Category Air War on the Eastern Front

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.

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 The Romanian Air Force suffered heavy losses, and most of its units were withdrawn from first-line ■ sen-ice after a couple of months.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although the largest air war in history was fought on the Eastern Front during World War II, this is one of the least known chapters of aviation history. The reason for this is clear: The prolonged Cold War succeeding the World War II created enormous barriers and frustrated all efforts by historians to develop a multisided picture of the true events during this war. The conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was as marked by ideological overtones as any civil war. Most participants were colored by the extreme propaganda of their own side. This has seriously affected the historical record. In the Soviet Union and in today’s Russia, the wartime tones from the Kremlin still prevail. In the Western world, the misconceptions and prejudices of the former Wehrmacht participants have created a correspondingly distorted pic­ture. When comparing Soviet/Russian literature with corresponding Western accounts, one wonders if they at all describe the same war.

The aim of this work is to present a balanced and objective description of the actual events during the course of this immense air w’ar. It is obvious that this is a diffi­cult task, and even if a large amount of research work- enhancing firsthand accounts and archiveal material from both sides—has been laid down by the authors, it is inevi­table that much still remains to be clarified.

Since the main topic of this work is confined to the field of aviation, relatively little attention is paid to the by far larger war on the ground. The authors only wish that the reader should keep in mind that the war between Germany and the USSR mainly was decided on the ground. This, however, should not obscure the fact, as we have mentioned, that the air war on the Eastern Front was larger than anything ever seen in aviation history.

To discuss the political reasons for the German inva­sion of the Soviet Union in 1941 would stretch beyond the aim of this work. To know the nature of the fierce

he main doctrine of both the German and the So­viet air forces in 1941 was offensive.

One of the main characteristics of the air war on the Eastern Front is that it was mainly of a tactical and operational nature. A strategic air war, in its full mean­ing, never took place. The strategic air raids undertaken were few and sporadic. Still, in the summer of 1941 each of the warring sides initiated brief attempts to open stra­tegic air raids as sketched in the theories of General Giulio Douhet. According to this Italian military theorist as early as 1920, the air force was the predominant branch of any large country’s armed forces. Douhet’s approach—a true forerunner of the 1991 Gulf War Allied doctrine – outlined a scenario in which a superior force of strategic bombers annihilated the war potential of the enemy and destroyed the will to resist among its population.

Due to the situation in which Germany went to war in 1939—desperately poor in its own natural strategic resources—Hitler had no other option but to go for a short but decisive war, aiming at a rapid seizure of natu­ral resources in enemy countries. Thus it followed that the main emphasis was put upon the creation of a tacti­cal bomber force. The empirical attempt to apply the theories of Douhet to the German standard medium bombers in the early years of the war met with various successes—but to the despair of the populations in cities such as Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry. Ger­many failed to achieve any rapid victory against its enemies, and its lack of a strategic bomber force became one of the main reasons for Germany’s defeat on the Eastern Front—and in the entire war.

The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had built up a

Volume I: Operation Barbarossa. 1941

relatively large strategic bomber force during the prewar years. In fact, in the thirties, the Soviet Union created the first large fleet of heavy bombers—more than eight hundred four-engine TB-3s—at a time when other nations had only very small numbers of heavy bombers. This force mainly relied on a doctrine similar to that of General Douhet’s. But in the beginning of the forties, the Soviet strategic air force was crippled by a low stan­dard of air-crew training, poor navigational devices, and hopelessly outdated aircraft. The results of the attempted “moral bombing” against civilian targets in the war against Finland in 1939-40 were all but disheartening. During the war with Germany, a combination of the long dis­tances to the main German cities and the needs at the front ensured that-with only a few exceptions—WS (Soviet Air Force) strategic operations were limited to nuisance raids.

The key to the success of the German Blitzkrieg in 1939-41 lay in the extensive use of air units in dose – support sorties. Called in by radio directly from the front­line commanders, dive-bombers or ground-attack aircraft would strike rapidly and hard against any encountered enemy stronghold. This method had been discovered and tested with success by German airmen in the Spanish Civil War. While close-support air units were in constant action over the front line, the task of the twin-engine tactical medium bombers was to destroy com­
munication lines, headquarters, and airfields in the enemy’s rear area.

According to the outlines of the Blitzkrieg, an inva­sion would open with all-out extensive air attacks against the enemy air force on the ground. The aim was to neu­tralize the enemy’s aviation, thus creating the precondi­tions for a successful ground offensive. Both at this and at the second, above described, stage of the Blitzkrieg air war, the twin-engine medium bombers were considered the backbone of the Luftwaffe.

Even if he had a career as a successful fighter pilot in World War I, the offensive-minded commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, emphasized the bombers, the dive-bombers, and-his per­sonal favorites—the Bf 110 Zerstorern (heavy fighters) to a greater extent than the single-engine fighters. The fighters of the Luftwaffe were put in a class by them­selves. Originally intended only for defensive purposes the fighters were somewhat superfluous to the predomi­nant Blitzkrieg doctrine; but Hermann Goring, chief of supply and procurement of the Luftwaffe Ernst Udct, and dozens of senior World War I-era fighter pilots influenced the young fighter pilots of the day with a romanticized von Richthofen mentality: "Find your enemy and shoot him down, nothing else matters” had been the classical maxim of the famous “Red Baron.” The ambitious fighter pilots of the new Luftwaffe embraced this doctrine, so that soon, to a йШН *ar8c extent> they were fighting a war of their own. What Baron Manfred von Richthofen cynically but correctly had described as “the art of manhunt” came to engage the entire Jagdwaffe (Hunting Arm). While fighter pilots of other air forces—not least the Soviet-fought a “real” war, striking at the enemy regard­less of if they found him in the air or on the ground, a whole generation of Ger­man fighter pilots was raised to seek an individualistic hunt of aerial victories, This is one important reason for the un­paralleled victory scores achieved by the top guns of the Jagdwaffe during World War II, and it fit well the task given to the single-engine fighters in the Blitzkrieg, to search and destroy any enemy aircraft encountered in the air. When the fight-

ers were not scrambled against enemy raids, this mission was normally fulfilled through fighter sweeps—so-called Freie Jagd (free hunting)—in groups normally consisting of not more than two to four planes over the combat area.

The manner in which aerial victories where more than one pilot participated were counted varied among different air forces. For instance, in the U. S. Army Air Forces of World War II, when two pilots shot down an enemy aircraft, each pilot was credited with half a vic­tory. Thus ten individual and two half victories were counted as eleven victories. In the Luftwaffe the entire victory was credited to just one of the participating pilots-most commonly the highest-ranking. Among Soviet airmen a distinction was always made between individual and shared (“group” or “collective”) victories.

The doctrine of the Soviet Air Force was similar to that of the Luftwaffe, although not as developed. Soviet military air doctrine was tactically offensive and strategi­cally defensive. The first aim of the VVS was to establish air superiority over the battlefield through bombing raids against the ground installations of the enemy air force.

Once air superiority had been achieved, the twin-engine medium bombers were assigned to the mission of sever­ing movement in the enemy’s rear area. There were almost no dive-bombers, as in the Luftwaffe, but increas­ing emphasis was laid on the creation of a ground – attack—Shturmovik—air force capable of providing the Red Army with excellent ground support. A large part of the VVS’s obsolescent 1-15bis and 1-153 biplane fight­ers had been adapted to this role, and the first specially designed Shturmovik, the famous 11-2, had just begun reaching combat units in 1941.

The Soviet strategic bomber fleet had not been appropriately modernized and was mainly comprised of twin-engine bombers. Still, a number of the huge TB-3s remained operative, and with them, the thought of a strategic bomber offensive remained during the opening phase of the war with Germany. Not least, the Winter War against Finland had demonstrated that Douhet’s theories still prevailed within the Soviet High Command.

As in the Luftwaffe, the task of the Soviet fighters was entirely defensive. While the “von Richthofen men­tality” nurtured individualistic aggressiveness among their

German counterparts, the Soviet fighter pilots of 1941 were largely defense-minded.

One main factor—particularly during the early stages of the war—that hampered effectiveness of all layers of the Soviet armed forces was the hierarchical command structure, or rather the fear of reprisals from the leader­ship, which curbed many individual initiatives. In 1941 most Soviet unit commanders feared Stalin more than they feared the enemy. The top leadership’s habit of issu­ing orders in the slightest matters, and of punishing unit commanders for issuing “unauthorized” orders in the slightest matters, paralyzed individual initiative at the local level. Although there was a doctrine for providing bombers with fighter escort, the absence of any explicit order from the High Command to assemble fighters for this task left the bomber units with the task of flying their missions without escort. This omission led to disas­trous losses in the VVS bomber units during the first weeks of the war.

Another difference between German and Soviet fighter pilots was the preparedness among the latter to carry out daring low-level attacks against ground targets. This was a lesson learned by the Soviets in the Winter War with Finland. The failure of the Soviet medium bombers during the first weeks of the war with Germany compelled the fighter pilots of the VVS to extend them­selves to undertake these operations.

raining was a field in which there were large differ­ences between the men of the two air forces. In 1941 all Luftwaffe airmen were carefully hand-picked vol­unteers. The basic training of the recruited Luftwaffe personnel was conducted at the Flugzeugfuhrerschulen (pilot training schools) of the Luftwaffe’s Fliegerausbildungsregiments (flight training regiments). Here, individuals suitable for pilot training were selected. Following basic training, the prospective pilots were trained at the A, B, and C pilot training schools. Each letter—A, B, and C—corresponded to different aircraft classes. The different classes were in turn divided into Al, A2, Bl, B2, Cl, and C2.

The Luftwaffe flight training opened with the A level and extended over Bl and B2 to Cl and C2. All levels included successively detailed training in aerobatics. At the A and В flight training schools, the would-be pilot received intense theoretical training followed by training on how to fly aircraft in various ways and in various situations. The conditions for the A2 flight certificate included a basic training of sixty training flights with a total of fifteen flight hours, including long-distance cross­country flights, formation flying, dead-stick landings, and four landings on open ground away from an airfield.

To receive his Luftwaffe wings, the pilot candidate then went on to the В and C courses. The В courses included high-altitude flights, precision landings, cross­country flights, instrument flights, night landings, and training to handle the aircraft in dangerous situations.

Having completed the В schools, the half-trained pilot was posted either to the weapons school or to a C school, depending on his goals and abilities. At the

special field-bomber, dive-bomber, Zerstorer, fighter, reconnaissance, or transport aviation—with thorough gun­nery and bombing training. The C student was then trained in handling multi-engine aircraft types. With pro­ficiency in navigational and instrument flying taught here, the basis for blind-flying training was created. For a bomber, reconnaissance, or transport pilot, blind-flying school was the last step before he received his Luftwaffe wings. As he finally arrived at a combat unit, the fresh Luftwaffe bomber pilot usually had 250 flight hours.

A graduate from a complete A-through-C military pilot training course normally was transferred to an Erganzungsgruppe (replacement group) of a combat wing. Here the new pilots received combat training under supervision of experienced pilots prior to being posted to a combat group. In 1941, Luftwaffe airmen were doubt­less among the best educated fliers of the world.

The training of a Soviet combat pilot in the early forties was inferior in most aspects to the German train­ing and had deteriorated considerably during the thir­ties. The German system of picking volunteers had no Soviet counterpart in 1941. Instead, large numbers of draftees were simply sent to military’ flight training schools.

The first Soviet air academy, the Zhukovskiy Acad­emy, was founded in 1922. In the late twenties and thirties, aviation was very popular in the Soviet Union. A key role was played by the Communist Friends of Aviation association, which in 1927 merged with similar associations for the promotion of volunteer defense work into the Osoaviakhim Society. The first commander of Osoaviakhim, General Robert Eideman, a hero from the Russian Civil War, managed to raise public military interest to a point where Osoaviakhim reached fourteen million members in 1934. Under Eideman’s supervision, aviation clubs mushroomed all over the country. A severe setback to the continued progress of Osoaviakhim was the purge and execution of Eideman, who was accused of “Trotskyism,” in 1937.

During the early years, the Osoaviakhim aviation clubs ensured that there were more than enough volunteers competing for military flight training schools. However, the system of “special recruitment” played an increas­ingly sinister role. Party or Komsomol (Communist Youth Organisation) branches received instructions from above to send certain percentage of their members to military flight training schools. These political branches picked

through “special recruitments” became good pilots; but; there were several who never should have been assigned to aviation.

Between 1927 and 1938 the flight training schools; trained pilot candidates for two and a half years. In 1938,’ the third Soviet Five-Year Plan called for shorter pilot training. In February’ 1941, a new system of yet again shortened pilot training in the USSR was establish® For prospective “ordinary” pilots there were primary flight training schools (Aviatsionnaya Shkola Pervonachal’nogc Obucheniya), with a four-month course in peacetimeand three months in wartime, followed by military flight train­ing schtxtls with a ten-month peacetime course and six months in wartime. Prospective aviation unit command ers received more training at secondary flight training schools (Voyennoye Aviatsionnoyc Uchilishche)-atwo year course in peacetime and one year in wartime. On top of this, there was an insufficient number of expert enccd (light instructors due to the rapid growth of the flight training program. In 1939, there were thirty™ pilot and pilot-technician schools in the Soviet Union. It mid-1941 there were 111 different schools preparing aviation personnel, including 3 Air Force academies,; military secondary flight training schools, 29 primary flight training schools, 21 fighter pilot schools, and 22 bomba pilot schools.

The pilot training mainly consisted of elementary takeoffs and landings. Thus fresh pilots earned the nick’ name “Takeoff-Landing” from combat pilots. It was not uncommon for fresh combat pilots to arrive at combat units with only eight to ten individual flight hours, often not even on the aircraft they were intended to fly in combat. There was practically no training in night flying, blind fly ing, or even in complicated meteorological con ditions sucli as fog. There was nothing correspondingt< the Luftwaffe В course training to handle the aircraft in dangerous situations. In fact, the “corkscrew” (vertical spin) was removed from the fighter training course, since it was regarded as too dangerous! The gunnery training was limited to simplified techniques, Most graduatesfroti the military flight training schools, in fact, had not learned how to aim and shoot accurately in the air. A completed Soviet flight training course in 1941 was perhaps roughly comparable to the Luftwaffe A 2 or B1 flight certificates

On top of all this came the disparity in the standards of the combat aircraft entrusted to the fliers of both sides;

he German standard single-seat, single-engine mono­plane fighter, Professor Willy Messerschmitt’s immor tal Bf 109, probably had better combat performance than any other aircraft—with the famous British Spitfire as the only exception—in service in early 194.. Designated “Bf’-from Bayerische Flugzeugwerke even after the com­pany became Messerschmitt AG—the 109 gave the Ger­man fighter pilots an enormous advantage in combat. In June 1941 most Luftwaffe fighter units had converted to the latest version, the Bf 109F, equipped with a 1,300- horsepower Daimler-Benz engine that gave a top speed of about 390 miles per hour at 22,000 feet. The earlier model, the Bf 109E, had a slightly weaker engine and was about 30 miles per hour slower. On the other hand, the E model featured two wing-mounted two 20mm automatic cannon in addition to two 7.92mm machine guns mounted over the engine nacelle. The Bf 109F was intended for precision shooting, with only one nose – mounted 15mm or 20mm automatic cannon together with the two 7.92mm machine guns. Both versions were vasdy superior to almost all that the Soviets could launch into the air in 1941.

The only deficiency of the Bf 109 was its short flight range, normally not more than slightly over 400 miles. This was due to the fact that it originally had been constructed as a local defensive interceptor. The twin – engine Bf 110 Zerstorer, intended for an offensive fighter role, had proved to be a failure during the Battle of Brit­ain. Although heavily armed with two 20mm automatic cannon and four 7.92mm machine guns in the nose, plus a 7.92mm aft machine gun—the Bf 110’s wide turn­ing radius and slow acceleration had turned it into an

easy prey for the RAF fighters. Nevertheless, on the East­ern Front the Bf 110’s top speed of 340 miles per hour and its ability to sustain battle damage gave it a com­pletely new chance.

Regarding bombers—the backbone of the Luftwaffe at this time—the Germans relied entirely on three twin – engine tactical medium bombers: the Heinkel He 111, the Junkers Ju 88, and the Domier Do 17. The former two were the most common, with the Ju 88 as the most modem. The He 111, a heavily armored “workhorse” armed with five machine guns and two automatic can­non, was able to carry about a 4,000- pound bomb load 800 miles. Entering service in 1939, the Ju 88 had been designed in response to the “high-speed bomber” concept of the late 1930s. This concept, aimed at producing bombers able to outrun enemy fighter interceptors, was hastily abandoned with the entrance of fast monoplane fighters of the Bf 109 and British Hurricane generation.

Neverthless, against obsolescent Soviet fighters on the Eastern Front, the high­speed bomber concept proved to work during 1941. With a maximum speed of 286 miles per hour, the Ju 88 was one of the fastest bombers in service at that time.

Armed with three 7.92mm machine guns and able to carry a bomb load of about 4,000 pounds, it was a most versatile air­craft, capable of carrying out roles as level bomber, dive-bomber, and reconnaissance aircraft. The Do 17Z, the least modern of the three German bomber types, also was a product of the high-speed bomber concept. The Do 17’s relatively small bomb load of 2,200 pounds and the vul­nerability’ of the airplane to hostile fire was to compel the Luftwaffe to withdraw this type from front-line service in 1942.

One of the most famous—not least among the enemy ground troops—Ger­man combat aircraft at this time was the feared Stuka, the single-engine Ju 87 dive- bomber. Although slow at a top speed of about 230 miles per hour and only lightly armed-and thus an easy victim to fighter
interception—the Ju 87 was able to deliver more than 1,000 pounds of bombs with frightening precision. The screaming sound from a formation of siren-equipped div­ing Stukas was enough to make an entire enemy unit take cover during the early years of the war.

In general, the Soviet Air Force material was of low technical quality at the onset of the war. The main Soviet fighter aircraft in 1941, the single-engine Polikarpov 1-16 monoplane—called lshak (Jackass) by the Soviet pilots and Rata (Rat) by the Germans, who had adopted this from their allies in the Spanish Civil War—was out-

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classed by the Bf 109 fighter in most aspects. At 9,800 feet flight altitude—where most air combats took place on the Eastern Front—the 1-16 was more than 60 miles per hour slower than the Bf 109F (around 280 miles per hour compared to 346 miles per hour). According to German fighter pilots’ reports, the 1-16 ‘‘easily caught fire if struck from above or from the sides.” Neverthe­less, the Ishak held two important advantages over the Bf 109. First, the Ishak was highly maneuverable. The German fighter ace Hans-Ekkehard Bob describes it as a “flying phenomenon” as the 1-16 Mark 5 could perform a full turn in 14 to 15 seconds. Second, the I-16’s radial engine was air-cooled. Since the Bf 109’s inline engine was liquid-cooled, a few hits in the radiator was enough to send a Messerschmitt trailing coolant down to the ground. According to the Soviet fighter ace Arkadiy Kovachevich, this was one of the main reasons why the 1-16 pilots preferred to enter combat with the Bf 109s head-on.

Frequently, Bf 109s hit in the radiator force-landed and were only slightly damaged, causing them not to be recorded in the German loss lists. This could help explain the large gap between Soviet victory claims and Luftwaffe loss data. (Several Bf 109s of the F-2 type were equipped with an emergency valve that enabled the pilot to close down the damaged radiator and return safely to base on the second radiator.)

The armament of the 1-16 differed among two 7.62mm machine guns in the Mark 5, four 7.62mm machine guns in Marks 10, 18, and 24, and two 20mm automatic cannon and two 7.62mm machine guns in Marks 17, 27, and 28.

In battles at Khalkhin Gol—in the Soviet Far East—in 1939 the second Polikarpov single-engine fighter, the 1-153 Chayka (Gull) biplane, had been a large success during the air combat with Japanese monoplane fighters with nonretractable landing gear. This definitely was one of the finest biplane fighters ever produced. The retract­able landing gear gave the 1-153 an unusually high top speed for a biplane—almost on the same level as the 1-16. It was even more maneuverable than the 1-16, but its weak armament—four 7.62mm machine guns—proved to be inadequate against armored enemy aircraft such as the He 111. On top of this, the weak structure of the 1-153 rendered it quite vulnerable to hostile fire. In 1941 this aircraft was on its way out of service in the VVS.

The predecessor of the Chayka, the Polikarpov l-15bis biplane fighter, was a rather unsuccessful upgrade of the 1-15, one of the world’s best fighters in the early thirties. By 1941, the I-15bis had become a slow, vulnerable, and poorly armed “morsel” for the victory-hungry Bf 109 pilots. “A few rounds fired into the sides were often enough to set them on fire,” reported the German pilots.1

As the Germans launched their attack, the Soviet Air Force was in the midst of a sweeping modernization program. The first aircraft of the new generation to arrive in large numbers to the front-line units was the Mikoyan-Gurevich mono­plane fighter, the MiG-3. Still, this new fighter was inferior to the Bf 109. The MiG-3 was heavier and had a slightly weaker armament—two 7.62mm and one 12.7mm machine gun, all mounted over the engine nacelle—than the German fighter. It also proved to be less maneuverable than the Bf 109, particularly at the lower altitudes. Intended as a high-altitude interceptor, the MiG – 3 was extremely fast at these levels, reaching al­most 400 miles per hour at 25,000 feet. But at lower altitudes, where most air combat on the Eastern Front were fought, it proved to be slow and heavy. German fighter pilots reported that the MiG-3’s “easily caught fire if hit from any direction.”2

Although part of the “new generation” of

fighters in 1941, most serial manufactured examples of the single-engine monoplane fighter Lavochkin-Gorbunov – Gudkov LaGG-3 were inferior even to the 1-16 in many aspects. The LaGG-3 was outclimbed, outmaneuvered— taking 30 seconds to perform a full turn!—and outgunned by the Bf 109. "While sturdy, the Soviet fighter demon­strated a unique and devastating blend of sluggishness and poor maneuverability.”5 The LaGG-3 proved to have a tendency to flip over into a spin if put into a tight turn. To a large extent the deficiencies of this plane derived from bad manufacturing qualities. Although the LaGG – 3 was designated with a top speed of 360 miles per hour, several examples that reached combat units were not able to exceed 315 miles per hour.

“The LaGG-3 suffered from serious shortcomings and vices, few of which were ever to be entirely eradicated, and the units supplied with the new fighters had prob­lems with learning how to operate it. The LaGG-3 gained a reputation for being a “widow maker” after high attri­tion during the initial conversion phase. It was found to be overweight and underpowered and difficult to fly,
there were frequent undercarriage failures, the gun« operating mechanism was unreliable, etc.”4 The Sovietfl fighter pilots’ gallows humor soon reinterpreted theLaGGM abbreviation as Lakirovannyy Garantirovaimyy GW), the И “Varnished Guaranteed Coffin.”

Nevertheless, production of the LaGG-3 tontinuedB until 1944, and it remained in front-line service until the |B.{ end of the war. A total of 6,528 LaGG-3s were built. As ■ I better Soviet fighters were introduced later in the war, Я the LaGG-3 became the favorite target for many “push’ *:] ers” among the fighter aces in the Luftwaffe,

By far the best Soviet fighter of 1941 was AleksandiT Yakovlev’s beautiful Yak-1 single-engine, single-seat! fighter. This was something completely different from 1 the Polikarpov, the LaGG, and the Mikovan-GureviaH fighters on hand at that time. Although the MiG-3 w faster at higher flight levels, both aircraft were equally I fast at lower altitudes. The Yak-1 had better maneuver ability than both the MiG-3 and the LaGG-3; on average, the Yak-1 could complete a full turn in 19 or 20 sec­onds, compared with the 23 seconds that it took the

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MiG-3. The nose armament of the Yak—one 20mm ShVAK-was far superior to the 12.7mm of the MiG-3. Just as with the Bf 109, the nose gun of the Yak-1 was supplemented with two machine guns (7.62mm) mounted over the engine nacelle. But the main advan­tage of the Yak was that it was much easier to handle. The disadvantage of both the MiG-3 and the LaGG-3 was that these aircraft had a tendency to go into a spin during tight maneuvers. This did not apply to the Yak-1. The similarities between the Bf 109F and the Yak-1 are striking. Both aircraft were very nearly equal in speed, maneuverability, and armament. The Germans reported that the Yak-1 was “more difficult to set on fire in attack from the rear than the MiG-3.1,5 Unfortunately for the Soviets, only a very small number of *Yak-ls were on hand at the outbreak of the war.

The Soviet medium bombers, mainly twin-engine DB-3s and SBs, were roughly comparable to the German Do 17 in speed and armament. Sergey Ilyushin’s DB-3, with a modern all-metal design would remain in front­line service throughout the war. With a maxiumum bomb load of 2,200 pounds on long-distance flights and 5,500 pounds of bombs over short distances, the DB-3 can be compared to early models of the He 111.

Andrey Tupolev’s “high-speed” SB bomber (incor­rectly referred to as “SB-2” in most Western publications) largely proved to be a failure. The normal bomb load of the SB—1,320 pounds—was not much more than that of the single-engine German Ju 87. Constructed to be as light as possible to improve speeds, the SB’s lack of armor and its light defensive armament gave it little chance when attacked by Bf 109s. While the fuel tanks of the DB-3 were encapsulated with rubber, the SB’s unprotected drop-feed aluminum fuel tanks over the engines were easily ignited by gunfire, thus causing the engines to burn. The German fighter pilots—and not least the Soviet bomber crews—soon learned that the SB was “highly flammable.”

Only with the appearance of the Petlaykov Pe-2, which had started to reach the combat units only in 1941, did the Soviets posess a twin-engine dive-bomber compa­rable to the German planes. With a top speed approach­ing the performances of the Bf 109F, the Pe-2 was the first true “high-speed bomber.” Yet the limited bomb load of 1,300 pounds remained a weak spot.

[ Sergey Ilyushin’s 11-2 was the unchallenged triumph of Soviet aviation industry during World War II. Enter­ing service in small numbers shortly before the German invasion, it probably was the most modern and suitable ground-attack aircraft in the world at the time. It was very heavily armored, and thus became known among the German fighter pilots as “the cement bomber.” The 11-2’s entire fuselage was protected with 4mm-to-13mm – thick steel plating and 5mm-thick duraluminum, capable of withstanding any hostile fire except heavy antiaircraft artillery. Despite its typically poor Soviet payload—a mere 880 pounds of bombs and eight rockets—the 11-2 soon earned the nickname Schwarzer Tod (Black Death) among the German ground troops. The Soviet airmen, who loved this fighting machine, nicknamed it Ilyusha or Gorbatyy (Hunchback, derived from the “humped” cockpit canopy on the slim fuselage). But to the world the 11-2 became known simply as Shturmovik, which in reality is the Russian word for “ground-attack airplane."

Regarding tactics, the Luftwaffe also was ahead of the Soviets. Adopted after the performance of the famous fighter pilot Werner Molders in the Spanish Civil War, the German fighters operated aggressively in loose two – and four-aircraft formations. This famous Rotte and Schwarm tactical formation would revolutionarize the fighter tactics of the world’s air forces within a few years. Abandoning the previous tight three-plane V formation, this new formation was perfectly adapted to the fast Bf 109 fighter, enabling the pilots to utilize the speed advantage in a flexible manner. Just as their British coun­terparts in 1940, the Soviet fighter pilots were trained to operate in tight V formations throughout 1941. This added a tactical advantage to the superior performance of the German fighters.

The most common German fighter attack tactic was a snap bounce from above, followed by a rapid climb to a superior altitude, utilizing the high-speed climb advan­tage of the Bf 109. This would be repeated over and over again during the same engagement. Only rarely did Bf 109 pilots enter turning combat with Soviet fighters.

Under attack from enemy fighters, the Soviet fighter pilots often formed the same Lufbery defensive circle (Oboronitel’nyy krug) as the RAF pilots encountering Bf 109s over the Western Desert or the Bf 110s during the Battle of Britain. The Lufbery was a rather sound defensive measure, but it rendered the entire mission of the fighters useless. The most courageous Soviet fighter pilots would turn nose-to-nose against attacking enemy planes, often attempting to ram them.

While the German bombers usually flew in one or several tight three-plane V formations, maximizing the defensive firepower of the gunners both through the formation and via air-to-air radio calls, the Soviet bomb­ers were compelled to operate in wedge and line configu­rations typically consisting of three to twelve aircraft— sometimes far above that figure—echeloned in altitude. This reduced the effect of the defensive firepower against intercepting fighters, but it was an imperative measure due to the need to maintain visual contact with the unit leader, because air-to-air radios—standard equipment in all German aircraft types—was something of a luxury to Soviet airmen. Only the unit commander’s aircraft was equipped with radios, but these radios were very unreli­able. Thus cooperation in the air’was difficult, and on several occasions this enabled German fighters to sneak behind a Soviet formation and shoot down one plane after another, the last victim caught by the same surprise as the first one.

The Soviet fighter ace Aleksandr Pokryshkin wrote: “Another deficiency was that our planes still lacked radio equipment. And the transmitters and receivers installed in the aircraft flown by some unit command* took up a great deal of space, were difficult to handle, and very unreliable. We could communicate only by rock-j ing the wings of our planes. In order to maintainj contact, we were forced to keep so tight together that we lost maneuverability.”6

At least in one field of high technology—radar-bodil sides were equal. Although the Germans made use of radar against British strategic bombers at this time, ground radar stations were only rarely used on the Eastern Front, | On the other side of the hill, Soviet technicians had ere-1 ated two different types of radar equipment to comple-1 ment one another, the RUS-1 and RUS-2 models. Nev-i ertheless, these were only deployed for the air defenses j of Moscow and Leningrad. Air surveillance on both sides on the Eastern Front mainly depended on air surveil-i lance posts and visual sightings at the front.

he fact that a numerically weaker Luftwaffe dealt its Soviet counterpart devastating blows during 1941- 42 is well known. These German successes have been widely described in the West in postwar aviation litera­ture, mainly based on information obtained from Ger­man sources. Although not openly stated, the generally meager attempts to explain these immense victories are almost w’ithout exception influenced by wartime Nazi propaganda. Some Western writers even assume that the “Soviet people” were inferior to the Germans. Hence American aviation historians Raymond F. Toliver and Trevor J. Constable state unhesitatingly that the Germans were “psychologically superior” to the Soviets.1 Several captured German airmen who had the privilege of visiting a Soviet air base described how surprised they were to find that “the Russian airmen were exactly like us.”

On the other hand, the old “Stalinist literature” pro­vides only a distorted picture, and the 1941 disaster is attributed to “incompetence” (without giving any rea­son) and even “treason” on the frontal command level, thus justifying the purging measures taken against the Red Army in the 1930s. Even if Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s brief “de-Stalinization” period removed the worst of these excesses, a lot still remains in Soviet historical literature. In fact, the Soviet Union’s and its air force’s defeat of the German forces was not due to Josef Stalin. On the contrary, victory was achieved despite Josef Stalin.

In the political campaign against the organizer of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, Arkadiy Rosengoltz, one of the first commanders of the Soviet Air Force, had been removed from his command as early as 1924.

Nevertheless, under the supervision of the commander in chief Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskiy, the Red Army and particularly its military’ aviation arm rose to a top level in the world during the early thirties. By 1935 the Soviet Union had the largest and most modem bomber force in the world. Meanwhile, the Soviet aviation industry created some of the best fighter planes in the world—the 1-15 and the 1-16. A few years later, the qual­ity of the Red Army had fallen far below Western stan­dards, despite several war experiences between 1936 and 1939 that could have improved the tactics and qualities further. The dominant reason for this downfall is the Stalinist purging measures in the late thirties.

A total of 772 Soviet airmen took part on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. Several of the most successful Soviet pilots in the first years of the war with Germany had drawn their first blood in the skies over Spain. The most successful, Polkovnik Vladimir Bobrov, claimed thirteen individual and four shared victories in Spain and went on to claim a further thirty individual and twenty shared victories in the war with Germany. Mayor Mikhail Fedoseyev, who was one of the top-scoring fighter aces in the VVS when he was killed in combat in the spring of 1942, had achieved seven victories in Spain.

During the Spanish Civil War the Soviet pilots discovered the advantages of the German Schwann (finger-four) fighter formation and the value of the enemy’s radio-controlled ground-attack sorties. Back in the Soviet Union, the High Command completely disregarded this valuable experience.

The purges of the Red Army opened with the sudden arrest of Marshal Tukhachevskiy in May 1937. An atmo­sphere of distrust, particularly against “new thinkers,” rapidly unfolded. The “dual-command” system, characterized by political commissars supervising all unit commanders, was implemented in 1937. This prevented pilots from using their initiative at field level. A large number of Soviet airmen who had served in Spain fell victim to the wave of political repres­sions.

The Soviet fighter ace Polkovnik Yevgeniy Stepanov gives the following account: “In 1939 and 1940, a number of Soviet pilots who had fought in Spain were framed and arrested, usu­ally without being charged formally and without any kind of investigation—Feliks Arzhenukhin, [Yevgeniy] Ptukhin, [Petr] Pumpur, Emil Shakht, Pavel Proskurin, and others. Most of these were executed by firing squad. Yakov Smushkevich, who had been awarded the Gold Star as a Hero of the Soviet Union on June 21, 1937, and a second Gold Star on November 17, 1939, rose to deputy commander of the Air Force, only to be arrested for treason shortly afterward. He spent almost two years in an NKVD (Narodnyy Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or Secret Police) prison. As the invading Germans ap­proached Moscow in October 1941, he was executed on the assumption that he might be freed by the Germans. Pavel Rychagov, a fifteen-victory ace of the Spanish con­flict, delivered a critical speech on the state of the air force at the end of December 1940. He was arrested early the next year and eventually executed.”2

Between 1937 and 1939, repressive actions were car­ried out against 5,616 Soviet airmen.3

Technical innovations also suffered tremendously from the Stalin regime’s paranoia. Hundreds of aviation designers, engineers, and specialists were imprisoned between 1934 and 1941. Many were executed and

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others perished in labor camps. Historian Alexander Boyd states: “Georgi Ozerov, a member of KOSOS [Experi­mental Aircraft Design Section] and later of Tupolev’s [aircraft designer A. N. Tupolev’s] internee design bureau, has estimated that four hundred and fifty air­craft designers, engineers, and specialists were interned between 1934 and 1941, of which some three hundred were later set to work in NKVD-supervised design bureaux, about a hundred died in GULAG labour camps, and no less than fifty were executed."4

In the midst of the war in Spain, the USSR sent a ^“Volunteer Air Brigade” consisting of 700 pilots and aviation technicians to aid China in its defense against the Japanese invasion between October 1937 and November 1939. Kapitan Petr Kozachenko, who would fight the Luftwaffe and other Axis air forces in the air over the Ukraine in 1941, claimed to have shot down eleven Japanese aircraft over China. Test pilots Podpolkovnik Stepan Suprun and Mayor Konstantin Kokkinaki, who were among other Soviet pilots who would earn reputations during the first months of the war with Germany, learned much from their air combat with the Imperial Japanese Army air force over China. Soviet DB-3 bombers were particularly successful in raids against Japanese air bases. During two raids against airfields in the vicinity of Hankow in August and September 1939, a Japanese source admits, 140 aircraft were destroyed on the ground.

" In 1938 and 1939 the USSR was drawn into two other separate conflicts with Japan. In the summer of 1938, a limited border conflict evolved at Lake Khasan on the border between the Soviet Union and Japanese-held Korea.

Here the Soviets were in complete con­trol of the air. And here, for the first time, Soviet bombers operated in large formations.

p In May 1939 Japan invaded Mongolia in the Khalkhin-Gol River area. The Soviet Union immediately in­tervened to defend Mongolia. Known as the Battle of Khalkhin-Gol, this prob­ably was the first time in history that both sides tried to win the ground battle
by achieving supremacy in the air. Between May and September 1939 when the Japanese withdrew, Soviet avia­tion carried out more than 20,000 combat sorties over Khalkhin-Gol. Losses were high on both sides.

The success achieved by the Red Army during these conflicts compelled Tokyo to refrain from an attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, thus saving the USSR from a complete disaster. On the other hand, the Soviet leader­ship attempted to apply the tactical experience gained against Japan to European conditions in 1940 and 1941— with devastating results to the Soviets.

The losses suffered by the Soviet Air Force at the hands of the small Finnish Air Force during the Winter War in 1939-40 served as a warning. According to Soviet sources, 261 Soviet aircraft were lost5—against no more than sixty to seventy Finnish aircraft admitted destroyed. This was the price for the crippling political purges against the entire Red Army. Highly professional senior commanders and officers had been rooted out and replaced with inexperienced second-raters. Historian Von Hardesty’s judgment regarding Stalin’s effect on the Soviet Air Force is harsh: “If the VVS had entered the
decade of the thirties as one of the premier air forces of the world, it found itself in a position of obsolescence by 1940.”6 In his characteristic fashion, Stalin next made a new 180-degree turn. He abolished the “dual command” system and ordered a rapid modernization and professionalization of the Red Army. But this came too late, and in June 1941 the Red Army still was a top – controlled, inflexible colossus with mainly obsolescent equipment and methods-and personnel largely inad­equately trained in technological fields.

t the outbreak of war between Germany and the USSR, the former had the most skillful, war-experi­enced airmen in the world, outfitted with some of the most modern equipment. The new German Wehrmacht, founded in a spirit of vengeance against the Versailles Treaty, was the piledriver of the most advanced military doctrines and tactics.

The fate of history’ had brought two “outcast states,” Germany and the USSR, together in the 1920s. In exchange for German high technology, the Soviet Union, poor and devastated after the Civil War, allowed Ger­many to secretly train military aviators at Lipetsk after Germany had been forbidden to have its own air force by the victorious Western powers after World War I. Between 1923 and 1933 Germany trained and devel­oped completely new military aviation tactics secretly at

Lipetsk. About 120 fighter pilots, the core of the new Luftwaffe, received their training at Lipetsk.

With Hitler’s rise to power and the eagerness of the Western states to forget the military restrictions of the Versailles Treaty in exchange for the strengthening of a reliable anti-Communist bulwark in the center of Europe, Hermann Goring’s new Luftwaffe was officially founded on February 26, 1935.

Within a few years, a modern air force with an offensive, tactical doctrine aimed at a short but decisive war, had been formed. The cream of the Luftwaffe was tested and refined while supporting Francisco Franco’s Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. The Con­dor Legion became synonymous with “Guernica,” the startling blow by modern German bombers against a defenseless Basque town. But the Condor Legion’s

significance was more than this; it was the cradle of mod­ern aerial warfare, for it was in Spain that the Blitzkrieg concept was evolved.

Having had to start from scratch, the young men of the Luftwaffe were not burdened with the conservative thinking that thwarts new ideas. Without a doubt, the Luftwaffe was the most dynamic air force in the world as Hitler commenced the world war in 1939.

The Blitzkrieg, and in particular the Battle of Brit­ain, brought not only bitter losses to the Luftwaffe but also hardened the airmen and improved their skills. By the end of the Battle of Britain, the famous fighter pilot Oberstleutnant Werner Molders had amassed a total of sixty-eight aerial victories, plus fourteen in Spain. Molders and a number of other young and extremely dangerous fighter aces, such as Hauptmann Walter Oesau, Hauptmann Herbert Ihlefeld, Oberleutnant Hans Philipp, Hauptmann Hermann-Friedrich Joppien, and Leutnant Heinz Bar had formed a core from which the new “hor­rible flying wolves” (in the words of Soviet aircraft designer Aleksandr Yakovlev) were developing.

On the other side of the hill, more than 91 percent of all commanders of larger VVS units had held their posts for fewer than six months on the eve of the Ger­man invasion.’ The stage was set for a massacre of the inexperienced Soviet airmen with their obsolete equip­ment. It was a matter of technology, experience and tac­tics—not “psychology.”

espite several early warnings of impending attack, most of the Soviet border defense was caught by total surprise as the German war machine went into action in the early hours of June 22, 1941. Eager to retain the power they had obtained, the autocratic lead­ers in the Kremlin had allied themselves with the anti- Communist Nazi dictator in Berlin. The Hitler-Stalin pact in August 1939 was the result of Josef Stalin’s readiness to sacrifice anything for tranquillity. His leadership was characterized by both brutality’ and wishful thinking. Stalin was fully aware of the fact that he had crippled both the revolutionary wing of the international working class and the Red Army, the two main factors that had saved the Communist government twenty years earlier. Never­theless, he simply refused to acknowledge the impend­ing war and disregarded the fact that the pact with Hitler enabled Germany to concentrate the bulk of its armed forces against the Western Allies. The Fiihrer naturally had never given up his dreams to conquer the Soviet Union, and once the fighting in the West had come to a standstill, he started preparations for invasion in the East, Operation Barbarossa.

On March 20, 1941, the Soviet intelligence services submitted a report that a German military attack against the USSR would take place between May 15 and June 15. This would also have happened, had Hitler not decided to divert his armies against the Balkans follow­ing the anti-German Yugoslav coup d’etat on March 26, 1941. However, a fear of “disturbing” the leader existed, particularly among the higher echelons of Soviet society. Thus General-Leytenant Filipp Golikov, the head of the Intelligence Service, commented that this was probably “misinformation coming from the English or perhaps even the German intelligence service.”

More reports of an approaching German invasion continued to pour in during the following weeks. On June 13 the People’s Commissar of Defense, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, advised Stalin to place the border troops on alert. The next day, Timoshenko and General Armii Georgiy Zhukov returned with the same proposal. “You propose carrying out mobilization?” exclaimed Stalin, “Alerting the troops and moving them to the Western borders? That means war! Do you understand that or not?”

Zhukov replied that, according to their intelligence reports, the mobilization of the German combat divisions was complete. Stalin shook his head and said, “You can’t believe everything you read in intelligence reports.”

Meanwhile, the largest invasion army the world had ever seen was marching on the opposite side of the Soviet western border: 3.6 million German and other Axis soldiers, 600,1000 vehicles, 3,600 tanks, and more than 3,000 first-line aircraft.

By sending a constant stream of reconnaissance air­craft over Soviet territory, the Germans themselves provided the Soviets with evidence of what was coming. The task of surveying the Soviet defenses was given to the strategic reconnaissance group of the Luftwaffe High Command, Aufklarungsgruppe Oberbefehlshaber der Luftwaffe. Under the leadership of Oberstleutnant

Theodor Rowehl, high-altitude Ju 86Ps and Ju 88s oper­ating from Hungarian and Polish bases carried out photographic mapping of the Ukraine. He Ills and Do 215s with specially modified engines that enabled them to increase their operational ceiling systematically covered White Russia and the Crimea from bases in East Prussia and Rumania.

According to Soviet estimates, some five hundred German flights over Soviet territory were made. On April 15, 1941, a Ju 86P crash-landed near Rovno in the Ukraine. Bad weather forced down another Ju 86P near Vinnitsa. Equipped with camera and exposed film show­ing Soviet territory, this was perfect evidence that the Germans were planning an aggression. But Stalin for­bade fighters or antiaircraft units to intervene against these reconnaissance flights out of fear of “provoking” Hitler.

On the evening of June 21, 1941, a German deserter reported that the attack would take place the following night. Marshal Timoshenko, General-Armii Zhukov, and General-Leytenant Nikolay Vatutin summoned Stalin, whose last hope was that “Perhaps the German generals sent this deserter to provoke a conflict?” But finally the Soviet leader agreed to issue a warning order to the bor­der troops. As the full strength of the German attack was launched less than two hours later, most units had not received this message.