Category Air War on the Eastern Front

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

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.

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.

[ 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.

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

Air 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.)

Herbert 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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

(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

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.

That 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.’

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

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

Volume I: Operation Barbarossa. 1941

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

days 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.

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.

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

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.)

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

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

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

[ 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

turned 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A 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.

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

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

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-

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.

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.

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.

hile the battle of annihilation raged in the Kiev area, a prolonged parallel battle was waged between mainly Romanian and Soviet forces for the I besieged Black Sea port of Odessa, which had been turned ї into a veritable fortress by the defenders. Most of the I Romanian front aviation—Gruparea Aeriana de Lupta B(GAL)—was concentrated at the latter battle scene. This t included the cream of the FARR: the Bf 109-equipped I Grupul 7 Vanatoare; Grupul 5 Vanatoare, outfitted with He 112Bs; Escadrila 53 Vanatoare, with Hurricanes; and I Grupul 8 Vanatoare, with Romanian-designed I. A.R. 80 I single-engine fighters. Since the Romanian assault on ^Odessa proceeded following German demands, Fliegerkorps IV allocated KG 27 Boelcke, KG 51 Edel­weiss, and the Bf 109s of Major Anton Mader’s H./JG ; 77 to strengthen the initial operations. The main aim of the German Kampfgcschwadern was to neutralize Vitse-

Admiral Filipp Oktyabrskiy’s powerful fleet, which largely dominated the entire Black Sea.

Early in August 1941, only weak air forces stood at the disposal of the Odessa defenders. The main air unit in Odessa was 69 1AP, led by Mayor Lev Shestakov. As Odessa was surrounded, Mayor Shestakov could count roughly twenty operational 1-16 fighters under his com­mand. Apart from 69 LAP, there were only three inde­pendent Black Sea Fleet aviation Eskadrilyas based at Odessa, two equipped with MBR-2 flying boats and one with SB bombers. These units were supplemented by sorties flown over Odessa by the remaining fighters and bombers of the Black Sea Fleet’s 62 LAB and 63 BAB, which were stationed in Nikolayev and the Crimea.

Mayor Shestakov’s fighters would very soon earn glowing reputation for their aggressive fight to protect the Odessa defenders from the air. Unfortunately, some

The l-16-equipped 69 IAP was reinforced during the Battle of Odessa by detachments from several units of VVS-ChF. including 8 IAP. This unit achieved fame throughout Soviet Union for its performance during the bitter fight for air supremacy in the late summer and autumn of 1941. This photo shows an 1-16 pilot receiving last – minute instructions from a VVS naval kapitan prior to takeoff. (Photo: Denisov.)

of the official credits given to the undoubtedly brave men of 69 LAP seem to be based on optimistic overclaims. On August 9 (or August 8, according to another Soviet source),17 69 IAP reported a major success against a for­mation of Bf 109s, claiming nine shot down without loss. There are no corresponding losses registered on the
side of the Axis air forces. I1./JG 77 filed no losses on! August 8 and only two Bf 109s damaged, neither of them due to combat, on August 9. The log of the Roma­nian Bf 109-equipped Grupul 7 Vanatoare makes no mention of any combat losses.

The main task to the Soviet bombers in Odessa was l

tactical—to raid the Romanian ground forces and their supply lines. In doing so, they suffered heavy losses, par­ticularly at the hands of II./JG 77. Within a short time, U./JG 77 was able to achieve air supremacy for the Axis in the skies over Odessa. In sixty-four fighter-escort and fighter-bomber sorties over the Black Sea port on August 10, the Bf 109 Gruppe claimed fifteen victories against only one loss. On top of this, these Messerschmitt pilots, experienced in antishipping fighter-bomber missions since the Battle of Crete, scored bomb hits on one light cruiser and a 6,000-ton steamer.

Shortly before noon on August 12, the Rotte com­posed of Oberleutnant Erich Friedrich and Leutnant Franz Hrdlicka, of II./JG 77, was on the way back to base after a fighter-bomber attack against shipping in the port of Odessa. Both had missed a "fat” 5,000-ton freighter. Suddenly they spotted three SBs. The Soviet bomber crews, belonging to 40 BAP/63 BAB, didn’t have a chance: In minutes, all three had been shot down. Oberleutnant Friedrich claimed two as his eighth and ninth victories, and Leutnant Hrdlicka claimed one as his second victory. Soviet sources confirm all three losses, listing two SBs force-landing in Soviet-held territory and the third close to enemy lines. The navigator and the
gunner of the latter made it back to Red Army positions while the pilot was captured by Romanian soldiers.

Later that day, one II./JG 77 pilot, Oberfeldwebel Eugen Wintergest, claimed what would become a rather famous act. As he returned from a single-plane test flight, he stunned his comrades by rocking seven victory signs with the wings of his Bf 109. Upon landing, Wintergest was surrounded by enthusiastic ground-crew personnel and pilots, whom he told of how he had come across nine “Martin bombers” (the incorrect German designa­tion for the SB early in the war) and had shot down seven. Hauptmann Anton Mader, the Croatian-born vet­eran Gruppenkommandeur, was not so sure about the young NCO’s story, so he flew to the area where Wintergest had reported his success. To his amazement, he actually found seven bomber wrecks on the ground in the area Wintergest had designated.18 Subsequently, all seven victories were officially confirmed as Wintergest’s eighth through fourteenth victories.

Soviet sources note that six SBs, all belonging to 40 BAP, were lost in the same area on this day, including the three downed by Friedrich and Hrdlicka at noon. At about the same time that Wintergest reported his spec­tacular successes, 1 Eskadrilya/40 BAP reported three

Hauptmann Anton Mader was appointed Gruppenkommandeur II,/JG 77 in June 1941. Under his leadership, II./JG 77 would claim nearly four hundred victories by December 1941. Mader was an extremely popular unit commander who became famous for paying great attention and care to each of his subordinates. He survived the war with a personal score of eighty-six victories. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.)

SBs lost in combat with a Bf 109, probably Wintergest’s. There may be gaps in the Soviet loss files on this particu­lar date, but the bomber wrecks seen by Hauptmann Mader could also have been the remnants of both air combats on this day.

Meanwhile, the bombers of the Black Sea Fleet con­tinued to carry out their small-scale strategic air offen­sive against Romania. An attempt was made on August 10 to interrupt traffic across the important Danube bridge at Cernavoda, connecting the port of Constanta with the interior. The attack was conducted in three waves: Five DBAs from 2 MTAP, in the first wave, and six Pe – 2s from 40 BAP, in the second wave, failed to strike the target decisively, but six I-16SPB Zvenos from 32 LAP damaged nearby oil pipelines.

On August 13, three TB-3 Zvenos took off from Yevpatoria in the Crimea at 0330 hours. Two hours and ten minutes later, the six I-16s were released ten miles off the coast. They came diving down on the bridge, caught the defenders totally by surprise, and placed five FAB-250 bombs directly on the span. The bomb damage caused considerable disturbance to the road and railway traffic across this bridge and destroyed the nearby oil pipelines. During the return flight, the six l-16s strafed a Romanian infantry column and finally landed at Odessa Airdrome at 0705 hours. Later that day they returned to Yevpatoria, where the 1-16 Zveno commander, Kapitan Arseniy Shubikov, became the first in VVS-ChF to be awarded the Lenin Order.

But all the efforts of the airmen of VVS-ChF could not hold the numerically superior enemy back. On August 13, Odessa was completely surrounded.

At this point, the Luftwaffe raids against supply ship­ping to the beleaguered port were intensified. On August 13, II./JG 77’s Fahnenjunker-Gefreiter Gunther Marschhausen, who had won the competition of the day on August 10 by downing three Soviet fighters, was killed by a direct AAA hit while attacking shipping off Odessa. During an attack on a Soviet ship convoy between Odessa and Sevastopol on August 15, a Ju 88A piloted by Lcutnant Heinz Unrau of 3./KG 51 was recorded lost through ramming by a Soviet fighter.14 Extraordinarily, there is no mention of any taran in this area in the Soviet records.20

To strengthen air support to the defenders, the ll-2s of Mayor Mikhail Kravchenko’s 46 OShAE from the small WS-Pinsk Flolilya, originally aimed at the protec­tion of naval operations on the Pripyat and Dnieper riv­ers, were flown in to Odessa. During the following days this unit suffered heavily in close-support missions over the front lines. Shortly afterwards the small VVS forces in Odessa were also joined by three Yak-Is from 32ІАР/ 62 IAB and four I-15bis from 94 OIAE.

The deteriorating situation forced the Zveno units to be deployed in tactical missions. 32 IAP/ChF and 63 BAB carried out their final strategic Zveno mission on August 17, scoring bomb hits on three ships in the Romanian port of Constanta. At least one 1-16 SPB was claimed shot down by I.(J)/LG 2.

On August 18 KG 27 and KG 51 reportedly sank or damaged more than thirty’ thousand tons of shipping during a single raid on Odessa. KG 27 was reported to have sunk eight transport ships totaling thirty-six thou-

sand tons, and an additional twenty-four ships were dam­aged between August 11 and August 18. A bomber crew that single-handedly managed to sink a 10,000-ton freighter off Odessa achieved the greatest individual suc­cess. Shortly afterward, the commanders of II. and 111./ KG 27 Boelcke, Hauptmann Reinhard Gunzel and Hauptmann Hans-Henning Freiherr von Beust, were awarded Knight’s Crosses.

One of the few losses suffered by 11./JG 77 in air combat occurred on August 18, when an 1-16 from 69 IAP shot down a Bf 109 of 6./JG 77. Three days later, Unteroffizier Wolfgang Polscher, of 6 Staffel, was shot down by an 1-153 and eventually machine-gunned by the Soviet fighter as he hung in his harness.

The effectiveness of the fighter escort provided by IL/JG 77 is demonstrated by the fact that KG 27 lost only four He Ills during the month of August 1941. The contrast to the poor showings by the Romanian air men is evident. On August 21, the Bf 109-equipped Grupul 7 Vanatoare was engaged by the 1-16s of 69 IAP, which were escorting a small group of Il-2s against Romanian ground positions. Locotenent Comandor Alexandru Popisteanu, the unit leader, was lost.

Having scored fifty-four kills in the air over Odessa, II./JG 77 left this sector for the southern Dnieper area on August 28. This proved to be a turning point in the air-war situation over Odessa. Following the departure of the experienced airmen of this Jagdgruppe, the Soviet fighters in Odessa made a frantic effort to gain air supe­riority. A series of stiff air combats followed, with severe losses on both sides. On August 28, air combat over Odessa claimed the lives of 69 LAP’s Leytenant Vitaliy Topol’skiy, victor in eight combats (including four shared kills), and Mladshiy Leytenant Ivan Berishvili of 81АР/ ChF. Berishvili died ramming a Romanian PZL P. ll fighter at treetop level. Next day, Starshiy Politruk Semyon Kunitsa (69 LAP) was shot down by a Roma­nian Bf 109. Kunitsa bailed out, but he came under fire from the ground and was killed.

GAL—counting ninety-one operational aircraft on September 221—proved unable to maintain the air supremacy achieved earlier with support of 1I./JG 77. During the first days of September, the Soviets gradually took control of the air over Odessa. This further increased the difficulties faced by the beleaguered Romanian Fourth Army. A large part of at least twenty Romanian aircraft

shot down during the Battle of Odessa22 fell victim to the fighter aces of Mayor Lev Shestakov’s 69 IAP. Lev Shestakov was credited with the destruction of eleven enemy aircraft (including eight shared victories) by mid-September 1941.

Among other successful pilots of 69 IAP were Kapitan Yuriy Rykachyov, with three personal and eleven collective vic­tories by the end of September. Kapitan Mikhail Astashkin (four personal and six collective kills), and Kapitan Konstantin Denisov of 8ІАР/ChF. Kapitan Denisov managed to destroy one Ju 88 in the moonlight on the night of August 29- 30, followed by an He 111 the next day.

Soviet soldiers found both wrecks. (Three months later, fighting over the main Crimean port of Sevastopol, Denisov shot down a Ju 87. The German pilot, who bailed out and was captured, asked the Soviet soldiers if he could meet the pilot who had shot him down. He was intro­duced to Denisov and handed over his flight pistol. From then on, Denisov never flew a combat mission without this German weapon.)25

Kapitan Mikhail Astashkin was killed near Odessa on September 14. Having shot down a Ju 88 (probably from Stab 1II./KG 51) as his tenth victory (four per­sonal and six collective kills), Astashkin was bounced by – two Romanian Bf 109s. Following the example of sev­eral other Soviet airmen, Astashkin reportedly crashed
his burning fighter into a concentration of enemy troops. He was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.24

On the night of September 21-22, the Soviet Black Sea Fleet made a surprise troop landing behind the Ro­manian lines at Grigorevka, west of Odessa. All available Soviet aircraft in Odessa were dispatched to neutralize the enemy air force in the area. The captured pilot of a Romanian PZL P. ll shot down by 69 LAP’S Batalyonnyy

Komissar Nikolay Verkhovets on September 21 had revealed that the Stukas of IlI./StG 77 had been called in to this sector again. Led by Mayor Shestakov, twenty l-16s from 69 1AP strafed the supposed Stuka bases at Beltsy and Baden on September 22, claiming twenty en­emy aircraft put out of action on the ground for the loss of one 1-16. Meantime, the fighters of 69 1AP and VVS – ChF managed to drive the Romanian airmen from the skies above the landing grounds, claiming twelve Axis aircraft shot down during the following three days. But the attempt to cripple StG 77 on the ground failed, with disastrous results to the Soviets. According to Luftwaffe loss statistics, not a single Ju 87 of IIL/StG 77 was de­stroyed during the Soviet air-base raids on September 22. By sinking the destroyer Frunze plus one gunboat and a tug, and damaging the destroyers Bezuprechnyy and Besposhchadnyy, the Stukas managed to seal off the in­vasion force. Hauptmann Helmut Bode, the Gruppenkommandeur of Hl./St. G. 77, was awarded with the Knight’s Cross shortly afterwards.

While the two Zveno units had been shifted to tacti­cal missions, the DBA DB-3s based in the Crimea contin­
ued to carry out small raids against Romania on an almost daily basis throughout the summer and most of the fall. Constanta withstood a total of thirty-four day raids and twenty-five night raids, mostly of a nuisance character. The most successful raid was carried out on October 9, when the oil pipeline at Cernavoda was once again heavily damaged. It was not until the German offensive against the Crimea began in the fall of 1941 that these air attacks diminished considerably. When Odessa and the Crimea finally fell into German and Romanian hands, these air attacks finally ended.

Early in October, as the German pressure on the Crimea mounted, the Soviets decided to give up Odessa and transfer its garrison to the defense of Sevastopol. Vitse-Admiral Oktyabrskiy launched the entire Black Sea Fleet in an impressive Dunkirk-like evacuation. Despite relentless enemy air attacks against the evacuation fleet, 350,000 soldiers and civilians, and 200,000 tons of materiel were ferried to Sevastopol. The last defenders in Odessa were either killed or captured on October 14. A final Soviet air raid against Constanta was flown on October 15.

During the bomber offensive against Romania from June 22 to October 15, 1941, the German fighter units operating in this area—I.(J)/LG 2, I1I./JG 52, and Erganzungsgruppe/JG 77—claimed to have shot down fifty-five aircraft.25 The last air combat over Odessa was fought on October 18, as Romanian fighters shot down two MBR-2 flying boats on a reconnaissance mission.

The sixty-four-day-long siege of Odessa proved to be extremely costly to both sides. About 100,000 Romanian soldiers were either killed or injured, while on the Soviet side, 16,578 Red Army and Black Sea Fleet soldiers were reported killed or missing, with another 24,690 injured.

Soviet airmen engaged in the defense of this port had demonstrated an outstanding ability to fight an effective defensive battle. 69 LAP. earned a reputation that would last throughout the war. This unit was cred­ited with ninety-four enemy aircraft and three transport gliders shot down between June 22 and October 14, the highest claims made by any VVS regiment during that period. After being pulled out of combat to convert to LaGG-3s after the Battle of Odessa, twelve 69 LAP pilots were made Heroes of the Soviet Union at the same time.

Although several loss records for the Soviet air units in Odessa appear to have been lost during the evacua­tion, the 144 aerial victories claimed by the Romanian airmen between August 29 and October 16 must be con­sidered a large exaggeration. A Romanian evaluation eventually also concluded that the claim figures over Odessa were highly inflated. As a consequence, the High Command of the FARR issued new’ and sharpened de­mands for approving confirmation of aerial victories,26 While the Bf 109s of H./JG 77 had confirmed the supe­riority of the German fighter arm against the Soviets, the FARR had produced modest results. This is an indica­tion of the long years of combat experience enjoyed by the German pilots—an advantage absent among the Romanian airmen—as the main factor behind the superiority of the Luftwaffe airmen against their VVS counterparts.

After the Battle of Odessa, the number of service­able aircraft of the Romanian GAL was down to one – fifth of its original strength. With the exception of three liaison squadrons, GAL was withdrawn from first-line service after the Battle of Odessa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On June 22, 1941, Generaloberst Hans-Jiirgen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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