Category Air War on the Eastern 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

Black Cross / Red Star

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.