Category Air War on the Eastern Front

n the southern combat zone, the Soviets still blocked the entrance to the Crimea. During October, Hitler’s concern over this matter grew. The seizure of the Crimea, the “permanent aircraft carrier” from where Soviet bombers threatened the Romanian oil fields, was of immense importance to the German strategic position.

The main obstacle to the German offensive was the strong VVS forces allocated to this area. JG 77 (to which I.(J)/LG 2 was assigned while I./JG 77 operated on the Arctic front) had originally been allocated to this area. But the demands in the Rostov sector, two hundred miles to the east, had left III./JG 77 as the only Gruppe of JG 77 in the skies over the Crimea. For this reason, IL/JG 3 had been shifted from the central combat zone to the Crimea. This force did not suffice to break the back of the VVS-Black Sea Fleet, and it was evident that further fighter reinforcements had to be brought in. Although there was mounting Soviet air activity that considerably delayed the advance of the northern wing of Army Group South toward the industrial area in the Donets Basin, the only fighter unit in this sector, III./JG 52, was trans­ferred to the Crimean front.

On October 23 three Jagdgruppen—1I./JG 3, 111./ JG 52, and III./JG 77—took off from the air base at Chaplinka, north of the Perekop Isthmus, to clear the Crimean skies once and for all. Oberst Werner Molders, the new inspector of the Fighter Air Arm, took personal charge of these German fighter operations.

The Soviet airmen wrere shocked at the sudden onslaught by such large groups of aggressive enemy fight­ers. Dozens of Soviet aircraft fell prey to the merciless fighter attacks from above. Finally, Soviet superiority in the air over Perekop was broken.

October 23, 1941, brought a brutal end to the Soviet piggy-back Zveno tactic. 63 BAB/Y’VS-ChF launched two TB-3s escorted by eleven I-15bis and eight 1-153s against artillery positions near Perekop. As large num­bers of Bf 109s suddenly appeared ahead of the target area, the 1-16 fighter-bombers were jettisoned. Kapitan Arseniy Shubikov, the able commander of 2 Eskadrilya of 32 ІАР/ChF, led the four l-16s against a tank con­centration below. At the same time, a swarm of Bf 109s from III./JG 77 pursued them. Several Messerschmitts attacked the escort with terrifying effect, downing five of the eight l-15bis and 1-153 biplanes of 8 ІАР/ChF. Leutnant Emil Omcrt and his wingman went after the diving l-16s. Closing in at high speed, Omert brought down two, his thirty-third and thirty-fourth victories. In one of the 1-16s, Kapitan Shubikov plunged to his death.

The pilots of 1I./JG 3 and HI./JG 77 shot down eleven MiG-3s, eight Polikarpov I-15bis, and three I-16s without suffering a single loss. The Gruppenkommandeur of ll./JG 3, Hauptmann Gordon Gollob, who had increased his victory tally from seventy-six to eighty-one the previous day, claimed four. An additional eleven Soviet aircraft were claimed shot down by the pilots of III./JG 52 and AAA gunners.

The only loss suffered by the participating Jagdgruppen was a Bf 109 of III./JG 52. This was this unit’s first day of combat over the Crimea, and the pilot lost was the leading ace in 9. Staffel, Feldwebel Ewald “Ede” Diihn. In the air over the Brom factory, I1I./JG 52 fell on six Pe-2s escorted by four Yak-ls of 5./32 IAP/VVS-ChF. According to the Soviet loss list, all six Pe-2s and one Yak-1 were shot down. Shortly after send­ing his twenty-third victim, a Pe-2, to the ground, Ede Diihn was last seen pursuing another bomber at low level.

Following the October 23 massacre, the Soviet avia­tion regiments in the Crimea were in complete disarray. Several experienced airmen had failed to return from the missions this day, and others were hospitalised with bad injuries. Apart from the large numbers of aircraft destroyed, there were damaged aircraft in need of repair before they could be used again. But the greatest blow was dealt to the fighting spirit of the airmen. What dis­couraged them further were the replacement aircraft brought in from the mainland. Proud Yak-1, MiG-3, and Pe-2 pilots found that they had to fly obsolete aircraft models again—I-16s, l-153s, and SBs. The bulk of the new modern aircraft emerging from the factories was earmarked for the defense of Moscow.

Feldwebel Johann Pichler of 7./JG 77 scored his fifteenth victory against one of the 1-15s” (probably l-15bis) shot down during the massacre on 32 ІАР/ChF over Perekop on October 23.1941, Later that day, Pichler proudly took this photo of his victory markings on the rudder of his Bf 109. One of the two ships painted above the victory markings indicates the bomb hit that Pichler scored on the British battleship Valiant north of Crete on May 22,1941. Pichler was in almost constant front-line service from August 1940 to August 1944, flying about seven hundred sorties and scoring a total of seventy-five victories. On August 30,1944, he ended up in Soviet confinement when Bucharest, where he was hospitalized, was seized by the Red Army. (Photo: Pichler via Norrie.)

On October 24 the Soviet presence in the air was weaker than ever in the Perekop skies. Faced with Bf 109 fighters, the Soviet bombers jettisoned their bombs and banked away. Next, it was the turn of the Soviet ground troops to feel wrath from the air. Large numbers of Stukas and horizontal bombers broke up the Soviet defensive positions. German shock troops did the final job with flamethrowers and hand grenades. Three days later, the entire Crimean front collapsed.

According to German sources, 140 Soviet planes were shot down during the final battle over the Perekop front, from October 18 to 24: 124 by German fighters and 16 by ground fire.

Suffering heavy losses during the next days and with no available replacements, the number of Soviet aircraft in the Crimea diminished rapidly. During the last seven days of October, 5 Eskadrilya/32 IAP/VVS-ChF lost fifteen of the seventeen Yak-ls it had on the evening of October 23.1II./JG 52, claiming more than forty victo­ries during this period, w’as responsible for almost all of these losses. The group’s Leutnant Hermann Graf alone w’as credited with five “1-6Is” between October 24 and 28. Fighting back desperately, Soviet Leytenant

Konstantin Alekseyev was credited with three victories during a ten-day period.

On October 25, 5./32 IAP/VVS – ChF was left with only four Yak-ls to escort a group of Pe-2s against the ad­vancing German troops. This elite Soviet squadron, led by Starshiv Leytenant Mikhail Avdeyev following the loss of Kapitan Ivan Lyubimov in September, was challenged by fourteen Messer – schmitts from 9./JG 52, including one piloted by Hermann Graf. And Oberst Werner Molders himself directed the air combat by radio from the forward trenches. “The hated, yellow-bellied Bf 109s flew higher than us,” recalls Mikhail Avdeyev. Nevertheless, the Yakovlev pilots managed to put up a gallant fight.

Oberleutnant Dieter Zehl’s Bf 109 was shot down, its pilot listed as missing. But the “1-61” claimed by Hermann Graf (his seventeenth victory’) probably was Mikhail Avdeyev’s Yak-1, which returned to base with thirty-two bullet holes. A week later, 5./32 LAP was pulled out of combat for three weeks so its pilots could journey to pick up new airplanes.

On November 1 the Germans captured Simferopol and shortly afterward were in control of most of the Crimea, except for Sevastopol, which was to hold out for another eight months.

As a finale to the Battle of the Crimea, one of the largest tragedies at sea in history occurred on November 7, 1941. Luftwaffe bombers hit and sank the passenger steamer Armeniya, which was evacuating soldiers and refugees from Sevastopol, in the Black Sea south of Yalta. Of an estimated five thousand people on board, all but eight perished in the sea.

The air battles during the struggle for the Crimea were some of the hardest fought on the Eastern Front during 1941. Between mid-September and the end of October, the Messerschmitt fighters of Fliegerkorps IV claimed approximately three hundred victories against eighteen pilot casualties in the Crimean skies: II./ JG 3, with sixty-seven victories for one pilot killed and one wounded; III./JG 52, with sixty victories for two pilots killed or missing; II./JG 77, with forty-

four victories for three pilots killed or missing, plus two captured and two wounded; IIL/JG 77, with an amaz­ing one hundred fifty-eight victories for three pilots killed and one wounded; and I.(J)/LG 2, with at least six vic­tories for two pilots killed or missing and one wounded.

That the main port of Sevastopol, the greatest bait in the Crimea, remained in Soviet hands was mainly due to the efforts of the Soviet airmen. As the balance sheet was drawn, it showed that they had held the Germans back for as long as it took to build up the defenses of Sevastopol.

The achievements of the Luftwaffe to a large extent relied on a dozen or so skillful fighter aces against whom most Soviet airmen stood little chance.

The Jagdgruppen assigned to the Battle of the Crimea had fought virtually to the “last round." At the end of the battle, the lack of reinforcements and vital supplies such as spare parts and fuel had brought down the Luftwaffe forces in this area to a mere handful of planes. The situation was so grave that some units were actually grounded for several days simply because there were no supplies.

At the end of October, all that remained of the Staffeln of Il./JG 3 were tw’o or three serviceable Bf 109s each.6 A few days later, Il./JG 3 was pulled out of combat and transferred to Germany for two months of rest and recuperation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a successful dogfight over the front area, Suprun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the most successful Soviet fighter pilots of Я

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Podpolkovnik Leonid Goncharov’s 131 IAP, rated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Volume I: Operation Barbarossa. 1941

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Cross / Red Star

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.