Category Air War on the Eastern Front

t the beginning of September 1941, the spearheads of the German Army Group North had reached the outer defense perimeter of Leningrad. These forti­fications became constant targets for Stukas and bomb­ers conducting low-level attacks. To the east of Leningrad, at Schlusselburg, on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga, the German Sixteenth Army managed to cut off Leningrad’s last land connection with the rest of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the Bf 110 Zerstorer of ZG 26 contin­ued their air-base attacks to suppress the reviving Soviet air activity. Early on September 5, the detachment from 13IAP/KBF stationed at Nizino, southeast of Leningrad, had just received orders to dispatch an attack against enemy troops at the Volosovo railway station, when the Zerstorem of ZG 26 struck the airfield once again. Petr

Brinko, newly promoted to Kapitan, and his wingman managed to take off before the bombs started to fall. The two 1-16s went after what appeared to be the German leader, but they were immediately attacked by four other Bf 110s. Turning against them, Brinko’s wingman man­aged to shoot down one of the Bf 110s.

At this point more Soviet fighters got airborne. Kapitan Brinko fired at several Bf 110s but failed to score any decisive hits. Having finally run out of ammu­nition, he decided to taran one of the enemy aircraft. With a sharp turn, he placed himself on the tail of a Bf 110, pushed the throttle forward, and the propeller of the 1-16 chewed into the twin tail of the Zerstorer. In the next moment, the Bf 110 fell away. Brinko’s own fighter was still flying, but the engine started to shake rather disquietingly, so he switched it off and made a relatively

safe landing at Nizino. This was Brinko’s twelfth victory. ZG 26 registered three Bf 110s shot down this day.1

The next day, September 6, II./JG 52 lost one of its most successful fighter aces, the Staffelkapitan of 5./JG 52, Oberleutnant August Wilhelm Schumann, credited with a total of thirty victories. It is possible that Schumann was shot down by the MiG-3 pilot Mladshiy Leytenant Afanasiy Okhvat of 159 1AP, who followed a Bf 109 that he had shot down too low in a dive from which he could not recover. Okhvat’s MiG-3 crashed and the pilot was killed.

On the same day, Oberleutnant Johannes Steinhoff, commanding 4./JG 52, brought down two Soviet air­craft. Steinhoff had been awarded the Gruppe’s first Knight’s Cross a week earlier, when his victory score stood at thirty-five.

On September 8, Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann of IV./JG 51 scored his fifty-fourth and fifty-fifth victo­ries against two SBs.2 These were Hoffmann’s last victories on the Leningrad front, for his unit was returned to the central combat zone.

On the night of September 8-9, Luftflotte 1 launched its first major raid against Leningrad in accordance with Hitler’s instruction to “level Leningrad to the ground.” At 1855 hours, twenty-seven Ju 88s started dropping 6,327 incendiary bombs, which caused 183 individual fires, of which the largest were in the Badayevo warehouses, in which Leningrad’s entire sugar reserve of 2,500 tons was set ablaze.

A second raid followed, at 2235 hours.

These raids were the first of several hun­dred to be mounted against Leningrad.

Even if the bomber forces available were considerably smaller than those engaged against London the previous year, the Germans made a great effort to destroy Lenin’s city from the air. The German historian Karl Gundelach, who flew an He 111 in KG 4 during the war, wrote:

“Frequently, the crews are launched twice a night against Leningrad.”3

Most Luftwaffe raids against Leningrad were limited to the hours of darkness. This was mainly the combined result of the heavy antiaircraft concen­
tration in the area and new reinforcements brought in to the VVS during September, including seven fighter avia­tion regiments to bolster 7 IAK.

The most successful Soviet fighter unit over Leningrad during this stage of the war was 13 ІАР/ KBF, which still flew 1-16s. Following the death of Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko in July, 13 LAP’s Kapitan Petr Brinko had emerged as the top ace on the Soviet side.

The air combat over and in the vicinity of Leningrad was some of the harshest during the war on the Eastern Front in 1941, claiming the lives of several of the most skillful airmen on both sides. On September 9 the Staffelkapitan of 5./JG 54, Oberleutnant Hubert Miitherich, was shot down and killed near Leningrad. With forty-three victories to his credit, including thirty – three Soviet aircraft, “Hubs” Miitherich was the most successful Staffelkapitan of JG 54 at that time. On the Soviet side, Starshiy Leytenant Mikhail Bagryantsev, one of the most promising young pilots in 5 ІАР/KBF, was killed in combat when his LaGG-3 was bounced from above by a Bf 109 Rotte. During another encounter that day, 191 LAP’s Mladshiy Leytenant Yegor Novikov was reported to have driven off two German fighters that attempted to machine-gun a Soviet fighter pilot hanging in his parachute harness.

On September 9 and 10, the units of Luftflotte 1 carried out more than eight hundred sorties, mainly against the Leningrad defense lines. On the tenth, four 1-16 pilots from 191 1AP engaged a large formation of Ju 87s and Bf 109s, claiming six victories without loss. Counted among the downed Stuka airmen was Gefreiter Erich Peter, a newcomer in 3./StG 2 Immel – mann, who had achieved considerable success during his first month of first-line service. Peter survived but was seriously injured. On the Soviet side, another air com­bat on September 10 cost the life of one of the most skillful VVS aces in this area, Starshiy Leytenant Aleksey Storozhakov of 154 1AP, who had been cred-

Starshiy Leytenant Aleksey Storozhakov, an ace in 154 IAP with eight personal and three shared victories, was among several Soviet airmen killed in combat on the Leningrad sector on September 10,1941. With the onset of the German offensive against Leningrad, the air war in this combat zone increased in intensity, resulting in a heavy bloodletting in the WS units. One single fighter Eskadrilya, the mainly LaGG-3-equipped 2./5 IAP-KBF, registered eleven fighters shot down and eight pilots killed, missing, or injured during the sixteen-day period from September 8 to September 23,1941. (Photo: Novikov.)

Stefan Litjens was one of the most experienced veteran pilots in ll./JG 53 Рік As in 1941. He was shot down on September 11,1941. He survived but lost his right eye, which did not deter him from returning to first-line service a year later. After gaining another fourteen victories in four months during his second combat tour, Litjens was shot down again, and sustained an injury to his left eye, which forced him to withdraw from first-line service. (Photo: Salomonson.)

The main attack by the German Army commenced on September 11 with ground troops advancing into the breaches created by Luftflotte 1 bombers undertaking 478 sorties. Soviet pilots were brought into constant action from dawn to dusk. The LaGG-3 pilots of 5 LAP/ KBF carried out ten to fourteen combat sorties each on September 10 and 11.

The combined efforts of both air forces on Septem­ber 11 resulted in costly air combat, with JG 54 claiming

seventeen Soviet aircraft shot down, against three losses.4 L1I./JG 27 alone recorded nine victories, including four by Oberfeldwebel Franz Blazytko. But these successes could not outweigh the loss of one of the most outstanding pilots of this Gruppe, Leutnant Hans Richter. Having achieved his twenty-second kill, Richter was attacked from behind by an 1-16. His comrades heard his cry over the radio:

“My engine is hit! I’ll try to force-land!”

The crippled Messerschmitt went down, caught some treetops, and immediately burst into flames. Hans Richter must have died instantly. Oberfeldwebel Stefan Litjens, an ace in II./JG 53 with twenty – four victories, was shot down and badly wounded by another 1-16 on the same day. His injuries cost this daring pilot his right eye. Five 1-16 pilots of 191 IAP/7 IAK claimed a major success during a combat with Ju 87s south of Leningrad, reporting nine Stukas shot down, including two each by Mladshiy Leytenants Yegor Novikov, Ivan Grachyov, and Vladimir Plavskiy, and one by Leytenant Nikolay Kuznetsov.3 Only one Ju 87 loss can be found in the Luftwaffe records.

To the south on this busy September 11, 7./JG 54 clashed with a formation of MiG-3s, possibly from Mayor Konstantin Gruzdyev’s crack 402 1AP, in the vicinity of Staraya Russa. Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann, who had been awarded with the Knight’s Cross for his twenty – nine victories one week earlier, claimed two Soviet planes, while a Soviet fighter pilot shot down Ostermann’s friend, Leutnant Peter von Malapert. It took von Malapert’s captors less than twenty-four hours to persuade the young Leutnant to join their side. Shortly afterward, aircraft from the DBA dropped hundreds of leaflets over JG 54’s base with a personal appeal from Leutnant von Malapert to surrender.6

During another encounter on September 11, Kapitan Petr Brinko, of 13 1AP/KBF, claimed an Hs 126 recon­naissance airplane, his fourteenth. The next day, Brinko bagged a Ju 88. Two days later, Brinko set out against a German observation balloon, from which artillery was being directed. Brinko hit the balloon’s basket with a salvo of RS rocket projectiles, but his Ishak suddenly
received a direct antiaircraft hit and crashed into a power line, killing the pilot. Petr Brinko was the highest-scoring Soviet ace at the time of his death.

At this point, multiple demands along the entire front line placed a heavy strain on all Luftwaffe units. Having breached the first Soviet defense line around Leningrad, the Ju 87s of StG 2 Immelmann were shifted to the Novgorod area, north of Lake Ilmen, where the North­western Front launched repeated diversionary attacks. On September 14, Hauptmann Emst-Siegfried Steen, the commander of IlL/StG 2, scored a direct hit on the large railway bridge over the Volkhov River at Novgorod, the main Soviet supply line in this sector.

The next day, the Stukas were rushed to the north again, because air reconnaissance had spotted three large supply ships bound for Leningrad on Lake Ladoga. Each vessel carried a thousand tons of wheat. StG 2 appeared before the grain had been unloaded and sank two of the ships.

On September 16, StG 2 was sent out over the Gulf of Finland, where heavy Soviet warships were bombard­ing the German troops outside Leningrad. As he led thirty Ju 87s, Hauptmann Steen spotted the battleship Marat off Leningrad. He immediately radioed an attack order

and commenced diving. The crew of the Marat was caught totally unaware. Before the antiaircraft guns could open fire, a 500-kilogram bomb struck the ship. The Marat steamed into the naval fortress island of Kronstadt to be repaired. Meantime, intercepting Soviet fighters claimed to have shot down four Ju 87s and one Bf 109 escort. StG 2 and JG 54 each registered one loss.

Responding to calls from the ground troops exposed to intensified Soviet air raids, especially the German spear­head and supply columns on the Leningrad-Luga high­way south of Krasnogvardeisk, Major Johanns Trautloft decided to shift his JG 54 from escort missions to fighter sweeps over the Leningrad combat zone on September 17. The evening entry’ in the combat diary of 7./JG 54 notes: “A really successful day.”7 One pilot of this Staffel, Feldwebel Karl Kempf, brought home five victories, his nineteenth through twenty-third. Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann and Unteroffizier Johann Halfmann claimed another two MiG-3s. That day, Soviet ace Mladsbiy Leytenant Yegor Novikov, of 191IAP/7 IAK, was killed in action over the Krasnoye Selo area. He possibly fell prey to Ostermann or Halfmann.

Friday, September 19, was one of the worst days experienced by the inhabitants of Leningrad. The Luftwaffe launched at least six raids against the city it­self, between 0814 and 2300 hours. Soviet fighters and antiaircraft artillery claimed seventeen German bombers shot down, whereas the Kampfgeschwader of Fliegerkorps I recorded two Ju 88s lost, StG 2 lost three Ju 87s, and ZG 26 lost a Bf 110.s On the ground, 442 people were killed or injured when a hospital was hit by two bombs. Two days later, another German bombing raid hit the destroyer Steregushchiy in Kronstadt.

Meanwhile, the declining number of serviceable Ger­man fighters and the increasing demands from the Stukas and Ju 88s for escorts to counter the stiffening Soviet fighter resistance left the VVS in control of the skies over the Leningrad battlefield.

On September 22 Major Trautloft visited the army front lines. Suddenly a soldier next to the JG 54 com­mander cried: “Achtung! Tiefflieger at ten o’clock! Take cover!” Trautloft and the artillery officers dived for the ground as two sections of 1-16 fighters came roaring in at treetop level, spraying the German trenches with ma­chine-gun bullets. Unhurt but covered with mud, the shocked German fighter commander spontanously exclaimed: “Where in hell are our fighters?”9 Just so!

The experience of weathering the plight of the German soldier on the Eastern Front had caused Trautloft him­self to express one of the most common questions in the German language on the Eastern Front during World War 11.

Not least due to the relentless VVS strafing attacks, the Red Army managed to force Hitler to abandon his plans to capture Leningrad. General Erich von Manstein, one of the ablest German Army commanders, who had led LYT Panzer Corps through the Baltic states, was posted to the south to assume command of the German Elev­enth Army for the assault on the Crimea. Panzergruppe 4 and Fliegerkorps VIII were transferred from the Leningrad front to the central combat zone, where they were intended to participate in the upcoming offensive against Moscow’.

Another major cause for the German setback was the bombardment from the warships of KBF based in Kronstadt. To neutralize this threat once and for all, StG 2 Immelmann remained in the northern combat zone until the end of September.

Loaded with 1,000-kilogram armor-piercing bombs, StG 2 took off for Kronstadt at 0845 on September 23. Intense antiaircraft fire, “virtually blackening the entire sky,” according to Oberleutnant Hans-Ulrich Rudcl of IlI./StG 2, met the dive-bombers and their escorts as they approached at 15,000 feet flight altitude. While attacking the cruiser Kirov, Hauptmann Steen’s Ju 87 received a direct hit and crashed into the water just beside the ship. Nevertheless, the remaining Stuka pilots defied all opposition and pressed home their attack. Oberleutnant Lothar Lau, the StG 2 technical officer, dove straight against the battleship Marat and managed to place his bomb directly on the deck, causing a huge fire. Another bomb caused the ammunition of the 30.5cm forward turrets to explode, with the result that the entire forecastle was blown off the great ship. Next, Oberleutnant Hans-Ulrich Rudel scored a direct hit, caus­ing an enormous explosion that put the 23,600-ton battle­ship out of action for several months. And Leutnant Egbert Jaekel scored a direct hit on the flotilla leader Minsk, causing it to sink. Apart from this, the destroyer Steregushchiy and submarine M-74 were sunk, while other bomb hits damaged the battleship Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiya and the destroyers Silnyy and Grozyashchiy.

As they turned away from the antiaircraft zone after the raid, the German planes were intercepted by large

formations of Soviet fighters. In the ensuing dogfight, the Soviet pilots claimed ten enemy aircraft shot down, " but 13 OIAE/KBF lost two pilots killed and one wounded. Soviet antiaircraft batteries claimed another five German planes destroyed, but German loss statistics note that six Luftflotte I aircraft were shot down on September 23, 1941—two Ju 87s, two Ju 88s, one Bf 109, and one Bf 110. On the other hand, JG 54 reported seventeen victories this day.

The Battle of Leningrad had reached a decisive point, requiring the last resources of both sides. On September 24, Leytcnant Vasiliy (iolubev and Mladshiv Leytenant Dmitriy Tatarcnko, the only pilots remaining of the group of six from 1 З OIAE that had been stationed on Komendantskiy Airfield in Leningrad eight days earlier, each carried out eight sorties. Led by Starshiy Leytcnant Aleksandr Avdcyev. a formation ol fighter-bombers from 153 1AP fell upon an enemy motorized column on the eastern outskirts of Leningrad and shot up more than ten vehicles.

With the Germans making only slight progress out­side Leningrad, the main effort of the VVS was shifted to the area south of bike Ilmen, where the Northwest­ern Front was tied up in a desperate fight to defend the main supply route from Moscow. On September 24 at least forty-one Soviet aerial attacks were mounted against the 8th Panzer Division, forcing it: to retreat.

Countering these air at tacks, 11L/JG 27 suffered yet
another heavy loss on September 25: “Ratas and ground-attack aircraft were attacking,” wrote Hans Ring and Werner Girbig in the chronicle of JG 27. “The Gruppe is airborne to meet the enemy. As the Messerschmitts land following this combat, Oberfeldwebel | Franz 1 Blazytko is missing. Later, it was found out that this outstanding airman and victor in twenty-nine aerial combats had fallen into Russian captivity.”11 The Soviet fighter pilot Vasiliy Golubev describes what most likely was Franz Blazytko’s last fight. On September 25, Leytcnant Mikhail Klimenko led two 11-2 Shturmoviks (the only aircraft remaining of an entire ShAP) on a ground-attack mission in the Ivanovo area. Fighter protection w as pro­vided by the “last two” Ishaks, which w’ere piloted by Leytenant Vasiliy Golubev and Mladshiv Leytenant Dmitriy Tatarenko, of 13 OIAE/ KBF. The Shturmoviks flew – at treelop level, with the I – 16s positioned roughly a thousand feet above them as top cover. Suddenly four Bf 109s fell upon them.

The German fighters split into Rotten, one attacking the fighter cover and the other going after Klimenko’s Ilyushins. Mladshiy Leytenant: Tatarcnko was presented with an easy target as the latter Bf 109s came diving just beneath him. The first burst from his guns was a direct hit. The leading Bf 109 never pulled out of its final dive and hit the ground.

Having seen their leader shot down, the three remaining Messerschmitts left the Il-2s and turned against the I-16s. A sudden AAA barrage saved Tatarenko and Golubev. Meanwhile, the Shturmoviks were able to reach the target area and started attacking. This was enough to persuade t he German fighter pilots to disengage and leave the scene as fast as they could. The antiaircraft guns, however, were not altogether a blessing to the Soviets. Leytcnant Klimenko’s 11-2 received a near-miss and later belly-landed in friendly territory’.12

While the Soviets strengthened the defenses in the northern combat zone day by day, the return of Fliegerkorps VIII to Luftflotte 2 considerably weakened the striking capacity of the Luftwaffe in the northern combat zone. The last unit scheduled to leave the Leningrad area was StG 2, u’hich in the meantime con­tinued to appear daily over Kronstadt from September

25 to September 28. Hauptmann Ernst Kupfer, of I./StG 2, displayed an almost fanatical determination to destroy the Soviet naval vessels during these final raids. After Kupfer scored a hit on a cruiser on September 28, his Ju 87 was attacked by Soviet fighters. His airplane was badly shot up and he made a forced landing at the fighter airfield at Krasnogvardeisk. A few hours later,

Kupfer returned to Kronstadt in another Ju 87. This time, his aircraft was hit by AAA and he had to make a second forced landing. On his third mission against the same target that day, Kupfer’s Stuka received a direct hit in the engine. The dive-bomber crashed in a forest, and the pilot and radio operator were seri­ously injured. Two months later, Ernst Kupfer was awarded the Knight’s Cross, and following eight surgical operations, the stubborn Stuka pilot returned to front-line service and flew a total of six hundred dive-bomber missions before he was finally killed in a flying accident. Fol­lowing the shift of II./JG 53 from Luftflotte 1 to Luftflotte 2, the entire responsibility for fighter cover in the northern combat zone fell to Major Johannes Trautloft’s JG 54 Grunhcrz.

Thus the last daylight bombing raid against Leningrad was carried out on September 29. During a combat between I-153s and I1I./JG 54 over Leningrad on September 30, Major Trautloft lost one of his most able Gruppenkommandeure,

Hauptmann Arnold Lignitz, of I1I./JG 54, victor in twenty-five engagements. It is believed that an RS-82 rocket fired by an 1-153 hit Lignitz’s Bf 109. Lignitz bailed out and was taken pris­oner, but he did not survive his captivity; he became one of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the German hun­ger blockade against Leningrad during the coming winter.

According to Hans-Ekkehard Bob, who flew as an Oberleutnant with JG 54 in 1941, combat morale remained “sky high” among the Griinhcrz pilots. On the first day of October, Oberleutnant Wolfgang Spate, the Staffelkapitan of 5./JG 54, knocked down two

Philipp and Spate stood at the peak, closely followed by Leutnant Josef Pohs, who had forty-three, and Hauptmann Franz Eckerle, Oberleutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann, and Oberleutnant Hans-Ekkehard Bob, each with thirty-seven.

Stubborn air combat over Leningrad continued daily for the next two and a half years. From July to Septem­ber 1941, the Soviet fighter pilots assigned to the defense of Leningrad were credited with the destruction of 333 German aircraft.

The airmen of General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov’s WS-Northwestern Zone had put up an impressive dis­play while almost being bled white. During the first stage of the war there were more self-sacrificing cases of taran in this area than in any other sector. According to VVS statistics, 2,692 Soviet aircraft had been lost in the North­western Zone by September 30, 1941.

With a growing emphasis placed on the defense of other sectors, the Stavka had allocated only limited replacements to the air units in the North­western Zone. In spite of numerous losses, WS-North western Front had received only 450 replacement aircraft by the end of September, including approximately 100 Il-2s and 90 LaGG-3s. Having regis­tered a total of 1,283 combat losses (in­cluding 749 in the air and with an addi­tional 211 aircraft receiving serious battle damage by September 30), WS-North – western Front was reduced to the equiva­lent of only slightly more than a Diviziya, mustering a mere 191 aircraft on Sep tember 22, 1941.” In 7 1AK/PVO, the number of pilots went down from 445 on July 1 to only 88 on October I. M Con­trary to the buildup taking place in the central combat zone, there were obvious signs of withering combat morale among the Soviet airmen in the Leningrad area during the fall of 1941. Due to accumu­lated losses during three months of unre­mitting combat activity, and with fight­ing spirit diminishing among the surviv­ing airmen, no fewer than eleven avia­tion regiments of W’S-Leningrad Front had to be with­drawn from combat for rest and refitting during Septem­ber. Two complete Aviadivizii, 2 BAD and 41 BAD, were virtually annihilated by the end of the month.

n late September 1941, the situation looked grim for the Soviet Union. Most of the Red Army had van­ished from the Earth. Millions of soldiers had been lost, 2.5 million of them ending up in German prison camps, where hundreds of thousands would perish dur­ing the coming months. According to German sources, the Red Army had lost 19,000 tanks (of which 8,000 had been captured by the Germans) and 30,000 artillery pieces (of which 11,000 had fallen into enemy hands). (These figures are largely supported by official Soviet records, according to which the Red Army lost 20,500 tanks and an astonishing 101,000 artillery pieces and mortars.) By September 30, Luftwaffe claims had mounted to 14,500 Soviet aircraft destroyed, of which approximately 5,000 had been shot down in aerial com­bat. At this point Hitler launched what his Soviet coun­terpart had feared most since July: the final major offen­sive against Moscow.

Before opening the powerful offensive against Mos­cow on September 30, 1941, the German Army Group Center had been considerably strengthened, the bulk of tank units on the Eastern Front having been hastily trans­ferred to its command. Luftflotte 2, back at full nominal strength with the return of Fliegerkorps VTI1 from the Leningrad sector and reinforced by units from Luftflotte 4, was tasked to provide the ground-assault forces with air support. The operation was given the illustrative code name Typhoon (Taifun).

Operation Typhoon was planned to take place in two stages. During the opening stage, Panzergruppcn (soon to be renamed Panzer armies) 3 and 4, covered by the infantry of the Fourth and Ninth armies, were placed

on the highway to Moscow to attack to the north and south of Smolensk, aim­ing at the city of Vyazma, in the hope of surrounding the entire Soviet Western Front. At the same time, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 was to strike from the Konotop-Romny sector, in the south, and advance in a northeast­erly direction. The aim of this operation was to envelop General-Leytenant Andrey Yeremenko’s Bryansk Front, which had been severely crippled by Guderian’s troops in the Battle of Kiev.

Following the planned annihilation of the Western and Bryansk fronts,, the second stage of Operation Typhoon was to be aimed at the direct capture of Mos­cow. The ancient city’ was not only the Soviet capital, it was also he most impor­tant Soviet communications hub. The Germans assumed that the seizure of Moscow would deal a death blow to Soviet morale and ability to organize resistance and from which the USSR would not be able to recover.

Severely handicapping the Germans were time and resources. The unexpectedly prolonged and costly battles in the Ukraine, the Baltics, and White Russia (Belorus) had placed the attackers in a most difficult situation. The Wehrmacht had suffered half a million casualties between June 22 and the end of September.

A total of 1,603 German aircraft had been destroyed, and a further 1,028 had been damaged on the Eastern Front between June 22 and September 27. Indeed, the Luftwaffe’s losses during the three first months of Operation Barbarossa were higher than during the Battle of Britain, where it sustained 1,385 combat losses from July to October 1940.15 Recently, a number of Luftwaffe units had been pulled out of action due to the severe losses. Among them were the two Zerstorergruppen of ZG 26 and the Bf 110-equipped SKG 210. These units had achieved impressive results: ZG 26 claimed to have destroyed about 1,000 Soviet aircraft in the air and on the ground, plus 300 vehicles and 250 tanks; and SKG 210 was credited with the destruction of 519 Soviet air­craft, 1,700 vehicles, and 83 tanks. But their own losses rendered these Gruppen unbattleworthy after three months of combat. The loss of the Bf 110 units would be detrimental to the close-support missions of the Luftwaffe.

Even though Luftflotte 2 had been reinforced by Stab, II., and IH./JG 3, plus a fresh Jagdgruppe (l./JG 52) brought in from the western Europe, the replacements did not make good the accumulated losses. At the open­ing of Operation Typhoon, the strength of Luftflotte 2 had dropped from 1,200 aircraft in June 1941 to 549, of which no more than 158 were bombers.

The situation was even worse on the Soviet side. As Operation Typhoon was about to commence, only 800,000 soldiers and 770 tanks stood at the disposal of the Soviet Western, Reserve, and Bryansk fronts, while the Germans attacked with 1.5 million soldiers and 1,100 tanks. The only—and not unimportant-advantage held by the defenders was the time they had bought. Opera­tion Typhoon was opened just ahead of the notorious Russian fall, with its heavy rainfall, which would make most roads almost impassable, thus creating a terrible obstacle to any major military operation. The Germans were fully aware of this and hence rushed the commence­ment of Typhoon, thus providing the forces allocated to it with too little preparatory time.

The offensive was initiated by heavy Stuka and bomber attacks against Red Army installations. Concen­trated tank spearheads roared through the thin defense lines at full speed, advancing on dry roads in sunny weather. This was Blitzkrieg at its worst. Wherever any serious resistance was made, Stukas swarmed from the skies. The entire Soviet defense collapsed during the first
forty-eight hours. During the first day, Generaloberst Guderian’s Panzergruppe 2 advanced fifty miles south of the city of Bryansk.

The Soviet commanders called in all the air support available. The air was the only field on which the Soviets could compare numerically to the Germans. Five days prior to the offensive, the commander of the Western Front, General-Polkovnik Ivan Konev, had desperately asked the Stavka for reinforcements, because all that remained of the VVS in this sector following the intense commitment of his air force during the battle of Yelnya were 373 planes. His badly mauled air units immediately were backed up by five DBA Divizii and several aviation regiments from the Moscow Military District, detached from the 6 ІАК/PV’O and special GKO reserve air groups. By this time the GKO had formed half a dozen reserve air groups, each consisting of four to six aviation regiments, directly subordinate to the Stavka. Thus, on October 1, the number of VVS combat aircraft opposing Army Group Center had been brought up to 863 (578 bombers and 285 fighters), of which 301 bombers and 201 fighters were serviceable.16

During these desperate days, the VVS provided its enemy with a series of unpleasant surprises, including what would become a benchmark of the Eastern Front, the flying night intruders: “From October 1, special night – bomber regiments equipped with obsolete machines were formed in accordance with GKO instructions. Of the first night-bomber regiments planned and prepared for operations in October and November, seventy-one were equipped with the fragile U-2 biplanes, thirty-two with R-5 and R-Z light-bomber biplanes, and five with SB bomb­ers. Eventually the U-2 (Po-2) was to become the stan­dard workhorse of the night-bomber regiments, with pilots making their way individually to the designated target area at heights of between 400 and 800 meters with engine throttles back to shower grenades or small bombs on any light or sign of activity.”1′

The efficiency of these nocturnal intruding U-2s— nicknamed "sewing machines” due to their characteristic engine sound—was proven not only by the diversion of Luftwaffe fighters to night operations but also by the fact that the Germans later plagiarized this tactic on the Eastern Front, forming the Nachtschlachtgruppen,

“flying museums” equipped with obsolete aircraft such as Fw 58s, Ar 66s, He 45s, and He 46s.

In daylight, the Soviet aircraft launched formations of three to six aircraft in incessant low-level attacks against the Panzer spearheads. Already, after the first day of the offensive, the German fighter bases had been left too far behind the forwardmost Panzer spearheads. This was one of the Blitzkrieg dilemmas: To sever the enemy’s retro­grade supply lines, the tank columns had to rush far ahead of the infantry, leaving large numbers of Red Army units behind in a far-from-cleansed area.

The VVS was quick to exploit this situation, striking at the advancing tank formations at places where there were no German fighters present and making a quick escape before the Bf 109s appeared. Flying in at altitudes of 75 to 150 feet, these aircraft climbed from 300 to 600 feet shortly before arriving at their target, and then car­ried out swift diving attacks.

The new Soviet twin-engine Pe-2 bomber; its heavy fighter version, the Pe-3; and the 11-2 Shturmovik began appearing in large numbers over the front area for the first time. In the Pe-2, the Soviets possessed a modern bomber quite comparable to the best German types. Josef Stalin once stated that “the 11-2 is as essential to the Red Army as air and bread.”

One of the first successful air strikes by U-2s on the Moscow front was carried out by 74 ShAP when four of its pilots surprised a motorized column on the road from Orel to Mtsensk, and destroyed fifteen armored vehicles and three gasoline trucks in a low-level bombing pass. As a result of incidents such as this, the Second Panzer Army, having reached Orel on October 3, filed sore complaints with the Luftwaffe: “Own fighter escort lacking due to too large distance.”18

The 11-2 Shturmovik also gave the Soviet ground – attack pilots a completely different chance in air combat. Unteroffizier Walter Todt of 1./JG 52 describes the 11-2’s ability to withstand even heavy cannon fire: “Dur­ing a return flight from the front area, Lcutnant [Karl] Rung and I came across a lone 11-2. We attacked and the Ivan dived in the direction of Moscow. He was too low to permit us to attack him from below’, where we could have hit his Achilles heel, the radiator. We fired from both sides, aiming at the tailfin, which flew apart. But the 11-2 kept flying! Suddenly, light antiaircraft fire was thrown up against us, and we had to disengage at tree – top level. These birds were a most difficult target. W’hen you attacked them from behind, the shells simply bounced off their springy plywood fuselage. And the pilot was seated in an armored tub!”19

As the Soviet lines of communication broke down following the rapid advance of the Panzer units deep into the Soviet lines and the devastating blows by the Luftwaffe, the Red Army came to rely completely on air reconnaissance. Early on October 2, Soviet reconnaissance aircraft spotted heavy concentrations of German armored columns ten to fifteen miles to the west of Belyye Berega, southeast of Bryansk. This was the German XXIV Army Corps, advancing toward Orel, threatening to cut off the Bryansk Front from the Southwestern Front At noon, forty Pe-3s of 95 IAP and sixty fighters of 27 IAP and 120 LAP were dispatched against this target. The twin – engine Petlaykovs struck first, followed by rocket-firing 1-153 Chaykas. The entire raid, lasting no more than thirty minutes, caused outrage among the German troop commanders—even if the Soviet claims of thirty trucks and forty-three tanks destroyed by the Pe-3s were exag­gerated. All the Soviet planes managed to escape before German fighters appeared.

On October 3, one of the major aces of JG 51, Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann, with sixty-three con­firmed victories, was missing following an air engage­ment near Shatalovo. It is possible that he fell prey to 233 IAP’s Starshiy Leytenant Sergeyev, who claimed a Bf 109 (his first victory) in the same area.20 In total, 233 LAP was credited with seven aerial victories—three Ju 88s, three Ju 87s, and one Bf 109—on October 3.21

The harshest strikes from the air were dealt by the Luftwaffe. On October 3, the units under command of Luftflotte 2 conducted 984 combat sorties and reported the destruction of 679 enemy vehicles and the serious disruption of movements by Soviet troops. Early on Oc­tober 4, forty-eight Stukas and thirty-two medium bomb­ers were dispatched against rail lines and troop move­ments in the Sumy-Lgov-Kursk area, where they severed communications between the Bryansk and the South­western fronts.

Despite having sustained paralyzing blows during the first days of the Moscow offensive, Soviet resistance mounted on October 4. On that day, the famous com­mander of the Second Panzer Army, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, narrowly escaped death in a strafing attack by Pe-3s. Meanwhile, the German Second Army, operating

on the northern flank of Guderian’s force in a pinccr movement aimed at surrounding the Bryansk Front, was confronted with a powerful counterattack from armored forces with strong air support. A total of 152 dive-bomber and 259 medium bomber sorties were carried out against this counterattack. These raids were followed up by strikes by 202 Stukas and 188 medium bombers against long supply columns in the Bryansk-Spas-Demensk area. The Luftwaffe airmen claimed the destruction of 22 tanks (including 4 of the very heavy KV type), 450 motor vehicles, and 3 fuel depots, and they completely routed the Soviet counteroffensive.

The full dimension of the impending disaster was not discovered by the Soviets until it was too late. On October 5, a Pe-2 reconnaissance crew-discovered a ten – mile-long German tank column—the main body of the Fourth Panzer Army—moving eastward on an axis south of Vyazma, halfway betw’een Smolensk and Moscow. Although two further reconnaissance missions from 120 LAP confirmed this report, it was dismissed as “false” by the Soviet High Command. Polkovnik Nikolay Sbytov, the VVS commander in the Moscow’ Military District, who had forwarded the report, was interrogated bv the NKVD and accused of being a “panic-monger.” Under “pressure” brought to bear upon him on instructions by Peoples Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrenty Beria, Polkovnik Sbytov eventually withdrew his report. On the following day, October 6, German troops swarmed into the city of Yukhnov, 110 miles southwest of Mos­cow, without encountering any ground opposition. Sud­denly the Stavka realized that the pincers were closing behind the bulk of the Red Army forces charged with defending Moscow.

All VVS units were launched to this sector to com­pensate for what the ground troops had failed to do. Early on October 6, U-2, l-15bis, and R-5 night intruders took off in the fog and attacked the German Fourth Army in the Yukhnov sector. Later that day, 1-153s of 120 1AP, SB-2s and Pe-2s of 173 BAP and 321 BAP, R-5s of 606 LBAP, and Il-2s of 502 ShAP continued the attack. The Soviet airmen managed to destroy a bridge over the Ugra River, but they wrere met with strong enemy fighter opposition. By now the complaints from the German front-line troops had compelled the Ger­man fighters to use advance airstrips in areas not com­pletely cleared of Soviet ground troops. These forward bases were used for landing and takeoff during daytime, and supplies w’ere brought in by air. Before dusk, the fighters returned to their main base in the rear again.

Following the capture of Orel on October 3, strong fighter units were deployed to the large air base there. The nine Jagdgruppen of Luftflotte 2 soon were able to regain control of the skies. Hauptmann Gordon Gollob’s ll./JG 3 was particularly successful against the new’ Pe – 2s, claiming four of 173 BAP’s Petlaykovs on October 6, of w’hich two fell before the guns of Hauptmann Gollob’s Bf 109-his fifty-second and fifty-third victories. The 215 ShAP 11-2 piloted by Leytenant Aleksandr Novikov reportedly carried out a “fire taran” against German ground troops after it was shot down in flames.2i

On October 6 and 7, Luftflotte 2 launched nearly 1,400 sorties. Attacks on October 7 alone resulted in (according to German sources) the destruction of 20 tanks, 34 artillery pieces, several bunkers, and 650 vehicles of various kinds.

Just as during the two previous deadly threats against Russia in history—from the Swedes in the eighteenth century and the French in the nineteenth century— the invader reached the pinnacle peak of his success exactly at a point when a shift in weather caused a major deterioration to his situation. During the night of Octo­ber 6-7, the first snow’ fell in the Moscow area. Early on

One of several thousand Soviet aircraft shot down in 1941. This II-2 Shturmovik, which fell prey to Hauptmann Gordon Gollob of ll./JG 3, descends toward earth with its oil tank fully ablaze. It is obvious that the pilot of this aircraft was not experienced enough to protect the vulnerable belly of the II-2 by flying at extremely low altitude. Caught from below, the II-2 was easy prey to Luftwaffe fighter pilots. (Photo: Gollob.) the seventh, the ground was covered with a white coat­ing. A few hours later, a thaw set in, turning the dirt roads and front-line airstrips into muddy quagmires.

But the Soviet Western Front could not be saved. On October 7, the German Third and Fourth Panzer armies linked up in the vicinity of Vyazma, thus sur­rounding General-Polkovnik Konev’s Western Front to the east of Smolensk. Konyev was immediately relieved of command and General Armii Georgiy Zhukov, one of the outstanding Soviet military commanders, was brought from Leningrad to take command of the Western Front.

The WS of the Soviet Fifth Army, in charge of the Mozhaysk defense line on the highway to Moscow to the east of Vyazma, was hastily reinforced with 41 IAP and 172 IAP, equipped with MiG-3s, LaGG-3s, and Yak-ls. But they could not prevent the disaster, nor were they able to drive away the large formations of Luftwaffe air­craft or protect their own bombers. Despite deteriorating weather, with low clouds and ground fog that prevented any major operation by the Luftwaffe—only 139 sorties were carried out on October 9—the southern flank of Army Group Center managed to close the pincers behind three armies of the Bryansk Front during the following days.

Between October 2 and October 10, 1./JG 52 recorded fifty-eight aerial victories against seven losses.23 Counted among the Soviet losses on October 10 was one of the most daring pilots in 11 IAP/6 LAK, Kapitan Konstantin Titenkov, credited with six kills, including one taran.

Practically the entire Red Army in front of Moscow – 40 percent of the entire Soviet military—had been envel­oped and threatened with annihilation. During the following days, weather proved to be a not altogether reliable ally of the Soviets. W’ith clear skies on October 10, Luftflotte 2 was able to mount 537 sorties against forces of the Western Front that attempted to break out. During these strikes, 450 vehicles and 150 artillery pieces were reported destroyed.24

Reinforced by four bomber regiments from the Cen­tral Asian Military District on October 10, the Moscow Military District launched an all-out air-base offensive from October 11 to October 18. The Soviet air offensive was initiated just at a point when Luftflotte 2 was becoming successively weakened. Early in October, 11. and Ill./JG 53 had been pulled out of combat for rest and recuperation. Shortly afterward, 1I./JG 3 was trans­ferred to the Crimean sector, in the South.

General Armii Georgiy Zhukov was one of the ablest Soviet army commanders of World War II. He served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War and rapidly rose to high command. In 1939 he led the successful operation at Khalkhin-Gol, which prevented the Japanese from occupying Mongolia. In January 1941 Zhukov was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army. When he was assigned to organize the defense of Leningrad in September 1941, the transport aircraft that flew him into the beleaguered city narrowly escaped being shot down by Bf 109s of JG 54. Shortly afterwards, Zhukov assumed command of the Western Front and led the successful counterattack that relieved the capital from German threats. Zhukov prepared the Stalingrad operation in 1942- 43 and finally directed the attack on Berlin in 1945. He received the German capitulation and was appointed Minister of Defense of the USSR in 1955. Two years later, however, he was unexpectedly removed from his post. Zhukov passed away in 1974, at the age of seventy-eight. Apart from the two leading fighter aces, Aleksandr Pokryshkin and Ivan Kozhedub, Georgiy Zhukov was the only man awarded as a Hero of the Soviet Union three times during World War II. (Photo: Authors’ Collection.)

On October 11, despite poor weather conditions, 74 ShAP dispatched twelve Shturmoviks—all that remained of that unit—against the large forward German air base at Orel. Kapitan Georgiy Zimin, one of six fighter pilots of 42 LAP acting as fighter cover, described the raid:

Six MiG-3s of 42 IAP took off on a mission to escort twelve Il-2s. The Shturmoviks were tasked with a strike on the airfield near the city of Orel. The fighter’s had to escort them, and if opportunity should arise, to participate in the strike. The cover en route was organized as follows: One fighter sec­tion led by Kapitan Morozov formed a close escort group to the Shturmoviks, while the section led by the group leader, the author of these lines, formed an assault group and flew in front of and higher than the Shturmoviks, in order to detect the main concentration of the enemy aircraft and direct the Shturmoviks by diving in this direction.

I saw the main concentration on the airfield – more than 200 bombers, standing wing to wing— and signalled “attention” and then started diving. The Shturmoviks reformed in right echelon and formed a circle turning to the left, heading toward the mass of the enemy aircraft, and started to at­tack them one by one, aiming individually. Dur­ing the first pass, the Shturmoviks^ dropped their bombs, during the second they fired rockets while diving, and during a third pass they attempted to destroy the remaining planes with cannon fire, pulling out of the dive at extremely low altitude.

As the main group of our aircraft approached the airfield, four Me 109s were scrambled. Our escort fighters attacked and destroyed them dur­ing takeoff. At this moment, I noticed five Ju 52s approaching the airfield from the south at an alti­tude of 200 meters. We bounced them and were able to shoot down all five.”25

Also on October 11, Soviet aircraft raided the air­field at Dugino-just as the inspector of the Fighter Air Arm, Oberst Werner Molders, arrived for an inspection.

During these operations, the Soviets had the advan­tage of raiding air bases where they themselves had been stationed only a few weeks earlier. Hence the attacking air crews had a good picture of the targets they were sent against. An NCO from the ground crew of 1./JG 52, stationed at Dugino during these days, wrote bitterly: “October 12. . . . Several Russian bombers attacked us today again. They set fire to a fuel depot, and this in an outrageously brazen manner which clearly showed that they were well acquainted w’ith our airfield.”26

Apart from a few’ lucky strikes and some attacks by particularly skillful pilots, the majority of these raids w’ere characterized by poor bomb-aiming—the direct and indi­rect results of the punishment the VVS units had taken at the hands of German fighters. This is clearly illus­trated in the following German account

Someone cries: “Air raid! Take cover!” Drow’sy

with sleep, we abandon the truck and rush toward a piece of woodland, w’here we seek cover from the Russian bombers. We watched as they opened their bomb bays. Their ‘blessings from the sky" went down several hundred meters away. This scene was repeated over and over again on this day. . . .

Airfield Kalinin-North. . . . Suddenly, there’s another attack by a large formation of bombers and Ratas. Everyone ran into cover. 1 searched for refuge in one of the destroyed hangars. A number of German aircraft were airborne, and they frus­trated the entire raid. Several bright fireworks in the sky told us that our fighters did a good job.27

The air-base offensive brought further heavy losses to already crippled VVS units. Among the airmen killed was Mladshiy Leytenant Dmitriy Kokorev, of 124 IAP, who had four victories to his credit, including a Bf 110 brought dow’n by ramming on the first day of war. He was shot down on October 12. On that day, the MiG-3 fighters of 16 IAP/PVO had a difficult encounter with the Bf 109s of Hauptmann Karl-Heinz Leesmann’s 1./ JG 52. As they charged a group of Ju 88s, the Soviet pilots were bounced by I./JG 52. Mladshiy Leytenant Ivan Shumilov, one of the Soviet pilots participating in this engagement, later recalled: “Suddenly two

Messerschmitts approached our formation___ [Mladshiy

Leytenant Ivan] Zabolotnyy singled out one of [the Ju 88s] and attacked. But the Germans always took the advantage of such single attacks. They charged him from behind with blazing guns. Although Zabolotnyy managed to destroy one of the German planes, he was himself se­verely hit and had to bail out. He returned to the unit three days later. The victory he had scored—it was in the vicinity of Kamenka, close to Maloyaroslavets—was his first.”28 Also on October 12, an 11-2 pilot hit a Bf 109 with his guns in the air east of Medyn. The German fighter lost one wing and crashed, burning on impact, and kill­ing the pilot, Leutnant Joachim Hacker of 7./JG 51. Hacker was credited with thirty-two aerial kills.

October 12,1941, also saw’ the American-built Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk single-engine fighter draw its first blood on the Eastern Front. The first P-40s delivered to the USSR were shipped directly to 126 IAP, a crack unit operating in the Moscow combat zone. But, just as with the British Hurricane, the Tomahawk was far from an excellent fighter plane. Although superior to the

Hurricane and roughly equivalent to the Bf I09E, it proved inferior to the Bf 109F. Not least due ro frus­trating technical and logistical problems, the equip­

ment transition of 126 IAP from MiG – 3s to Tomahawks resulted in a decline in morale.

By October 13, the Western Front in the northern pocket had been almost completely annihilated by Luftwaffe attacks/" The confused battle to the west, northwest, and southwest of Moscow during these days made an appraisal of the combat situation almost impossible. A state of almost total chaos reigned. The entire area was a huge battlefield with­out any fixed front lines.

On October 13, the commander of 180 LAP, Kapitan A. P. Sergeyev, and his adjutant, Starshiy Leytenant Khlusovich, landed their Mi(»-3s at Mikhailovo Air­drome—which was occupied by the enemy. Khlusovich managed to take off at the last minute, but the commander failed to do so and was killed.

Oberlcutnant Friedrich Lang, the Staffelkapitan of l./Std 2, recalls a rare incident, at his billeting during one of these days:

The construction of a runway had been begun by the Russians. The half-completed w ork blocked much of the airfield for takeoffs and landings.

The f rsl U. S.-buiit Curtiss P-4C1 Tomahawk fighters to reach the Soviet Union arrived with a Murmansk-bound convoy iff the fall of ‘9^1 and were immediately de ivered to 125 IAP cf 6 .‘AK/PVO for in tne defense of Moscow. (Photo; Seidl.)

Well hidden under the trees of a Russian forest, a U-2 light bomber undergoes maintenance. The Soviet decision to deploy U-2 trainers and R-5- and R-Z biplanes in the role of harassment bombers over German rear areas at night proved to be quite successful. The Polikarpov U-2 (later redesignated Po-2) was nicknamed ‘Sewing machine" by the Germans due to its characteristic engine sound. The U-2 was one of the most-produced aircraft in the world, In all, 32,711 U-2s/Po-2s were delivered by the Soviet aircraft industry between 1929 and 1949. Additional numbers were manufactured on license by Poland under the designation CSS-13. More than half pf the 19,993 U-2s/Po-2s produced during World War II were delivered from State Aircraft Production Plant No, 169 in Kazan. (Photo: Grubich.)

Mounds of earth and mud were severe obstruc­tions to the operations of our aircraft. . . .

We were billeted into some small wooden houses in a village around three kilometers from the airfield. We, the officers of the 1st Staffel, took possession of such a house, which was made up of an anteroom, a large room with a baking stove, a smaller room, and a chamber. The grandmother of the house slept in the stove room together with her four to eight kids. . . .

During one of the last days of our stay at this house, we returned from the airfield earlier than usual because of a heavy snowfall. The woman came to meet us and seemed more excited than ever. From the flow of words that came over her lips, we could understand that her dear husband, who definitely was no Communist, had returned

home. He had been left in the Vyazma pocket and had made it through the woods until he arrived at his village. We barely had made the woman understand that we understood her before she flung the door open. A man dashed into the house, threw himself on his knees, and attempted to kiss my tunic. To us, his flow of words appeared as nothing but an incomprehensible sound effect. We adopted ourselves to the shining faces of the family and I patted the man on his shoulder and said some­thing, which he didn’t understand anyway. The per­formance was over and he dashed out of the room, in the same way as he had arrived, beaming with joy, followed by his family. We never saw him again.30

On October 18, the Soviets lost another of their most experienced airmen on the Moscow front: Starshiy

Leytenant Vasiliy Khitrin, who was credited with seven vitories. When his 1-16 was damaged by antiaircraft fire over the front lines, Khitrin attempted to bring it back to base at low altitude. But during the return flight, one of the Ishak’s wings broke off. The airplane plunged to the ground, and Khitrin was killed.

The annihilation of the two southern pockets of the Moscow front on October 17 and 20 was the climax of Operation Typhoon. The German armies rounded up 673,000 prisoners and sent them to a confinement from which few would return alive. The total losses sustained by the armies of the Soviet Western, Reserve, and Bryansk fronts between September 30 and December 4, 1941, numbered 514,300 soldiers killed, wounded, missing, or captured. Nevertheless, instead of leading to a German victory, which could have been expected, these encircle­ment battles in fact marked the turning point of the Battle of Moscow.

The dirt roads where heavy tank units had passed soon became almost impassable streams of deep mud. Advance tank units found themselves almost completely cut off from supplies in a sea of mud. While supply col-: umns were stuck on the roads between Orel and Tula, south of Moscow’, rations had to be air-dropped by Luftwaffe units.

Not the w’inter, as is widely believed, but the sleet and the mud—the notorious Russian rasputitsa, for which j the German armies were not equipped—w’ere w’hat saved the Soviet capital. The snow and rain brought the Get-; man offensive to a halt at the last moment.

ven as the main focus of the war in the USSR once again had been shifted to the central combat zone, Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army

Group South was engaged in a wide-scale campaign over a huge area to the east of the Dnieper River. Following the Battle of Kiev, von Rundstedt was compelled to dis­perse his forces against three main targets: the Crimea; ‘ Rostov; and the Soviet industrial center in Kharkov and. the Donets Basin, in the eastern Ukraine. Seizure of the latter was one of Operation Barbarossa’s main strategic objectives.

1 Here the Soviets defended their position with bitter

tenacity and with strong air support. Even before resis­tance in Kiev was overcome, most of VVS-Southwestern Front had been shifted to this area. Reinforced with 1 RAG and 4 RAG from the Bryansk Front, WS-South-

western Front had doubled in strength since early Sep­tember and had launched heavy attacks against the advancing German troops. In the absence of its com­mander, General Leytenant Fyodor Astakhov, who had been entrapped in the Kiev encirclement and who would make it back to Soviet lines only in November, VVS – Southwestern Front was headed by the able General – Mayor Fyodor Falaleyev.

On September 22 an 1-153 piloted by Leytenant Grigoriy Kotseba from Kapitan Farit Fatkullin’s famous Staff Eskadrilya of 44 IAD managed to set fire to the construction equipment and pontoons intended for the German engineer bridge over the Orel River, a tribu­tary to the Dnieper. This delayed a crossing by consider­able German army forces.

Since Flicgerkorps V had to give up most of its fighter units to Luftflotte 2 at the prospect of the final offensive against Moscow, the task of clearing the skies of Soviet aircraft in this area was given to only one Jagdgruppc, Ill./JG 52. This unit included skillful young men such as Feldwebel “Ede” Duhn, Oberleutnant Giinther Rail, Leutnant Hermann Graf, Leutnant Adolf Dickfeld, Unteroffizier Gerhard Koppen, Unteroffizier Heinrich Fullgrabe, Unteroffizier Leopold Steinbatz, and Unteroffizier Alfred Grislawski, all of whom would start their real “Experten” careers during the fight for air supremacy over the Kharkov area. Any Soviet airman who came across the Messerschmitts piloted by these hotspurs was lucky if he survived.

On September 24, the_Rotte composed of Oberleutnant Rail and Unteroffizier Koppen scrambled against an incoming Soviet bomber formation, nine SBs escorted by four MiG-3s. Afterward, Unteroffizier Koppen filed the following report on his eighteenth and nine­teenth victories: “I immediately attacked the MiG-3 sec­tion that flew astern of the formation and opened fire against a fighter that flew with its undercarriage down. The MiG pulled up, caught fire, and fell down over its right wing, descending vertically with a black plume of smoke. It crashed to the ground, exploding on impact. As the second MiG climbed away, 1 charged an SB posi­tioned on the right flank of the bomber formation. My first burst turned the SB into a ball of fire. It went down and crashed five kilometers east of Chudovo."31

In response to the menace from the air, between Sep­
tember 25 and September 27, General Robert Ritter von Greim, the commander of Fliegerkorps V, dispatched his medium bombers against the bases of WS-Southwest – ern Front. According to German figures, forty-three aircraft were destroyed on the ground. Moreover, by September 28, Ill./JG 52 claimed to have shot down fifty-eight Soviet planes in the Kharkov area, against only one loss.

On October 2 four pilots of 9./JG 52 conducted a surprise low-level attack against a Soviet fighter base east of Kharkov. Two I-I6s were claimed destroyed on the ground, both by Leutnant Graf. On the return flight, the German fighters spotted a formation of twenty enemy fighters. Leutnant Graf and Unteroffizier Grislawski blew two 1-16s out of the sky, and all the German fighters returned to their base without having suffered any damage.

On the Soviet side, Mladshiy Leytenant Vladimir Garanin, a six-victory’ ace in the 1-16-equipped 254 IAP, was severely wounded in a combat during which he claimed to have downed two Bf 109s, including one through ramming. Nevertheless, between October 3 and October 14, 1941, Ill./JG 52 was credited with more than fifty’ aerial victories without suffering any losses.

On one occasion, ten of Ill./JG 52’s Bf 109s caught a squadron of 1-153 fighter-bombers and blew all but one of the Soviets out of the sky. The 1-153 that was left from this carnage managed to get off only due to the supreme flying skills of its pilot. Even if no correspond­ing Soviet accounts have been found, it is possible that

was the first one there, and right away he got onto the tail of an Ivan. How­ever the Russian shot past him, only to be caught by Hauptmann | Franz| Hornig. The enemy biplane caught fire and crashed in a bright red ball of fire not far from the German trenches. 1 was unable to take part in the action, as my guns had jammed. Damned mess! The air was filled with tracers.

A bullet whistled through the cockpit behind me, in the left side and out the right. Plexiglas splinters struck my neck and blood trickled down my collar. Close call! After what couldn’t have been more than ten minutes, there were about a dozen of our com­rades from the other side burning on the ground. Only one Ivan was left. Obviously an outstanding pilot, he simply refused to go down. Six Messerschmitts swirled around him, but he escaped every attack by elegantly half-rolling and diving away.

I had to admire the fellow. Not quite sure of what drove me to it, I pressed the transmit button and called to the others, “Don’t shoot him down, don’t shoot him down. Let him live, we’ll escort him home.”

Seconds later the air battle ended. The Ivan immediately dropped down to just above the ground and turned east. Remaining above and behind followed the Russian. Repeatedly, he turned his head to look at us, not believing his “freedom." However, his machine was just too slow; even with landing gear and flaps down, we were still too fast to stay with him. So we waved fare­well and left him to return in peace, home to his airfield.”*2

The dogfights in the air over Kharkov during these days are quite illustrative of the air war over the entire Eastern Front during 1941. Even if Kapitan Farit Fatkullin and the experts of his Staff Squadron of 44 IAD prob­ably were of the same caliber as the aces of IIl./JG 52,

their frail and slow 1-153s did not allow them to meet the enemy fighters on equal terms.

Meanwhile, the Soviets started dismantling the fac­tories in this area and opened a huge operation to trans­fer them farther to the east. A race developed between the advancing German armies and Soviet workers and technicians dismantling the production facilities and send­ing them eastward. Since the bad condition of the Russian roads made them unsuitable for the large-scale evacuation of an entire industrial area, these transports came to rely totally on the rail lines.

To halt these movements, the bomber forces of Fliegerkorps V were committed to their interdiction. But an astounding Soviet capacity to repair and improvise frustrated these efforts. The almost complete isolation of the battlefront created by the same German bomber units during the Battle of Kiev could not be repeated. Fre­quently, a rail line that had been completely destroyed was operational again in no more than a few hours. According to Soviet sources, the railway lines in the vicinity of the front were subjected to 5,939 air attacks between June and December 1941. On average it took no more than five hours and forty-eight minutes to put a severed railway back in operation.

As a consequence, Fliegerkorps V turned the atten­tion of its bombers to destroying the rolling stock, par­ticularly railway engines. KG 55 Greif was selected for this task. From its airfield at Kirovograd, west of the Dnieper Basin, the He-11 Is of this unit w’ere assigned to individual “free hunting” against Soviet rolling stock all across the huge area between Kursk in the North and Stalino in the South. Since the He-llls lacked equipment for successful attacks at night, only day missions were flown. The “rail hunting” missions were flown at treetop level. The only device for target-finding was eyesight. Any train spotted was attacked with 50-, 250-, and 500-kilogram bombs, dropped from only sixty feet. Two extra nose-mounted 20mm automatic cannon also were employed by the He Ills.

During the first weeks of the effort, considerable successes were achieved.

Within a short time, however, the Sovi­
ets shifted all raihvay movements in this area to nights, j or to days with adverse weather. In addition, strong. AAA j concentrations were deployed at key points such as Kupyansk (sixty miles east of Kharkov), Valuyki (forty j miles to the northeast on the same railroad line), and Svoboda (farther to the northeast). The German pilots learned to avoid these areas, which known as “the death zones” to the airmen of KG 55. Soviet fighters were only a minor problem, since most WS aircraft in this area < were committed to low-level attacks against the advanc – j ing German ground forces. Thus German losses during j the rail-hunting missions were very limited; KG 55 lost no more than two aircraft on railway attacks during! October 1941.

Although severe losses were inflicted on the Soviet j rolling stock around Kharkov—KG 55 was credited with the destruction of 222 trains, including 64 locomotives53-! the evacuation of industrial goods, machines, and even j goods from Kharkov and the Donets Basin could not be prevented.

During this period of intense rail interdiction, other і tasks assigned to the Luftwaffe were neglected. This enabled the aircraft in VVS-Southwestern Front to be j launched in “increasing attacks that often severely inter – j fered with the maneuverability of German ground:]

forces.”34 The exhausted German troops could make only slow progress.

On October 5, the bombers and ground-attack planes of WS-Southwestern Front were in action all along the German Seventeenth Army’s front. Against the LV Army Corps alone, forty-two air raids involving about 250 air­craft were made. The next day, five I-153 Chaykas, led by Levtenant Boris Biryukov from the Staff Squadron/ 44 IAD, attacked crossings at the Berestovaya River. While Biryukov managed to destroy the bridge by a direct bomb hit during the first attack, his wingmen strafed the enemy troops on the bank, putting one truck and an antiaircraft gun out of commission/

Contrary to the aim of seizing, the industries in Kharkov and the Donets Basin, the Luftwaffe resorted to some of their rare strategic bombing missions on the Eastern Front. On the night of October 6, 1941, three He II Is of 9./KG 55 Greif were launched against the large tank factory at Kramatorskaya, between Stalino and Slavyansk in the northern Donets Basin. One of the He 11 Ls was badly hit by antiaircraft fire over the target area, and the flight engineer lay helplessly bleeding to death on the return flight. But the bombs were dropped with utmost precision, completely wiping out the plant and killing or maiming hundreds of workers. Two weeks later, the same Staffel raided Aircraft Factory 18 Znamia Truda at Voronezh, where ll-2s were manufactured. The results were devastating.

On October 9, the 195th Infantry Division of the German Seventeenth Army was hit by forty-three aerial attacks along the front lines, nearly eighty miles south­west of Kharkov, The Soviet air attacks were so intense that the entire Seventeenth Army was forced to take cover and could not continue advancing for the entire day. On October 12, the Seventeenth Army reported 200 soldiers and 238 horses killed in air raids.36 Step by step, the Soviets in this sector were improving their posi­tion in the air.

On October 14, Unteroffizicrc Alfred Grislawski and Heinrich Fiillgrabe of 9./JG 52 encountered two of the heavily armored 11-2 Shturmovik ground-attack planes north of Poltava.

Grislawski recalls that it took five attacks, in which he fired almost all of his 20mm ammunition, to bring down one 11-2, confirmed as his sixth victory. That af ter­noon, Leutnant Hermann Graf and Unteroffizier

Fiillgrabe ran into four Yak-1 fighters, which were some­thing completely different from the Chayka biplanes the two were used to engaging. During an exhausting thirty – minute combat, the two German pilots had to fly for their lives, only narrowly escaping being shot down by the Soviet flight leader. Turning head-on at the onset of the combat, the Mcsserschmitts managed to destroy two Yakovlevs; then all hell seemed to break loose, as Graf later described in his diary:

Fiillgrabe is in deep trouble. The Russian flight leader proves to be most skillful. 1 rush to my wingman’s assistance. The second Russian has had enough and disengages. I order Heinrich to get out of my way. And then the nicest and most dangerous air combat I have ever encountered starts. We wrung the most possible of man and machine: wide loopings with a radius of more than three thousand meters, and sharp, 180-degree turns, time after time. My body soaks with sw’eat. My adversary is at least as good as 1 am. It’s amazing how he repeatedly tries to outwit me. One sharp turn follows another. Over and over again, we meet nose-to-nose. Both fire their guns. He jumps over me in the last moment, and then he comes after me again. On one occasion we almost rammed each other.

Suddenly the second Russian fighter reap­peared. I just had a few free seconds and was able to fend off his attack. The Soviet wingman tries to escape in a dive. A quick glance backward tells me that my main enemy is sitting on my tail, although at a distance of more than four hundred meters.

So I aim and open fire against his wingman. The Russian fighter is thrown upward, then it starts falling—and doesn’t stop until it hits the ground. I must have hit him in the head.

Fiillgrabe informs me of this over the radio. I had no time to watch. Seeking revenge, the expert is clinging on to me. In the meantime, he has approached to a distance of two hundred meters.

I dive to the deck. I quickly glance at the speed­ometer: six hundred kilometers per hour! That’s enough. Now—“rise with the Daimler-Benz”—and I reach 1,200 meters altitude. Behind me, the Rus­sian is at 1,000. It’s a climbing race! W’e reach 3,000 meters. Then we start circling again.

Another ten minutes have passed. Each attack made by the enemy fills me with respect. This lias to be their top ace. Fortunately, 1 have practiced this kind of flying for years; had it not been for this, 1 would already have been dead.

Heinrich Fullgrahe reports that he must leave. His aircraft is running out of fuel.

Another five minutes, then my red warning lamp starts twinkling. That means I’ve got no more than twenty minutes’ flight time left. And we are fifty kilometers behind the front line. I ought to disengage. But my pride doesn’t permit me to do so. That would give my adversary at least a sym­bolic victory. And, anyway, he still is on my tail, hunting me toward our own lines.

We start turning on each other again and come rushing head-on. During one of these nose-to-nose encounters, 1 try to turn past him instead of climb­ing above. By coincidence, he undertakes the same maneuver. We pass by each other with only a few meters left between us. Now what will he do? Will he let me pass by, and then turn around and give me the final hit? I never let him out of my eyes.

Then the incredible occurs: He continues fly­ing to the east—and 1 to the west. 1 return literally on the last drops of fuel. During the landing, my propeller stops.

My whole body is shivering as I climb out ( the cockpit. What an enemy! I am hardly aware c the congratulations to my two victories. My hea is filled with thoughts of the Russian fighter pilo I would have liked to sit down and chat with hiir He must be a nice fellow. I wonder what he migh be thinking of me.”57

Hermann Graf was one of the most skillful Gerr fighter pilots. Less than a year after this aerial duel, was the highest-scoring ace in the Luftwaffe, with m than two hundred kills to his credit.

Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Reichenau’s C man Sixth Army finally seized Kharkov on October. but the Germans found the industrial area in the Don Basin filled with empty factories. Between July and i" vember 1941, 1.5 million wagonloads of industrial n chinery, tools, material, and personnel were carried ea ward on the Soviet railway system. No few’er than 1,5! factories, installations, and research establishmeni including 85 percent of Soviet airframe and acroengii production facilities, were evacuated.

Kapitan Farit Fatkullin’s Staff Eskadrilya of 44 1A1 was one of the main contributors to delaying the Germa offensive against the Donets Basin. Since the mountin

crisis in the Crimean sector had forced the Germans to transfer lll./JG 52 to this area on October 22, the field was left open to Kapitan Fatkullin’s daring pilots.

On October 25, as the German Sixth Army was cross­ing the Donets River, three 1-153s, led by Mladshiy Leytenant Yevgeniy Chistyakov, struck a German troop column in the vicinity of Kirovo and destroyed one tank and eight trucks. Three days later, Chistyakov destroyed six trucks and four pontoons in the same area.38

On October 30 Leytenant Petr Kudar and Serzhant Ivan Zinchenko of Staff/44 LAD fell upon a column of German motorized infantry in the Sakhnovshchina area. This time they were confronted with heavy antiaircraft fire. Serzhant Zinchenko, who was out on his second combat mission, had his 1-153 hit, so he broke off and returned to base. Left alone on this, his 155th combat mission, Kudar decided to defy the German AAA. Mak­
ing one run after another against the ground targets, his Chayka was hit again and again. Finally Petr Kudar turned toward his own airfield. He managed to cross the front line, but eight miles from the airfield, the engine stopped. The 1-153 crashed during an attempted forced landing, and Kudar was killed. On November 20 he was posthu­mously appointed Hero of the Soviet Union. Indeed, as an acknowledgment of the important role played by the pilots of this unit (which on November 4 was redesignated 92 IAP), seven of its pilots, including the commander, Kapitan Farit Fatkullin, also received this honorary title on November 20.

Among the most successful pilots in Fatkullin’s unit during the air campaign to delay the German advance into the Donets Basin, were: Leytenant Boris Biryukov, who was credited with the destruction of 6 tanks and 112 trucks between August 6 and October 31, 1941;

Leytenant Arseniy Stepanov, credited with the destruc­tion of 3 tanks, five trucks, and 8 motorcycles between September 8 and November 3; Mlaclshiy Leytenant Yevgeniy Chistyakov, credited with the destruction of 3 ranks, 60 trucks, and 4 artillery pieces (Chistyakov’s Eskadrilya, 2/92 1AP, carried out 4.32 combat sorties in two months, claiming 17 tanks, 24 artillery’ pieces, and 730 trucks); and Mladshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Perepelitsa, who was born in the area, and who report­edly put 6 tanks, 4 artillery pieces, and 32 trucks out of commission from August 6 to October 31, while the flight he commanded destroyed 8 tanks, 5 artillery pieces, and 98 trucks in two months.

The race for the Soviet industrial area is illustrative of the entire war situation on the Eastern Front from the fall of 1941 onward. Even if the Luftwaffe crews scored impressive individual achievements, the resources of the attackers were by far insufficient for the enor­
mous and growing tasks. The Red Army, on the other hand, showed an astounding ability to sustain almost any military disaster without losing its ability to per­form a still and effective defense. The entire founda­tion to this lasting ability was laid during the impres­sive shift of the nation’s main industrial area from the Kharkov and the Donets Basin area to the east during this period.

“1 remember these days with pride,” wrote Soviet aircraft designer Aleksandr Yakovlev. “Only three weeks after the arrival of the transported goods, we were able to relaunch serial production. After another three months we were producing more than before in Moscow. Eleven months went bv, and our production % ures were two and a half times greater than prior to the evacuation.”

The preconditions of these large-scale operations were created only through the will to fight to the last—at any cost—displayed by the ground troops and the airmen of

UnterofRzier Alfred Grislawski (r.), shown next to his Bf 109F, Yellow 9, was one of the up and coming aces of 9,/JG 52 who roamed the skies over the Ukraine in the fall of 1941. Grislawski, the son of a miner, is regarded as one of the toughest fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe. During most of his missions in 1941 he flew as the wingman of the famous Leutnant Hermann Graf. Grislawski would survive the war with a total of 133 victories. (Photo: Grislawski.)

the Southwestern Front, immediately after the annihila­tion of the core of this army group at Kiev. Another important factor was the immense performance made in the production lines in the midst of the evacuation. In fact, the production of Yak-1 and LaGG-3 fighters rose from 335 and 322, respectively, during the first six months of 1941 to 1,019 and 1,149, respectively, during the June- to-December period of 1941. Of 1,549 11-2s delivered in 1941, 1,293 were produced after June.

This stamina on the Soviet side had not been antici­pated by Hitler and his generals as they prepared Opera­tion Barbarossa. Of this, historian Heinz A. F. Schmidt wrote: “This fantastic technical performance, which had not been anticipated by the Fascist leadership, was made possible by the massive heroism displayed by Soviet industrial workers. They struggled under grim circum­
stances, with poor food rations, in cold and snow under the open sky, working twelve to fifteen hours each day to resume aircraft production.”39

Total output figures from the Soviet aircraft indus­try during the last six months of 1941 reached 9,780. However impressive this was, losses exceeded output during the first six months of the war with Germany. Even if reinforcements poured in from other parts of the USSR, the number of VVS front-line aircraft dropped considerably from midsummer to fall 1941. Neverthe­less, eventually it would be the Soviet stamina and industrial output that finally put an end to the Third Reich. Thus the battle for the eastern Ukraine, fought with relatively small forces on both sides during the fall of 1941, would prove to be one of the most decisive military campaigns of World War II.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although part of the “new generation” of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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