Category Air War on the Eastern Front

Nothing seemed to stop the German Army Group Cen­ter as it continued eastward on both sides of the highway to Moscow during the first days of July 1941. On the northern flank. General Wolfram von Richthofen dis­patched the bulk of his Fliegerkorps VIII to provide close support for Panzcrgruppc 3, which was rushing Coward the city of Vitebsk, to the north of the highway to Moscow.

To render the operational command more effective, a spedal air command, Nahkampfftihrer, led by Oberst: Martin Fiebig, was established by Fliegerkorps II. Com­prising the Bf 110 “high-speed bombers” of SKG 210 and the Bf 109s of JG 51, Nahkampffiihrer w-as employed to provide close support of Panzcrgruppe 2 as it advanced from the Berezina bridgehead on the south­ern flank of Army Group Center.

While delivering highly successful strikes against the Soviet defensive positions, the close support from the air also had the effect of lowering the willingness among the German ground troops to fight without air cover. Luftwaffe Oberst Hermann Plocher noted that the army at: this point “had become outrageously spoiled by the continous employment of Luftwaffe units in direct sup­port on the battlefield."” Ground troops started showing a tendency to retreat prematurely whenever confronted with any serious Red Army resistance if Luftwaffe air­craft were not: present. The ground troops frequently complained that the liaison with the close-support units of the Luftwaffe did not work quickly enough. General von Richthofen replied that the army should understand that every sortie required time; planes had to be refueled, loaded with bombs, and then flown to the

new objective. He wrote that “the Army refused to real­ize that the Luftwaffe could not be dribbled out at all places but must be concentrated at major points."

Six fresh Soviet armies were establishing a defense position along the Dnieper River, but they were consid­erably slowed and hurt by Luftwaffe bombings. The me­dium bombers of Luftflotte 2 were directed against the communication lines in the Soviet rear area; roads, rail­ways and railway junctions were the main targets. Simul­taneously, the Soviet airfields were attacked again and again.

With fewer than five hundred combat aircraft divided among seven air divisions remaining in VVS – Western Front after the air battle with JG 51 over Bobruysk on the last day of June, there was a desperate need for reinforcements on the Soviet side. However, as the front line spread to the east, the air war reached into the operational area of the crack 6 ТАК of the Moscow PVO. The 6 IAK included units equipped with aircraft designer Aleksandr Yakovlev’s first fighter, the superb

Yak-1. On July 1 the Stavka directed the special 401 IAP, assigned to test new aircraft types, to the Berezina – j Dnieper front The commander of this unit, American – j born Podpolkovnik Stepan Suprun, was one of the most : experienced Soviet fighter pilots at that time. Awarded! the Golden Star as Hero of the Soviet Union in 1940, he I tested more than a hundred aircraft types, the last one— ? as late as June 29, 1941—a modified Yak-1 M.

Suprun was a friend of aircraft designer Aleksandr! Yakovlev. The last time they met, on June 29, Suprun f told Yakovlev that he wished to go to the front as soon I as possible and “test the German fighter aces.”

With the arrival of 6 LAK and Suprun’s elite unit, Щ the previous instruction to all VVS fighter pilots to avoid ft combat with the Bf 109s was abolished. A serious В attempt was made to actually challenge the Luftwaffe – I including the Jagdflieger—for air supremacy. 6 LAK and 1 Suprun’s pilots were immediately throwm into fierce air j combat. The pilots of 401 IAP put up five to six sorties Щ on July 1, claiming several kills. Suprun triumphed by Щ

knocking down four on this his first day of combat with “the German aces." On this day, KG 53 Legion Condor under command of Oberst Paul Weitkus lost four He Ills.

Also on July 1, Leytenant Nikolay Terekhin of 161 1AP scored three rather unusual aerial victories. Terekhin’s flight of six I-16s had just landed at Minsk Airdrome after a combat mission when a formation of German bombers, probably He Ills of KG 53, appeared and started dropping bombs on the base. Despite having emptied his ammunition on the earlier sortie, Terekhin took off in the middle of the raid. His little Polikarpov fighter climbed rapidly. Terekhin aimed at a bomber on the right side of a flight formation and without hesitat­ing started cutting its tail fin with his propeller. With the rudder cut into pieces, the German aircraft flipped over to the left and hit the flight leader’s aircraft. This bomber in turn veered to the left and collided with the last air­craft of the Kette. It was a fantastic scene. In the next ; minute, all four planes—the three Luftwaffe bombers and

the I-16-went down. Six or seven parachutes opened in the sky, but the combat was not over. On their way to the ground, the German airmen and Terekhin started j firing at each other with their small flight pistols.

Meantime, a group of Bf 109s appeared and started attacking the I-16s that had followed Terekhin aloft. One or two l-16s went down in flames as the remaining Ger­man bombers withdrew to the west. A bit farther away If the He Ills came under attack by another flight of 1 1-16s.

As they landed in hostile territory, the parachuting і German bomber fliers were disarmed and tied up with a rope by members of a local collective farm. As if taken from a scene from a Western movie, Terekhin appeared in General-Mayor Georgiy Zakharov’s 43 1AD hcadquar – K ters with his pistol in one hand and the rope with the tied-up Luftwaffe airmen in the other.

The sudden appearance of large numbers of modern Soviet fighters stunned the Germans. “The enemy still ^ possesses remarkably great numbers of bombers and fight­ers” was noted in the war diary of Oberstleutnant Werner if; Molders’s JG 51 on July 2, 1941. On that day the ( medium bombers of Luftflotte 2 dispatched a large-scale effort against the airfields around Gomel, south of Army і Group Center’s right flank.

The Soviet tactic was to fight to win time. It was I derided that Smolensk, a main city on the road to Mos­cow, was to be defended at all costs. On July 3, German reconnaissance aircraft reported, “Strong enemy tank column, at least one hundred heavy tanks, heading west­ward for Orsha.” Orsha, on the Dnieper bend halfway between Borisov and Smolensk, would become the scene of a major tank battle during the next few days. General von Richthofen immediately employed his Stukas against this threat while the Do 17 medium hombers of KG 2 and 11I./KG 3 raided the supply lines of these Soviet troops.

As a way of maximizing the pressure on the Red Army, the medium bombers of Luftflotte 2 were committed to both day and night bombing. The Soviets countered by launching fighters at night, though with very primitive methods—guided only by eyesight and searchlights. During a mission on the night of July 3-4, 160IAP lost its commander, Mayor Anatoliy Kostromin. Flying an 1-153, he attempted to attack an He 111 of KG 53, visible in the searchlight beams over Smolensk but was himself shot down by the gunners of the bomber.

On July 4 the large tank concentration spotted by the Luftwaffe reconnaissance—a crack Red Army divi­sion equipped with some of the new T-34 tanks, supe­rior to anything the Germans could mobilize at that time – clashed with the German 17th Panzer Division west of Orsha. The last remaining ground-attack planes avail­able to the Soviet Western Front were dispatched to pro­vide the T-34s with air support. Few of the planes returned.

One of the most famous Soviet ground-attack pilots of World War II, Mladshiy Leytenant Mikhail Odintsov, twice awarded Hero of the Soviet Union (once for shoot­ing down two German aircraft while flying an 11-2), flew an Su-2 in 820 ShAP and narrowly escaped getting killed: “Four Me 109s attacked us. Both my gunner and myself were seriously injured. We barely managed to land. Our plane was so shot up that it was classified beyond repair! But at least my navigator had shot down one Me 109.”9

The new WS tactic of actively seeking combat with the Jagdflieger proved to be a fatal mistake. To the young and self-assured German fighter aces, this mainly meant new opportunities for shooting down enemy airplanes. On July 4 Leutnant Erich Schmidt of 1II./JG 53 achieved his thirtieth victory’ by downing an 1-16. On that day another German fighter pilot claimed the life of Podpolkovnik Stepan Suprun.

After a successful dogfight over the front area, Suprun

remained in the air for a while in order to protect his landing comrades in the eventuality of a German raid. Suddenly two Ju 88s of KG 3, escorted by four Bf 109s of JG 51, dove out from the clouds. Suprun made a courageous attack and managed to shoot down one of the Ju 88s. In the next moment, his MiG-3 was attacked by the Bf 109s. One of the German fighter pilots scored a decisive hit and the MiG-3 fell vertically into a forest. The remains of this formidable fighter pilot were not found until twenty years later, but on July 22, 1941, Suprun was posthumously awarded his second Golden Star, thus becoming one of the first double Heroes of the Soviet Union. (During the war, seventy-four Soviet air­men were made double Heroes of the Soviet Union.)

The German equivalent of the Golden Star of the Hero of Soviet Union, the Knight’s Cross, was awarded to one of the aces of JG 51 on July 2—Leutnant Heinz Bar (nicknamed Pritzl because of his affection for Pritzl

candy bars). Bar, who had scored his thirtieth victory the same day, would develop into one of the outstanding 1 fighter aces of World War П. Although in almost con­stant trouble with his superiors due to a nearly total lack of military’ discipline, Bar showed tremendous skill in air combat. From the first day of war in 1939 until the final months in 1945, he flew approximately a thousand ties on all fronts, and achieved 220 confirmed victories, j including 96 on the Eastern Front and 16 while flying an Me 262 jet fighter.

On July 5 Bar increased his score with one MiG-3 and two DB-3s while his Geschwaderkommodore, thfi famous Oberstleutnant Werner Molders, bagged two MiG-3s and two SBs. With such adversaries, most Soviet airmen active in the summer of 1941 could not expect to survive long. In fact, the average life expectancy h the Soviet front-line air regiments during 1941 was not more than twenty-five missions, a few weeks of normal

Mikhail Odintsov was one of the most famous Shturmovik pilots of World War II, during which he was twice awarded the Golden Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. The outbreak of the war in 1941 saw Odintsov as a nineteen-year-old mladshiy leytenant and Si – 2pilot. After recovering from wounds he sustained when his Su-2 was shot up by a Bf 109, Odintsov learned to fly the II-2 with considerable success. By the end of the war, Odintsov had paid bac< dearly for when he was shot down; he was credited with a total of twelve aerial victories, the highest score for any il-2 pilot during the war. (Photo: Seidl.)

combat activity. Several VVS units were completely obliterated during the air war in the Smolensk area.

Added to the losses in the air were the continued devastating results of the German air-base raids. Also on July 5, twenty-nine Do 17s of II1./KG 2 Holzhammcr and III./KG 3 Blitz claimed twenty-two Soviet aircraft on the ground during a raid against the airfield at Vitebsk. Only one German bomber, from KG 3, was lost.

The last hope for the Soviet army commander, General-Leytenant Pavel Kurochkin, was the new 11-2 Shturmovik. Regarded as the trump card of the VVS, the Il-2s of 61, 215, and 430 ShAP had
been kept in reserve during the first days of the war. But now 430 ShAP was rushed to the front to bolster the battered 4 ShAP.

At dawn on July 5, 1941, a formation of nine Il-2s from 430 ShAP attacked the tank spearheads of the German 17th Panzer Division at Orsha. In spite of heavy fire from light AAA-several Shturmoviks received more than 200 hits, but none failed to return to base—they caused enough destruction and confusion to delay the German offensive on this sensitive sector for twenty-four hours, thus enabling the Soviet ground forces to rein­force their positions. 430 ShAP’s first combat mission was a total success.10

Other Soviet air units suffered worse. Raiding the airfield at Bobruysk on the same day, 4 ShAP lost two pilots, including the commander of 3 Eskadrilya, Kapitan Nikolay Satalkin. Nevertheless, 4 ShAP claimed a major success, and this won the unit commander, Mayor Semyon Getman, the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

But the results of the aerial combats were never one­sided. On this July 5, both fighters of the alert Rottc of 6./JG 51 were shot down while pursuing Soviet bomb­ers. The airfield of JG 51 at Bobruysk became the target of a sudden strafing attack by a group of I-16s. “Go get them!” shouted the Staffelkapitan, Oberleutnant Walter Stengel. Fcldwcbcl Georg Seidel and his wingman, young

Gcfreiter Anton Hafner, took off immediately. As the two Bf 109s climbed above the burning airfield, they could see no trace of the intruding Ishaks. Instead, three DB-3 bombers appeared. The two German fighter pilots heard the voice of the Staffelkapitan in their headphones: “Stay close together and attack! You’ll pick all three!” Armin Relling, the biographer of then-up-and-coming top ace Anton “Toni” Hafner, wrote:

But they didn’t pick anything. The Soviet airmen also had learned a great deal.

The German fighters were met with a strong defensive fire. Feldwebel Seidel’s aircraft was hit in the oil tank and the entire windscreen was cov­ered with grease. Flying too low to be able to bail out, he jettisoned the canopy, and was sprayed with hot oil all over his face. With severe bums on his face, he managed to belly-land. Hafner was next in turn to receive the full brunt of the Soviet gunners’ attention. He saw a flash immediately in front of him, and for a moment he thought that an explosive grenade had exploded on his goggles. Then he saw the hole in the cabin glass.

Still he didn’t feel any pain, but he knew that the next hit would settle the fate of his machine. More instinctively than consciously, he glanced at his instruments and saw blood dripping from his glove.

He would have liked to retaliate, but a man must know his own limits. He radioed the ground control and requested the airfield to be cleared for an emergency landing. He noticed that he hardly could speak. Suddenly, he felt the pains in his face.

Nevertheless, he managed to undertake a per­fect landing. His aircraft had barely stopped be­fore the ambulance with the doctor braked next to him.11

Several aces of both sides played a dominant role during the increased struggle for air superiority that raged over the battlefield in the Rogachev-Orsha-Smolensk tri­angle. On July 6 a flight of Soviet fighters under com­mand of Starshiy Leytenant Vladimir Shishov of 6 IAK intercepted a formation of eight Ju 88s. Shishov shot down one of them and forced the remaining seven bomb­ers to turn away. At this moment German fighters appeared. Shishov managed to down one Bf 109 but was

As the main concentration of the air war spread to the east, the 6 IAK of ; I the Moscow Air Defense, which mainly consisted of pilots with above- ; I average training, was drawn into purely tactical operations. On July ЗІ I and 4, Mladshiy Leytenant Petr Mazepin of 111AP scored 6 lAK’s first to : і kills, an He 111 and a Ju 88. The Ju 88 claimed by 233 lAP’s Starshiy ; I Leytenant Vladimir Shishov, above, on July 5 was 6 lAK’s fifth victoiy..| I During the following fourteen months, Shishov would score twelve mors 1 I kills in 215 combat sorties. At the end of 1942 he was named a Hero of li­the Soviet Union. (Photo: Seidl.)

then jumped by another Bf 109, which damaged his air – j I craft before the German was driven off by Shishov’s wingman. During another encounter on that day, ; Leytenant Konstantin Anokhin of 170 LAP/23 SAD 1 sacrified his life. Intercepting five German bombers in I the Orsha vicinity, Anokhin destroyed one, but in |j return his own Yak-1 was shot down in flames. The Soviet fighter pilot crashed bis aircraft into a German j tank formation near the small village of Zubovo. In Feb­ruary 1943 he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet 1 Union posthumously. After the war, a statue of Anokhin 1 I j was erected in Zubovo. On the German side, Leutnant | I Heinz Bar of 1V./JG 51 claimed two “Severskys”- probably ll-2s of 4 ShAP—on the same day.

One of the most successful Soviet fighter pilots of Я

the first years of the war, Ley tenant Vladimir (■Kamenshchikov of 126 LAP, drew his first blood during these air battles. Between June 22 and June 30, he par­ticipated in shooting down five enemy planes in the vicinity of Bialystok (one personal and four shared kills). On July 7 he destroyed a sixth, a Bf 109 possibly piloted by Leutnant Gronke of 2./JG 51, who was missing after Й low-level attack near Slobin.

к Oberstleutnant Werner Molders of JG 51 kept hunt­ing m the skies. Returning from a meeting with Hitler at I fe Fflhrer’s headquarters, Wolfsschanze, in East Prussia (where he had received the newly instituted highest German military award, the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords), Molders brought down three Soviet fighters on July 9 followed by two more on the tenth, and a further ten during the following five days.

On July 10 Generaloberst Heinz Gudcrian decided to disengage his Panzergruppe 2 from the battle at Orsha.

Tvm of the top fighter aces of the Luftwaffe: Werner Molders (I.) and Walter Oesau. Both served with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, in which Molders emerged as the highest scoring German fighter pilot with fourteen confirmed victories. Molders is known as the inventor of the Rotte – Schwarm fighter tactic, and he personally proved its validity by scoring 101 victories by July 1941. He later became very popular as Inspector of the Fighter Arm but soon came into violent conflict with the Nazi leadership. On November 22,1941 he was killed in a flight accident. (Photo: Galland.)

Instead, he mounted an attack across the Dnieper River to the south of Orsha. On that day, Leytenant Kamenshchikov of 126 1AP increased his score to eight (including four shared) by downing a Ju 88 of KG 3. Kamenshchikov would amass a total of twenty individual and seventeen shared victories by August 1942, but he was killed in combat later in the war. In the same engagement in which Kamenshchikov achieved his eighth kill, 126 LAP’ s Mladshiy Leytenant Stepan Ridnyy shot down a second Ju 88 with his 1-16. In Stab/KG 2, the Do 17 piloted by Leutnant Bruno Berger was shot down by Starshiy Leytenant Mikhail Chunusov from a second MiG-3-equippcd crack test-pilot regiment, 402 IAP. On July 11 IV./JG 51 ’s Leutnant Heinz Bar scored his forti­eth victory when he bagged two DB-3s near Bobruysk. Meanwhile, Mladshiy Leytenant Ridnyy destroyed an He 111, and on July 12, together with another pilot, downed two more Ju 88s, possibly from 5./KG 3, which lost three Ju 88s during attacks against Soviet lines of com­munication near Smolensk. Four weeks later, both Kamenshchikov and Ridnyy were made Heroes of the Soviet Union.

Also on July 12 Hauptmann Richard Leppla, the commander of I1I./JG 51, brought home the twelve-hun­dredth victory of Werner Molders’s Jagdgeschwader, of which more than 40 percent were credited against Soviet aircraft Guderian noted that wherever Molders’s fighters showed themselves, “the air was soon clear.” This was felt by three 1-16 pilots of 168 IAP who ran into four Bf-109s on July 12. Only one of these I-16s returned to base.

Between July 12 and 14 Guderian’s armored forces managed to break through the Soviet defense lines at the Dneiper River and surround the strong Red Army con­tingents at Orsha and Mogilev. To the south of Guderian’s main thrust, the Soviet Twenty-first Army launched a strong counterattack in the Bobruysk area, seized Rogachev and Zhlobin on July 13, and thus posed a seri­ous threat to Guderian’s lines of communication. The entire ground situation appeared utterly contradictory. On the one hand, large columns of defeated Red Army contingents were moving eastward, retreating from Guderian’s powerful offensive, but on the other hand, other Soviet motorized columns were moving westward to support the counteroffensive. The tactical units under command of Luftflotte 2 were launched in “roll­ing attacks” against both these streams. Ulf Balke, the

chronicler of KG 2, noted that each mission was inter­cepted by Soviet fighters at this time. On July 13 the Staffelkapitan of 7./JG 51, Oberleutnant Hermann Staiger, was shot down and seriously injured.

Having recovered from the wounds sustained by a DB-3 gunner over Bobruysk, 6./JG 51’s Gefreiter Anton Hafner spotted three 1-153s in the air over the front on July 13. Hafner immediately went after the biplanes. To his amazement, he saw the three enemy pilots dive to the ground and land on a field. With the engines in their aircraft still running, the Soviet airmen quickly jumped out of their Polikarpov planes and ran toward a nearby forest. It took Hafner two passes to set all three I-153s on fire. That evening, he made the following remark regarding the three Soviet pilots in his diary: “So now they had to walk home.”12

1I1./JG 27 scored thirty-six kills between July 12 and July 14. On the latter date, Luftflotte 2 put up 885 sor­ties, mainly against enemy troop columns. Oberstleutnant Werner Molders once again triumphed, this time by violently sending three of the new Pe-2 bombers to the
ground. On this day also, Unteroffizier Hans Fahrenberger of 8./JG 27 was shot down behind the enemy lines. Fahrenberger was lucky to evade capture, and after a few days managed to return to his unit. Shot down in the same area on July 15, the Stuka ace in 8./StG I, Oberfeldwebel Wilhelm Joswig, had a similar experience, Joswig was captured by Soviet troops but was liberated by German soldiers six days later.

The fate of Joswig was overshadowed by a remark­able feat on the same day, when Oberstleutnant Werner Molders became the first fighter pilot ever to surpass the hundred-victory mark. In his enthusiasm over this achieve­ment, Hitler instituted yet a new top military award, the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. Molders became the first holder of this extravagant dis­tinction. Afraid of losing such a pearl from the Nazi pro­paganda machine, Hitler removed Molders from front­line service and appointed him the first Inspector of the Fighter Arm. Ironically, this young favorite of Adolf Hitler would turn away from the Nazi regime in disgust within three months.

On July 16, Luftflotte 2 carried out 615 sorties against the Soviet Twenty-first Army in the Bobruysk area, reporting the I destruction of 14 tanks, 514 trucks, 2 [ antiaircraft guns, and 9 artillery pieces, к Luftwaffe losses included the commander в‘of 6./JG 51, Oberleutnant Hans Kolbow, who was killed as he attempted to bail out from his damaged Bf 109 only sixty feet above the ground. On that same day the Soviets were forced to abandon I Smolensk.

I On July 17, Panzergruppe 2 reached і Yelnya, fifty miles southeast of Smolensk.

With this, another twenty Soviet divisions [ were surrounded in the Smolensk area.

In his enthusiasm over these victories, і Hitler awarded the commanders of I Panzergruppen 2 and 3, Guderian and Hoth, respectively, and the commander of Fliegerkorps VIII, General von

Richthofen, with the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross. |: As an acknowledgment of the vital role played by

ihe close-support units of Luftflotte 2, the commanders I ofStG 2, Oberstleutnant Oskar Dinort, and SKG 210,

Major Walter Storp, were awarded with the Oak Leaves on July 14, 1941. Known as “Uncle Oskar,” forty-year – old Dinort was one of the most popular Luftwaffe unit commanders at this time. He became the first dive-bomber airman to be awarded the Oak Leaves.

The Soviet situation was growing increasingly desperate. At this point the terrible losses placed the Red Army in the central combat zone in qualitative as well ".s numerical inferiority. General – feldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center enjoyed a superiority of five to one in tanks and almost two to one in artillery, and Luftflotte 2 could muster twice as many serviceable aircraft as its Soviet opponents in this sector.

Despair spread among the Red Army soldiers and airmen. The shrinking num­ber of Soviet aircraft operated under most difficult conditions, taking off from bat­tered airfields littered with wrecks of planes destroyed in Luftwaffe raids.

On July 20 the WS-Western Front was down to 389 aircraft—103 fighters and 286 bombers. The combat figures for 410 BAP/OSNAZ are quite revealing: Having arrived at the Western Front with thirty-eight new Pe-2 bombers on July 5,

this unit carried out 235 sorties and lost 33 planes (22 to German fighters) in only three weeks’ time. 4 ShAP, the first 11-2-equipped unit, was reduced to ten aircraft and eighteen pilots—down from sixty-five on hand two weeks previously. Until the end of July, 4 ShAP counted fifty – five aircraft lost on combat missions, with two other planes receiving severe battle damage.11

After the first month of the war, the Luftwaffe reported the destruction of 7,564 Soviet aircraft It is difficult to verify this figure. Loss statistics generally should be handled with great care, particulary concerning the Eastern Front, where documents frequently were lost by both sides during chaotic retreats. VVS loss statistics show a lower figure. But by comparing official loss figures with the decrease in the number of aircraft on hand (includ­ing replacements), a large gap between VVS loss figures and the actual decrease in the number of combat aircraft is obvious. This “unaccounted decrease" figure for the period June 22-July 31 amounts to 5,240 combat air­craft. For instance, the officially registered loss figure for 64 LAD on June 22 was five aircraft destroyed in combat plus three or four in accidents. But of 239 aircraft (175 1-16s and 1-153s, 64 MiG-3s) on hand on June 21, fewer than 100 remained on June 23.

In fact, the total number of first-line aircraft in the VVS dropped from nearly 10,000 on June 22 to 2,516 (of which fewer than 1,900 remained serviceable) in mid – July—a decrease of about 7,500.

Desperate to save the situation, on July 16 the Stavka reestablished the old dual-command system-politically appointed commissars supervising the military command­ers at every level of command. This move was extremely counterproductive. What the Soviets needed was more individual initative at the front, not an increased fear of reprisals.

The price paid by the invaders had also been consid­erable. During the two weeks between July 6 and July 19, the opening of the Battle of Smolensk, 477 Luftwaffe aircraft were destroyed or damaged on the Eastern Front After the first month of war with the USSR, total Luftwaffe losses on the Eastern Front amounted to 1,284 aircraft destroyed or damaged—nearly half the original force. By July 15 Oberstleutnant Werner Molders’s JG 51 had lost eighty-nine Bf 109s since the first day of the war on the Eastern Front. The number of serviceable German aircraft fell alarmingly. On July 22 Hauptmann Wolf-Dietrich Wilcke’s II1./JG 53 reported: “Frighten­ing lack of aircraft!"14

Unremitting Soviet counterattacks in the air and on the ground had delayed the schedule for the offensive, resulting in heavy losses on both sides. Nevertheless, the two dead-tired armies continued to rain hard blows on one another. On July 19, Hitler issued his Order No. 33, calling on the overextended Luftwaffe to begin conduct­ing terror raids against Moscow.

ollowing the annihilation of the Soviet Eighteenth Army north of the Sea of Azov during the first week of October, the Soviet Southern Front retained only weak forces to counter the offensive by the German First Panzer Army toward the city of Rostov, the gateway to the Caucasus. The Soviets attempted to build a new de­fense line along the Mius River, about fifty miles west of Rostov. Worsened weather conditions, which created enormous logistical problems for the Germans, and the diversion of Luftwaffe units to the Battle of the Crimea were what mainly saved the Soviet defenses in this sec­tor from a total breakdown.

The battle in the air above the road to Rostov was fought between the last poor remnants of the once – powerful Fliegerkorps V and VVS-Southern Front. Heavy attrition during a sustained campaign had worn down the units in Fliegerkorps V to an average of six to nine serviceable aircraft in each Gruppe. On top of this, short­ages of fuel and spare parts particularly affected the twin – engine bomber units, KG 54 and KG 55.

With most air force replacements bound for the Moscow sector, four months of accumulated losses had left VVS-Southern Front with no more than a mere 130 serviceable aircraft by mid-October. But at least the Sovi­ets were spared the supply problems of their adversaries, because their aviation regiments operated in the immedi­ate vicinity of some of their nation’s main supply bases. Hence the Soviet air commanders could launch every available plane in five, six, or even more sorties over the front lines each day. Through this permanent maximum effort, considerable pressure from the air was dealt to the German ground troops moving very slowly ahead in the deep mud.

Podpolkovnik Leonid Goncharov’s 131 IAP, rated

as a crack unit, was assigned to fend off the threat from the German Jagdgruppen in this area, I.(J)/LG 2 and 1I./JG 77. During the first three months of the war, 131 IAP had taken part in approximately five hundred aerial combats, during which sixty-three enemy aircraft were claimed.’ This regiment included several outstanding fighter pilots: The deputy commander, Kapitan Viktor Davidkov, counted six personal and two shared victories by September 1941; and Starshiy Politruk Moisey Tokarev claimed five Bf 109s and two Ju 88s shot down during only eight air combats before the end of 1941. Another highly rated pilot with this unit was Mladshiy Leytenant Dmitriy Nazarenko, a veteran of the Winter War.

On October 22, 1941, the l-16s of 131 IAP escorted a formation of SB bombers against a German airfield. While attempting to intercept the SBs, I.(J)/LG 2 lost two Bf 109 shot down—both falling prey to Mladshiy Leytenant Nazarenko. 131 IAP would file claims for twenty-one enemy aircraft destroyed in the air on Octo­ber 22, including four by Nazarenko. There are, how­ever, no according German loss reports that substantiate such high claims.

Confronted with the experts of Hauptmann Anton Mader’s 1I./JG 77, WS-Southern Front paid dearly for its “maximum effort.” Eleven Soviet aircraft were shot down by 1I./JG 77 on October 23. On October 27, Podpolkovnik Goncharov dispatched his last I-16s against
the German fighter base at Taganrog, on 1 the northern shore of the Sea of Azov, I but they only succeeded in putting one 1 Bf 109 out of commission,

Of seventy-nine serviceable fighters J available to VVS-Southern Front on 1 October 1, forty-three were registered as 1 “totally lost” by November l. s II./JG 77 I claimed thirty-seven victories for only one I loss in air combat between October 27 1 and 31. Podpolkovnik Goncharov was 1 killed in action on October 31, possibly 1 as the thirty-second victory credited to I Oberlcutnant Heinrich Setz of 4./JG 77. 1

Once it crossed the Mius River, the First Panzer Army 1 opened its final offensive against Rostov on November I 5. Luftwaffe raids enabled the Germans to break through j on the left flank. Next, the bombers of KG 54 and KG 1 55 were sent into action against both the retreating troops I of the Southern Front and the massive Soviet reinforce – 1 ments moving on the rail lines connecting Rostov with 1 the Caucasus. In the course of the latter attacks, the j bomber crews reported the destruction of 79 trains with 1 another 148 damaged by direct hits.9

Once again, it was “General Mud” who saved the ] Soviets. Already on November 6, new rain showers made j the roads impassable, and the attack came to a complete I standstill. A few days later, the temperature dropped 1 below the freezing point, creating severe difficulties in 1 starting the engines of tanks and aircraft in primitive I field conditions.

At this point the staff of Fliegerkorps V was shifted J from the Eastern Front to Brussels, with the intention I of organizing a mine-laying air corps to be used against ] Britain. All elements of KG 54 and KG 55 were also j pulled back.

The Soviets made use of the lull created by wore – j ened weather conditions to rebuild their battered forces. ] In mid-November VVS-Southern Front mustered 119 I bombers, 72 fighters, and 13 ground-attack aircraft, the j highest figures in three months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

l ктвуиипан армии. Bnaw 80 пражских самолетов сбкля часть. коГироі
IIНпдует инициатор соасорсвяоаания ял фронте В. А. Рудаков. На снимке
вря жег гаї ft самолет. еЛіггьіИ летчиками частя то», Рудакова

Фото М. РЫЖАКА (ТА00)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The VVS responded by renewing its aerial offensive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the dead.”20

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

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

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

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

During the hasty evacuation, one Ju 52 received a direct artillery hit and was completely burned out. Several others were damaged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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