Category Air War on the Eastern Front

he war on the Eastern Front in 1941, in the air as well as on the ground, has few rivals in terms of its sheer bitterness. It was fought between the two most motivated armies in the world at the time. Ideology played a central role in this conflict. Just as Hitler’s Germany was permeated with the Nazi ideology’, creating a chau­vinist mentality that should not be underestimated, the traditions of early Bolshevism marked the entire Red Army down to the simple private, creating a determina­tion described by some as fanaticism.

Much has been said and written about the objective circumstances that caused the defeat of the German in­vasion army in the winter of 1941-42. But it should not be forgotten that it was the bottomless stamina of the Soviet soldiers and airmen that had laid the foundation for this situation. The Red Army had been pushed back­ward step by step since June 22, 1941, suffering enor­mous losses, yet it was able to force the invaders to fight bitterly at every point on every day. The accumulated effects of this incessant fighting among the invaders finally bore fruit at the very gates of Moscow’.

Both sides put up a skillful and bold fight. Even if the Luftwaffe relied mainly on its technological and tac­tical superiority, the courage and vigor of the German airmen are indisputable. Facing an enemy with a tre­mendous numerical advantage during the opening days of the war and an unflagging resistance following the first onslaught, the airmen of the Luftwaffe never stopped attempting to fulfill the increasingly overinflated demands of the situation until they were either killed or com­pletely worn dowm.

The bombers, Stukas, and Zerstorer displayed a high

efficiency in causing high material and personnel losses to the enemy. By neutralizing the potential threat from thousands of Soviet aircraft, providing the advancing armies with decisive close support, and disrupting com­munications on a grand scale in the rear of the Red Army, the crews of these aircraft played a key role to the by-then-unparalleled series of German victories in the summer of 1941. For instance, between June 22 and No­vember 22, II./StG 77 recorded the destruction of 140 Soviet tanks, 45 artillery pieces and 43 antiaircraft artil­lery pieces, and its aircraft sank 10 ships.

Air reconnaissance provided the German command­ers on all levels with detailed and frequently decisive tactical information.

The Jagdflieger achieved air supremacy’ and domi­nated the skies wherever they appeared and were accorded well-deserved respect from the Soviet airmen. The word for the Bf 109, Messer, spread as a nimbus throughout the entire VVS. The Jagdgeschwader deployed on the Eastern Front claimed more than 7,000 victories during Operation Barbarossa: JG 3 posted 1,287 victories; JG 27 had 270 victories; JG 51 had 1,820 victo­ries; JG 52 had approximately 800 victories; JG 53 posted 775 victories; JG 54 posted 1,185 victories; and JG 77 (including l.(J)/LG 2) achieved approximately 1,250 victories

Two fighter pilots, Oberst Werner Molders of JG 51 and Major Gunther Liitzow of JG 3, each surpassed the hundred-victory mark during these combats. And both of these Jagdgeschwader could boast two other of the
top aces at that time, Hauptmann Gordon Gollob ofjG 3, with a total score of eighty-five kills at the end of 1941; and Oberleutnant Heinz Bar of JG 51, with eighty’ kills. Also, in JG 54, Oberleutnant Hans Philipp had a score of seventy-three as 1941 drew to a close.

Among thousands of Soviet airmen who fell prey to the superiority of the Bf 109 fighters in 1941 were expe­rienced pilots such as the famous test pilot Podpolkovnik Stepan Suprun of 4011AP; the Zveno ace Kapitan Arseniy Shubikov; 127 lAP’s Starshiy Ley tenant Luka Muravitskiy, who had fourteen personal and collective kills; 154 IAP’s Starshiy Leytenant Aleksey Storozhakov, with eight personal and three collective kills; and 19 IAP’s Mladshiy Leytenant Yegor Novikov, with ten personal and five collective kills. Among the missing was the vet­eran female bomber pilot Starshiy Leytenant Yekaterina Zelyenko of 135 BAP.

According to Soviet statistics, at least 21,200 aircraft were lost, including 10,600 in combat, between June 22 and December 31, 1941.1 The combat losses included 5,100 fighters, 4,600 bombers, 600 ground-attack aircraft, and 300 other types. To these figures should be added the “unaccounted decrease” of 5,240 VVS aircraft between June 22 and July 31. The corresponding overall figure given by the Luftwaffe—17,745 Soviet aircraft destroyed by December 19—is thus not far from reality.

This was the inevitable outcome of a clash between the world’s most skillful and best-equipped air force on the one hand and an air force hobbled by Stalinism. If early Bolshevik traditions had revolutionized the combat

spirit of the Soviet soldiers, the autocratic Stalinist rule had created a numerically vast army with equally vast qualitative deficiencies. Command structures, doctrines, tactical thinking, the training standards, and equipment technology marked the Red Army with the fatal stamp of a conservative and ruthless bureaucracy.

The harsh lessons of the first six months of the war compelled the WS to carry out a complete reappraisal of most of its doctrines and theories. This new thinking particularly influenced the bomber fleet of the VVS, where inadequate equipment demonstrated that prewar strategic bombing doctrines had been a mere dream. During the course of the long war, the Luftwaffe would force the VVS to abandon all of its erroneous prewar tactics and doctrines and, indeed, to adopt Luftwaffe methods and structures.

Even if the Soviet airmen of 1941 wrere forced to fight from an inferior position regarding most qualita­tive aspects, they gave proof of an impressive courage and made enormous personal sacrifices. Western post­war accounts tend to underestimate the performance of the VVS airmen during these first difficult months of the war. But in reality, any German soldier fighting on the Eastern Front would be able to testify to the unre­mitting pressure from the air, from the first day of the war to the last. Any airman in the Luftwaffe would tell of how the Soviet fighter pilots forced their counterparts to wage a permanent fight for air supremacy.

There is a great disparity between Soviet claims and registered Luftwaffe losses. Even if the Luftwaffe loss lists have proved to suffer from gaps, it is indisputable that the Soviet airmen, on average, made higher overclaims than their German counterparts. This may be the result of several factors. The humiliating losses at the hands of a hated invader could be regarded as one of the main explanations.

Contradictory to the overall air-combat situation and its actual results, the combat records of most VVS fighter units show’ a good victory-to-loss ratio. For instance, the combat records for Kapitan Aleksandr Khalutin’s 249 1AP (equipped mainly with 1-16s, l-15bis, and I-153s) between June and October 1941, w’hen the unit was with­drawn from combat on the southern sector of the front, show claims of twenty-five enemy aircraft destroyed in the air. The same unit also was credited with the destruc­tion of twenty enemy planes, more than fifty trucks, and about twenty tanks in ground attacks. The losses for all of this apparently did not exceed ten airplanes and six pilots.

The logbook of 158 LAP, now in the files of the Russian Central Military Archive TsAMO, shows sixty – nine victory claims against fifty-two aircraft lost between June 22 and October 22, 1941. These include forty-nine aircraft lost during combat missions and three on the ground.

For the period June 22 to December 15, 7 ІАК/ PVO claimed 313 aerial victories against a recorded com­bat loss of 307 aircraft—286 in the air and 21 on the ground.2

The pilots of VVS-Southem Front were credited w’ith 42 aerial victories against 89 combat losses, including 43 fighters in October; and 65 aerial victories against 92 combat losses, including 42 fighters, in November 1941.* Fifty-three single-engine German fighters (46 Bf 109s and 7 ‘‘He 113s,” a frequent misidentification of Bf 109F) were claimed destroyed in air combat, by AAA units, and on the ground by VVS-Southern Front units in October, and 54 were claimed in November 1941.4 The Luftwaffe registered only 15 Bf 109s lost in this sector during October and 16 in November.’ In fact, the total number of single-engine German fighters claimed de­stroyed by VVS-Southern Front alone between June 22 and December 22, 1941—450 of a total of 1,072 claims overall6—is about half the figure of all Bf 109s registered as lost or damaged on the entire Eastern Front.

The claims made by the most experienced pilots, how’ever—and naturally—display a better accounting. For example, of Kapitan Boris Safonov’s sixteen individual victory claims in 1941, only seven can definitely not be found in the far-from-comprehensive loss list of Generalquartiermeister der Luftwaffe.

As a comparison, RAF Fighter Command pilots did not come any closer to the truth regarding their claims during the Battle of Britain. Official VVS claims amount to 3,879 downed in aerial combat and 752 downed by ground fire in 1941. As several Axis aircraft listed as “severey damaged”—most having made forced landings – could justifiably be acknowledged as “shot down,” the overclaim ratio is nearly 2:1. On the other hand, regard­ing results of air-base raids, Soviet airmen proved to be most optimistiq they claimed 3,257 Axis aircraft destroyed on the ground in 1941.

There is no doubt that most VVS fighter units in

reality suffered more losses than successes in air combat during 1941. Starshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Pokryshkin of 55 LAP recalk “the hard times in 1941” characterized by “uneven combats with the Messerschmitts, which rarely led to results to our favor.”7 During 1941 the WS fighter units in reality managed to bring down perhaps fifteen hundred enemy aircraft of all types in aerial combat, at a cost of approximately three thousand fighters (excluding losses to ground fire and aircraft lost on the ground).

Despite inadequate equipment, several Soviet fighter pilots had shown considerable skill and had developed into aces. Oberleutnant Hansgeorg Batcher, who flew with l./KGr 100 on the Eastern Front from late July 1941, reflects the general view on the Soviet aviators held by the Luftwaffe airmen when he says, “They were very courageous. They were only handicapped from an obsolete equipment.” Top scorers in the WS during this stage of the war had been Kapitan Boris Safonov, with sixteen kills, and Kapitan Petr Brinko, with fifteen, most of which had been scored while flying the 1-16 Ishak. The evolution of such proficient individuals contradicted the Nazi propaganda relating to “Russian subhumans,” which had a widespread influence at all levels of the Wehrmacht.

Counted among the German airmen who had fallen prey to the WS airmen in 1941 were brilliant fighter pilots such as the seventy-victory-ace Hauptmann Hermann-Friedrich Joppien of JG 51, sixty-three-victory’ ace Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann of JG 51, fifty – seven-victory ace Oberfeldwebel Edmund Wagner of JG 51, forty-three-victory ace Oberleutnant Hubert Mutherich of JG 54,thirty-eight-victory ace Oberleutnant Kurt Sochatzy of JG 3, and twenty-nine-victory ace Oberfeldwebel Franz Blazytko of JG 27.

The remarkable stamina of the soldiers and airmen of the Red Army and the efforts by Soviet industry were two further factors never anticipated by the planners and organizers of Operation Barbarossa. The fact that the WS survived disastrous losses in the summer of 1941 and was able to regain numerical superiority against the Luftwaffe by the end of 1941 is unparalleled in the history of war.

The shift in numerical balance in favor of the WS naturally depended both upon Soviet reinforcements and Luftwaffe losses. The successes by the Luftwaffe should not obscure the fact that it suffered higher losses during Operation Barbarossa than during any previous campaign.

According to the Luftwaffe’s own records, 2,093 German aircraft (758 bombers, 568 fighters, 170 dive-
bombers, 330 reconnaissance aircraft, and 267 miscella­neous types) were completely destroyed on the Eastern Front between June 22 and December 6, 1941. Another 1,362 aircraft (including 473 bombers and 413 fighters) received battle damage of varying degrees. Of 4,653 Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed or damaged in front-line sendee from June 22 to December 31, 3,827 were lost on the Eastern Front. As Hitler launched bis offensive against what he portrayed as “Russian subhumans,” no one on the German side could have anticipated such high losses. At the end of 1941 it was clear that neither aircraft pro­duction nor the flight training schools could keep pace with such heavy attrition.

If the material losses were hard to replace, the per­sonnel losses were impossible to replace. From June to December 1941, the Luftwaffe lost 13,742 men, includ­ing ground personnel, on the Eastern Front. Of these, 3,231 were killed, 2,028 were missing, and 8,453 were injured.

In spite of all its material successes and the high price it paid, the Luftwaffe failed to fulfill its primary mission during Operation Barbarossa—providing the Wehrmacht with preconditions to completely bring down the USSR. The effects of the numerical achievements during the opening months of the war were considerably mitigated by the failure to stifle the reconstruction of the Red Army through the destruction of the Soviet war industry. The predominant tactical doctrine of the Luftwaffe and the lack of equipment to undertake a strategic-bomber offen­sive proved to be the fatal flaws of Operation Barbarossa. As a result, the air war against the Soviet Union devel­oped into a situation similar to what Oberst Werner Molders’s successor as General der JagdfHeger, Oberst

Adolf Galland, described as “attempting to blot out an anthill by stamping on one ant at a time.”

As the front line grew’ increasingly extended at the same time as accumulated attrition was rapidly bringing down the number of serviceable Luftwaffe aircraft, the overall efficiency of the combat arm dropped successively. After less than a month of war, it stood clear that Hitler had launched an invasion with a totally inadequate num­ber of combat aircraft. There was not only a lack of stra­tegic bombers. Shortages in fighters enabled the Soviets to achieve air supremacy over the central combat zone in August, over the Crimea in September, and on the Mos­cow front in November. Inadequate numbers of close – support aircraft—Stukas and ground-attack planes—com­pelled the Germans to deploy their twin-engine medium bombers in costly close-support missions. Throughout the campaign, calling in strong concentrations of air forces repeatedly solved serious crises at the front. Within a short time, the thinly spread Luftwaffe units on the East­ern Front were turned into a pure fire brigade.

In reality, the Luftwaffe lost its independence on the Eastern Front, in practice involuntarily adopting the doc­trine of its enemy. It was, as Oberst Hermann Plocher remarked, “the beginning of the death of the Luftwaffe.”-1 In December 1941 it was obvious to anyone who wished to see that the war with the USSR marked the beginning of the end of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Reich. But the road to the downfall of the Third Reich would prove long and lead to immense hardships. The Luftwaffe air­men had not yet said their last word. They would not only adopt the doctrine of the Soviet Air Force, they would also learn to fight with the same stamina as the Soviet airmen. The largest air war in history had merely begun.

o the south of the Pripyat Marshes, along the 750-

mile front entrusted to Generalfeldmarschall Gerd

von Rundstedt’s Army Group South, with air cover provided by Generalobcrst Alexander Lohr’s Luftflotte

4, the situation was completely different from that to the і north of the Marshes. Von Rundstedt opened his offen-

У sive by launching the German Sixth and Seventeenth armies, together with Panzergruppe 1 on the left flank, v between the Pripyat Marshes and the Hungarian- ! Slovakian border. These forces were intended to strike in an eastern and a southeastern direction, while the Romanian Third and Fourth armies and the German *, Eleventh Army were held back along the Soviet-Roma – nian border. The purpose of this operation was to en – R drcle and destroy most of the Red Army troops west of ; the Dnieper River.

The strongest opposition in the air during the first

[1] ers and managed to shoot down the precious LaGG-3— I his twenty-third personal victory. Kapitan Khalutin at – B tacked a Bf 109 w ith his 1-16, giving it a long burst with I his machine guns. The enemy fighter exploded violently, ■ spreading burning shrapnel over a large area. К Oberfeldwcbcl Heinrich Brenner, in the cockpit, had no і chance of survival. Less than two minutes later, the So – f viet fighters and fighter-bombers were gone.

According to the Soviet report, ten enemy aircraft і were destroyed on the ground,13 but 249 IAP failed to № put JG 3 out of commission. On the other hand, the air – І base raids by the Kampfgruppen of Luftflotte 4 in the 1 same operational area did not meet with better success. В Contrary to the German assessments, Soviet reports show і that only a limited number of VVS aircraft were В destroyed on the ground. At this point the Soviets I regularly dispersed and camouflaged their planes on the в airfields.

The Slovak 12 Letka (squadron), equipped with Avia B-534 single-engine biplane fighters, saw heavy action

n the Baltic States, the German Army Group North had made considerable territorial gains during the first three weeks of the war but failed in its aim of sur­rounding large Soviet troop forces. Panzergruppe 4, con­stituting the central thrust of Army Group North, advanced in a northeasterly direction toward Leningrad. The Eighteenth Army, on its left wing, rolled into Esto­nia, and the Sixteenth Army, on the right, advanced in the direction of the area south of Lake Ilmen. Having penetrated more than four hundred miles into Soviet – held territory, the exhausted Panzer troops had reached a point sixty miles southwest of Leningrad at the Luga by mid-July. By this time, General Erich von Manstein’s LVI Panzerkorps had lost half its tank equipment and ran into heavy counterattacks with strong air support. A pause was inevitable. During the following weeks, Army

Group North concentrated on securing the flanks of the tank spearheads. By mid-July the Eighteenth Army had reached Dorpat while the Sixteenth had advanced fifty miles into “old Russia.”

The Ju 88 bombers of KG 1, KG 76, and KG 77 were assigned mainly to attack the heavy Soviet rail traf­fic in Estonia, with the hope of preventing the Soviet Eighth Army from escaping eastward over the narrow strip of land between Lake Peipus and the Gulf of Fin­land at Narva.

Having brought the Soviet medium-bomber raids to an abrupt end, the Bf 109s of I1./JG 53 and JG 54 were tasked to suppress the upsurge in Soviet fighter and fighter-bomber activity along the entire front line of Army Group North. The VVS fighters were particularly suc­cessful in the western sector, in the skies above Estonia

and the Gulf of Riga. In mid-July the German High Com­mand noted that enemy fighters made air reconnaissance difficult in Estonian airspace.1′ Major Johannes Trautloft, commanding the Jagdgruppen in Fliegcrkorps I, sent his pilots out on regular search-and-destroy free-hunting missions. A favorite tactic among these Bf 109 pilots was to circle above the enemy’s fighter bases to provoke him into the air.

On the afternoon of July 19, 1941, Leutnant Walter Nowotny of 9./JG 54 took off on a fateful free-hunting mission to the island of Osel in the Gulf of Riga together with his wingman. The two Messerschmitt pilots posi­tioned themselves above a Soviet air base with the aim of provoking enemy fighters into the air.

The Soviet 153 IAP launched four I-153 Chaykas led by Starshiy Lcytenant Aleksandr Avdeyev against the German aircraft. Later, Nowotny wrote: “The Bol­shevik fighter base was located near Arensburg. As we started circling in the air above the airfield, ten fighters were scrambled. Two Curtiss 1-153s became my first two victims. . . . Moments later, I noticed a white-nosed aircraft on my tail’ Some of the planes of 153 IAP had their spinners painted white. Similarly, some Bf 109s of JG 54 had white spin­ners. Casting only a short glance at the aircraft behind him—noticing the white nose but not the double pair of wings – Nowotny assumed it was his Kaczmarek or “Wooden Eye” (Holzauge), as wingmen were called in Luftwaffe slang. Instead, it was the Chayka piloted by Starshiy Leytenant Avdeyev. According to a Soviet source,18 Avdeyev attacked the lead Bf 109 and shot it down with a long burst. Then he suddenly felt a hard strike and his cockpit was filled with smoke. Avdeyev found himself attacked from behind.

Avdeyev’s flying skills and the ma­neuverability of the 1-153 made it impos­sible for his pursuers to finish him off. Suddenly another Bf 109 appeared, just in front of him. The German pilot was making a combat turn. Aleksandr Avdeyev immediately pulled up his Chayka and fired a long burst Smoke started pouring out of the 109. The Soviet pilot pressed the trigger again and saw the Bf 109 go down.

Walter Nowotny recalled: “It was not until bullets slammed into my aircraft that I became aware of my fundamental mistake. Unfortunately, by then it was too late. I managed to revenge myself by sending this false wingman to the ground as today’s number three, but then my engine stopped.”

While Starshiy Leytenant Avdeyev bailed out of his 1-153 and landed in friendly territory’, Leutnant Nowotny directed his crippled Bf 109 to the south, out over the sea, in a desperate effort to bring it to the coast of Ger­man-occupied Lithuania. Nowotny failed, and spent three

days and nights in a rubber dinghy in the Bay of Riga before finally reaching the shore near Mikelbaka on the northern tip of the Lithuanian mainland.

: As a car arrived to bring Nowotny to the hospital,

the young pilot insisted that he should drive! Noting Nowotny’s exhausted state, the driver objected, but the Leutnant used his higher rank to push his will. The result was that Nowotny lost control over the car and collided with a tree, giving him a concussion. Finally returning to his unit, Nowotny found that his belong­ings had been packed and were about to be sent to his parents.

“As I started flying combat missions again, 1 had a very unpleasant feeling as soon as I had water below. I couldn’t get rid of this feeling until fourteen days later, as I managed to shoot down a Russian bomber exactly on the same spot as I had gone down.”19

During the rest of his combat career, the supersti­tious Nowotny always wore the trousers that he had car­ried during those three days in the Gulf of Riga—with exception of one mission, his last sortie, at Achmer on November 8, 1944, when he was killed flying an Me 262 jet fighter.

Avdeyev later became one of the top Soviet fighter aces, but he was killed in action thirteen months after this encounter with Walter Nowotny.

On the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland, other famous Soviet fighter aces were operating from the beleaguered naval base at Hanko. On July 23, Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko and Leytenant Petr Brinko of 13 IAP/KBF took off from Hanko together with nine I-153s on a mission against Turku Airdrome in south­western Finland. Since no Finnish aircraft were found there, the Soviet airmen decided to look at the harbor instead. As the formation arrived over Ruissalo Seaplane Station in Turku, they were met with heavy antiaircraft fire that blew one of the biplanes apart. Nonetheless, the two well-known aces pressed home their attack, claiming two seaplanes destroyed. According to German sources, nine Soviet aircraft attacked Ruissalo, where one He 114 and an He 59 were damaged by machine-gun fire.20

But the odds during the Battle of Hanko were too uneven, as 13 lAP’s airfield came under constant artil­lery shelling. While Antonenko was landing after a com­bat mission on July 25, an artillery shell exploded right behind his 1-16. The shock wave overturned the airplane,

In the summer of 1941, twenty-four-year-old Starshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Avdeyev experienced the German onslaught on the USSR as a pilot in 153 IAP, which was equipped with 1-153 and 1-16 fighters. In 1942 this unit was one of the first to receive American-built Bell P-39 Airacobra fighters. On August 12,1942, Avdeyev was killed ramming a Bf 109 of II./ JG 77, his thirteenth aerial victory. On February 10,1943, Avdeyev was posthumously appointed Hero of the Soviet Union. {Photo: Novikov.)

and Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko, the formidable fighter and victor in eleven aerial combats, was thrown out of the cockpit and killed instantly.

The death of his friend shocked Petr Brinko. The commander of the Hanko aviation group saw this and decided to transfer him from Hanko to Tallinn, in north­ern Estonia. In the latter sector, the situation for the Soviet Eighth Army was deteriorating day by day. Squeezed toward the northern coast of Estonia by the German Eighteenth Army, it was in danger of being sealed off by the advance of Panzergruppe 4 to the Luga River, in the east. Leytenant Brinko arrived to join the air forces of KBF and Northern Front that were brought in to relieve pressure on the Eighth Army with aerial assaults against the enemy ground troops.

On July 23 1941. nine 1-153s led by Kapitan Leonid Beiousov and the two 1-16s pilotec by Kapitan Aleksey Antonenko and Leytenant Petr Brirkc—all frorr tie detachment of 13IAP/KBF at Hanko—set out against the Finn sh airfield at Turku. Flying in over the nearby seaplane station at Riissalo. the Soviets found two hydroplanes. Antonenko and Brinko attacked them with machine-gun f re and destroyed both, an He 114 and an He 59, pmbably from Fernaufklarungsgruppe 125. This photo shows the He 59, ‘DK+BS,’ shortly after the Soviet deadly duo’s unwexome visit. {Photo: Matti Poutavaara via Valtonen.)

On the other side of the hill, the Germans shifted the task of the bombers of Luftflotle 1 to an offensive against the supply lines leading to Leningrad, a move intended to prepare the upcoming offensive against that city. On July 25 and 27 the important rail junction at Bologoye, on the Moscow – Le n і ng r a d line, was hit decisively.

Intercepting a formation of Ju 88s over Krasno – gvardeysk, the old czar residence southwest of Leningrad, on July 27, Mladshiy Leytenant Vladimir Zalcvskiv of 157 І. ЛР/7 IAK reportedly brought down one bomber by ramming it with his 1-16. The successful Soviet рік* survived, unlike Leutnant Gerhard ZicImVs crew from 7 / KG 76, which was listed as missing in the same area.21

Having destroyed the remnants of three surrounded Red Army divisions west of the Nevel River, on the right flank of Army (Troup North, the German Sixteenth German Army mounted an offensive on July 28 against the railway junction Velikiyc Luki, a hundred miles to the east of the Russian-Lal vian border. A close-support
mission in this area on the first day of the attack claimed the life of Hauptmann Johannes Freiherr von Richthofen, the St affcl kapitan of 6./ZG 26. Badly hit by enemy fire, his Bf 110 crashed into woods, exploding on impact and creating a violent: forest fire/2

During these days, ZG 26 was followed by the remaining units of Fliegerkorps VIII, as this command was shifted from Luftflotte 2 to Luftflotle I. Bringing in four Stukagruppen and three Jagdgruppen meant a sig­nificant strengthening of the Luftwaffe forces available for support of the upcoming offensive against lxningrad.

Assembled in the Velikiye Luki sector, IIl./JG.5.1 achieved JG 53’s thousandth victory on July 29. On the last day of July, the famous Slarshiy Leytenant Petr Ryabtsev (12.5 IAP), who had been one of the first successful air-to-air rammers on the first day of the war, was shot down and killed by a Grunherz fighter. On the following day, Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann achieved the Grunherz Gesehwader s thousandth victory.

The rate of attrition in the Soviet air units is clearly – depicted by the losses sustained by VVS-North western Front. Unable to count more than approximately 150 aircraft on July 1, 1941, VVS-North western Front alone registered 189 planes lost in combat (including 132 on combat missions, with a further 4 receiving heavy battle if damage) in July.2′ Even this figure is incomplete, since the number of Il-2s listed as lost according to this source I is 19, while the unit records of 74 ShAP/VVS-North – | western Front lists 25 Il-2s lost in July 194124—a fear – some loss rate. After the first month of the war, the I strength of VVS-Northwestern Front had been reduced

■ to only 88 aircraft, including just seventeen SB bomb – P ers.25 A total of 184 aerial victories credited to the fliers

of WS-North western Front during the same period was a poor consolation.

To the costly aerial combat were added the crippling blows dealt by the Luftwaffe against the Soviet air bases, г Responding to complaints from the German Eighteenth I Army about the increased VVS activity in Estonia, ZG -■ 26 was called on to launch a raid against the large air

■" base at Tallinn. The low-level “Hun rides” against air – ; fields deep inside enemy territory were specialities of the Bf 110 crews of ZG 26. This Zerstorergeschwader was І credited with the destruction of 620 Soviet aircraft on і the ground or in the air between June 22 and July 31, ‘ 1941.

ZG 26 managed to catch the Soviets і at Tallinn Airdrome by surprise on August 2. The Bf 110 crews returned home with claims of about forty enemy aircraft destroyed on the ground. In aerial combat with Soviet aircraft, the heavy Ї Zerstorer planes were able to score far t better than during the Battle of Britain.

; t The Soviet naval fighter ace,

[; Levtenant Vasiliy Golubev, recalls a very unpleasant encounter with the Bf 110s ofZG 26. Early one morning, 13 OIАЕ/

KBF was scrambled just as two forma­tions of twin-engine German planes came in to raid the airfield. Leytenant Golubev l’- decided to attack what he assumed to be

■ four Ju 88 bombers head-on and was sur – i prised that the enemy pilots made no at­tempt to evade his attack. Having the

Л enemy leader in his gunsight, Golubev

was just about to press his trigger when the nose of the enemy aircraft seemed to explode. Instantly, 20mm shells slammed violently into the Ishak’s engine and large flames erupted. Golubev instinctively pushed his stick forward, and the enemy aircraft flashed by above him. Only then did Golubev realize that they were Bf 110s equipped with powerful nose armament, and not Ju 88 bombers

Fortunately for Golubev, the airfield was right below, but the Zerstorer pilot came back to finish his kill. At this moment, Golubev’s faithful wingman, Leytenant Dmitriy Knyazev, got on the Bf 110’s tail and hit it with his four machine guns. While Golubev made a quick belly landing, Knyazev continued after the Bf 110, which, with smoke pouring out of one engine, had become sepa­rated from its flight. Knyazev finished it off in the vicin­ity of Narva.26

Meanwhile, the bombers of Fliegerkorps II and VIII continued striking at the Soviet rear area. On August 4, German bombers managed to completely destroy the rail­way station at Toropets, reporting four trains with about eighty railway cars destroyed. Obviously these missions were carried out without the bomber crews being much troubled by the Soviet fighters in this sector. According to Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker of IIL/KG 1: “Early on August 5 we flew against troop columns near Staraya Russa, and during the afternoon an ammunition depot

On August 6,1941, Oberleutnant Reinhardt Hejn, staffelkapitan of 2./JG 54, went down over Soviet territory and was captured. Nine days later, these photos appeared in Leningrad Pravda. In the center, Red Army soldiers are seen examining Hein’s belly-landed Bf 109 F-2. To the right is Oberleutnant Hein, who has received first aid, with armed guards. A close comparison of German and Soviet documents shows that it is highly likely that Hein was Starshiy Leytenant Andrey Chirkov’s seventh victory, reportedly achieved in the vicinity of Lake Samro, about twenty miles from Narva. According to Soviet sources, the German pilot, an Oberleutnant, was interrogated in the headquarters of 158IAP. (Photos: TASS/Leningrad Pravda.)

at Luga was our target. During all of our missions we had to deal with Russian antiaircraft fire, and sometimes also fighters, mostly Ratas. The latter didn’t trouble us very much when they attacked separately. But the Rus­sian antiaircraft fire was effective and dangerous at all flight levels.”

To counter the appearance of Fliegerkorps VIII, four new Soviet aviation regiments arrived as reinforcements to the Northwestern Zone. Starting on August 3, the

Soviet Air Force intensified its air assaults against all sectors of Army Group North. The German Eighteenth Army in Estonia sustained particularly heavy losses.

On August 6, ZG 26 returned to Estonian airspace on another “Hun ride,” reportedly completely annihilat­ing the entire aircraft park at a KBF seaplane station. Probably on the same day, 158 IAP/39 IAD, equipped with Yak-Is, suffered a severe setback as Bf 109s of I./ JG 54 shot down an entire formation of three fighters in a single dogfight. Starshiy Leytenant Andrey Chirkov, with seven victories to his credit at this time, survived a forced landing in friendly territory after bring­ing down one Bf 109. The German pi­lot, Oberleutnant Reinhardt Hein of 2./ JG 54, was slightly injured and subse­quently captured.

On August 7, 1II./KG l’s Haupt­mann Gerhard Baeker experienced a stag­gering example of the strengthened Soviet fighter force in this area:

I was supposed to raid the airfield at Nizino, southwest of Leningrad, together with two aircraft of the 9th Staffel. The weather was bad, with a cloud ceiling of only 150 to 300 feet above our base. The Jagdgruppe com-

manded by Hauptmann Dietrich Hrabak [II./JG 54J was supposed to escort us, but it couldn’t take off due to the adverse weather conditions, so l was tasked with the mission of a solo flight.

1 took off at 0825 and immediately sought refuge in the clouds. To the east of the Luga River, the cloud ceiling rose slowly to 6,000 feet. 1 remained close beneath the clouds so that I would be able to disappear into the haze in case of a fighter attack. Just ahead of the target the clouds dispersed, and all that was left were a few cloud mountains at an altitude of between 3,000 and 6,000 feet. I approached the airfield at 7,500 feet flight level, but just as 1 was about to launch my bomb load 1 found a huge cloud between myself and the tar­get During my second approach flight, 1 noticed that the Soviet fighter defense had been alerted, so I made a quick dive-attack and then climbed into the closest cloud. As I came out of the cloud, 1 was met by three Ratas (IT 6). 1 gave full throttle and attempted to reach the cloud cover at 2,000 feet altitude to the west. The Ratas had difficul­ties in following me, but suddenly nine modern fighters approached—low-winged planes with retracted undercarriage (MiG-Is?). Realizing that 1 had no chance of reaching the clouds, I put the nose of my Ju 88 down, but before I had even commenced my dive the nine fighters were on me. I found myself in the midst of a flood of tracers. Parts of my aircraft were torn off. My left aileron no longer responded and I found it very difficult to move the side rudder. One thought went through my mind: "It looks as though you’re go­ing to be shot down.” But I soon came to my senses. My engines were still running and 1 was diving. The first attack was over. I managed to pull my Ju 88 up and headed for the west at treetop level. None of my crewmen had been injured.

Next, the Soviets made one single pass after another. 1 flung my head in all directions, to watch the ground, to check behind, to follow’ the attack­ing enemy fighters with my eyes. The Russians committed a decisive mistake—they all attacked sin­gly, below and to the left. As long as I could see the muzzles of their arms, nothing happened to me, and when they attempted to fire with the necessary aiming off, I pushed the controls of my

Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker served as technical officer in III./KG 1 Hindenburg during the first two months of Operation Barbarossa. On August 19,1941, he was severely injured in a forced landing due to engine failure on his 132nd combat sortie. Returning to front-line service in 1944, he flew four-engine He 177s with KG 1 and ended the war as Gruppenkommandeur II./JG 3. (Photo: Baeker.)

damaged rudders to the right. This went on for about thirty minutes, until we reached Luga. There, the last Soviet fighter made a final attempt to fin­ish me off just as I had to pull up in front of the steep river bank. But I was prepared, and he failed to hit me. The Luga River was the front line. By now I was over friendly territory, and the last Soviet fighter disengaged.

As long as I had remained high, my gunner, Feldwebel Hein Bruns, fired below to the rear and my radio operator, Unteroffizier Hans Jager, fired above to the rear. At low level, only my radio operator was able to fire with his MG 15. He met

every attack with well-aimed bursts. The gunner and my observer, Feldwebel Zens, handed him new magazines as he emptied one after another at a rapid pace. Within a short time he had expanded all our ammunition magazines. There were only a few rounds left. Only when the situation became precarious did he give the enemy a pair of short bursts. Three Soviet fighters were shot down. One Rata was caught in the air current of my propel­lers at low altitude and crashed into the ground. Two MiGs were shot down by my crew.

After we landed successfully on one wheel at our base at Sabarovka, we counted five cannon and seventeen machine-gun hits in our Ju 88. The fuel tanks had been shot through, but they remained functional due to the self-sealing device. The antenna above the cockpit was also shot through, and the left aileron was severely damaged.

On the evening of August 7, bombers of KBF raided the German supply port at Pamu, in southwestern Esto­nia. A few hours later, the Soviets stunned their enemy by dispatching an air raid against Berlin.

The idea of raiding Berlin was promulgated by the commander of naval aviation, General-Leytenant Semyon Zhavaronokov, in July 1941. Having drawn up the tech­nical plans for the raid, he introduced the plan to the

Polkovnik Yevgeniy Preobrazhenskiy, the commander of WS-Red Banner Baltic Fleet’s 1 MTAP, was one of the ablest Soviet naval aviation regimental commanders in 1941. In January 1942, 1 MTAP-KBF was among the first naval aviation regiments to receive the honorary title “Guards Regiment’. (Photo: Author’s collection.) commissar of the Soviet Navy, Admiral Flota Nikolay Я Kuznetsov. According to Zhavaronokov’s plan, all bomb Я ers in VVS-KBF would participate. The main problem ■ was that only one air base, at Osel Island, permitted the ■ bombers to reach Berlin. Kuznetsov presented the plan I to Stalin. The Soviet dictator accepted, but only agreed Я to the use of two Eskadrilyas of 1 MTAP.

General-Leytenant Zhavaronokov was put in charge Я of the Berlin raid. On July 30 he arrived in Bezzabotnoye Я Airdrome, where he met the commander of 1 MTAP/Я KBF, Polkovnik Yevgeniy Preobrazhenskiy.

The call for a Berlin raid did not come as a surprise* to Preobrazhenskiy. A few days earlier, he had instructed I his regiment’s chief navigator, Kapitan Petr Khokhlov, Я to investigate the possiblities of launching a mission against Я the German capital. The total distance from Osel to Вег – Я lin and back again was more than eleven hundred miles, Я which implied a flight duration of seven hours for the Я DB-3T bombers. This allowed no more than twenty-five Я minutes of fuel reserve.

Polkovnik Preobrazhenskiy ordered twenty DB-3Ts Я to be prepared for the mission. Some of these aircraft underwent certain technical improvements, including the j installation of powerful radio transmitters. Five planes j had their engines exchanged. The best and most expert j enced crews were singled out and interned in a closed zone two miles from the air base, with strict orders that prohibited any contact with outsiders.

At 2300 hours on August 4, fifteen DB-3Ts (the remaining five were still waiting for engine exchanges) і took off from Bezzabotnoye. After a flight of 375 miles, j they landed at Kagul/Osel Airdrome. On August 7, ] weather recce flights to the German Baltic Sea coast were J undertaken by some daring fliers in Che-2 aircraft from j the same airfield. Despite reports of adverse weather 1 conditions-low clouds at 2,500 to 3,000 feet in altitude, 1 and rains—General-Leytenant Zhavaronkov decided to launch the raid that very evening.

At 2100 hours, thirteen bombers started taking off against Berlin. With the exception of one aircraft, which ] carried a 1,000-kilogram bomb load, each DB-3T carried j two 100-kilogram ZAB incendiary bombs and six 100- kilogram FAB high-explosive bombs.

The approach flight was carried out at an altitude of 18,000 feet, the crews having to endure temperatures j of 37 degress Celsius below zero. After three hours, the first ] bombers arrived over Berlin. According to the Soviet ver – 1

[ sion, Polkovnik Preobrazhenskiy dropped the first bombs. 1 He then radioed Osel: “Target Berlin, mission accom­plished!" 1 MTAP reported six bombers arriving over j the German capital, with the remainder dropping their bombs on targets of opportunity.

In his chronicle of the Berlin raids during World War II, historian Werner Girbig gives the German ver – [ sion: “The Russians dispatched a small group of Ilyushin [. Il-4s [DB-3Ts|, which reached the Berlin area but never undertook any real attack. Only one single aircraft ap­pears to have dared enter the airspace over the city’ itself. I Approximately forty minutes after the alarm was sounded,

I several searchlight beams caught the twin-engine Rus­sian aircraft. The pilot maintains his course stubbornly, I without making any evasive maneuvers. The antiaircraft К artillery opens fire. After a few minutes the 11-4 is cov­ered with flames. It goes down in a steep dive and crashes I somewhere in the outskirts of the city. On the following day, the widespread wreckage of the Soviet bomber is I examined closely by air force specialists.”27

According to the Soviet version, all aircraft returned, F though one DB-3 crashed at the airfield due to poor I ground illumination. After the landing, the Soviet airmen I celebrated with a whole box of brandy. 1 MTAP carried out I two more raids against Berlin during the following nights.

The air activity reached a new climax along the en­tire northern combat zone after August 8, when Panzergruppe 4 opened the final offensive against Leningrad on the Luga front, southwest of the city. On the first day of the offensive, heavy rain hampered most air activity. General-Leytenant Markian Popov, the com­mander in chief of the Northern Front, called for large – scale airstrikes against the German area of deployment. This was a difficult task, because his battered air force was widely dispersed. Of 560 aircraft available on August 10, 142 were deployed along the Finnish border and farther north, in the Murmansk area. VVS-KBF was engaged supporting the Soviet Eighth Army in northern Estonia. General-Mayor Aleksandr Novikov, the supreme VVS commander in the Northwestern Zone, decided to shift 2 BAD from the area south of Lake Ilmen and 7 IAP/5 SAD from the Karelian Isthmus to the Luga sector.

With clearing skies on August 10, the air forces on both sides launched all available aircraft in close-support missions in the Luga sector. The impact was terrible. On this day alone, 1,126 Luftwaffe sorties and 908 VVS sorties were logged. The German airmen claimed to have destroyed ten tanks, more than two hundred vehicles,
and fifteen artillery batteries on August 10.28 On the Soviet side, 288 ShAP claimed large successes in low – level attacks against concentrations of enemy motorised troops.

By the end of the day, the Luftwaffe counted fifty – four Soviet warplanes shot down.24 The participating German fighter units suffered only three losses, one of them through a ramming by a MiG-3 piloted by Kapitan Ivan Gorbachyov of 71 LAP/KBF. According to Soviet figures for August 10, VVS-Northern Front shot down twenty-three German planes against eleven of its own planes lost.30

The air strikes enabled Pansergruppe 4 to penetrate the Soviet defense positions on August 11, initiating the drive toward Leningrad. But despite the heavy Luftwaffe air strikes, the Soviet resistance continued to be very hard. The Panzergruppe was only able to move forward slowly in the marshlands on the way to Leningrad, fight­ing bitterly for every step ahead.

The largest Soviet aerial effort against Berlin took place on the night of August 11. It involved both Podpolkovnik Preobrazhenskiy’s naval aviation regiment and aircraft from DBA: DB-3s and DB-3Fs from 200 BAP at Osel; plus eight TB-7s from 432 BAP/81 AD; and three Yer-2s from 420 BAP/81 AD based at Pushkin, near Leningrad. The four-engine TB-7 bombers were personally led by the commander of 81 AD, Kombrig Mikhail Vodopyanov, a veteran and Hero of the Soviet Union.

The mission was a complete failure. One TB-7 crashed during takeoff. Since the KBF had not been informed of this mission, two other TB-7s were mistak­enly shot down by friendly antiaircraft batteries, while a third was downed by a KBF 1-16. Two other TB-7s returned home with heavy AAA damage sustained over enemy territory, and both were destroyed in crash land­ings. One Yer-2 was listed as missing. Only three TB-7s and two Yer-2s managed to reach Berlin.

Kombrig Vodopyanov’s own experiences are quite telling. During the approach flight, bis TB-7, Blue 8, found itself bounced by a group of 1-16s, but it luckily managed to escape without getting hit. Having strayed off course, the crew of the bomber managed to locate Stettin, eighty miles northeast of Berlin, where it ran into a heavy anti­aircraft barrage. Despite one engine out of action due to damage, the crew succeeded in bringing the plane to the Berlin area, where the bombs were salvoed somewhere in the northern outskirts shortly after midnight. Twice hit by antiaircraft fire again, Vodopyanov’s TB-7 went! down in a forested area in German-occupied southern Estonia. After a two-day walk, the crew managed to reach the Soviet lines, only to learn that Vodopyanov had been; relieved of his command and replaced by Polkovnik Aleksandr Golovanov, who later rose to command the entire Soviet strategic bomber force.

These minor Soviet raids naturally had no influence. on the general war situation. The defenders of Leningrad! saw the enemy approach closer day by day. Despite tena – cious efforts by the ground troops and the airmen of the Red Army, the advance of the enemy tank spearheads seemed to be slowed but not entirely halted. On August 13, Panzergruppe 4 reached the rail line connecting! Tallinn, in northern Estonia, with Leningrad. With that General-Mayor Novikov decided to reinforce the air units on the Luga-Leningrad front with 126 navy aircraft, the hulk of WS-KBF.

The scale and pace of operations inevitably wore down the Red air units. On August 13, a successful na­val air force pair, Lcytenant Vasiliy Golubev and Leytenant Dmitriy Knyazev of 13 OlAE/KBF, were shot down. Flying air cover for the Tallinn rail line on the northern coast of Estonia, a group of I-16’s led by Starshiy Leytenant Petr Kulakov was jumped by a Staffel of Bf 109s. The Soviets managed to evade the first attack with­out suffering any losses, but the Bf 109s came back. A whirling dogfight followed in which the Soviet pilots had to use all their flying skills. Leytenant Knyazev’s Ishak was shot down in flames, and Knyazev bailed out, Leytenant Golubev was eventually defeated when a Bf 109 sneaked up on his tail. A violent strike told Golubev that his aircraft was hit. As he turned away, he felt an­other strike, this time from below. His flight altitude was too low by now, and the ground was rushing toward him. Hot oil splashed onto his face and covered his goggles; he threw them off and saw a small wood in front of him. Having slowed by turning off the engine, Golubev man­aged to pull the stick by using all his strength and both hands. Then followed the crash. Vasiliy Golubev returned to conciousness only on the following day.31

Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann of 7./JG 54 Griinherz later described a most difficult air combat with a Soviet fighter pilot in the same area on August 4:

The Russian flight leader had noticed us and

turned around. My wingman made another attack. Once again, the Russian turned and met him head – on. Damn, this was a tough fellow!

The rest of my flight intervened and made wild attacks on him from all positions. This Rus­sian pilot definitely was one of their top aces. He avoided each attack exactly at the right moment, pulled up, and then went down steeply over his wing. He even had the nerve to pull up behind our flight and fire some very accurate bursts. We lay above him, dove on him at high speed, and then pulled up steeply. So far, 1 hadn’t intervened

7./JG 54’s Leutnant Max-Hellmuth Ostermann was one of the most aggressive fighter pilots of JG 54 during the early years of the war with the USSR. He was so short in stature that his Bf 109 had to have wooden blocks attached to the rudder pedals. Nevertheless, Ostermann was one of the few German fighter pilots who dared to enter—and was able to win—turning combats with the highly maneuverable Polikarpov fighters. He later became famous for his long-range sorties, searching out victims over airfields far in the Soviet rear area. Ostermann was killed during one of these sorties, on August 9,1942, after having achieved a total of 102 victories. (Photo: Bundesarchiv.)

Leytenant Vasiliy Golubev of 13 OIAE/KBF was one of the noblest aerial opponents of the Bf 109s of JG 54 Griinherz during much of the war. He scored his first victory, against a Ju 88 on June 28, 1941, and through August 1941 he succeeded in bringing down a total of eleven enemy aircraft, most of them jointly with his faithful wingman, Leytenant Dmitriy Knyazev. Golubev finished the war with a total of sixteen personal and twenty-three shared victories. He reached the rank of leytenant-general before retiring in 1975. (Photo: Seidl.)

in the combat, since I wanted my Kaczmarek to have this kill. But suddenly the Russian tried to get away, heading for two Russian naval ships anchored in the bay. The AAA on the ships was already firing at us. It was now or never! I went down after him, but he turned to the right. I had aimed slightly to the left, but he had noticed this immediately. As I pulled up again, he had already banked to the left. Then he came around and started shooting at me from behind! Suddenly, light AAA fire opened up at me from the ships. I turned left as hard as I could, went down over the left wing, and then pulled left again. 1 made this very fast, and got the Russian in front of me. From

slightly above him, I finally managed to get a burst at him. I could see hits! The plane left a trail of dark smoke.

When Leytenant Golubev returned to 13 OIAE a month later, he would find only nine I-16s left of the original twenty-six.

On the right wing of Army Group North, the Ger­man Sixteenth Army approached Novgorod north of Lake Ilmen. The immediate aim of this attack was to sever the important supply line from Moscow to Leningrad. Dur­ing a battle lasting eleven days, both sides sent strong air forces to this sector. The air units of Luftflotte 1 fell upon the retreating Soviet columns, while VVS-North – western Front and DBA units carried out 460 sorties against the advancing German troops. On August 13 Gefreiter Erich Peter, a newly arrived dive-bomber pilot in 3./StG 2 Immelmann, managed to interrupt the Soviet retrograde movement by knocking out a vital bridge across the Volkhov River. The next day, a formation of Bf 109s bounced a group of Soviet aircraft carrying out low-level attacks near Lake Ilmen and downed seven-
five of them by Oberleutnant Erbo Graf Kageneck of III./JG 27—without suffering any losses. The I Staffelkapitan of 4./JG 52, Oberleutnant Johannes! Steinhoff, scored one victory in the same area. One of his pilots was killed in combat with eight DB-3s of 1 BAK and four of the new 11-2 Shturmoviks. That day, also, 288 ShAP was reported to have destroyed > or damaged more than fifty vehicles in a single Ger­man supply column near Soltsy, southwest of Lake Ilmen.

During one of the 155 sorties flown by KG 2 on August 14, the Do 17 piloted by Knight’s Cross holder: Leutnant Heinrich Hunger received a direct AAA hit! and crashed near Novgorod. The crew managed to bail out. Later, the remains of Leutnant Hunger and his radio operator were found, butchered by their Soviet captors.

On August 16, as Novgorod fell into German hands, the Soviet Eleventh and Thirty-fourth armies opened a counterattack south of Lake Ilmen, at Staraya Russa. KG 1 77 and the entire Fliegerkorps VIII were immediately brought into action against this threat. Dive-bombers and Zerstorer carried out close-support attacks while the

Ju 88s and Do 17s struck against troop columns and railway lines leading to Staraya Russa, inflicting severe casualties. The bombers of Fliegerkorps I meanwhile were fully engaged against Soviet rail supplies, and on August 16 Hauptmann Gerhard Baeker of I1I./KG 1 managed to sever the rail line to the Luga front. On August 17 six Do 17s, led by Oberleutnant Werner Lutter of Stab/ KG 2, managed to destroy eighteen Soviet tanks during a single mission west of Staraya Russa.

Despite a successive decrease of the number of ser­viceable aircraft, the WS continued to present problems to the Luftwaffe in the air. In his chronicle of KG 2, Ulf Bailee made the following note for August 16: “Very strong enemy fighter opposition made the task of the bombers difficult Only due to the Me 109F fighters of fll/JG 54, which flew continous free-hunting missions over the battlefield, were the losses limited to one Do 17 of 9./KG 2, which was forced to belly-land near Vereteni with heavy damage from enemy fighters.”32

The strong offensive action by the WS compelled the Luftwaffe to resume its air-base offensive. Soviet fig­ures, however, show a meager outcome, with only six aircraft of VVS-Northern Front destroyed on the ground on August 16.

During one of these raids, a formation of twenty – four Bf 110s of I./ZG 26 and four Bf 109s of III./JG 54 were intercepted by five courageous MiG-3 pilots. The Soviets claimed four enemy aircraft shot down. I./ZG 26 recorded one Bf 110 heavily damaged while 8./JG 54 Grunhcrz lost Oberfeldwebel Georg Braunshirn, a thirteen-victory ace. Braunshirn was the first among the Griinherz top aces to fall on the Eastern Front.

The logbook of 7./JG 54 on August 18 reads: “The Staffel is involved in daily air combat with numerically superior enemy formations southwest of Leningrad. These engagements frequently last for an hour’s time. The maneuverability of the Russian fighters makes it hard to shoot them down. Leutnant Ostermann nevertheless

Oberleutnant Hans Philipp, the Staffelkapitan of 4./JG 54, was the top scorer of JG 54 in 1941. On August 24,1941, after he had scored his sixty-second victory, he was awarded the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross. This photo shows Philipp a few days before the award ceremony, posing beside the rudder of his Bf 109 F, which displays fifty-six markings. By the time Philipp was killed in combat with U. S. heavy bombers and Thunderbolts on October 8,1943, he had achieved a total of 206 victories. (Photo: Hofer.)

managed to bring down two l-lbs today.”55 The top ace in JG 54, Oberleutnant Hans “Fips" Philipp, of II Gruppe, scored his sixtieth victory during these fights.

To the west, the Battle of Estonia was settled during the latter half of August. On August 19, eight 13 1АР/ KBF Ishaks took off from Tallinn to strafe a column of German troops on the road from Parnu to Tallinn. This cost them three 1-16s damaged, of which one, piloted by Leytenant Alim Baysultanov, exploded shortly after landing.

Striking against the Soviet air units that supported the Red Army in the Leningrad sector, ZG 26 was dis­patched on August 19 against the base of 5 ІЛР/KBFal Nizino, seventeen miles southwest of Leningrad. Oberleutnant Johannes Kiel of I./ZG 26 later wrote the following vivid account of this raid:

We started diving from an altitude of 3,000 meters, J right into the antiaircraft fire. AAA bursts appear to the left, to the right, and between our aircraft And still we continue toward our target. Battle excitement has caught us. Each of us concentrates only on the target. We approach the airfield rap­idly. Each pilot has singled out his target The

ground comes rushing toward us, as if it is going to consume us. Five hundred, three hundred, one j hundred meters. Our guns start hammering. The Zerstorcrgruppe comes sweeping down over the j airfield, only a few meters above the ground. Here and there we can see enemy aircraft burst into I flames, and then we climb again. A wild circus is J commenced. The formation is split as each pilot | seeks his target. The aircraft dive upon their vic­tims from all directions….

‘‘Achtung! Fighters from the left!” The en – j emy fighters have arrived already! Everything is! on fire on the airfield beneath us. Heavy explo – j sions are sounding and there is thick smoke in the air. We dive into the smoke over and over again, and discover more hidden aircraft. As in a dream,

1 can sec one of our own aircraft disengage with a j thick trail of smoke—hit by antiaircraft fire. The j damaged plane is turning away to the west. It starts losing altitude, goes deeper and deeper. There. It hits the ground.

From the Soviet viewpoint, Leytenant Igor Kaberov | of 5 IAP recalled this raid: “A huge formation of enemy aircraft dove out of the sun and came roaring over the hangar roofs. The whisde from falling bombs and rat­tling of machine guns deafened me. I threw myself to the ground and saw the twin-engine Messerschmitts rush over the runway. 1 waited for the right moment, then I stood up and dashed to the shelter. Having almost tom the door from its hinges, I jumped in and flung myself flat to the floor. Someone pulled me into a corner of the shelter. Moments later, a machine-gun burst pierced the door and the tables close to it The lights went out. In the darkness we listened to the seemingly endless

machine-gun fire, bomb explosions, and roaring aircraft engines.*34

According to Soviet sources, twenty Soviet aircraft were destroyed on the ground and a further thirteen received damage of varying degrees during this raid.35 Only one pilot, Mladshiy Leytenant Nikolay Sosedin, managed to take off during the raid, and he crashed his 116 on the runway, sustaining severe injuries. Two days later, one Eskadrilya of 5 1AP/KBF was pulled out of combat to reequip on LaGG-3s.

The airmen of L./ZG 26 claimed the destruction of forty Soviet aircraft on the ground, plus three in the air, for the loss of one Bf 110. With this, ZG 26 had increased its toll of enemy planes destroyed since June 22 to 191 in the air and 663 on the ground.

On August 20 the German Sixteenth Army finally managed to capture Chudovo, north of Novgorod, thus cutting off one of the two main supply lines between Moscow and Leningrad. During this eleven-day battle the units under command of Fliegerkorps VIII had dropped more than thirty-three hundred tons of bombs.

The next day, Panzergruppe 4 reached Krasno – gvardevsk, thirty miles southwest of Leningrad. Instead of concentrating the entire armored force against Leningrad, the commander of Army Group North, Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, ordered
the XXXI Panzer Corps to turn south. The plan was to surround the Soviet troops remaining in the Luga – Novgorod area. During renewed Luftwaffe air-base raids on August 21, VVS-Northern Front registered eighteen aircraft lost on the ground at Pushkin.

To improve the structure of the defense operations at Leningrad, the Stavka divided the Northern Front, responsible for the huge sector between Leningrad and Murmansk, into two new fronts: the Karelian Front, mainly in charge of the Soviet-Finnish combat zone; and the Leningrad Front.

On August 25, Mladshiy Leytenant Petr Kharitonov of 158 IAP reportedly downed a Ju 88 near Krasnogvardeysk by ramming it; then he successfully bailed out. According to a Soviet source,36 the four-man crew of the German bomber bailed out and, from a posi­tion above Kharitonov, opened fire at the fighter pilot with their flight pistols. Another Yak-1, piloted by a young Leytenant, came to Kharitonov’s assistance with blazing guns, killing one of the German airmen while he was hanging in his harness. As they reached the ground, the three surviving Luftwaffe aviators were captured by infuriated Red Army soldiers. The loss lists of Generalquartiermeister der Luftwaffe reveal that a Ju 88 of 6./KG 76 was lost to Soviet fighters in the same area on that day. The entire crew w’as listed as missing, with the comment that two airmen probabably managed to bail out.

Kharitonov was awarded the Golden Star as a Hero of the Soviet Union. This was his second taran—the first being achieved with his 1-16 over another Ju 88 in the vicinity of Pskov in the Soviet – Estonian southern border area on the seventh day of the war. Shortly aftenvard Kharitonov was shot down and seriously w’ounded in air combat. He returned to the front only in 1944, ending the war in the PVO with sixteen victories to his credit.

Another Soviet fighter pilot shot dow-n and killed the Staffelkapitan of 1./ KG 2, Oberleutnant Horst Scharf von Grauerstedt, south of Chudovo, near the Volkhov River on August 25.

Intense fighting along the extended front line on the northern combat zone

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

To the south, on the border between Army Group North and Army Group Center, a prolonged battle was being waged at Velikiye Luki, where a Soviet counterattack was halted with the help of Fliegerkorps VHL This resulted in the complete destruction of the Soviet Twenty-second Army. Here, 40,000 Soviet soldiers perished and 30,000 were captured, a high price for merely slowing the German advance against the sector between Lake Ilmen and Moscow. Oper­ating over this battleground, the Bf 109s of I1I./JG 53 Рік As took a heavy toll of WS-Northwestern Front, reinforced to muster 174 aircraft on August 22. On August 25, Oberfeldwebel Stefan Litjens of 111.,/JG 53 repeated Oberleutnant Erbo

Graf Kageneck’s previous feat by knocking another five Soviet fighters out of the air, including four “MiG-Is” (in reality probably MiG-3s).

In total, VVS-Northwestern Front registered 115 air­craft lost in combat during August 1941, against 88 victory1 claims from July 22 to August 22.37 Most VVS units suffered unbearable losses. Among those that suffered worst was the 11-2-equipped 74 ShAP/VVS – Northwestern Front, which registered twenty-five aircraft lost in July and nineteen in August.38 7 LAK/PVO regis­tered fifty-two fighters lost out of a total of only about one hundred fifty—and those only from August 20 to 30.34

Stiff air battles were fought over the bridgehead es­tablished by the German Sixteenth Army at the Lovat River, south of Lake Ilmen, where the VVS made repeated attempts to destroy the river crossings. For the first time in several weeks in this sector, the Soviet air­men appeared in formations of up to twenty aircraft. On August 27, II1./JG 53 claimed no fewer than seventeen victories in a single engagement, surpassing the five-hun­dred-victory mark of the Gruppe. On the same day, II./ JG 53 claimed another ten victories, including three by Feldwebel Herbert Rollwage.

On the Soviet side, 35IAP/7 LAK was credited with five enemy aircraft, including three Bf 110s, shot down on August 27, and six on August 29-all for the loss of only one MiG-3 on each date. Mladshiy Leytenant Nikolay Shcherbina had three of these victories. None of these claims can be verified with Luftwaffe loss lists.

To the north, a hard blow to the defenders was dealt with the German sei­zure of the Estonian capital, Tallinn, on August 28. The Soviets launched a large naval fleet to evacuate the Tallinn garri­son, but the evacuation units quickly drew the attention of the Luftwaffe. The bombers of Luftflotte 1 had two field days on August 28 and 29. Commanded by Hauptmann Klaus Noske, on August 29 nine He Ills of L/KG 4 managed to sink three ships with a total of six thou­sand tons and damage another three by using the tactic of a stream of individual low-level attacks against the evacuation fleet in a single mission.40 In total, the German bombers succeeded in sinking eighteen vessels of the evacuation fleet.41 Another thirty-five vessels were destroyed by mines or Finnish torpedo boats.

One of the emerging Soviet top aces of 1941, 191 lAP’s Mladshiy Leytenant Yegor Novikov, claimed an extraordinary success on August 29: He reported down­ing two Ju 87s and a Bf 109 near Mga in a combat end­ing with Novikov himself being shot down and wounded. With this, the Soviet fighter pilot had reached a total score of four.

At Lake Ilmen, the battle reached a critical stage during the last days of August, with the Wehrmacht attacking to the north and the Red Army counterattack­ing to the south of the lake

While escorting six Pe-2s of 514 PBAP and four ll-2s of 288 ShAP against the base of II./JG 52 at Soltsy to the west of Lake Ilmen on August 29, nine MiG-3 pilots of 402 IAP spotted a Bf 110, which Mayor Konstantin Gruzdyev attacked. It took a prolonged air combat before he finally managed to finish off the Bf 110. (4./ZG 26 filed the loss of the Bf 110 piloted by Feldwebel Karl Grinninger in the same area.) Mayor Gruzdyev was one of the most skillful Soviet pilots in the Northwestern Zone at this time. When he was recalled from combat duty to continue to serve as a test pilot in February 1942, he had achieved a total of seven­teen victories and was one of the top scorers in the entire VVS.

A dive-bomber mission on the same day deprived Fliegerkorps VIII of one of its most brilliant Stuka aces,

Knight’s Cross holder Hauptmann Anton Keil, the com­mander of IL/StG 1. During an attempted forced land­ing in enemy territory, Keil’s Ju 87 overturned, killing both crew members. The aircraft was afterwards set afire by Soviet troops.42

At the end of August, the pincer movement initi­ated by XLl Panzer Corps succeeded in closing in the remnants of the enemy forces in the Novgorod-Luga area. The largest annihilation battle on the northern combat zone rapidly unfolded, but the outcome was not more than twenty thousand Soviets being taken prisoner.

At this point the German fighter units in the north­ern combat zone were temporarily reinforced with IV./ JG 51. This Jagdgruppe included some of the most bril­liant German fighter pilots of the time. One of the most notable was Oberleutnant Heinz “Pritzl” Bar, who had achieved an amazing victory total since the opening of the war with the USSR, increasing his kill tally from seventeen to seventy in only two months. In action in the northern combat zone, he surpassed his own per­sonal one-day record by downing six enemy planes on August 30 alone. Nevertheless, the fighting on August 31 almost cost Bar his life.

After scoring his seventy-ninth and eightieth victo­ries against two Pe-2s, Bar’s Bf 109 was severely hit, leav­
ing the ace with no choice but to force land behind the enemy lines. Despite having both feet sprained in the violent crash, he leaped from the Messerschmitt as fast as he could, hid in some bushes, and managed to evade capture by Soviet soldiers arriving at the wreck. In a state of terror, confusion, and pain, Bar remained in hid­ing during the rest of the day and the following night The next morning he pulled himself together and decided to try to make it back to the German lines. Turn­ing his leather jacket inside out, stuffing it with hay, and throw’ing away his flight boots, he attempted to appear as a Russian peasant. He could have thrown away the Knight’s Cross and the Oak Leaves he had been awarded two weeks earlier, but his vanity prevented him from doing that; he just put them in his pocket, together with his watch and his small flight pistol. Then Bar started walking with two sprained ankles. He actually made it back to the German lines. By that time he was so injured that he would remain hospitalized for two months.

On August 31, JG 53 Рік As lost its most successful pilot, the 111 Gruppe’s Leutnant Erich “Schmidtchen* Schmidt, in the Velikiye Luki area. Schmidt had achieved a total of forty-seven victories.

Oberfeldwebel Heinrich Hoffmann, another expert of IV./JG 51, achieved his fiftieth victory by downing

four "R-3s" (in reality probably R-5$ or R-Zs) in a row on September 2.4; Two days later, Hoffmann blew three So­viet aircraft— two 1)13- 3s and one MiG-3—out of the sky.4"

The mosl successful fighter unit on the Soviet side during the air battles in the Northwestern Zone in August 1941 was 39 IAL), which claimed thirty-nine German aircraft shot down that month.4′ This unit could count sev – iti lighter in’, in. n. i’t ‘iiuesvhil Ih – ing •’гг’Іііч I <- і пі.: r I К к m’v St. nrh. ikov. uiih a moil v..uv if. igiv •.iciori.- ні: r і І і he end o| Ліи;ііч:

V. Ucsh v I eyieiuni ndrey C hirkov.

GT nun and Slarviiy livu. uri lVti Гтгч. v wil l four. In V> kill.

Lum. iir a’iliv < io. ihev had ;іііі, і’чі i-lvven п. гмтіІ а:ні colic; live kilh ‘Sis l>: li"k. in. 11 In ллч. и ні ■ми-1 u I S9)." кiriian IVn Riink.. 14 I 3 і М» KI3I i.»i. k: onur, eleven mdiv i. liuil kills by the oul ■( AugiM. Rut 40.’ I lvs Mayor k. ii’si;. і r < i-i ciiyev, wiili binecr tor

On the night of September 4-5, before the advance of German ground troops forced the unit to abandon Oscl, 1 MTAP undertook its last of a total of ten Berlin missions. The twelve DB-3s of 200 BAP had also participated in nine Berlin missions, with a total of cighty – one individual flights. Fifty-five aircraft were reported to have reached the Ger­man capital. Two crashed on takeoff due to extreme overload, and the rest lost their way or suffered technical problems and had to pick nearer targets.

Of a total of eighty-six Soviet naval bombers that flew against Berlin in 1941, thirty-three were said to have reached the target. Others attacked targets of oppor­tunity, such as Stettin, Konigshcrg, Danzig, and Schwcincmtimie. Polkovnik Preobrazhenskiy, the daring commander of 1 MTAP, and four of his pilots were awarded the Golden Star as I leroes of the Soviet Union. Five pilots of the DBA were given the same award for their participation in the Berlin raids.

The “moral bombings” of Berlin were definitely a two-edged sword. Just as these raids gave a moral boost

A fighter pilot of 13 IAP/VVS-KBF inspects some small-caliber battle damage dealt to his 1-16 during a stiff engagement with German aircraft in the fall of 1941. (Photo: Russian Aviation Research Trust.)

to the battered Soviets during these hard times, the forced abandonment of this venture was felt as a setback.

Early in September, Schlisselburg, on the southern shore of Lake Ladoga to the east of Leningrad, became the focus of ground combat in the northern combat zone. From September 5, the He Ills of Oberst Hans-Joachim Rath’s KG 4 General Wever were concentrated in heavy “rolling attacks” against Soviet fortifications in this sec­tor. Four days later, Schlisselburg fell into German hands, depriving the defenders of Leningrad with their last land connection with their supply bases.

At this point the German Army Group North had J succeeded in driving the Soviets out of the Baltic States I and severing the land connection to Leningrad. The I defenders had suffered tremendous losses, in the air and 11 on the ground. What saved the situation for the Soviets! I on this front was that the bulk of the ground troops had j managed to withdraw in orderly fashion. Only limited I Red Army forces had been surrounded and annihilated, ] I and the construction of the Leningrad defense was in I full swing. The mobile war in this front sector had closed, j I but the Soviets had all the reason in the world to fear] the coming battle of Leningrad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

General-Polkovnik Mikhail Kirponos, was killed in combat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although part of the “new generation” of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

■ Freiherr von Richthofen, Johannes von

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

|: Indeed the Luftwaffe’s fearsome Blitz-

j krieg tactic was due mainly to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kuzmin realized that this dogfight was with one of

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

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

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

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

Although heavily struck by Fliegerkorps II and Vlll,

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

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

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

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

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

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

A MiG-3 Eskadrilya commanded by Kapitan Fyodor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They went on coming the whole afternoon.

From our airfield alone we saw twenty-one crash,

and not one get away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pokryshkin adds,

From above 1 saw red stars on the wing surfaces!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roughly three-quarters of this total may be consid­

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

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

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

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

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

This was not what the invaders had expected. A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ffitect firms /tfedSter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kapitan Vitaliy Gordilovskiy of 125 SBAP recalls a similar experience:

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

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

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

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

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

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

II thousand mark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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