On August 13, Panzergruppe 4 reached the rail line connecting! Tallinn, in northern Estonia, with Leningrad. With that General-Mayor Novikov decided to reinforce the air units on the Luga-Leningrad front with 126 navy aircraft, the hulk of WS-KBF.

The scale and pace of operations inevitably wore down the Red air units. On August 13, a successful na­val air force pair, Lcytenant Vasiliy Golubev and Leytenant Dmitriy Knyazev of 13 OlAE/KBF, were shot down. Flying air cover for the Tallinn rail line on the northern coast of Estonia, a group of I-16’s led by Starshiy Leytenant Petr Kulakov was jumped by a Staffel of Bf 109s. The Soviets managed to evade the first attack with­out suffering any losses, but the Bf 109s came back. A whirling dogfight followed in which the Soviet pilots had to use all their flying skills. Leytenant Knyazev’s Ishak was shot down in flames, and Knyazev bailed out, Leytenant Golubev was eventually defeated when a Bf 109 sneaked up on his tail. A violent strike told Golubev that his aircraft was hit. As he turned away, he felt an­other strike, this time from below. His flight altitude was too low by now, and the ground was rushing toward him. Hot oil splashed onto his face and covered his goggles; he threw them off and saw a small wood in front of him. Having slowed by turning off the engine, Golubev man­aged to pull the stick by using all his strength and both hands. Then followed the crash. Vasiliy Golubev returned to conciousness only on the following day.31

Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann of 7./JG 54 Griinherz later described a most difficult air combat with a Soviet fighter pilot in the same area on August 4:

The Russian flight leader had noticed us and

image98turned around. My wingman made another attack. Once again, the Russian turned and met him head – on. Damn, this was a tough fellow!

The rest of my flight intervened and made wild attacks on him from all positions. This Rus­sian pilot definitely was one of their top aces. He avoided each attack exactly at the right moment, pulled up, and then went down steeply over his wing. He even had the nerve to pull up behind our flight and fire some very accurate bursts. We lay above him, dove on him at high speed, and then pulled up steeply. So far, 1 hadn’t intervened

7./JG 54’s Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann was one of the most aggressive fighter pilots of JG 54 during the early years of the war with the USSR. He was so short in stature that his Bf 109 had to have wooden blocks attached to the rudder pedals. Nevertheless, Ostermann was one of the few German fighter pilots who dared to enter—and was able to win—turning combats with the highly maneuverable Polikarpov fighters. He later became famous for his long-range sorties, searching out victims over airfields far in the Soviet rear area. Ostermann was killed during one of these sorties, on August 9,1942, after having achieved a total of 102 victories. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.)

Leytenant Vasiliy Golubev of 13 OIAE/KBF was one of the noblest aerial opponents of the Bf 109s of JG 54 Griinherz during much of the war. He scored his first victory, against a Ju 88 on June 28, 1941, and through August 1941 he succeeded in bringing down a total of eleven enemy aircraft, most of them jointly with his faithful wingman, Leytenant Dmitriy Knyazev. Golubev finished the war with a total of sixteen personal and twenty-three shared victories. He reached the rank of leytenant-general before retiring in 1975. (Photo: Seidl.)

in the combat, since I wanted my Kaczmarek to have this kill. But suddenly the Russian tried to get away, heading for two Russian naval ships anchored in the bay. The AAA on the ships was already firing at us. It was now or never! I went down after him, but he turned to the right. I had aimed slightly to the left, but he had noticed this immediately. As I pulled up again, he had already banked to the left. Then he came around and started shooting at me from behind! Suddenly, light AAA fire opened up at me from the ships. I turned left as hard as I could, went down over the left wing, and then pulled left again. 1 made this very fast, and got the Russian in front of me. From

slightly above him, I finally managed to get a burst at him. I could see hits! The plane left a trail of dark smoke.

When Leytenant Golubev returned to 13 OIAE a month later, he would find only nine I-16s left of the original twenty-six.

On the right wing of Army Group North, the Ger­man Sixteenth Army approached Novgorod north of Lake Ilmen. The immediate aim of this attack was to sever the important supply line from Moscow to Leningrad. Dur­ing a battle lasting eleven days, both sides sent strong air forces to this sector. The air units of Luftflotte 1 fell upon the retreating Soviet columns, while VVS-North – western Front and DBA units carried out 460 sorties against the advancing German troops. On August 13 Gefreiter Erich Peter, a newly arrived dive-bomber pilot in 3./StG 2 Immelmann, managed to interrupt the Soviet retrograde movement by knocking out a vital bridge across the Volkhov River. The next day, a formation of Bf 109s bounced a group of Soviet aircraft carrying out low-level attacks near Lake Ilmen and downed seven-
five of them by Oberleutnant Erbo Graf Kageneck of III./JG 27—without suffering any losses. The I Staffelkapitan of 4./JG 52, Oberleutnant Johannes! Steinhoff, scored one victory in the same area. One of his pilots was killed in combat with eight DB-3s of 1 BAK and four of the new 11-2 Shturmoviks. That day, also, 288 ShAP was reported to have destroyed > or damaged more than fifty vehicles in a single Ger­man supply column near Soltsy, southwest of Lake Ilmen.

During one of the 155 sorties flown by KG 2 on August 14, the Do 17 piloted by Knight’s Cross holder: Leutnant Heinrich Hunger received a direct AAA hit! and crashed near Novgorod. The crew managed to bail out. Later, the remains of Leutnant Hunger and his radio operator were found, butchered by their Soviet captors.

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On August 16, as Novgorod fell into German hands, the Soviet Eleventh and Thirty-fourth armies opened a counterattack south of Lake Ilmen, at Staraya Russa. KG 1 77 and the entire Fliegerkorps VIII were immediately brought into action against this threat. Dive-bombers and Zerstorer carried out close-support attacks while the

Подпись: Oberleitnanl Erbo Graf Kageneck (r.) claimed forty-seven Soviet aircraft shot down between June and October 1941, making him the top scorer of JG 27 on the Eastern Front. He was awarded with the Knight's Cross on July 30,1941. and the Oak Leaves on October 26. He was transferred to North Africa, where he was mortally injured in combat with British fighters on Christmas Eve 1941. (Photo: Roba.)

Ju 88s and Do 17s struck against troop columns and railway lines leading to Staraya Russa, inflicting severe casualties. The bombers of Fliegerkorps I meanwhile were fully engaged against Soviet rail supplies, and on August 16 Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker of I1I./KG 1 managed to sever the rail line to the Luga front. On August 17 six Do 17s, led by Oberleutnant Werner Lutter of Stab/ KG 2, managed to destroy eighteen Soviet tanks during a single mission west of Staraya Russa.

Despite a successive decrease of the number of ser­viceable aircraft, the WS continued to present problems to the Luftwaffe in the air. In his chronicle of KG 2, Ulf Bailee made the following note for August 16: “Very strong enemy fighter opposition made the task of the bombers difficult Only due to the Me 109F fighters of fll/JG 54, which flew continous free-hunting missions over the battlefield, were the losses limited to one Do 17 of 9./KG 2, which was forced to belly-land near Vereteni with heavy damage from enemy fighters.”32

The strong offensive action by the WS compelled the Luftwaffe to resume its air-base offensive. Soviet fig­ures, however, show a meager outcome, with only six aircraft of VVS-Northern Front destroyed on the ground on August 16.

During one of these raids, a formation of twenty – four Bf 110s of I./ZG 26 and four Bf 109s of III./JG 54 were intercepted by five courageous MiG-3 pilots. The Soviets claimed four enemy aircraft shot down. I./ZG 26 recorded one Bf 110 heavily damaged while 8./JG 54 Grunhcrz lost Oberfeldwebel Georg Braunshirn, a thirteen-victory ace. Braunshirn was the first among the Griinherz top aces to fall on the Eastern Front.

The logbook of 7./JG 54 on August 18 reads: “The Staffel is involved in daily air combat with numerically superior enemy formations southwest of Leningrad. These engagements frequently last for an hour’s time. The maneuverability of the Russian fighters makes it hard to shoot them down. Leutnant Ostermann nevertheless

image101

Oberleutnant Hans Philipp, the Staffelkapitan of 4./JG 54, was the top scorer of JG 54 in 1941. On August 24,1941, after he had scored his sixty-second victory, he was awarded the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross. This photo shows Philipp a few days before the award ceremony, posing beside the rudder of his Bf 109 F, which displays fifty-six markings. By the time Philipp was killed in combat with U. S. heavy bombers and Thunderbolts on October 8,1943, he had achieved a total of 206 victories. (Photo: Hofer.)

managed to bring down two l-lbs today.”55 The top ace in JG 54, Oberleutnant Hans “Fips" Philipp, of II Gruppe, scored his sixtieth victory during these fights.

To the west, the Battle of Estonia was settled during the latter half of August. On August 19, eight 13 1АР/ KBF Ishaks took off from Tallinn to strafe a column of German troops on the road from Parnu to Tallinn. This cost them three 1-16s damaged, of which one, piloted by Leytenant Alim Baysultanov, exploded shortly after landing.

Striking against the Soviet air units that supported the Red Army in the Leningrad sector, ZG 26 was dis­patched on August 19 against the base of 5 ІЛР/KBFal Nizino, seventeen miles southwest of Leningrad. Oberleutnant Johannes Kiel of I./ZG 26 later wrote the following vivid account of this raid:

We started diving from an altitude of 3,000 meters, J right into the antiaircraft fire. AAA bursts appear to the left, to the right, and between our aircraft And still we continue toward our target. Battle excitement has caught us. Each of us concentrates only on the target. We approach the airfield rap­idly. Each pilot has singled out his target The

ground comes rushing toward us, as if it is going to consume us. Five hundred, three hundred, one j hundred meters. Our guns start hammering. The Zerstorcrgruppe comes sweeping down over the j airfield, only a few meters above the ground. Here and there we can see enemy aircraft burst into I flames, and then we climb again. A wild circus is J commenced. The formation is split as each pilot | seeks his target. The aircraft dive upon their vic­tims from all directions….

‘‘Achtung! Fighters from the left!” The en – j emy fighters have arrived already! Everything is! on fire on the airfield beneath us. Heavy explo – j sions are sounding and there is thick smoke in the air. We dive into the smoke over and over again, and discover more hidden aircraft. As in a dream,

1 can sec one of our own aircraft disengage with a j thick trail of smoke—hit by antiaircraft fire. The j damaged plane is turning away to the west. It starts losing altitude, goes deeper and deeper. There. It hits the ground.

From the Soviet viewpoint, Leytenant Igor Kaberov | of 5 IAP recalled this raid: “A huge formation of enemy aircraft dove out of the sun and came roaring over the hangar roofs. The whisde from falling bombs and rat­tling of machine guns deafened me. I threw myself to the ground and saw the twin-engine Messerschmitts rush over the runway. 1 waited for the right moment, then I stood up and dashed to the shelter. Having almost tom the door from its hinges, I jumped in and flung myself flat to the floor. Someone pulled me into a corner of the shelter. Moments later, a machine-gun burst pierced the door and the tables close to it The lights went out. In the darkness we listened to the seemingly endless

image102Подпись: Gdov Airdrome, east of Lake Peipus, in August 1941. The command post of 7./JG 54 was tioused m this trailer, which displays the unit's 120 victory bars. The Staffers 120th victory was achieved when Leulnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann downed an 1-16 on August 21,1941. (Photo: Roba.)machine-gun fire, bomb explosions, and roaring aircraft engines.*34

According to Soviet sources, twenty Soviet aircraft were destroyed on the ground and a further thirteen received damage of varying degrees during this raid.35 Only one pilot, Mladshiy Leytenant Nikolay Sosedin, managed to take off during the raid, and he crashed his 116 on the runway, sustaining severe injuries. Two days later, one Eskadrilya of 5 1AP/KBF was pulled out of combat to reequip on LaGG-3s.

The airmen of L./ZG 26 claimed the destruction of forty Soviet aircraft on the ground, plus three in the air, for the loss of one Bf 110. With this, ZG 26 had increased its toll of enemy planes destroyed since June 22 to 191 in the air and 663 on the ground.

On August 20 the German Sixteenth Army finally managed to capture Chudovo, north of Novgorod, thus cutting off one of the two main supply lines between Moscow and Leningrad. During this eleven-day battle the units under command of Fliegerkorps VIII had dropped more than thirty-three hundred tons of bombs.

The next day, Panzergruppe 4 reached Krasno – gvardevsk, thirty miles southwest of Leningrad. Instead of concentrating the entire armored force against Leningrad, the commander of Army Group North, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, ordered
the XXXI Panzer Corps to turn south. The plan was to surround the Soviet troops remaining in the Luga – Novgorod area. During renewed Luftwaffe air-base raids on August 21, VVS-Northern Front registered eighteen aircraft lost on the ground at Pushkin.

To improve the structure of the defense operations at Leningrad, the Stavka divided the Northern Front, responsible for the huge sector between Leningrad and Murmansk, into two new fronts: the Karelian Front, mainly in charge of the Soviet-Finnish combat zone; and the Leningrad Front.

On August 25, Mladshiy Leytenant Petr Kharitonov of 158 IAP reportedly downed a Ju 88 near Krasnogvardeysk by ramming it; then he successfully bailed out. According to a Soviet source,36 the four-man crew of the German bomber bailed out and, from a posi­tion above Kharitonov, opened fire at the fighter pilot with their flight pistols. Another Yak-1, piloted by a young Leytenant, came to Kharitonov’s assistance with blazing guns, killing one of the German airmen while he was hanging in his harness. As they reached the ground, the three surviving Luftwaffe aviators were captured by infuriated Red Army soldiers. The loss lists of Generalquartiermeister der Luftwaffe reveal that a Ju 88 of 6./KG 76 was lost to Soviet fighters in the same area on that day. The entire crew w’as listed as missing, with the comment that two airmen probabably managed to bail out.

Kharitonov was awarded the Golden Star as a Hero of the Soviet Union. This was his second taran—the first being achieved with his 1-16 over another Ju 88 in the vicinity of Pskov in the Soviet – Estonian southern border area on the seventh day of the war. Shortly aftenvard Kharitonov was shot down and seriously w’ounded in air combat. He returned to the front only in 1944, ending the war in the PVO with sixteen victories to his credit.

Another Soviet fighter pilot shot dow-n and killed the Staffelkapitan of 1./ KG 2, Oberleutnant Horst Scharf von Grauerstedt, south of Chudovo, near the Volkhov River on August 25.

Intense fighting along the extended front line on the northern combat zone

Подпись: Three smiling Soviet fighter pilots of 158 IAP on July 8,1941. Mladshiy Leytenants Mikhail Zhukov (I.), Stepan Zdorovtsev, and Petr Kharitonov(r.) became the first three airmen of the war against Germany to be appointed Heroes of the Soviet Union on this day. Zdorovtsev was killed in action the following day and Zhukov was shot down and killed in June 1943. On June 28,1941, Kharitonov survived the ramming of a Ju 88, probably from 6J KG 76. Two months later, he managed to survive a second taran, once again probably a Ju 88 from the same 6./KG 76. He ended the war with fourteen victories and died in Donetsk (formerly Stalino) on February 1,1987. (Photo: Seidl.)

lay an increasing burden on the exhausted combat pilots of both sides.

image104Подпись:To the south, on the border between Army Group North and Army Group Center, a prolonged battle was being waged at Velikiye Luki, where a Soviet counterattack was halted with the help of Fliegerkorps VHL This resulted in the complete destruction of the Soviet Twenty-second Army. Here, 40,000 Soviet soldiers perished and 30,000 were captured, a high price for merely slowing the German advance against the sector between Lake Ilmen and Moscow. Oper­ating over this battleground, the Bf 109s of I1I./JG 53 Рік As took a heavy toll of WS-Northwestern Front, reinforced to muster 174 aircraft on August 22. On August 25, Oberfeldwebel Stefan Litjens of 111.,/JG 53 repeated Oberleutnant Erbo

Подпись: The end of a Stuka: Red Army soldiers examine the sad remains of a Ju 87 shot down by a Soviet fighter in 1941. (Photo: Seidl.) Graf Kageneck’s previous feat by knocking another five Soviet fighters out of the air, including four “MiG-Is” (in reality probably MiG-3s).

In total, VVS-Northwestern Front registered 115 air­craft lost in combat during August 1941, against 88 victory1 claims from July 22 to August 22.37 Most VVS units suffered unbearable losses. Among those that suffered worst was the 11-2-equipped 74 ShAP/VVS – Northwestern Front, which registered twenty-five aircraft lost in July and nineteen in August.38 7 LAK/PVO regis­tered fifty-two fighters lost out of a total of only about one hundred fifty—and those only from August 20 to 30.34

Stiff air battles were fought over the bridgehead es­tablished by the German Sixteenth Army at the Lovat River, south of Lake Ilmen, where the VVS made repeated attempts to destroy the river crossings. For the first time in several weeks in this sector, the Soviet air­men appeared in formations of up to twenty aircraft. On August 27, II1./JG 53 claimed no fewer than seventeen victories in a single engagement, surpassing the five-hun­dred-victory mark of the Gruppe. On the same day, II./ JG 53 claimed another ten victories, including three by Feldwebel Herbert Rollwage.

On the Soviet side, 35IAP/7 LAK was credited with five enemy aircraft, including three Bf 110s, shot down on August 27, and six on August 29-all for the loss of only one MiG-3 on each date. Mladshiy Leytenant Nikolay Shcherbina had three of these victories. None of these claims can be verified with Luftwaffe loss lists.

To the north, a hard blow to the defenders was dealt with the German sei­zure of the Estonian capital, Tallinn, on August 28. The Soviets launched a large naval fleet to evacuate the Tallinn garri­son, but the evacuation units quickly drew the attention of the Luftwaffe. The bombers of Luftflotte 1 had two field days on August 28 and 29. Commanded by Hauptmann Klaus Noske, on August 29 nine He Ills of L/KG 4 managed to sink three ships with a total of six thou­sand tons and damage another three by using the tactic of a stream of individual low-level attacks against the evacuation fleet in a single mission.40 In total, the German bombers succeeded in sinking eighteen vessels of the evacuation fleet.41 Another thirty-five vessels were destroyed by mines or Finnish torpedo boats.

One of the emerging Soviet top aces of 1941, 191 lAP’s Mladshiy Leytenant Yegor Novikov, claimed an extraordinary success on August 29: He reported down­ing two Ju 87s and a Bf 109 near Mga in a combat end­ing with Novikov himself being shot down and wounded. With this, the Soviet fighter pilot had reached a total score of four.

At Lake Ilmen, the battle reached a critical stage during the last days of August, with the Wehrmacht attacking to the north and the Red Army counterattack­ing to the south of the lake

While escorting six Pe-2s of 514 PBAP and four ll-2s of 288 ShAP against the base of II./JG 52 at Soltsy to the west of Lake Ilmen on August 29, nine MiG-3 pilots of 402 IAP spotted a Bf 110, which Mayor Konstantin Gruzdyev attacked. It took a prolonged air combat before he finally managed to finish off the Bf 110. (4./ZG 26 filed the loss of the Bf 110 piloted by Feldwebel Karl Grinninger in the same area.) Mayor Gruzdyev was one of the most skillful Soviet pilots in the Northwestern Zone at this time. When he was recalled from combat duty to continue to serve as a test pilot in February 1942, he had achieved a total of seven­teen victories and was one of the top scorers in the entire VVS.

A dive-bomber mission on the same day deprived Fliegerkorps VIII of one of its most brilliant Stuka aces,

Knight’s Cross holder Hauptmann Anton Keil, the com­mander of IL/StG 1. During an attempted forced land­ing in enemy territory, Keil’s Ju 87 overturned, killing both crew members. The aircraft was afterwards set afire by Soviet troops.42

At the end of August, the pincer movement initi­ated by XLl Panzer Corps succeeded in closing in the remnants of the enemy forces in the Novgorod-Luga area. The largest annihilation battle on the northern combat zone rapidly unfolded, but the outcome was not more than twenty thousand Soviets being taken prisoner.

At this point the German fighter units in the north­ern combat zone were temporarily reinforced with IV./ JG 51. This Jagdgruppe included some of the most bril­liant German fighter pilots of the time. One of the most notable was Oberleutnant Heinz “Pritzl” Bar, who had achieved an amazing victory total since the opening of the war with the USSR, increasing his kill tally from seventeen to seventy in only two months. In action in the northern combat zone, he surpassed his own per­sonal one-day record by downing six enemy planes on August 30 alone. Nevertheless, the fighting on August 31 almost cost Bar his life.

After scoring his seventy-ninth and eightieth victo­ries against two Pe-2s, Bar’s Bf 109 was severely hit, leav­
ing the ace with no choice but to force land behind the enemy lines. Despite having both feet sprained in the violent crash, he leaped from the Messerschmitt as fast as he could, hid in some bushes, and managed to evade capture by Soviet soldiers arriving at the wreck. In a state of terror, confusion, and pain, Bar remained in hid­ing during the rest of the day and the following night The next morning he pulled himself together and decided to try to make it back to the German lines. Turn­ing his leather jacket inside out, stuffing it with hay, and throw’ing away his flight boots, he attempted to appear as a Russian peasant. He could have thrown away the Knight’s Cross and the Oak Leaves he had been awarded two weeks earlier, but his vanity prevented him from doing that; he just put them in his pocket, together with his watch and his small flight pistol. Then Bar started walking with two sprained ankles. He actually made it back to the German lines. By that time he was so injured that he would remain hospitalized for two months.

On August 31, JG 53 Рік As lost its most successful pilot, the 111 Gruppe’s Leutnant Erich “Schmidtchen* Schmidt, in the Velikiye Luki area. Schmidt had achieved a total of forty-seven victories.

Подпись: Allf-oi.gr it ca-nes only two v dory bars or 1-е s ce ruccer. this belly-landed end deserted B; 109o' IV./JG 51 is p-obaz у the о ene in лп cn Obe- autnar: Heinz 3ritz Ba' was s'ct down on Aug-st 3t. '941. II is ■utown f'om Ge'man coane-ts that Ber went down n Slack '' that day. and УЛІЗ 51 c< not register any other "Black Г lost on the Eastern Front in 1941. (Photo: Seidl.)

Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann, another expert of IV./JG 51, achieved his fiftieth victory by downing

four "R-3s" (in reality probably R-5$ or R-Zs) in a row on September 2.4; Two days later, Hoffmann blew three So­viet aircraft— two 1)13- 3s and one MiG-3—out of the sky.4"

The mosl successful fighter unit on the Soviet side during the air battles in the Northwestern Zone in August 1941 was 39 IAL), which claimed thirty-nine German aircraft shot down that month.4′ This unit could count sev – iti lighter in’, in. n. i’t ‘iiuesvhil Ih – ing •’гг’Іііч I <- і пі.: r I К к m’v St. nrh. ikov. uiih a moil v..uv if. igiv •.iciori.- ні: r і І і he end o| Ліи;ііч:

V. Ucsh v I eyieiuni ndrey C hirkov.

GT nun and Slarviiy livu. uri lVti Гтгч. v wil l four. In V> kill.

Lum. iir a’iliv < io. ihev had ;іііі, і’чі i-lvven п. гмтіІ а:ні colic; live kilh ‘Sis l>: li"k. in. 11 In ллч. и ні ■ми-1 u I S9)." кiriian IVn Riink.. 14 I 3 і М» KI3I i.»i. k: onur, eleven mdiv i. liuil kills by the oul ■( AugiM. Rut 40.’ I lvs Mayor k. ii’si;. і r < i-i ciiyev, wiili binecr tor

On the night of September 4-5, before the advance of German ground troops forced the unit to abandon Oscl, 1 MTAP undertook its last of a total of ten Berlin missions. The twelve DB-3s of 200 BAP had also participated in nine Berlin missions, with a total of cighty – one individual flights. Fifty-five aircraft were reported to have reached the Ger­man capital. Two crashed on takeoff due to extreme overload, and the rest lost their way or suffered technical problems and had to pick nearer targets.

Of a total of eighty-six Soviet naval bombers that flew against Berlin in 1941, thirty-three were said to have reached the target. Others attacked targets of oppor­tunity, such as Stettin, Konigshcrg, Danzig, and Schwcincmtimie. Polkovnik Preobrazhenskiy, the daring commander of 1 MTAP, and four of his pilots were awarded the Golden Star as I leroes of the Soviet Union. Five pilots of the DBA were given the same award for their participation in the Berlin raids.

The “moral bombings” of Berlin were definitely a two-edged sword. Just as these raids gave a moral boost

image109A fighter pilot of 13 IAP/VVS-KBF inspects some small-caliber battle damage dealt to his 1-16 during a stiff engagement with German aircraft in the fall of 1941. (Photo: Russian Aviation Research Trust.)

to the battered Soviets during these hard times, the forced abandonment of this venture was felt as a setback.

Early in September, Schlisselburg, on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga to the east of Leningrad, became the focus of ground combat in the northern combat zone. From September 5, the He Ills of Oberst Hans-Joachim Rath’s KG 4 General Wever were concentrated in heavy “rolling attacks” against Soviet fortifications in this sec­tor. Four days later, Schlisselburg fell into German hands, depriving the defenders of Leningrad with their last land connection with their supply bases.

At this point the German Army Group North had J succeeded in driving the Soviets out of the Baltic States I and severing the land connection to Leningrad. The I defenders had suffered tremendous losses, in the air and 11 on the ground. What saved the situation for the Soviets! I on this front was that the bulk of the ground troops had j managed to withdraw in orderly fashion. Only limited I Red Army forces had been surrounded and annihilated, ] I and the construction of the Leningrad defense was in I full swing. The mobile war in this front sector had closed, j I but the Soviets had all the reason in the world to fear] the coming battle of Leningrad.

Annihilation at Kiev

fter the successful encirclement battle at Uman in southwestern Ukraine, the German Army Group South hesitated to launch a head-on assault against the heavily defended Ukrainian capital of Kiev. Instead, the bulk of Army Group South concentrated on wiping out the Soviet forces to the west of the lower Dnieper River and on establishing bridgeheads across the water­way. To the south, along the Black Sea coast, the Ger­man Eleventh and Romanian Fourth armies advanced toward the Dneiper mouth, with the seizure of the im­portant Black Sea port of Odessa as their primary goal.

On the right flank of the German Army Group South, the bomber units of Fliegerkorps V opened a series of intensive air raids on August 17 against the traffic center of Dnepropetrovsk. These were designed to delay an orderly retreat of the Red Army forces remaining to the west of the Dnieper bend; the main targets for these raids were the railroad station, thoroughfares, and bridges.

Panzergruppe 1 succeeded in establishing the first bridgehead at Zaporozhye, in the southern Dnieper bend, on August 19. Three days later, the German Seventeenth Army seized Cherkassy, about two hundred miles far­ther up up the Dnieper, and established a second bridge­head, on the eastern bank of the wide river.

On the left flank of Army Group South, the Ger­man Sixth Army pushed the Soviet Fifth Army, subject to unremitting attacks from the bombers of Fliegerkorps V, toward the Dnieper. On August 23 the Soviet Fifth Army had to give up its positions on the western Dneiper bank at Gornostaypol, thirty miles north of Kiev. A major Soviet setback in this sector came when the

Подпись: No other aircraft better symbolizes Soviet air power during World War II than Sergey Ilyushin's II-2 Shturmovik, or ‘Gorbatyy” (Hunchback), as it was nicknamed by the men who flew it. In all, 36,163 ll-2s were manufactured during the war. (Photo: Seidl.)

defenders failed to destroy the wooden road bridge across the river. By the evening of August 23, the spearheads of the German Sixth Army had established positions on the eastern side of the Dnieper.

That day, also, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 of Army Group Center delivered a heavy blow to the south from the Gomel area, 130 miles north of Kiev. This was the opening of the largest encirclement battle in history. Fliegerkorps II of Luftflotte 2, includ­ing crack units such as JG 51 and SKG 210, provided effective air support for Guderian’s drive to the south. The tank columns of Panzergruppe 2 paved their way through weak Red Army forces in the border between the Soviet Thirteenth and Fortieth armies. Any attempt to resist was met by rapid aerial attacks from SKG 210. Meanwhile, the medium bombers of KG 3 and KG 53 devastated the railway junction at Chernigov, on the Desna River 100 miles to the south. On the first day, Guderian’s armored troops advanced sixty miles. On August 24, they seized the intact Desna bridge at Novgorod-Severskiy.

Fighting desperately to relieve its ground troops from the air, the crack 126 IAP filed an extraordinary claim on this day—seventeen aerial victories. Counting aces such
as Leytenant Stepan Ridnyy and Mladshiy Leytenant ■ Vladimir Kamenshchikov in its ranks, 126 IAP had been 1 credited with thirty-six aerial victories against twenty – я seven MiG-3s and l-16s lost in combat during the first я seven weeks of the war.

Soviet reaction to the new double threat was swift. Я To the south, General-Leytenant Kirponos, the com – jfl mander of the Southwestern Front, ordered his aviation 9 assets against the Dnieper bridge at Gornostaypol. These I forces were met by strong concentrations of German fight- | ers and antiaircraft fire, which were credited with the 1 destruction of thirty-three attacking aircraft on August 1 24 alone. But finally the pilot of one of the new 11-2 1 Shturmoviks, Leytenant Sergey Kolybin of 74 ShAP, man – | aged to place two incendiary bombs on the wooden bridge. | Kolybin’s plane was hit by AAA fire and crashed into a concentration of vehicles.1 The surviving German sol – | diers helplessly witnessed the costly bridge falling prey to я the flames.2 Fliegerkorps V’s Oberst Hermann Plocher 1 established that the loss of this bridge “adversely affected | further river-crossing operations and considerably delayed I the attack by the Sixth Army.”3

As Army Group South’s Panzergruppe 1 established a a new bridgehead across the Dnieper at Dnepropetrovsk, Я

north of Zaporozhye, on August 25, the Germans were immediately confronted with heavy air attacks from the DBA and VVS-Southern Front, including 11-2 Shturmoviks entering service with 210 ShAP. During the first two days, the aircraft of 210 ShAP were reported to have put several tanks and eighteen vehicles out of commission in the Dnepropetrovsk bridgehead. The diary of the German High Command noted: “In spite of own fighter cover, there are heavy and uninter­rupted low-level attacks against the bridge and bridge­head at Dnepropetrovsk. These attacks were intensified during the evening hours.”4 Thirteen airmen from 210 ShAP were decorated for these missions, which were carried out in defiance of the intercepting Bf 109s of D./JG 3.

By this time the rapid decrease in the number of serviceable aircraft became a mounting problem to the Luftwaffe. During the last days of August, Luftflotte 4 could muster no more than 320 bombers, 20 fighters, and 35 reconnaissance aircraft. At the same time, the WS of the Southwestern and Southern fronts possessed 493 bombers, 473 fighters, and 20 reconnaissance air­craft. The support by the air forces of Germany’s allies was vital in this sector.

Thus the Soviets met pilots of several different nationalities who were fighting on the German side. Apart from the Romanians in the South, there already were Hungarian and Slovakian airmen flying alongside the Luftwaffe in the Ukrainian skies. On August 27 the Italian 22 Gruppo, equipped with fifty-one MC.200 Saetta single-engine fighters, commenced operations with a low – level attack against Soviet troops near Dnepropetrovsk. When they returned to base, the Italian fighter pilots reported eight confirmed and four “probable” victories.

In the North, the impact of the strafing attacks by SKG 210 permitted Generaloberst Guderian’s troops to cross the Rozhok River almost without suffering any casualties on August 26. Meanwhile, Stalin was prepar­ing a great surprise for Guderian. A new Soviet army group—the Bryansk Front—was formed under command of General-Leytenant Andrey Yeremenko. The intention of the Bryansk Front, equipped with the best Soviet material, including Katyusha rockets and T-34 tanks, was to annihilate Guderian’s presumptuous Panzergruppe through a threefold attack from the east, south, and west.

An air force consisting 464 combat aircraft was assigned to Yeremenko’s new front. The foundation of the new VVS-Bryansk Front, commanded by General – Mayor Fyodor Polynin, is quite telling with respect to the Soviet reinforcement capacity. In August 1941 the new’ Stavka Reserve, including strong aviation units, was built up. Within a short time, six reserve aviation groups (RAGs), equipped with the most modern aircraft, were commissioned. The first RAG was allocated to the Bryansk Front, and all 11-2 Shturmovik regiments from the Reserve Front were transferred to the VVS-Bryansk Front. Other units arrived from the Transcaucasus Mili­tary District, from the Moscow PVO, from the Naval Air Force, and by means of the absorption of the Central Front into the Bryansk Front. These forces were supple­mented with aircraft brought in from flight schools.

The largely inexperienced airmen of the new VVS – Bryansk Front stood little chance against the veterans of JG 51, w’ho claimed thirty-five victories in the air over the Panzer spearheads on August 27. The bombers of Fliegerkorps II effectively frustrated Yeremenko’s prepa­rations for the offensive, delaying the arrival of large contingents of the Bryansk Front’s combat divisions to the deployment area. But when Yeremenko finally launched his offensive on August 29, it was with such force that it compelled Guderian to halt his advance and turn to defense.

Fliegerkorps II and VVS-Bryansk Front launched everything they had along the front. On the first day of the counteroffensive, crew’s in TB-3 four-engine bomb­ers of 42 BAD (formerly З BAK) made two sorties each; the SB, Pe-2, and 11-2 crews, three or four sorties each; and the fighter pilots, six or seven sorties each. Forty – three aircraft were claimed shot down by the Germans on the first day, but despite these losses, the Soviets car­ried out a total of fiften hundred sorties on August 30 and 31.

Nevertheless, the hardest strikes against ground tar­gets were dealt by the Luftwaffe. A Red Army senior officer later recalled how’ “the continous enemy air strikes held our troops down.”3

In the South, the preparations for Army Group South’s pincer movement were completed during the last two days of August, as a number of new bridgeheads were established across the Dnieper River south of Kiev. In the Dnepropetrovsk area on. August 30, I1I./JG 77 Herzas claimed three victories against two losses in

image111Подпись: Bombing up an 1-153. Although outclassed by enemy fighters and vulnerable to ground fire, this biplane was used extensively in the ground-attack role before the modern II-2 arrived to outfit the VVS's Shturmovik regiments. (Photo: Seidl.)combat with VVS units that included 88 IAP. Among the Soviet pilots shot down was six-victory ace Leytenant Vasiliy Knyazev, who was fortunate to survive. On Au­gust 31, in the same area, Il./JG 3’s Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Brenner claimed a DB-3, followed by a “V-l 1” (probably an 11-2 of 210 ShAP). That day, also, the pilots of I1./JG 3 destroyed six Soviet aircraft in the air over the Kremenchug sector, including a TB-3 heavy bomber of 14 ТВАР shot down by the unit commander, Hauptmann Gordon Gollob (his thirty-sixth victory).

On the first day of September, stiff dogfights cost Ш./JG 52 three pilots, including the Staffelkapitan of 7./JG 52, Oberleutnant Hans-Jorg Zimmermann, who was credited with seven victories. Meanwhile, Oberfeldwebel Brenner of II./JG 3 continued his string of successes by downing an SB. Minutes later, a Soviet fighter pilot in an 1-16 scored hits on the radiator in Brenner’s Bf 109. The German pilot disengaged and man­aged to bring his plane back over German lines, where he made a nice belly landing.

Early in September, the largest aerial combats in the operational area of Luftflotte 4 were fought over the Dnepropetrovsk and Kremenchug bridgeheads in the South, where the decimated forces of VVS-Southern Front made desperate attempts to destroy the bridgeheads of the German Seventeeth Army and Panzergruppe 1. With the bulk of the aircraft on the southern combat zone concentrated in the VVS-Southwestern Front, the

Southern Front could count no more than 119 service­able aircraft on September 1. One hundred two aircraft had been registered as “total losses” during the past five weeks, including seventy-seven during combat missions.4 210 ShAP had lost eleven of its planes, with two others severely damaged, during its first weeks of combat.7 і On September 2 the Soviets lost another of their precious experienced airmen in this combat zone when 43 lAP’s Leytenant Sergey Zaytsev, credited with seven personal victories, was shot down and killed.

Luftflotte 4 concentrated all three Gruppen of JG 3 in the Kremenchug area, and on September 4 the Ger­mans severely handled the remains of VVS-Southem| Front, claiming forty-two Soviet aircraft destroyed. The commander of the VVS-Southern Front, General-MayofJ Shelukhin, decided to dispatch some of his best airmen to neutralize the threat from JG 3. On September 7, at dusk, 249 LAP, under the command of Kapitan Aleksandr Khalutin, to which Kapitan Farit Fatkullin’s crack Staff Eskadrilya/44 IAD was attached, launched a surprise attack on the JG 3 base at Mironovka, on the right bank of the Dnieper south of Kremenchug.

249 LAP was one of the most successful Soviet fighter; units in the Southern Front during this period. Among its pilots was the famous fighter ace Kapitan Petr Kozachenko. The regiment had a mixed composition of | l-153s (deriving from the disbanded 248 LAP), l-16s, and one LaGG-3. The LaGG-3 involved a very peculiar story. While the regiment was based at Kotivets Airdrome in the vicinity of Dnepropetrovsk in August 1941, one of the pilots found a deserted LaGG-3 that had made a forced landing near the airfield. This plane was repaired and passed among the pilots in the regi­ment. More than twenty pilots thus man­aged to become familiar with the LaGG – 3 prior to the regiment’s official transi­tion to LaGG-3 later in September. | The Mironovka raid was described both in Pravda8 and in the following words from the German point of view: “Fcldwebel [Werner] Lucas of 4 Staffel, who was airborne, spotted the incoming bombers. He sent a warning through ra­dio. Nevertheless, the bombs were already falling as the Gruppe scrambled.”9 Feldwebel Lucas dived on the attack-

Подпись: An He 111 unit on an airfield in the southern USSR. The vast open areas in the Ukraine offered generous opportunities for airfield construction—to the advantage of both warring sides. (Photo: Batcher.)

during the air war above the Dnieper bridges farther to the north. Commanded by Senior Lieutenant Ivan Haluznicky, 12 Letka was entrusted with the task of defending the new bridge at Gornostaypol, north of Kiev. While fending off nine I-16s attempting to attack the bridge on September 7, ten Avia B-534s claimed to have shot down two of the attackers. On September 8 three Avias of 12 Letka battled with two Ishaks over Gornostaypol and shot down one of them.[1] [2]

On the latter date, General-Leytenant Yeremenko was compelled to cancel his counteroffensive against Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 in the North, and started to retreat. As a measure of the enormous impact the Ger­man bomber units had on the Red Army, take the suc­cess claims by KG 3 Blitz: During the first eleven weeks of Operation Barbarossa, this Kampfgeschwader was cred­ited with the destruction of 349 trains, 488 trucks, 30 tanks and 450 Soviet aircraft on the ground, to which should be added twenty-one Soviet aircraft claimed shot down in the air. In the sky over the battlefield, littered

with scores of burning Soviet tanks, Oberst Werner Molders’s successor as Geschwaderkommodore in JG 51, Major Friedrich Beckh, achieved his Jagdgeschwader’s 2,000th aerial victory on September 8. Counted on the loss side this day was the deputy commander of II./JG 51, thirty-victory ace Oberleutnant Erich Hohagen, who was shot down in aerial combat and severely wounded.

On the lower Dnieper, 63 BAB and 32 1AP of the ChF launched a Zveno raid against the German river crossing at Berislav on September 8. The Soviet aircraft were intercepted by the Bf 109s of I1I./JG 77 and lost one I-16SPB and one of the escorting Yak-ls, the former being registered as Leutnant Emil Omcrt’s eighteenth victory. Another clash between the same units over this target area on the following day ended in the Soviets’ favor, with 32 1 АР/ChF claiming two Bf 109s shot down lor no losses. In fact, 7./JG 77 recorded two Bf 109s force-landed with battle damage.

The Kiev drama unfolded rapidly. On September 10, Army Group South’s Seventeenth Army and Panzergruppe 1 started moving out of the Dnieper bridge­head at Krcmenchug to advance toward the north. They were heavily supported by the units of Fliegerkorps V. Soviet strongholds and troop movements were subjected to intense aerial attacks. In the North, Romny, 120 miles to the east of Kiev, was captured by Guderian’s troops on September 10.

At this point Stalin decided to intervene personally by directing 90 percent of VVS-Southwestern Front against the enemy’s armored spearheads in the Romny sector. The missions carried out in this area on Septem­ber 12 claimed one of the first Soviet female-pilot casual­ties of the war, Starshiy Leytenant Yekaterina Zelyenko, one of the first women to enter service in the VVS as a combat pilot. Having had her baptism of fire in the Win­ter War against Finland, Zelyenko was appointed deputy commander of an Su-2 Eskadrilya of 135 BAP in 1941.

Returning from a combat sortie in the Romny sec­tor, Starshiy Leytenant Zclycnkos bomber was attacked by seven Bf 109s from JG 51. During the initial fighter attack, otic Bf 109 was claimed shot down by Zelyenko’s gunner, but the other Messerchmitts continued to attack the bomber, and a full burst killed the gunner. As Zelyenko’s machine guns had run out of ammunition and the bomber was set on fire, she directed her Su-2 right into the closest Bf 109. Shrapnel from the smashed

Bf 109 hit and killed Zelyenko instantly. Only on May 5, 1990, did Mikhail Gorbachev decide to award Yekaterina Zelyenko the title of Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously.

To the south, Marshal Budyonny ordered the. Soviet Thirty-eighth Army to launch a counterattack against Panzergruppe 1 at Kremenchug. The Thirty-eighth Army was immediately beset by “rolling attacks” from the air. On September 12 the army headquarters reported: “Im­possible to move in open terrain due to aerial attacks.”1’ The entire counterattack was canceled that day.

The Soviets next resorted to hit-and-run fighter – bomber sorties against the river crossings. On September 13, more than a dozen major fighter-bomber raids were carried out in this sector. The sky over the Dneiper bridges at Kremenchug was filled with Soviet fighter-bombers attempting to evade the aggressive attacks of the Bf 109s. On September 13 alone, II./JG 3 was reported to have shot down twenty Soviet airplanes, including thirteen “V-l Is”—probably 11-2s—for the loss of only one Bf 109.

As the ring was closing around the Southwestern Front in the Kiev area, the Soviet commanders appealed to the Stavka for permission to withdraw. But Stalin had decided to defend Kiev at all costs. He dismissed Mar­shal Budyonny as supreme commander of the South­western Zone and replaced him with Marshal Timoshenko. Stalin also sent the following harsh wire to the Kiev defenders: “Once and for all, you have to stop looking for possibilities to retreat. Instead, you must concen­trate on the possibilities of resisting and only resisting.”

Early on September 14, Soviet aircraft raided the base of JG 3 at Mironovka once again. Two Bf 109s managed to take off. The pilots, Hauptmann Gollob and his wingman, Oberleutnant Walthcr Dahl, pursued the attackers back over the Dnieper and later returned with claims of two I-153s shot down. Both Gollob and Dahl were known to be very ambitious, and at least the latter has been proven to have wildly exaggerated some of he successes.

Also on September 14, Leytenant Arseniy Stepanov, f rom Kapitan Farit Fatkullin’s Staff Eskadrilya/44IAD, was out on a patrol mission in the same area when he discovered an enemy airfield on which two Ju 87s were j being refueled. Stepanov put the nose of his 1-І 53 Chayka down and strafed the field, sett ing both Ju 87s on fire | Heading for home after the attack, Stepanov found him – j

self pursued by two Bf 109s. A stiff twenty-minute dogfight ensued until Arseniy Stepanov managed to hit one of the Bf 109s and then get away.13 Shortly after­ward, the 1-153 flight led by Starshiy Politruk Boris Vasilyev, from the same unit, made another attack against the same airfield. This time seven enemy aircraft were claimed destroyed on the ground. During the return flight, Leytenant Grigoriy Kotseba became separated from his comrades and got involved in a prolonged dogfight with four Bf 109s, from which he was lucky to escape alive.

Meanwhile, the bombers and dive-bombers of Fliegerkorps 11 and V were engaged in preventing any “volunteer attempts” by the Soviet Southwestern Front to escape to the east. Day and night, hundreds of He Ills and Ju 88s hammered the lines of communication in the rear area, repeating the successful “envelopment from the air” that had preceded the battle of annihila­tion at Uman in July and August. By September 14, Fliegerkorps V had destroyed or damaged 727 trucks in this sector. During the “envelopment from the air” against Kiev, Hauptmann Rudolf Kiel’s I./KG 55 Greif was credited with the destruction of 58 railway cars, 675 trucks, and 22 tanks. One He 111 crew, led by Oberleutnant Adalbert Karbe, the Staffelkapitan in 3./ KG 55, distinguished itself by destroying seven railway trains during a single mission. The Ju 88 crews of I./KG 54Totenkopf also achieved considerable success during these operations, and on September 19 the commander of this Gruppe, Major Richard Linke, was awarded the Knight’s Cross. By that time his 1./KG 54 had been cred­ited with the destruction of 240 Soviet aircraft on the ground, hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces, and thou­sands of vehicles. Moreover, the Gruppenkommandeur had knocked out thirty Soviet tanks himself.1,1

Oberst Hermann Plocher, the Fliegerkorps V chief of staff wrote: “The German isolation of the Kiev pocket was exemplary, with the bombers of the Fliegerkorps V ; (Luftflotte 4) operating from the Kirovograd area in the south and those of the Fliegerkorps II (Luftflotte 2) from north of Gomel and Orsha in the north.”15

j On September 16, Panzergruppen 1 and 2 met at і Lokhvitsa, 130 miles east of Kiev, thus closing the ring around five Soviet armies. The full meaning of Stalin’s I order that Kiev must be held “at any cost” was nothing j less than total annihilation, in the air as well as on the ground.

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Oberst Hermann Plocher served as chief of staff of Fliegerkorps V from 1940 to 1943. He had received pilot training at Lipetsk in the USSR in 1928 and served with the Condor Legion in Spain. After the war, he wrote an important book about the German Air Force versus the Soviet Union. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.)

On September 18 the German Sixth Army opened its offensive against Kiev from the west By now the intense air activity in combination with strung-out sup­ply lines and inadequate transport space created a severe fuel shortage on the Luftwaffe airfields in the Ukraine. Most twin-engine bombers of Fliegerkorps V w-ere grounded during the days following the closing of the ring around Kiev. Thus increased demands were put on the single-engine Ju 87 dive-bombers of lII./StG 77. Fly­ing four to six sorties each day, the Stuka airmen of this unit fell upon the bunkers and artillery positions in the approaches to the Kiev citadel, breaking all resistance. On September 19 the fortress was in German hands. On September 20, the commander of the Southwestern Front,

General-Polkovnik Mikhail Kirponos, was killed in combat.

Stalin had already practically given up Kiev and the hundreds of thousands of entrapped Soviet soldiers. The skies over Kiev were completely handed over to the Luftwaffe. The remains of the WS-Southwestern Front were concentrated in the Poltava sector, against the east – bound advance of the German Seventeenth Army, now two hundred miles from Kiev. Here, the Soviet airmen fought vehemently to halt the German offensive and relieve their ground forces. On September 20 I1I./JG 52 lost four Bf 109s in this sector.

Even if the fuel shortage would not permit Fliegerkorps V to carry out more than an average of 140 sorties per day during the final-stage of the Battle of Kiev, this was fully sufficient to deal crippling blows against the tight concentrations of Soviet troops and equipment inside the narrow Kiev pocket. Between September 12 and September 21, Fliegerkorps V claimed 42 aircraft, 23 tanks, and 2,171 motor vehicles destroyed on the ground, plus 65 Soviet planes shot down in the air.

The Soviet Twenty-sixth Army made a desperate attempt to break out to the east on September 21. The Bf 110 high-speed bombers of SKG 210 were brought into action against this maneuver, with devastating results. General-Leytenant Fyodor Kostenko, the com­mander of the Twenty-sixth Army, radioed an urgent appeal to the Stavka: “All efforts to cross the river are futile. No ammunition left. Help required from the air force!"

On September 26, the greatest battle of annihilation in history was over. The Soviet Fifth, Twenty-first, Twenty-sixth, and Twenty-seventh armies had ceased to exist. According to German reports, 440,000 prisoners were taken in the Kiev pocket. Altogether, 665,000 Soviet soldiers ended up in German confinement on the battlefields in the southern combat zone between August 31 and September 26."’ The VVS recorded more than 1,500 of its aircraft lost over the Ukraine between June 22 and September 26—to no avail in preventing the disaster at Kiev.

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A Luftwaffe bombing attack against retreating elements of the Red Army, as seen from the a German airplane. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.)

The commander of the VVS-Southern Front, Gen­eral-Mayor P. S. Shclukhin, was made the scapegoat for the failure in the air, and was replaced on September 24 by Polkovnik Konstantin Vershinin, a veteran of the Russian Civil War. The commander of the VVS – Southwestern Front, General-Leytenant Fyodor Astakhov, was trapped in the encirclement but managed to evade capture. He reached Soviet lines in November 1941, hav­ing made it three hundred miles through enemy-held territory.

The Kiev battle was an immense operational victory for the Germans, but nothing else. After the war, the German General Kurt von Tippelskirch declared: “The Russians had indeed lost a battle, but [they] won the campaign.” This would prove true as the final offensive! against Moscow was launched, too much delayed because | of the diversion of Gudcrian’s Panzergruppe to the south. I As this offensive finally opened, the Wehrmacht on the | Eastern Front had been reduced to between one-half and j one-third of its original strength.