Category Air War on the Eastern Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

combat with VVS units that included 88 IAP. Among the Soviet pilots shot down was six-victory ace Leytenant Vasiliy Knyazev, who was fortunate to survive. On Au­gust 31, in the same area, Il./JG 3’s Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Brenner claimed a DB-3, followed by a “V-l 1” (probably an 11-2 of 210 ShAP). That day, also, the pilots of I1./JG 3 destroyed six Soviet aircraft in the air over the Kremenchug sector, including a TB-3 heavy bomber of 14 ТВАР shot down by the unit commander, Hauptmann Gordon Gollob (his thirty-sixth victory).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

General-Polkovnik Mikhail Kirponos, was killed in combat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The main task to the Soviet bombers in Odessa was l

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On June 22, 1941, Generaloberst Hans-Jiirgen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

n accordance with the Blitzkrieg doctrine, Hitler’s in­vasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, opened with a massive air assault against the Soviet air-base system all along the 1,000-mile front. The first major task assigned to the Luftwaffe was to relieve the inva­sion army from any threat from the air.

Luftwaffe veterans, hardened in the savage battles over France and the English Channel, delivered the first strike against the air-base system of the Soviet Air Force in the early hours of Sunday, June 22, 1941. During the night of June 21-22, about 150 German bombers— Do 17s of KG 2, Ju 88s of KG 3, and He Ills of KG 53-started crossing the border into the USSR from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. This was the scouting force, comprised of crews who were experienced in night flight. Divided into elements of three to five planes, they headed for all the main Soviet military air bases within the bor­der region. As the scouts buzzed across the dark and silent East European sky, thousands of aircraft engines roared to life on Luftwaffe airfields in East Prussia, Poland, and Romania. This was a display of German precision at its peak.

The first raid was carried out a few minutes ahead of schedule, against the home of 15 IAP/8 SAD based at Alytus Airdrome, halfway between the East Prussian border and the city of Vilnius. Conducted by the Bf 110s of 5th Staffel of ZG 26, this attack was led by a cousin of the famous “Red Baron,” Hauptmann Johannes Freiherr von Richthofen.1

At about 0305 hours, the pathfinder force started reaching its targets. In an instant, incendiary bombs pro­vided a beacon to thirty-one Soviet airfields.

Despite previous warnings, the massive Luftwaffe onslaught against the Soviet aviation installations in the western border area during the early hours of Sunday, June 22, 1941, caught most Soviet airfields by a total surprise. The Do 17 "high-speed bombers" of KG 2 flew against airfields and communication lines in the border area between Soviet-occupied eastern Poland and Lithuania throughout the first day of war and managed to escape with only one Do 17 lost. Shown on this photo is the Do 111-2, the most common bomber version of the Do 17. The slim aerodynamic fuselage of trie Do 17 rendered it the nickname “Flying Pencil”. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.)

Minutes later, the Luftwaffe’s first attack wave—870 medium bombers, Stukas, Zerstorer, and fighter-bomb­ers—hit their targets. The timing for the attack could not have been better chosen. The Luftwaffe struck just as the reequipment program of the VVS stood at its height. Due to teething problems with the new aircraft types entering service, the front-line airfields—many of them fewer than ten miles from the border—were packed with aircraft, both old types on their way out, and the newly received modern types. This was particularly the case in the recently Soviet-occupied territories of Lithuania and eastern Poland, where the airfield construction program simply had not complied with the need to harbor such vast numbers of aircraft.

An astonishing sight met the German airmen as they approached their targets. On most Soviet airfields hit by the Luftwaffe, the Soviet airplanes stood parked in tight row’s, wingtip to wingtip, and with no camouflage mea­sures whatsoever.

To several German airmen, the first raid was merely a gunnery training exercise. The units of Luftflotte 1, under the command of Generaloberst Alfred Keller, were directed against the WS installations in Lithuania, where Hauptmann Johannes von Richthofen had already opened the onslaught. Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker, the techni­
cal officer of III./KG 1 Hindenburg, told the authors: “At 0211 we took off on our first mission against the East. It was a clear night and the horizon was bright from the midnight sun in the far north. Our target was the airfield Libau in Lithuania. The base was occupied by a fighter unit, and its so-called Ratas stood parked in nice, tight rows, offering us a good target in the bright night.”

The Ju 88s of 1I1./KG 1 unloaded their bombs onto “long rows of completely uncamouflaged aircraft stand­ing in close formation as though on parade along the edges of the Libau (Liepaja) airfield,” as stated by an­other of the participants in that raid, Hauptmann Manfred von Cossart." Hauptmann Baeker adds, “We landed undramatically at 0351, before sunrise.”

Major Hannes Trautloft escorted other Ju 88s of Luftflotte 1 against the Kaunas Airdrome in Lithuania at the head of his JG 54. Just as the bombers came in over the large, grass-covered airfield, the sun rose above the horizon and cast its bright rays on the deadly birds. Trautloft watched as the fragmentation bombs exploded in devastating series among the double lines of neatly parked Soviet aircraft. Here, dozens of 1-153s of 13ІАР/ 8 SAD were turned into scrap within minutes. Only two airborne 1-153s appeared in front of the attacking air-

I craft, but they left as quickly as they came. Returning 1 from this raid, the Luftwaffe air crews reported seventy К Soviet planes put out of commission.

At the airfield of Varena, southwest of Vilnius in I the old Polish-Lithuanian border area, 8./JG 53 shot up В seven of the SB bombers of 54 SBAP/57 SAD on the j ground. 111./JG 53 was subordinate to Fliegerkorps VIII, J commanded by General Wolfram

■ Freiherr von Richthofen, Johannes von

■ Richthofen’s elder brother. General von К Richthofen was one of the Luftwaffe’s J; most able close-support commanders.

|: Indeed the Luftwaffe’s fearsome Blitz-

j krieg tactic was due mainly to him.

The two Fliegerkorps of General – I к feldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s power – i S ful Luftflotte 2, to the south of Luftflotte I 1, were in action against all VVS units ; that could possibly threaten the German ]: Army Group Center. Operating in the

1 і skies over the left flank of this army В group. General von Richthofen directed j j his Fliegerkorps VIII mainly against 11 and 9 SAD of the Red Army’s Western 11- Special Military District (ZOVO).

At Grodno Airdrome, a few miles } from the northern part of the Soviet – I I German Polish border, a formation of M6s of 122 LAP/11 SAD attempted to I take off as a formation of Bf 109s came

swooping down. The fragmentation bombs fell upon the starting planes, and they were all destroyed in a perfect take-off formation at the end of the runway. Mladshiy Leytenant Sergey Dolgushin, one of the Soviet pilots, later described how it looked from the side of the attacked: “At three o’clock, the alarm went off. We all ran towards our airplanes. At 0420, when the

Messerschmitts appeared over the airfield, 1 had to take off. While 1 was taking off, during that first dogfight, l was hit sixteen times.”3

Of the seventy-five 1-16 fighter planes in 122 IAP, sixty-five were destroyed.

9 SAD/ZOVO, based in the Bialystok area only a few miles from the attack forces of the German Panzergruppe 3, northeast of Warsaw, suffered even worse. This composite aviation division was a crack unit commanded by the Hero of the Soviet Union General – Mayor Sergey Chernykh, a veteran from the aerial com­bats in the Spanish Civil War, where he had shot down three Loyalist planes (including the first Bf 109 ever to be lost in air combat). According to an inspection shortly before the outbreak of the war, General-Mayor Chernykh’s command was one of the best in the entire VVS. The four fighter regiments in 9 SAD were equipped w ith 233 of the modern MiG-3 fighters and had only 156 obsolete Polikarpov fighters. The division’s bomber regiment, 13 SBAP, was equipped with fifty-one bomb­ers, including twenty-two experimental tw’in-engine Ar-2 dive-bombers (a modified version of the SB “high­speed bomber”).

9 SAD had the dubious luck of receiving the atten­tion of both Fliegerkorps VIII and II of Luftflotte 2, and suffered heavier losses that any other VVS unit on this fateful Sunday morning. All of 9 SAD’s airfields were targeted. In his diary, Leutnant Arnold Doring, an He 111 pilot in KG 53 Legion Condor of Fliegerkorps II, described the first raid against the airfield of 1261АР/ 9 SAD at Dolubovo, south of Bialystok:

The ground below is covered with haze, but the targets nevertheless are clearly visible. 1 am sur­prised that we are not met w’ith any counterac­tion. This will come as some surprise to those below!

The “eggs” are released. Piles of fire and smoke, fountains of earth and dust, mixed with wreckage parts of all kinds, are shooting vertically upward. Unfortunately our bomb rows lay to the right side of the ammunition bunkers. But a whole row of bombs goes down across the entire field and plows the runway. The take-off strip receives two hits.

As the formation makes a turn 1 can see fifteen of the parked fighters go up in flames, plus most of the living quarters. Toni cries: “Antiaircraft fire,” but we could only see one single shot more than

half a mile behind us. We are already out of their shooting range. Then there is a fearsome cry over | the radio: “Fighters from behind!” Our machine guns rattle. The formation tightens up. Of course, a we offer a large target to the Russians, but our и defensive fire is most concentrated. Bullet tracers, j from twenty-seven planes sprinkle against the Russians, who immediately decide to disappear j diving.4

General Bruno Loerzer’s Fliegerkorps П, to which KG 53 belonged, struck against 9 and 10 SAD on the right wing of Army Group Center in the Soviet-German : border district of Poland. Making six low-level attacks against Pinsk Airdrome in the southwestern part of the Soviet-occupied Polish territories, a single Ju 88 piloted by Leutnant Ernst-Wilhelm Ihrig, the commander of 3./KG 3 Blitz, claimed sixty planes destroyed on the ground. Here, 39 SBAP/10 SAD lost forty-three SB bombers and five Pe-2s. At Brest Airdrome, close to the Soviet-German border in Poland, 33 IAP/10 SAD had twenty fighters destroyed by Bf 109 fighter-bombers dut – S ing the first raid. During another raid against the same target, nine Bf 109s pressed home their strafing attacks for nearly 40 minutes and put an additional twenty-one I-16s and five l-153s out of action.

One Staffel, l./SKG 210, equipped with Bf 110s, destroyed about fifty of 10 SAD’s aircraft at Kobrin, 30 miles farther to the east, where the headquarters of 10 SAD and the Soviet Fourth Army were located. In all, 10 SAD lost 180 of 231 planes on June 22. Two of 10 SADs air regiments were completely wiped out. SKG 210 was reported to have destroyed no fewer than 344 planes on the ground and claimed an additional eight in the air on this day.

The situation looked much the same immediately to the south of the Pripyat Marshes, where Generaloberst; Alexander Lohr’s medium bombers and Bf 109 strafers of Luftflotte 4 struck against twenty-nine Soviet airfields over a wide area all the way down to the Black Sea coast.

VVS-Kiev Special Military District (KOVO), on the northern flank of this area, received the full brunt of the attacks by KG 51, KG 54, KG 55, and JG 3 of Fliegerkorps V. Hauptmann Hans von Hahn, flying a Bf 109 at the head of 1./JG 3, wrote in his diary: “We hardly believed our eyes. Row after row of reconnais­sance planes, bombers, and fighters stood lined up as if on parade.”

Launching eighty Ju 88s on the first mission of the day, KG 51 was reported to have destroyed about a hun­dred of KOVO’s aircraft on the ground. “That day 1 will remember to the end of my life,” says Fyodor Arkhipenko, mladshiy leytenant and operations duty officer of 17 1AP in Kovel in northwestern Ukraine. He recalls:

Beginning at 0425 in the morning, about fifty Ger­man planes bombed our field, coming back four times. Only myself and the duty pilot, my squad­ron leader, Ibragimov, and the guards, the security forces, were there. Because it was Sunday, the rest had been allowed to go home on leave.

The airfield was small, two by three kilome­ters. You can imagine the kinds of horrors that took place at the airfield. Then, by afternoon, the pilots and ground crews started arriving. Many of them, their hair had turned white. And some of them had even begun to stutter from fear after experiencing that kind of bombing.3

Starshiy Leytenant Aron Shapiro of 86 SBAP, based at Ternopol, about a hundred miles farther to the south, still has a vivid memory of the bombings by KG 51 on this Sunday morning:

Since the commanders of the Polk had left for a staff meeting on Saturday, 1 was the senior officer on the airfield. The alarm went off at 0400 hours.

No one understood what happened. At about 0430, three planes appeared. They looked very similar to our SBs. We watched silently as they approached at high speed at an altitude of 300 feet. Everyone believed that our commanders had ordered these planes to undertake a mock attack in order to test our combat vigilance.

As they buzzed above our heads, we suddenly saw that they didn’t carry red stars—but black crosses—under their wings! And then we heard bomb explosions. We didn’t know what to do. The connection to the headquarters was severed. In the control tower there was a radio transmitter.

1 managed to handle it, and from the very noisy conversations that I heard, l understood that war had broken out. Then we only heard German voices in the radio.

Ten minutes after the first bombing, more alien aircraft appeared. By that time, we understood that

Fyodor Arkhipenko experienced the attack by Fliegerkorps V against the air base at Kovel on June 22, 1941, as a nineteen-year-old mladshiy leytenant in 17 IAP. Arkhipenko would survive to pay the Germans back by amassing a total thirty individual and fourteen shared aerial victories. In 1945, Arkhipenko was recognized as a Hero of the Soviet Union, In this post-war photo Arkhipenko wears the Golden Star, the token of a Hero of the Soviet Union, and the medal Tor the Victory over Fascist Germany.” (Photo: Seidl.)

they were German. We opened fire at them with everything that could shoot, but since we had no antiaircraft artillery, we could only confront the Germans with light arms fire, including rifles. The aircraft gunners sat in the turrets of the bombers and fired vertically.

One of the German bombers was hit and left a black trail of smoke. 1 think it was a Ju 88. The crew bailed out and landed on our airfield. Every­one rushed to the point of descent and surrounded them. One officer who knew German served as interpreter. 1 particularly remember one of the Germans, a huge, red-haired young man. He acted most brazenly. “Stalin kaputt, Heil Hitler he acclaimed, smiling scornfully. We had no

intention of playing his game. A soldier gave him two punches, which made the German pilot more talkative. Finally we found out what was going on. It was war-the Blitzkrieg had started. He con­fidently declared that the Germans would be in Moscow’ by October: “To all of you, allcs kaputt!”

The Soviet reaction to the first German onslaught was sporadic and uncoordinated, to which came the con­fusion created by communications lines broken down as a result of the air raids.

Only the commander of the air force of Odessa Military District had ordered ordered his commsand to w-ar readiness and dispersed his units and aircraft over several airfields. As a result, only six aircraft under his command were destroyed on the ground. But this was the only exception.

Oberleutnant Georg Schirmbdck, who participated in JG 77’s first fighter-bomber mission against the air­fields of VVS of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet (ChF), later told German aviation historian Jochen Prien: “Russia
really was not prepared at all. Railway stations, villages, | everywhere where there was light, the entire country I was lit up. At railway stations we could see fully normal ] activity.”

Leutnant Joachim Deicke of JG 77 recalls the scene 1 as the German fighter-bombers came buzzing dow n against I their target: “The Russians came out of their barracks | and waved their hands at us. Having seen this, upon the j return to our base, we asked ourselves if this raid wasn’t ] a terrible mistake.”’’

While the bombs were raining over dozens of Soviet 1 airfields, the huge invasion army crossed the Soviet bor­ders along a 500-mile front ranging from the Baltic coast | in the north and across the entire Soviet-German border in Poland. Stukas, ground-attack planes, and Bf 109 and | Bf 1І0 strafers flew over the heads of the advancing 1 German soldiers, striking defense positions, command | posts, and troop quarters of the Red Army. The Soviet border troops were caught totally by surprise, and at most places the entire front crumbled.

The scene on the Soviet side was characterized by total confusion. “From beleaguered command posts, field telephone-centers, and bomb-ravaged aerodromes, mes­sages poured into Moscow: We are under fire. What are we meant to do?’ Back came the reply: ‘You must be feeling unwell. And why isn’t your message in code?’”7 This reply from the High Command perfectly reflects the Stalinist mentality of appeasement at this time: “Do not give in to provocation! Do not open fire!” According to Soviet Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevskiy, the Red Army had received strict orders to avoid “any action that the Nazi leaders could use to exacerbate the

situation or make a military1 provocation.” The Soviet leaders desperately clung to the hope that the German attack was an act of “self-willing German generals” at­tempting to provoke a war against the will of Stalin’s ally Hitler.

Vitse-Admiral Filipp Oktyabrskiy, the commander of the ChF, received the answer from Moscow that Sevastopol simply was not under attack—hardly reassuring to the admiral as bombs began exploding outside the building from which he was making the call.

In the northern Baltic area, Mladshiy Leytenant Nikolay Gapeyonok, an SB pilot in 202 SBAP, had an experience quite symptomatic of the general confu­sion during these hours, at an airfield fif­teen miles north of Kingisepp. Gapeyonok told the authors: “No one had expected war. It broke out on a Sunday. On the previous day, Saturday, most of the regiment’s airmen had left for athletic games. 1 was one of the few who remained on duty’ at the airfield. Suddenly we could hear sirens, but we expected it was train­ing. Since the radio operator was gone, we couldn’t receive any radio calls. It was not until 1100 hours, as the airmen returned to the airfield, that we learned that there was war. Fortunately, our air­field was not bombed."

Despite the surprise attack and spotty communications, Soviet pilots scrambled at several places. Bitter dogfights raged in the skies all along the front during these early morn­ing hours. The Soviet fighter pilots, in fact, managed surprisingly well on this first day.

At Kurovitsa Airdrome, to the south of Lvov in the northwestern Ukraine, units of VVS-KOVO had been alerted before the German bombers had reached this target. Nevertheless, the pilots of the ground-attack regiment 66 ShAP figured it was a training alarm and came too late-which resulted in thirty-four of the regiment’s 1-153 Chaykas and I-15bis being scrapped by the Ju 88s of KG 51.

As the bombs fell, the fighter pilots of 164 LAP were

airborne and climbed from Kurovitsa after the enemy in their small I-16s. Minutes later, they were followed by the remaining biplanes of 66 ShAP. “Skillful and aggres­sive attacks by Russian fighter units,” the chronicle of KG 51 comments, “ensured that the struggle for air su­premacy was no easy game.”8

Leytenant P. N. Rubstov of 66 ShAP attacked a for­mation of German bombers. He sprayed a Ju 88 with machine-gun bullets until it finally caught fire and crashed within sight of Kurovitsa Airdrome. Thus Leytenant Rubstov prob­ably achieved the first aerial victory in the Russo-German war.

The Polikarpov fighters kept pursu­ing the Junkers bombers of KG 51 on their return flight to the west In min­utes, one bomber after another was shot down. The Germans left a trail of white parachutes and blazing flames in the hazy sky. Of twenty-eight Ju 88s dispatched by 1II./KG 51, seven were shot down during this first mission, five of them from 9th Staffel.

In the middle of all this, the German fighter escort appeared. The fast Bf 109s
of JG 3 jumped the Soviets with ham­mering cannons and machine guns. The first 1-16 was shot down by Oberleutnant Robert Oljenik of l./JG 3. As it buried itself into the ground, Oljenik had achieved his sixth of forty-one confirmed victories in World War II. His was prob ably the first German aerial kill in the Russo-German war. At 0430, Feldwebel Ernst Heesen of 2./JG 3 destroyed a sec­ond Ishak. As it went down, the glow from the raging fires at Kurovitsa .Air­drome, twenty miles farther to the east, could still be seen in the darkness. A third 1-16 fell victim to Feldwebel Detlev Luth of l./JG 3.

KG 55 Greif (Griffon) had at least eight He 11 Is shot down by fighters and five damaged while attacking the airfields of VVS-KOVO. Returning from their bombing mission against Dubno Air­drome at about 0425, the crews of 1./ KG 55 experienced the determination with which many Soviet airmen fought. The He 111 of 3./KG 55 piloted by Unteroffizier Werner Bahringer came under attack from a lone 1-16. The Soviet fighter pilot, Leytenant Ivan Ivanov of 46 1AP, had no intention of letting this in­truder get away; he simply crashed his small Ishak fighter right into Unteroffizier Bahringer’s He 111 in the air fifteen miles east of Dubno. Both planes went down.

The bomber violently burst into flames as it hit the ground. Apart from the gunner, who was probably killed as Ivanov’s 1-16 rammed the bomber, the crew of the Heinkel managed to bail out, but they were all reported missing, probably captured by the Soviet troops and killed. Leytenant Ivanov never got out of his fighter; he was later found dead among the dispersed remains of his 1-16. He was posthumously awarded the Soviet Union’s highest recognition, Hero of the Soviet Union.

This was the first successful taran—air-to-air ramming— of the war. With Leytenant Ivanov as an example, the taran would become a not-uncommon and most heroic way of destroying enemy aircraft by Soviet pilots. More than 580 German planes were destroyed by taran during the conflict. The taran method “soon developed into an effective form of attack much feared by the enemy ”9

Among other taran victims this day was the com­mander of JG 27, Major W’olfgang Schellmann, a Knight’s Cross recipient who had opened his account during the

Spanish Civil War, in which he had served Franco’s Loy­alist side by shooting down twelve Republican aircraft, many of which were Soviet. Prior to the invasion of the USSR, he had scored another thirteen victories in World War II.

Returning from the first mission against the Soviet airfields to the south of the Lithuanian border, the Bf 109s of Schellmann’s staff flight sighted and jumped sev­eral 1-153 fighters from 127 1AP/11 SAD in the vicinity of Kamenki, near Grodno. During the first minute of the encounter, Major Schellmann destroyed an 1-16. He then went after an 1-153 Chayka. By turning sharply, Leytenant Petr Kuzmin managed to avoid Schellmann’s first attack. Kuzmin pressed his triggers and emptied his ammunition in a fruitless attempt to hit the fast Messerschmitt. Schellmann attacked again. Yet another sharp turn saved Kuzmin’s life, but 7.92mm machine – gun bullets had hit both him and his plane.

Kuzmin realized that this dogfight was with one of

Germany’s best airmen and could only end in one way. He decided to take the enemy ace with him.

Schellmann apparently was certain of his fifteenth victory. Suddenly the small biplane turned around and came head-on. The Messerschmitt managed to avoid a collision by a few inches. Then the 1-153 came after Schellmann again! It was obvious what the Soviet pilot had in mind. Wolfgang Schellmann could have saved himself by simply pushing the stick forward and using the Messerschmitt’s superior speed to leave, but his pride wouldn’t allow him to escape. He managed to evade col­lision three times, but Kuzmin’s fourth attempt was successful. Plowing his Chayka into the fuselage of the Messerschmitt, Petr Aleksandrovich Kuzmin ended his life. The German ace managed to bail out successfully.

Nothing is known for sure about Wolfgang Schellmann’s fate, but it is remarkable that, on June 28, Pravda ran a story about the capture of a German fighter
pilot—and "holder of the Iron Cross”—by the name of Franz Jord. According to the news story, the German had served in the Mediterranean area prior to the inva­sion of the USSR. No German airman named Franz Jord was reported lost on the Eastern Front at this time, but Feldwcbel Franz Jordan had served under Wolfgang’s Schellmann’s command in Stab/JG 27 until he was killed over Greece in April 1941.

127 IAP/11 SAD, to which Kuzmin belonged, pur up a very stubborn resistance in the air over the Soviet – occupied Polish territories on June 22. Three of this regiment’s pilots were reported to have made air-to-air rammings; apart from Leytenant Kuzmin, Starshiy Politruk Andrey Danilov claimed two Bf 110s shot down and a third rammed with his 1-153 during a single dog­fight near Lida, and Leytenant Aleksandr Pachin rammed a Ju 87.

Although heavily struck by Fliegerkorps II and Vlll,

9 SAD, operating in the same area, gave full proof that it was a genuinely crack unit. As artillery fire was heard in the west, most of 129 LAP/9 SAD was scrambled from Tarnovo Airdrome, approximately eight miles from the border. In a fierce clash with the incoming raiders, 129 1APclaimed one Bf 109 and two He Ills shot down.

During the raid against his airfield near Dolubovo, Mladshiy Leytenant Yevgeniy Panfilov of 126 1AP/9 SAD managed to survive the ramming of a Bf 109. Panfilov remained in action until August 1942, when he finally was killed in action.

Another taran reportedly was carried out in the air over Pruzhan, in the vicinity of Brest, at 0520 Moscow time. Leytenant Stepan Gudimov of 33 IAP/10 SAD managed to shoot down one He 111 and then was killed as he rammed a second Heinkel.

Four 1-I53s of 123 LAP/10 SAD clashed with a for­mation of eight Bf 109s from Oberstleutnant Werner Molders’s JG 51. Leytenant G. N. Zhidov claimed one Bf-109 shot down, but shortly afterward his own aircraft was severely hit—possibly by Molders, who claimed an 1-153 (incorrectly referred to as a “Curtiss" by the Ger­man fighter pilots during the first months of the war) in this combat. This was registered as Molders’s sixty-ninth victory in World War II (added to the fourteen he had scored in the Spanish Civil War). While another 1-153 came to Zhidov’s aid, Leytenant Petr Ryabtsev rammed a Messerschmitt. Ryabtsev managed to bail out and was soon back in action again, only to be killed in combat a few weeks later.

Returning from its first mission against Soviet air bases in Lithuania, III./JG 53 ran into a small group of obsolete I-15bis fighters from 42 or 237 IAP/57 SAD. Even if this predecessor of the 1-153 was the slowest Soviet fighter in operation, and equipped with nonretractable landing gear, these biplanes caused the Bf 109 pilots considerable problems. Nevertheless, during a twenty-minute dogfight, the Gruppenkommandeur, Hauptmann Wolf Dietrich-Wilcke, managed to shoot down three, while Feldwebel Werner Stumpf shot down a fourth.

Although a number of individual Soviet fighter pilots achieved impressive results, it was inevitable that the VVS suffered bitter losses at the hands of the Ger­man Bf 109 pilots. In the South, on the “Romanian front,” the Bf 109s of III./JG 77 claimed six I-16s shot down during one of the early morning clashes.

A MiG-3 Eskadrilya commanded by Kapitan Fyodor

Atrashkevich of 55 IAP at Beltsy Airdrome in Moldavia was alerted by the appearance of a lone Henschel Hs 126 reconnaissance plane over the air base. Four MiGs, led by Leytenant Konstantin Mironov, immediately scrambled, intercepted the Henschel, and promptly shot it down. Meanwhile, Atrashkevich was notified that twenty bombers and eighteen fighters were approaching the airfield. Kapitan Atrashkevich later reported: “Junk­ers planes came and dropped their bombs on the airfield. We had too little antiaircraft artillery. The fuel depot caught fire immediately; it exploded and burned down. Our fighters took off and engaged them while the ground crew pulled the wounded men out of the flames.”10

The four remaining MiG-3 fighters entered an uneven combat. Led by Kapitan Atrashkevich’s adjutant, Leytenant Semyon Ovchinnikov, the MiGs met the enemy above the airfield. From the ground, Atrashkevich witnessed how Ovchinnikov was shot down: “His air­craft was hit while turning. He started twisting like a roundabout. Two Messerschmitts hung on to him and kept firing…. He went down over the airfield, right in front of our eyes.”11

A formation of hostile bombers raided the city of Beltsy in Moldavia, to the north of the Soviet-Romanian border at Iasi. A lone MiG-3 from 55 IAP attacked this formation and managed to destroy one bomber, but it was in turn shot down by one of the escorting Bf 109s. In fact, there are no German fighter claims for either Ovchinnikov or the latter MiG-3. It is possible that these two planes of 55 IAP fell victim to airmen of Germany’s ally Romania.

The Royal Romanian Air Force (FARR) was equipped w’ith German-made He 112B single-engine fighters (rather similar to the Bf 109), license-built PZL P.24E fighters of Polish design, British-made Hawker Hur­ricanes, and bombers of British, French, Polish, and Ital­ian origin. As a part of the diplomatic attempt to block German influence in the Balkans, the British govern­ment had supplied Romania with twelve Hawker Hurri­cane fighters and forty Bristol Blenheim twin-engine bombers in 1939 and 1940. The Hurricanes went on to be very successful against the VVS. Until the end of 1941, FARR’s Escadrila 53 claimed thirty-five victories for the loss of only one aircraft on the Eastern Front.

At 0430 hours on June 22, Capitan Aviator Anton Stefanescu’s bomber Escadrila 76 and Locotenent Comandor Aviator Stefan Anton’s Escadrila 77 raided the Bolgardi and Bulgarica airdromes in southern

Another victory for a German fighter pilot and a terrible death in the flames of his burning aircraft for a Soviet pilot, (Photo: Roba.)

Moldavia, dropping their bombs from an altitude of 1,500 feet. According to Rumanian sources, the Potez 6.33B-2 bombers attacking Bulgarica were intercepted by thirty’ 1- 16s (from 67 IAP). In the ensuing battle, Sublocotenent Aviator Teodor Moscu, piloting one of the twelve es­corting He 112s of Grupul 5 Vanatoare, claimed two l-16s shot down but also had his own plane damaged, and one Potez bomber was lost. 67 LAP registered one 1-16 lost; its pilot bailed out. The two crewmembers of the Potez bomber went down in the Dnestr marshlands but managed to return to their unit after three days of swimming and wading in no-man’s-land. In the same area, two Romanian PZL P.24E fighters were attacked and driven off by another group of very aggressive 1-16 pilots. Both fighters returned to base with heavy battle damage.

Returning to their respective bases on this Sunday morning, the first Luftwaffe and FARR attack wave left behind burn­ing airfields and Soviet planes destroyed by the hundreds. As these Heinkels, Junk­ers, Domiers, and Messerschmitts landed, the planes of the second wave were already dropping their bombs on the VVS ground installations. This continued all day long, hour after hour. After landing, the German aircraft were rapidly rearmed and refueled, then sent out to undertake new strikes against the Soviet airfields.

Dropping SD-2 fragmentation bombs on the airfields at Dorubanok, near Vilnius, the Bf 109s of 1I./JG 27
destroyed some eighty aircraft on the ground. Hauptmann I Gerhard Baeker of 1II./KG 1 recalls: “The whole Gruppej took off against Libau Airdrome on the second mission, I at 0900. We were met by fighters and antiaircraft fire,! but all aircraft returned without damage.”

Still, the Soviet fighter pilots kept challenging the enemy in the air throughout the day, regardless of losses.: For instance, the pilots of 123 ІАР/10 SAD carried out ten to fourteen sorties apiece during the day, claiming thirty German aircraft shot down for the loss of nine 1-153s and eight pilots (including the commander, Mayor Boris Surin). Two hours after the German onslaught, the VVS even started striking back. At 0538, П./JG 53 in East Prussia received the first alarm for approachingl enemy bombers. All available fighters were scrambled and met a formation of the SB twin-engine bombers from 40 SBAP. At 0552, Hauptmann Walter Spies shot down the first SB. In minutes, eight of the vulnerable Soviet bombers fell in flames. Following the escaping remain’ I der of the Soviet formation, a desperate cry w’as sud denly heard over the German R/T: “My engine is hit, I I’m w’ounded!” It was the voice of Hauptmann Heinz ] Bretnutz, one of the top aces of the Luftwaffe at that] time. Bretnutz made a belly landing in enemy territory! and w’as lucky to be hidden by friendly local people. But ] this could not save his life. Recovered by advancing Ger-1 man troops on June 26, this victor in thirty-seven aerial j duels died of his wounds on the following day.

55 IAP put up a brave show’ on the extreme south – J ern flank of the long front, claiming ten aerial victories, I

including a bomber reportedly piloted by a major deco­rated with the Iron Cross who was shot down by Kapitan Atrashkevich.

Later that day, the PZL P.37 Los bombers of FARR’s

Grupul 1 Bombardament, escorted by Hawker Hurricane fighters from Escadrila 53, attacked Odessa. They were inter­cepted by a group of I-16s and lost two PZL P.37s, one in aerial combat and one to ground fire.12

On the second mission of the day, 1I./JG 3 was involved in a whirling dog­fight in the Dubno area, claiming seven VVS-KOVO Polikarpov fighters shot down. As Stab 11./JG 3 was involved in its third combat of the day, another four Polikarpov fighters were bagged. In total, I1./JG 3 claimed sixteen kills, four of them by the Gruppenkommandeur, Hauptmann Lothar Keller (his personal victories seventeen through twenty). The only loss was one Bf 109. The pilot, Feldwebel Hermann Freitag, went down over Soviet-held territory near Lvov/ Brody. He was hidden from Soviet soldiers by the local inhabitants and recovered by advancing German troops after eleven days.

At 0915, a formation of Bf 110s ran into a large formation of Soviet fighters near Zambrova on the Soviet-German border in Poland. These were the MiG-3s and I-16s of 124 1AP, another regiment of the crack 9 SAD. Three Soviet fighters and two Bf 110s went down in flames. Having run out of ammunition (which was quite common among the Soviet fighter pilots due to their instruction to fire extremely long bursts), Mladshiy Leytenant Dmitriy Kokorev cut the rud­ders of a third Bf 110 into pieces with the propeller of his MiG-3. The German plane went down and crashed into the ground while Kokorev managed to bring his damaged plane home to a successful landing at Vysoke-Mazovetsk Airdrome. This Soviet airman was awarded the Order of the Red Banner for the taran. He carried out another hundred sorties and achieved a total victory score of five before being shot down and killed in October 1941.

Among other Soviet airmen who destroyed enemy aircraft through air-to-air ramming on the first day of the war were Mladshiy Leytenant Leonid Butelin of 12 1AP, Starshiy Leytenant Nikifor Ignatyev, Leytenant Terentiy Maliyenko of 86 BAP, Leytenant Aleksandr Moklyak of 67 LAP (who rammed a Romanian Savoia-Marchetti 79 bomber), and Leytenant Vasiliy Loboda of 10 1AP.

Leutnant Franz Schiess, flying a Bf 109 with Stab/ JG 53, testified: “They would let us get almost into an aiming position, then bring their machines around a full 180 degrees.” Here, the Soviet pilots made full use of the superior maneuverability of their aircraft. Fourteen Ger­man planes were destroyed by ramming on the first day of the war.

Of course, there were varying reactions among the Soviet airmen on this first terrible day of the war. Stunned by the feriocity of the massive onslaught, many displayed an increased reluctance to enter battle as the day contin­ued. During the second raid against the air base at Libau, the Ju 88s of 1II./KG 1 were met by a group of 1-16 Ishaks, of which only a few chose to attack. They came in individually, opened fire when still 550 yards distant, and attempted to escape in a dive as soon as their fire was returned.

Due to the devastating, successive air-base raids and the Soviet losses in the air, a few Luftwaffe units actually flew all day long without sighting any Soviet planes in the air. Leutnant Heinz Knoke of Il./JG 52 wrote the following lines in his diary of June 22, 1941: “At 2000 hour, we took off on our sixth mission for the day. All day long we haven’t seen a trace of Russian fliers.”13

On this first day of the war, each Stuka crew carried out seven to eight sorties, the Luftwaffe fighter pilots five to eight, and the bomber crews four to six. They made sure that “everything” kept burning all day long on the Soviet side.

The highest losses were suffered by the WS-ZOVO, stationed immediately ahead of the main German tank thrust toward Moscow. Of 847 combat aircraft in 9, 10, and 11 SAD, no more than 185 remained serviceable on the evening of June 22. 11 SAD registered 127 of 199 aircraft destroyed. General-Mayor Sergey Chernykh’s crack 9 SAD suffered most: Of 409 planes, no fewer than 347 were destroyed, including the majority of the

la у s ruler. Bsritc Mussclino ‘ I Ci. ce.’ lent a hand to AdoK H Зє’ітііГ Soviet adventure not only with a sizeable expeditionary ground force, out an air unit as well. In support of Corpo diSpedizione Italiano nella fiitsi (CSIR). a fighter and a reconnaissance-bomber group, completed by^ transport squadron of Regia Aeronautica (Italian Air Force), were setlo the southern sector of the Eastern Front in mid-August 1941. The louH squadron-strong 22d Fighter Group was equipped with fifty-two Vlacchi C.200 Saeffa monoplane fighters, the three-squadron-strong (j§ Reconnaissance Group fielded thirty-two Caproni Ca.311 twin-enginelm bombers, and the 245th Transport Squadron had ten Savoia-Mardi: S.81 Pipistrello three-engine transports. In late November, a seem transport squadron, the 246th, joined in. Overall, more than a hundred Italian aircraft and almost two thousand men were dispatched to № Eastern Front in 1941. By the end of the year, the Italian fighter pikn reported a significant number of downed WS aircraft, with only ight causalities from their ranks-some inflicted by their German ally, unfamM with the silhouette of the Italian radial-engine aircraft types. Showihedj is the Macchi C.200 of Capitano С. M. Ruspoli, hidden along the forest edge at Salz Airfield, in Trans-Dnestra, Romania, in September 1941; (Photo: Bemad)

57 MiG-3s and 52 1-16s of 129 IAP alone. Five daj later, General-Mayor Chernykh, Hero of the Soviet Union, was executed by a firing squad.

WS-KOVO in the South managed to escape total annihilation, but it still lost 277 of 1,913 combat aircraft) on the ground.

To the personnel on the Soviet air bases, it was as if the end of the world had come. Mladshiy Leytenant Fyodor Arkhipenko of 17 IAP remembers: “Around three o’clock that afternoon, the first day of the war, 1 was able to make one reconnaissance flight, from Brest to the region of Lvov along our border. I could see the entire area on our side was—if one could put it this way-ojj fire. Everything—the towns, the villages, the settlemen everything was burning.”14

t took the Soviet High Command several hours to analyze the full extent of the disaster. By then, the German armies, spearheaded by large tank concentra­tions, were flooding into the Soviet-held territories of Lithuania and Poland. Only to the south of the Pripyat Marshes were the defenders barely able to hold their positions. But to the north, the entire border defense had collapsed, and the invasion army kept streaming over bridges across the Dubisa, Neman, and Bug rivers in the border area. The confused directives sent from the High Command during the early morning hours had prevented the destruction of most of these bridges. As the Soviet High Command finally reacted, the VVS was instructed to launch every available bomber against these arteries of the invasion armies.

Beginning on the morning of June 22 and continu­ing throughout the remainder of the day, the Soviet Air

Force, despite all the difficulties, managed to dispatch large formations of mainly SB and DB-3 medium bomb­ers against the invaders. This response displayed a remarkable ability’ to improvise at the regimental level.

The next stage in the air war would be the downfall of the Soviet bomber force. The chronicle of JG 27 reads: “Alarmstart! Two Messerschmitts come dashing across the runway. Leutnant |Arthur] Schacht comes up on the tail of a DB-3, but in the next moment the bomber is torn apart by an antiaircraft hit. Schacht clings to a sec­ond bomber, aims, and opens fire. The Russian flew straight for a while, then dove vertically into the ground."15

The Soviet bomber missions during the first days of the war only furnished the overall catastrophe with additional multiple losses. There was no fighter escort available. Due to the lack of air-to-air radio, the bombers,
carrying out their missions in regimental groups, were forced to operate in open echelon formations that gave each pilot visual contact with the formation leader. This deprived the bomber formations of the opportunity to concentrate the gunners’ defensive fire against intercept­ing fighters. In reality, the SBs and DB-3s launched against the invaders on the first days of the war were more or less sitting ducks against the attacking Bf 109s. Never­theless, the bomber crews kept flying, literally “to the last man,” against the aggressor. This was not only a matter of obeying orders; these airmen were convinced that they represented the motherland’s last resort. From the air they clearly could see the full extent of the crisis. The courage and discipline displayed by the Soviet bomber crews during these first days of the war are virtually unequaled.

One of the first bombing missions was carried out by 39 ВАР/10 SAD in the central combat zone. After the first devastating German raid against their base, eighteen of the regiment’s SBs managed to take off at about 0700 hours to artack the German tanks and motorized units of Army Group Center as they crossed the Bug River. At least one bridge was hit, but all eighteen bombers were downed on the return flight.

All day long on June 22, 1941, the Soviet bombers kept coming; they held course and made no attempt to evade either ground fire or fighters encountered on the way to their targets. Over and over again they were shot down in huge droves. On several occasions, whole for­mations were completely wiped out by the Messerschmitt fighters. It was a tragic sight. Hauptmann Herbert Pabst of StG 77 witnessed the massacre caused by Bf 109s on Soviet bombers attempting to raid his air base at Biala Podlaska:

As the first one fired, thin threads of smoke seemed to join the bomber. Ttiming ponderously to the side, the big bird flashed silver, then plunged ver­tically downward with its engines screaming. As it crashed, a huge sheet of fire shot upward. The second bomber became a glare of red, exploded as it dived, and only the bits came floating down like great autumnal leaves. The third turned over back­ward, on fire. A similar fate befell the rest, the last falling in a village and burning for an hour. Six columns of smoke rose from the horizon. All six had been shot down!

They went on coming the whole afternoon.

From our airfield alone we saw twenty-one crash,

and not one get away.

The First air raid in the Russo-German war that pos­sibly could be called “strategic” was carried out by the Soviets on this first day of the war. Approximately sev­enty Soviet bombers, divided into several groups, were dispatched against various targets in German-held areas of Poland and East Prussia. About twenty bombers reached as far as the Tilsit-Insterburg axis. Their bombs killed or wounded a small number of civilians. Major Hannes Trautloft, Geschwaderkommodorc of JG 54 in East Prussia, made the following entry in his diary: “The airfields at Gerlinden and Lindental report that they had spotted enemy bombers passing the airfields. The alert Staffeln are scrambled to prevent them from reaching East Prussian territory. Out of twenty-six SB-2 ‘Martin’ bombers, seventeen are shot down. The remainder dis­appear in a wild escape. Everywhere you can see burn­ing, descending aircraft and parachutes in the sky.”

Soviet air units based in the rear area began deploy­ing to the forward zone from midday on June 22. The airmen of these units knew very little or nothing at all of what was taking place in the western border area. They were shocked by what they encountered as they arrived at the front-line airfields. First, there were distant, huge
smoke plumes, then raging fires, hangars and maintenance stores burning or com­pletely destroyed, runways littered with bomb craters, dozens upon dozens of destroyed and damaged Soviet aircraft, dead and wounded W’S soldiers, and terror painted on the faces of those sur­viving. The ground organization, respon­sible for the newly arrived aircraft, was in complete disarray. Fuel depots and am­munition dumps were destroyed. And then—without any warning—a formation of Stukas appeared, howling down over the field and bombing the newly arrived planes to pieces.

Among the Soviet bombers launched on combat missions this day were the new single-engine Su-2s of 210 BBAP/45 SAD.

Only seventy-five Su-2s were in ser­vice on June 22, and the new bomber type was a carefully guarded secret—in fact, too carefully guarded. The security shield surrounding the Su-2 was so strict that most Soviet airmen knew nothing of its existence.

During 210 BBAP’s approach flight, a 55 LAP MiG – 3 detachment was scrambled against incoming “enemy” planes. This was the first combat mission for Starshiy Leytenant Aleksandr “Sasha” Pokryshkin, who would soon emerge as one of the top Soviet fighter aces.

Spotting the formation of unfamiliar single-engine bombers, Pokryshkin immediately attacked: “I aimed at the first bomber and gave him a short burst. I couldn’t miss; I wras so close that the air current from his propel­ler shook my plane. 1 broke off to the right and started climbing over the bombers."

Leytenant Ivan Pstygo, one of the Su-2 pilots, recounts, “Two MiG-3s approached us. We hoped that flying with friendly fighters would make us safe, but suddenly one of the MiG-3s attacked our squadron commander’s airplane.

“As the MiG-3 followed through to attack my plane, 1 rocked the wings to try to show our identification insig­nia. It helped; the fighter pulled off.”

Pokryshkin adds,

From above 1 saw red stars on the wing surfaces!

Flying over the formation, I didn’t know what to do. The bomber l had attacked was lagging behind the others.

The rest of our fighters approached in a tight formation. The leading fighter started preparing an attack on the bombers from the opposite side. I was desperate—they’re going to shoot them all down! Without hesitating, 1 cut his way, waggling the wingtips of my aircraft. He almost collided with me, but then flung himself to the side. 1 had to repeat the same maneuver and fire warning bursts in front of each and every one of the remaining fighters. In spite of this, some took a shot at the bombers but scored no hits.

The bomber I had hit belly-landed on a field, while the remaining continued westward.16

To Sasha Pokryshkin’s luck, the general confusion of the war’s first day saved him from being court-martialed.

The remaining Su-2s continued on against their tar­
get, the Romanian railway station at Iasi, where they found at least forty trains with wagons. Leytenant Aleksandr Pavilchenko, recalls, “During the approach flight, our nine Su-2s flew in three close three-plane for­mations at 3,600 feet altitude, as on a parade. Despite heavy antiaircraft fire, we remained at the same altitude and released our bombs above the station. SBs and Ar-2s of other Polks of the 45 SAD also participated in this raid, and we could see them ahead of us.”

The twin-engine bombers of 45 SAD fared even worse than the Su-2s, as Leytenant Pavlichenko recounts: “During supper that evening we learned that twenty – seven planes from our Diviziya had failed to return from this mission."

The German fighter pilots reaped an enormous harvest. The most successful fighter unit, with seventy – four claims on June 22, was JG 53 Рік As (Ace of Spades). JG 51 was credited with twelve fighters and fifty-seven bombers shot down—four each by Oberstleutnant Werner Molders and Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hofemeier. JG 54

Granherz (Green Heart), operating from East Prussia, reported forty-five aerial victories. On this first day of the war with the USSR, the German report stated that 1,489 Soviet aircraft were destroyed on the ground and 322 in the air. These figures appear incredible. They were even doubted by the Luftwaffe’s commander in chief, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, who had them secretly checked: “For days on end, officers from his command staff picked their way about the airfields overrun by the German advance, counting the burnt-out wrecks of Rus­sian planes. The result was even more astonishing: their tally exceeded 2,000." 7

In fact, Soviet sources confirm most of the German claims. Even the extensive History of the Great Patriolic War of the Soviet Union1’4 admits that on June 22, 1941, 1,200 Soviet combat aircraft were lost, of which there were “more than 800 on the ground." ll is interesting to note that whereas Soviet sources list 336 Soviet planes shot down in the air—including 204 in the operational
area of WS-ZOVO alone—on June 22, the Germans claimed 322 aerial victories, to which of course should be added a number of victories by Romanian pilots and antiaircraft batteries.

As June 22 drew to a close, there was no victory euphoria among the Luftwaffe airmen. They had achieved tremendous results, but sixteen to eighteen hours of relentless combat activity had worn out every flier. Their own losses were not small, either, and in some cases they were absolutely unbearable. In the chronicle of KG 51, Wolfgang Dierich wrote: “In the evening of the first day, follow ing the last landing at 2023 hours, the Kommodore, Oberstlcutnant [Hans Bruno I Schuk-Heyn, made a fright­ening summation in the castle Polanka Krosno: Sixty men (fourteen crews!) of the flying personnel had been killed or were listed as missing, the Hlrd Gruppc alone had fourteen planes put out of commission in crashes or shot down—in other words 50 percent losses. The scene was just as dismal in the other Gruppen. Even the old

The armed forces of the tiny Slovak state took part in the multi-national “Crusade Against Communism" virtually from the very first day of hostilities. Similarly to their Italian Axis partners, the Slovaks sent to the Eastern Front a fighter and a reconnaissance/light bomber group, supplemented by a liaison/transport squadron. The three-squadron-strong 2nd Fighter Group was equipped with eleven Avia B-534 and Bk-534 biplane fighters, the three-squadron-strong 1st Reconnaissance Group with ten Letov S-328 reconnaissance/light bomber biplanes, and the unnumbered Liaison Squadron with a mixture of one Praga E-39 and two Praga E-241 biplanes, augmented by a sole, civilian-registered Stinson SR-10C Reliant high-wing VIP transport monoplane. The expeditionary air unit of Slovenske Vzdusne Zbrane (Slovak Air Force) started combat operation in mid-July 1941 in southwestern Ukraine. Although their equipment was largely similar to the Soviets’, the Slovaks reported good results over their adversary, with minimal losses. The Slovak air units returned to their homeland in late October 1941. Shown here are Avia B-534 fighters on a Slovak airfield, prior to their dispatch to the Eastern Front, in early July 1941. (Photo: Bemad)

"lucky guy,” Oberleutnant von Wenchowski, commander of the 5th Staffel, had been killed.”1’

Even considering the large number of sorties flown, the Luftwaffe’s own losses on June 22, 1941, were most severe. Although some published accounts have referred to the lower figure issued by the German news agencies during the war—thirty-five German aircraft lost—the offi­cial loss statistics of the Luftwaffe list seventy-eight combat aircraft destroyed and eightv-nine damaged on the Eastern Front on June 22, 1941. These figures sur­passed those of the fateful Battle of Britain day, Septem­ber 15, 1940, when sixty-one planes were destroyed and eleven damaged.

Roughly three-quarters of this total may be consid­

he large-scale German air-base raids continued with almost the same intensity throughout June 23. Major Hannes Trautloft, the commander of JG 54, wrote in his diary: “We felt the exertions of the [first] day. we were all dead-tired. But it was not until mid­night that we could get some sleep. Two hours later we had to prepare ourselves for the first mission of the next day.” Luftwaffe photo-reconnaissance uncovered several hitherto unknown VY’S airfields, filled with airplanes— incredibly in the same deployment as on the first day. Other German aircraft, mainly Stukas and ground – attack planes to the north of the Pripyat Marshes, struck against Soviet pockets of resistance, paving the way for the advancing Panzer formations. Meanwhile, the main task assigned to the Kampfgeschwader, apart from air­base raids, was to interdict the retreating Red Army bor­der troops through large-scale bombings of the roads lead­ing from the border area to the east. The aim of these raids was to create the preconditions for a surrounding of the armies in the western USSR. To the south of the Pripyat Marshes, the medium bombers of Luftflotte 4 were committed to both close support and interdiction missions. Red Army Polkovnik Ivan Fedyuninskiy recalls: “German aircraft attacked the railways and the supply lines. We suffered from a severe shortage in radio equipment, and most soldiers did not know how to handle this equipment. Orders and instructions were delayed or did not reach the troops at all. This enabled the enemy to break through our defense lines rapidly, and then they could attack our staff headquarters. Although the Ger­mans were in control of the air, our columns undertook no measures to avoid detection from the air. Frequently, congestion of troops, artillery, vehicles and field kitchens occurred on narrow roads. Such lumps inevitably became fat targets to the enemy air force.”

The Panzer spearheads drove deep into Soviet terri­tory, leaving large contingents of hemmed-in Soviet bor­der troops behind them. On the second day, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s Army Group North had reached to within ten miles of Vilnius.

The Soviet leadership was in complete disarray after the terrible events on the first day of the war. In Mos­cow, Stalin panicked. In the evening of June 22 he had blurted out that “All that Lenin created we have lost forever,” and then isolated himself for eleven days. Gen­eral-Mayor Ivan Kopets, the commander of WS-ZOVO, committed suicide on June 23. Probably unable to grapple with its own part in the disaster, the Soviet leadership started looking for scapegoats. General-Mayor Aleksey Ionov, commander of the VVS Baltic Military District, shortly “disappeared.” All VVS commanders of the mili­tary districts that had been hit by the Luftwaffe on June 22 were replaced during the next few days. The only WS military district commander on the western borders who managed to escape persecution was General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov, in the Leningrad Military District. He would eventually rise to command the entire WS.

During the first days of the war, the military districts were brought to a state of war, renamed “fronts,” the Soviet equivalent of the German army groups. Thus the following fronts saw daylight: Leningrad Military District-Northern Front; Baltic Special Military District – Northwestern Front; Western Special Military District – Western Front; Kiev Special Military District—Southwest­ern Front; and Odessa Military District—Southern Front

Most Soviet soldiers and airmen at the front refused to give in. This was the decisive factor that saved the USSR from collapsing during these early days. Any other nation’s armed forces probably would have been totally crushed by an assault of the immensity the Soviets had endured during June 22, 1941. But the Soviet airmen and soldiers proved to be tougher than most others. One of the Soviet fighter pilots at this time, Starshiy Leytenant Ivan Lakeyev, said: “During the war, I saw’ people pick up and carry a truck. Word of honor. You’d say it was impossible, but they did it. Each person had that strength, that force. Where did we find the strength? In love for our motherland.”1

This was not what the invaders had expected. A

German account from this time reads: "What has | become of the Russian of 1914-17, who ran away or | approached us w’ith his hands in the air when thej firestorm reached its peak? Now he remains in his bun­ker and forces us to burn him out, he prefers to be ’ scorched in his tank, and his airmen continue firing at us even when their own aircraft is set ablaze. What has j become of the Russian? Ideology has changed him!”2

Oberleutnant Hans-Ekkehard Bob, Staffelkapitan of і 9./JG 54 of Luffflotte 1, recalls the scene in the air on j the northern combat zone on the second day of the war. | In spite of the intensive Luftwaffe air-base raids on June 22, Soviet “bombers came in several waves of squadron strength against the invading German units… without interruption.” The bombers of DBA and the Northwest – ern Front made sure that the units of Luftflotte 1 had to keep struggling hard for air supremacy.

Before dawn on June 23, ten Soviet long-range bomb­ers even undertook a daring daylight raid against the East Prussian port of Konigsberg, where they managed to hit and damage the gas works and the wharf area, і

Whereas the bombers were prepared for large-scale | action against the invaders, only a few Soviet fighters were brought into action by VVS-Northwestern Front, an effect of the Luftwaffe preemptive bombings that had struck hard mainly against the first-line fighters of VVS! Northwestern Front. Nevertheless, the aviation units of the Northern Front grouped along the entire Finnish border from Leningrad in the south to Murmansk in the Far North had been almost completely saved from air raids. Ju 88s flying without fighter escort due to the long distances to airfields of VVS-Northern Front repeatedly came under fierce attacks by Soviet fighters. The bomber units of Fliegerkorps I—KG 1, KG 76, and KG 77-regis – tered eighteen Ju 88s shot down on June 23. One of the bombers lost during the early morning hours was brought down by 158 XAP’s Leytenant Andrey Chirkov. It was the first of a total of thirty-eight victories scored during the war by this future Hero of the Soviet Union.

At about 1000 hours on June 23, sixteen SBs flew unescorted to the East Prussian air base at Gumbinnen. Although intercepted by the Bf 109s from Stab and II./ JG 54, thus losing several bombers during the approach flight, the SBs stiffly carried on, unloading their bombs from 10,000 feet. Following the raid, the formation broke up into individual flights, pairs, and single aircraft at­tempting to escape at tree-top level. No one returned to

Early on June 23, 1941, Leytenant Andrey Chirkov of 158 IAP was scrambled in a Yak-1 fighter in the Pskov area. He spotted two German bombers flying about a thousand feet higher and attacked from the sun. One of the bombers caught fire from Chirkov’s first burst, and the Soviet fighter plot continued to fire until the enemy plane had descended vertically and crashed into the ground. Chirkov earned a reputation for toughness in the air and considerable flying skills. Although wounded in action twice during 1941, he survived and eventually ran up a score of twenty-nine personal kills and nine shared kills by the end of the war. Chirkov died on Septerroer 10,1956, at the age of thirty-eight. (Photo: Seidl.)

base; they were all shot down over German territory. Shortly afterward l./JG 54 ran into yet another Soviet bomber group and returned with fourteen victory claims.

At 1100, nine Bf 109s of 7./JG 54 took off on a free-hunting mission in Lithuanian airspace. Forty-five minutes later, the fighter pilots spotted a formation of nine SBs to the north of the Lithuanian capital, Kaunas. The Staffelkapitan of 9./JG 54, Oberleutnant Hans – Ekkehard Bob, leading the German formation, immedi­ately ordered an attack. Oberleutnant Bob was one of the top scorers of JG 54 Grunherz, with twenty-one marks on his victory’ board on the eve of Operation Barharossa. Within minutes he had witnessed eight SBs being shot down in flames. Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann, bagged two.3 This short-statured twenty-three-year-old

Oberleutnant Hans-Ekkehard Bob, commanding 9./JG 54 in 1941, was one of the most daring fighter pilots of the Grunherz Geschwader. This almost cost him his life on June 23,1941, as he recalled several years later: “I adapted the speed of my fighter to that of the bomber and positioned myself 50 meters behind him. I aimed carefully and pressed the firing buttons. It worked: as I flew very slowly behind the bomber, the hits from my guns set him ablaze. As both engines and parts of the fuselage were burning—astonishingly the bomber still kept flying!—I opened the throttle to climb away beneath the bomber. Logically I passed very close to him and saw the rear gunner, eye-to-eye, just as he aimed at me and opened fire " (Photo: Bob.)

from Hamburg would develop into one of the most suc­cessful fighter aces of the war. Only one SB, piloted by the unit leader, survived. Oberleutnant Bob managed to finish this one off, but during the procedure he was him­self shot down by the Soviet mid gunner. The German fighter pilot landed deep inside enemy-controlled terri­tory but was lucky to reach German lines after two days.

The Soviet bombers kept coming in over the Lithuanian and East Prussian war zone without inter­ruption. The pilots of JG 54 Grunherz claimed a total of thirty-nine victories before the second day of the war was over. During the confusion of combat, there were frequent occasions when Grunherz pilots mistakenly

attacked friendly bombers. At least four KG 77 Ju 88s and one KG 76 Ju 88 lost on June 23 were shot down by friendly fighters.4 During the late afternoon a Ju 88 fired back, shooting down and killing Unteroffizier Walter Puregger of 5./JG 54.5

While large-scale air combat took place on the north­ern and southern combat zones throughout the second day of the war, the skies in the sector of General- feldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center were totally under German control. 9, 10, and 11 SAD— the cream of ZOVO—had virtually ceased to exist. The remnants of these units were pulled out of combat.

Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker of 1II./KG 1 recalls: “On June 23,24, and 25 we carried out night raids against the airfields of Essern and Riga-Spilve, which were found to be filled with Russian bombers.”

According to the Luftwaffe records, 1,357 Soviet planes were destroyed on June 23 and 24, the majority on the ground.

Launched from East Prussia against Lithuania, Gen­eral Erich von Manstein’s LVI Panzerkorps had reached a hundred miles into enemy territory’ in eastern Lithuania on June 24. At that moment, the corps was struck by a heavy counterattack by a large number of Red Army – tanks, organized by General-Polkovnik Fedor Kuznetsov, the commander of Northwestern Front. Most of the aircraft remaining in WS-Northwestcrn Front were brought into the air to support the counterattack. In addition, the 1st Long – Range Bomber Corps (1 AK DBA) was dispatched to the same task. These So­viet air units were reported to have put up more than twenty-one hundred sor­ties during the three-day battle, suffering tremendously at the hands of the Bf 109s.

The twenty-seven DB-3As and DB – 3Fs of 53 BAP, flying against General von Manstein’s motorized columns in the Vilnius area on June 24, were intercepted by the Bf 109s of Hauptmann Max Dobislaw’s II1./JG 27 between Grodno and Vilnius. The Messerschmitt pilots claimed seven Soviet bombers shot down and returned to base without having suf­fered any losses. In fact, 53 BAP recorded nine DB-3s lost (including eight to Bf
109s). In the same area, Stab and I./JG 53 claimed sev – 1 enteen Soviet bombers shot down, while JG 54 recorded І another fourteen victories for the loss of one Bf 109. ]

On the ground, the Red Army’s giant 52-ton KV-2 heavy tanks armed with 152min howitzers stunned the Germans. “In a fantastic exchange of fire,” wrote the : historian of the 1st Panzer Division, “the Russian tanks I continued their advance while our antitank shells sim­ply bounced off them.”

"Yet at the very moment of this life-and-death j struggle,” wrote Nikolai Tolstoy, “the NKVD had free use of the main railway lines linking the Baltic States і with the interior. The mass purge which they had launched on the night of June 13—14 continued as if no invasion had taken place, and truckloads of kidnapped j Balts took up much of the scanty railway system at a time when Kuznetsov’s troops desperately needed every shell and gallon of petrol they could lay hands on.’’6 |

This definitely was the summer of massacres. Fear – : ing an upsurge, the Soviet leadership ordered the evacu – ; ation or murder of all inmates of prisons threatened bv the German advance. “Thousands of political prisoners of the Left were shot, lest they offer leadership to the uprising masses.”7

ffitect firms /tfedSter

TheGcrmans-both the notorious Einsatzgruppen of the SD and ordinary Wehrmacht: soldiers—started the deliberate mass execution of unarmed civilians on June ‘ 23. Local nationalists in the Ukraine and the Baltic States took part w ith enthusiasm, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and Communists during the following weeks and months. Two million Soviet POWs had perished in – German captivity by February 1942.” And finally, one f million to two million people were to starve to death in besieged Leningrad and in the territories occupied by the ; Germans during the coming months of the war.1’ The mass death of Soviet ground troops and bomber crews in June 1941 just fell in line with these massacres.

Bogged down by lack of fuel, General-Polkovnik Kuznetsov’s tanks became easy prey to the Luftwaffe bombers. Fliegerkorps Vlll was called in from Luftflotte 2 to break up the Soviet attack and reportedly destroyed j, 105 tanks. Particularly successful attacks were made by the Do 17s of 1U./KG 2 Holzhammer (Wooden Ham­mer) The commander of 9./KG 2, Hauptmann Walter

I Bradel, was awarded the Knight’s Cross for this action.

I In the central combat zone, Panzergruppe 2, commanded by armor warfare expert Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, was advancing in a northeasterly direction along the Brest-

Minsk highway in east-central Poland on June 24. This tank thrust threatened to cut off all Soviet troops remaining in the border area at Brest.

Both sides launched strong air units to this sector. Minsk, a key point in the Soviet defense on the highway to Mos­cow, was almost totally devastated by continuous bombings by Luftflotte 2. But on June 24, 1941, the bomber and dive- bomber crews of Luftflotte 2 were also taught not to underestimate the Red fighter pilots. Since 9, 10, and 11 SAD had been withdrawn from combat, 43 1AD became the fighter spearhead of WS-Western Front. Based in the rear area between Minsk and Smolensk, 43 1AD had escaped the attention of the Luftwaffe air-base raids on June 22. Now, the commander of this unit, General – Mayor Georgiy Zakharov, was instructed to concentrate his fighters to repel the German air raids.

Zakharov, a famous ace from the Spanish Civil War and the conflict in China, who despite his high rank had participated in combat on June 22 (he shot down two Ju 88s), directed all available fighters to the air over the battlegrounds at Minsk. German bomber losses included five He 111 s of KG 53 Legion Condor and two Do 17s of KG 2 Holzhammer. 163 LAP,/431AD claimed twenty – one aerial victories in this area on June 24. Right above the city of Minsk, six 163 LAP 1-16s fell upon twenty-six Ju 87s of II. and III./StG 1. Led by Starshiy Leytenant Zakhar Plotnikov, a veteran from the Spanish Civil War, the Ishak pilots shot down six dive-bombers without any losses. One of the downed Stukas was piloted by the commander of Hl./StG 1, Hauptmann Helmut Mahlke. Lucky to survive, Mahlke was counted among the most able German dive-bomber pilots. He had made more than a hundred raids in France, against England, and in the Mediterranean area prior to the war with the Soviet Union. Flying over the USSR, he was shot down no less than three times within two and a half weeks.

Meanwhile, the Soviet medium-bomber units were assigned to attack Panzergruppe 2. General-Mayor Fyodor Polynin’s 13 BAD managed to get through and attack Generaloberst Guderian’s tanks in the area of Grudopole,

Pilovidy, and Ivantsevichi, halfway between Brest and Minsk. The sudden reappearance of Soviet bombers in this sector was totally unexpected by the Germans, and the SBs managed to reach the target without interfer­ence by the enemy fighters. The bombers attacked in three waves of nine bombers each as the tanks were con­centrated at the crossing on the Shara River. As they inflicted bloody casualties on the ground, Oberstleutnant Werner Molders’s JG 51, which had moved forward to airfields abandoned by the VVS on the previous day, was alerted. Its Bf 109s scrambled amid the wrecks of dozens of smashed planes with red stars and rapidly climbed into the sky. An excited voice crackled in the headphones of the Messerschmitt pilots: “Mobelwagen [moving vans—the Luftwaffe code for enemy bombersl ahead!” The SBs were caught as they were turning for home. Oberleutnant Karl-Heinz Schnell, Staffelkapitan of 9./JG 51, aimed at the closest silvery bird and gave it a short burst with his 20mm cannon. The brittle alumi­num bomber immediately caught fire and started to fall. Schnell turned slightly, blasted away a new salvo against a second SB, followed by another, and another. In four minutes he sent down four SBs in flames. His total score for the day ran to seven. Lcutnant Ottmar Maurer of I1I./JG 51 claimed another six.

Starting on this day, much to the astonishment of the Germans, the skies over Army Group Center were once again filled with scores of Soviet medium bombers. And once again the Bf 109s rose to meet them. The Jagdflieger found the same kind of unescorted bomber formations, and the “clay-dove shootings” started all over again. JG 51 was credited with the destruction of no less than fifty-seven SBs on June 24.

From this day on, the Jagdgeschwader on the East­ern Front maintained continous fighter patrols, their Bf 109s operating in independent Schwarm – or Rotte-size units over the tank spearheads. There were only few encounters between German and Soviet fighters as the WS fighters were operating mainly in the rear area with the task of concentrating on enemy bombers and dive – bombers and avoiding the Bf 109s. But for a couple of days there were sufficient Soviet bombers to fill the Jagdfliegers’ desire for easy hunting.

To the north of Guderian’s forces, Generaloberst Erich Hoepner’s Panzergruppe 3 reached Vilnius on June 24, the same date on which Napoleon had seized the city in 1812. Next day, III./JG 53 was transferred to the

Karl-Heinz “Bubi" (‘Little Boy") Schnell served with the JG 51 since 1939. His success as a fighter pilot began during the invasion of the Soviet Union, when he managed to shoot down four SBs in four minutes. On August 1,1941, Oberleutnant Schnell was awarded the Knight’s Cross for twenty-nine victories. He eventually rose to command III./JG 51 but was relieved from command due to sustained criticism of his superiors Schnell survived the war with a total of seventy-two aerial victories to his credit. (Photo: Schnell via Salomonson.)

large air base at the outskirts of Vilnius. There the amazed men of this unit counted fifty-six Soviet aircraft on the ground, the sad remnants of 57 SAD. Meanwhile, II./ JG 54 occupied the air base at Kaunas, where it discov­ered eighty-six Soviet planes, the major part abandoned undamaged, of 8 SAD.

Provided with an effective fighter shield against fur­ther enemy air attacks, Panzergruppe 2 captured Slonim and Baranovichi and thus sealed off the Soviet ground forces in the Brest area on June 25. The continued flow of Soviet bomber formations that were sent against these tank spearheads was brutally taken care of by JG 51. Claims made by JG 51 reached a new climax on June 25—sixty-eight SBs, of which one pilot, Oberleutnant Hans Kolbow, destroyed six. Farther to the north, III./JG 53 was reported to have brought down thirty-two Soviet aircraft (of which the majority were unescorted DB-3 bombers).

While the Soviet counterattack in Lithuania finally broke down on June 25, VVS-Northwestern Front attempted a new tactic, concentrating its main bomber forces against the forward German fighter airfields around Vilnius. But the attempt to neutralize the German fight­ers on the ground backfired cruelly. The vicinity’ of the air base at Vilnius became the scene of another carnage in the air. Throughout June 25, formation after forma­tion of Soviet bombers tried to break through and attack the airfields. Each time, they were bounced by П. and 111./JG 27. One of the German fighter pilots involved in this melee, Leutnant Gustav Langanke, succeeded in shooting down seven bombers. At dusk, the burned-out wrecks of fifty-three DB-3s and SBs—and one Bf 109— surrounded Vilnius.

It was mainly the cream of the Soviet medium-bomber airmen that was sacrified. In 202 SBAP, to which Mladshiy Leytenant Nikolay Gapeyonok belonged, the number of air crews was twice that of the aircraft available on the eve of the war. The most experienced aviators were selected to fly the first missions. After the first days, most of these experienced bomber crews had been killed. 9 SBAP virtually ceased to exist after the first days of combat and was withdrawn from first – line service on June 25.

The claimed score for the Luftwaffe on June 25, 1941, was 251 Soviet air­craft destroyed. At the end of the day, bomber and Stuka units returned from their missions, reporting that it was increasingly difficult to find “sufficient” amounts of undamaged Soviet aircraft to attack on the ground. Airfield after air­field had been overflown and found littered with scores of aircraft wrecks, but very few remained serviceable. Hence it was decided to shift the main mission of the horizontal bombers, Stukas, and Zerstorer from air-base raids to tactical support at the front—with devastating results for the Soviet ground troops.

The Soviet leadership desperatly tried to regain control of the situation. The High Command, Stavka, which had been formed on the second day of the war, instructed the new Reserve Front, com­manded by Marshal Semyon Budyonny,
to form a rear defense line from Vitebsk on the Dvina River to Kremenchug on the Dnieper River. But con­stant air raids kept inflicting terrifying losses on the Red Army units, especially at the congestion of Soviet troops and vehicles at river crossings. On Thursday, June 26, the bombers and Stukas of Luftflotte 2 were concen­trated in devastating attacks against the railroads in the sector assigned to the Reserve Front. The forces oppos­ing the German Army Group Center broke up in in­creasing disorder, and by June 26 had ceased to operate as a cohesive whole.

The remainder of the Red Frontal Aviation’s bomber force was sacrified in senseless operations during the next few days. Fearing the reprisals that could follow from any deviation from official doctrine, the Soviet air com­manders stubbornly stuck to their traditional horizontal mass-bomber attacks. Attempting to raid General Erich von Manstein’s forward Panzer columns in southeastern Latvia on June 26, a formation of SBs was completely – torn apart by the Bf 109s of 7./JG 54. Against a single loss—Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann survived a belly landing—the German fighter pilots claimed eight victories, of which Unteroffizier Karl Kempf took half.10 With this, JG 54 Grunherz had surpassed its five – hundred-victory mark.

Hav ng dealt cr ppling blows against VVS airfields ir the combat zone during the first f ve days of the war, the main attention of Luftflotte 2 was shifted against Soviet troops and I nes of communication. On Jjre 26,

1941.___ iftflotte 2 carried out no! ess than 1,072 combat sorties, mainly

against these targets. Seen from the cockpit of arothe’ aircraft of the Kette. an He 11′ is ooering its bomb run. (Photo: Galland.)

During one of the tragic aerial encounters over the central combat zone on June 26, a formation of eighty Soviet bombers was intercepted by JG 51. This cost the Soviet formation half its planes. According to Soviet sources, the DBA lost forty-three DB-3 or DB-3F bomb­ers on June 26." 207 DBAP fared worst, with fifteen planes not returning from combat missions.

During one ol the missions carried out by 207 DBAP on this day, the first “fire taran”—air-to-ground ramming— was attributed to the bomber pilol Kapitan Nikolay (iastello. At about 1030 hours, the pilot of a DB-3 hit by enemy fire directed his damaged bomber toward a col­umn of German vehicles on the Molodcchno – Rodoshcvichi road. (iiven significant coverage by Soviet propaganda, this action was to be emulated by dozens of

Soviet airmen during the war. Ironically, the postwar Soviet identification of the pilot proved to be wrong. Research in recent years has shown that while Gastello’s damaged DB-3 descended before it had reached the vehicles and crashed into the marshes between the vil­lages Matski and Shepeli, another DB-3 of the same unit dived into a column of twelve German vehicles. Local inhabitants buried the bodies of the latter bomber s crew. When Soviet authorities in 1951 uncovered the grave to build a monument over Gastello, the medallion of the air gunner from another crew—that of Kapitan Aleksandr Maslov of the same unit—was found. This disconcerncd the authorities, who had created a nationwide hero’s myth around Gastello. They decided to hush up the finding, and the bodies of Maslov’s crew were buried under Gastello’s monument, while fragments of Maslov’s DB-3 were put on display at several museums as the fragments of Gastello’s aircraft.12

According to German estimates, the Soviets lost three hundred aircraft on June 26. From that day, Soviet pres­ence in the air on the central combat zone started dimin­ishing again. For instance, the combat record of 40 BAD (including 53 and 200 BAP) shows that no operations were flown on June 26.

Panzcrgruppen 2 and 3 met in a successful pincer movement near Minsk on this fateful Thursday. Thus a large encirclement battle started unfolding in the central combat zone.

On June 27 the two Panzer groups formed a second circle around another four Soviet armies in the Minsk area. This double encirclement was made possible mainly by the crippling pressure on the Soviet troops from the air. At this point the German bombers stepped up their blows against communication lines in the Soviet rear area, creating the conditions for a fun her enlarged encircle­ment battle.

Effectively covered from Soviet air attacks by the single-engine fighters of Luftflotte 2, Panzcrgruppen 2 and 3 continued to the cast on both flanks of Army Group Center. On the right flank, Panzcrgruppe 2 had already reached the Berezina River at: Bobruysk, two hundred miles inside Soviet: territory. The Soviets made a frantic effort to halt the invaders at this place.

On the evening of June 27 the new, heavily armored Soviet Shturmovik aircraft П-2 made its combat debut against this sector, but with poor results. When the war broke out, there had been only 249 planes of this model

at hand, all manufactured at Aircraft Production Plant No. 18 Znamia Truda at Voronezh. The pilots of 4 ShAP had been shifted from obsolete R-Z planes to Il-2s only in June 1941. By the time the war broke out they had been trained only to take off and land this new aircraft. Know­ing nothing about required tactics or combat use, and not even having fired the 20mm guns or RS rockets, they were brought into action against enemy vehicle col­umns in the Bobruysk area. The first mission was carried out by three Il-2s. One of them returned to base with severe damage from antiaircraft fire. Half an hour later, a damaged SB crashed into this Ilyushin, destroying it completely.15 The next day, the Bf 109s of JG 51 experi­enced the armored shell of the 11-2 for the first time. Against three of 4 ShAP’s Il-2s that were raiding the pontoon bridges over Berezina River at Bobruysk, the fighter pilots were stunned to see their bullets and can­non shells bounce off the agile single-engine planes. The only result was one damaged 11-2, whose pilot managed to bring it home to a safe landing. During the first three days of combat, 4 ShAP registered only two Il-2s shot down by enemy fighters, but due to a lack of experience among its pilots, a further nineteen were lost to other causes, including at least eight to AAA.14 No less than twenty of the regiment’s pilots were killed or listed as missing during these three days.15

Even though it was operating on a diminishing scale, the Soviet bomber force refused to give in. Nineteen-year-old Leutnant Hans Strelow of JG 51 testifies to the stiff refusal to give in by the remaining Soviet bomber airmen:

Flying at an altitude of 1,200 feet, 1 closed in on the left bomber. I gave the rear gunner a couple of short bursts, then l shot the right engine in flames from a distance from sixty to twenty-five yards. Since the rear gun­ner had stopped firing, I flew close alongside the burning bomber. 1 saw the rear gunner raise in his little cabin.

As he caught sight of me, he shook his fist at me. Then he looked, with confusion and despair painted in his face, first ahead in the direction of the pilot’s cockpit, then at the ground,

and finally at me. The bomber was down to merely forty-five feet, giving him no choice of bailing out. His despair really captured my mind for a while. I thought: How will he come out of this? The engine is on fire, a belly landing is out of the ques­tion. To bail out would be madness. … In that moment the bomber started cutting off treetops, then the upper halves of the trees, and suddenly it lay in the woods, nothing more than a sea of flames.

Kapitan Vitaliy Gordilovskiy of 125 SBAP recalls a similar experience:

On the way to the target on June 28, my right engine was hit by antiaircraft fire. Unable to keep pace, 1 let my wingmen carry on while I lagged behind. Coming out from the target area alone, we came under attack from four Messerschmitts. My gunner opened fire. Suddenly three of the fight­ers broke off and turned away—I don’t know why; perhaps they had run out of fuel. But one remained and started hitting us. At first he made a frontal attack from the right, then he came up from below’. Following these attacks, he placed himself beside us, wingtip-to-wingtip. He was so close that 1 could see the pilot’s face. With a finger he signaled to me: Bail out! I showed him a

corresponding sign: No! Then he turned and hung on to my tail, and hit my plane once again. 1 noticed that 1 couldn’t hear anything from my gun­ner. The Messerschmitt now attacked us without meeting any resistance. His bullets slammed into the armor shield behind my back with such force that even my teeth shook. After this attack, he passed beneath us and my navigator managed to give him a burst with his machine gun pointed downward. The ‘Messer’ disappeared. 1 switched off the damaged engine and headed for the air­field. We came in directly toward the topographi­cal tower [one of a network of special high build­ings erected by the Soviets in order to facilitate mapmaking]. W’ith only one engine running, it would have been impossible to jump over it, so I switched on my damaged engine again, made a quick jump over the tower, and—plop—came down on the ground. I hit the dashboard, while my navi­gator was thrown out of his hatch. Smoke poured out of the engines, and the whole fuselage was

. ers of З ТВАР were dispatched on a fateful mission in the Bobruysk area. Only one aircraft returned.

The next day, the commander of the Soviet West­ern Front, General Armii Dmitriy Pavlov, and the mem­bers of his staff were summoned to Moscow, where they I were brought before a firing squad. Marshal Semyon j Timoshenko personally replaced Pavlov. All available I bomber units were instructed to attack Guderian’s Panzers J “to the last plane" to prevent the German armored units I from crossing the Berezina at Bobruysk. This was a sui – I ride order. On Monday, June 30, 1941, hundreds of I bombers of various types—SBs, DB-3s, Il-2s, Su-2s, and E TB-3s—were launched against the bridge at Bobruysk.

Coming in at around about sixty five hundred feet, I [ the Soviet bombers were met by a savage fire barrier I from the Luftwaffe’s 10th Flakregiment (AAA regiment), ]. which inevitably tore the attack formations apart. Then came the Bf 109s of Oberstleutnant Werner Molders’s j I JG 51, which had been concentrated for the defense of I this strategic key point. Within hours, 113 Soviet air – craft were shot out of the air by JG 51. All of the sixty 1 German fighter pilots participating in the air battle over J, Bobruysk scored successes. Oberstleutnant Werner j – Molders, Hauptmann Hermann-Friedrich Joppien, and і Leutnant Heinz Bar each scored five victories on this j j day, with Molders reaching his eighty-second and thus і surpassed Manfred von Richthofen’s World W’ar l top Ж score of eighty. Heinz Bar scored his twentieth victory. ■ With this, the total victory score of JG 51, the most suc-

I s cessful Jagdgeschwader at that time, surpassed the one-

II thousand mark.

The most deplorable contribution to this German j I fighter success had been given by З ТВАР. Its sluggish, : four – engine TB-3s flew doggedly into the flocks of Bf 109s. і і After two days of combat З ТВАР had lost eleven TB-3s, of which seven were shot down by German fighters.17

In the northern combat zone a similar air battle took « place over the Daugava bridges at Daugavpils in south­eastern Latvia on the same day. General von Manstein’s 1 advanced armored forces of Army Group North had І managed to establish a bridgehead at this point, and metre than a hundred SBs and DB-3s from 1 MTAP, 57 BAP, and 73 BAP of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet’s 8 BAB

were dispatched to destroy the river crossings. Coming in without escort at altitudes of up to 7,000 feet; one bomber formation after another was annihilated by the Bf 109s of JG 54 Griinherz. The first attack was directed against the airfields of 1L and Ill./JG 54 near Daugavpils. Hauptmann Dietrich Hrabak, Gruppenkommandeur in II./JG 54, reported: “At dawn they attempted to raid our base, but fortunately the bombs fell by the side of the airfield without inflicting any damage. The alert Schwarm shot down six of them right above the field. The soldiers of both Gruppen lay flat on the ground during the attack. Hauptmann [Arnold] Lignitz saw one bomber go down right in front of his tent.”18

Shortly after noon, the commander of 8 BAB dis­patched the largest formation, forty SBs and DB-3s. Once again, they were intercepted by the Grtinherz fighters. Without any fighter escort, the naval bomber crews were caught in a hopeless combat, but they fought back des­perately. The DB-3 piloted by Mladshiy Leytenant Petr lgashov of 1 MTAP was charged by four Bf 109s coming in from two directions. After two attacks the bomber was severely damaged and three Bf 109s closed in to deal the coup de grace. In that moment one of the fight­ers received the full brunt of the nose and aft gunners’ combined fire. The Bf 109 violently burst into flames and immediately went down. In spite of heavy battle damage to his airplane, Mladshiy Leytenant lgashov decided to carry on. Seconds later, four other Bf 109s moved to finish this stubborn plane. The bomber pilot realized that he had no chance of escaping and made a swift decision. Guiding his crippled twin-engine plane against the approaching enemy formation, he managed to hit the closest Bf 109 with the wing of his DB-3. Then the bomber rolled on its back and crashed right into a concentration of vehicles on the main road below.

From the German point of view, Major Hannes Trautloft, the German Geschwaderkommodore, wrote:

As we reach the enemy aircraft, a wild air combat unfolds. Everywhere you can see Russian bombers go down like comets. The sky is filled with burn­ing planes. We take a terrible toll among them. 1 attack a single Russian, apparently separated from his formation by antiaircraft fire. A long burst sets him on fire and one crew member bails out. The burning aircraft hits the ground in a wood, ten kilometers to the north of our airfield, but I’m already after the next. I fire once, twice, and flames envelop his left engine and his undercarriage opens.

He goes into a steep dive and approaches a small lake. The bomber hits the surface, bounces across

the water like a skimmed stone, is flung over the shore, and finally it crashes in the woods in a huge cascade of fire.

To the left I can see another plane being shot down, in front of me yet another. It is a horrific picture. Suddenly an Me 109 falls on its back and plunges to the earth at high speed. Apparently the pilot had been mortally wounded in the air.

As we return to base, almost every aircraft is rocking victory signs with its wings….

Four of our pilots are missing. Oberleutnant [Hubert] Mutherich, Leutnant [Peter] von Malapert, Oberfeldwebel [Max] Stotz, and Obcrfcldwebel [Georg] Kiening. Two Me 109s were observed going down. What may have become of the other two? Oberleutnant Mutherich was last heard on the radio, reporting: “I’m hit, have to belly.” Hopefully he will return.19

The triumphant Grtinherz fighters reported a total of sixty-five Soviet bombers shot down during the day, four of them by Oberleutnant Hans-Ekkehard Bob. 8 BAB recorded forty-three losses against claims by the gunners of fifteen German fighters destroyed.20

Apart from Mladshiy Ley-tenant Petr lgashov, two other Soviet bombers carried out fire tarans during the raids against the Daugava crossings on June 30—the SBs piloted by Leytenant Aleksey Glukhov and Leytenant Petr Ponomaryov, both from 73 BAP. Total losses regis­tered by JG 54 were five Bf 109s shot down. Two pilots, Leutnant Heinrich Wachsel of 9./JG 54 and Oberfeldwebel Georg Kiening of II./JG 54 never returned. A few pontoon bridges were hit and destroyed, but the main river crossings remained intact.

The German armor could roll eastward across the Berezina and to the northeast across the Daugava with­out interruption. Meanwhile, the encircled Soviet armies in the central combat zone—numbering half a million soldiers—succumbed. In the air over the wide encircled areas, the Luftwaffe adopted a “free hunting” tactic. Divided into small groups of three to six aircraft on con­stant patrol, hundreds of aircraft from Luftflotte 2 attacked anything that moved within the encircled area. The slow-flying Hs 123 biplanes of 10.(S)/LG 2 were particularly successful during these missions. The result was a rapid breakdown of supplies and organiza­tion in the Bialystok-Minsk areas. All resistance was broken during the first days of July. More than three hundred thousand Soviet soldiers ended up in German confinement.

The Germans claimed to have shot down more than 1,000 Soviet planes between June 23 and June 30, with a further 1,700 destroyed on the ground. Soviet sources admit the loss of 1,669 aircraft in the air from June 22 to June 30,1941.2I By July 1, VVS-Western Front could muster no more than 374 bombers and 124 fighter aircraft. To a large extent, the terrifying losses in men and materiel in the Soviet bomber units can be ascribed to the conservative thinking that dominated Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Major Hannes Trautlofl was one of the most able and popular Luftwaffe unit commanders of the war. With experience as a fighter pilot during the Spanish Civil War, as well as over Poland and France. Trautloft was put in charge of JG 54 Griinherz in 1940. He would lead this Jagdgeschwader for almost three years and documented this entire period in a highly detailed diary, which unfortunately remains unpublished. Trautloft was credited with a total of fifty-seven aerial victories and was awarded with the Knight’s Cross. He died on January 12,1996. (Photo: Trautloft.)

Historian Alexander Boyd noted: “Shock and confu­sion combined with disrupted communications and the paralyzing reluctance of local commanders to take any kind of independent action aided the Luftwaffe greatly. There was no tradition of personal initiative at junior command levels to cope with this kind of crisis, and the most obvious and elementary measures were often neglected by officers who did not know or did not dare to act independently. As late as 9 July, when the Luftwaffe had already given ample proof of its ferocity and effec­tiveness, divisional and regimental air commanders had to be instructed from Moscow to base no more than nine to a dozen aircraft on any one airfield, to disperse and conceal aircraft immediately after they landed, to pro­vide trenches for shelter during air raids, and to prohibit personnel and vehicles from crossing the open airfield or congregating on it. One legacy of the past four years was that officers were more afraid of the NKVD than of the Germans.”22

Only under the brutal lashes of the German war machine were the shackles eventually broken, and the well-known Russian ability to improvise and adapt to new situations was able to spread to the armed forces.

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.