Category Air War on the Eastern Front

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

■ Freiherr von Richthofen, Johannes von

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

|: Indeed the Luftwaffe’s fearsome Blitz-

j krieg tactic was due mainly to him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kuzmin realized that this dogfight was with one of

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

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

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

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

Although heavily struck by Fliegerkorps II and Vlll,

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

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

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

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

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

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

A MiG-3 Eskadrilya commanded by Kapitan Fyodor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They went on coming the whole afternoon.

From our airfield alone we saw twenty-one crash,

and not one get away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pokryshkin adds,

From above 1 saw red stars on the wing surfaces!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roughly three-quarters of this total may be consid­

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

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

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

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

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

This was not what the invaders had expected. A

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kapitan Vitaliy Gordilovskiy of 125 SBAP recalls a similar experience:

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

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

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

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

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

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

II thousand mark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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