Endurance in the South

I

n the southern combat zone, the medium bombers of General Robert Ritter von Greim’s Fliegerkorps V had played a decisive role in enabling Panzergruppe 1 and the German Sixth Army to advance despite effective Soviet resistance against Kiev on the left flank of Army Group South.

A Soviet counterattack on July 1 against Panzergruppe 1, aimed at covering the withdrawal of the Southwest­ern Front toward Kiev, was completely routed by Fliegerkorps V. On this day the Ju 88 and He 111 bomb­ers of KG 51, KG 54, and KG 55 reported the destruc­tion of 220 motor vehicles of all kinds, including 40 tanks, west of Lvov.

To block the movements of Soviet troops in the rear area-transports that were mainly undertaken by rail due to the adverse state of the dirt roads in this area—the He 11 Is and Ju 88s of the entire Luftflotte 4 initiated a large-scale railway-interdiction offensive in a huge area to the west of the Dnieper River. The main mission of the Bf 109 pilots was to seek out and destroy any enemy aircraft encountered in the air. The main tactic used was a series of constant free-hunting missions in small groups of Bf 109s over the vast battle area and the closest Soviet rear areas. A prolonged ridge of high pressure created clear skies, which provided the fighter pilots with the best possible conditions.

The first ten days of intense air activity had left no more than a few hundred VVS aircraft remaining in the entire southern combat zone. General-Leytenant Yevgeniy Ptukhin, a veteran of Spain who commanded VVS-Southwcstern Front, was made scapegoat for the failure. On July 1 he was relieved from command and eventually fell victim to a firing squad. The first task of the new commander, General-Leytenant Fyodor

Astakhov, was to organize air support for the hard-pressed Red Army units in the Lvov area. Six aviation divisions of the Southwestern Front and two bomber corps from the Long-Range Air Force were employed. Their mission was divided into three main tasks: The bomb­ers of 4 BAK/DBA were assigned to attack the advancing enemy columns; other bombers and ground-attack air units were instructed to provide the retreating army with close support at the front; and fighter units were directed to cover the retreating army from air attacks. A main obstacle to all of these tasks would remain the Jagdwaffe.

One of the toughest fighter pilots of the entire war, Hauptmann Walter “Guile” Oesau, the commander of III./ JG 3, roamed the skies in this area. On July 1 he scored his fifty-second to fifty – fourth victories by downing three SB bombers. Total claims by the fighters of Luftflotte 4 on the first day of July were seventeen Soviet aircraft shot down against only two losses.

The front along the Sovict-Romanian border had remained relatively calm during the first days of the war, the German and Romanian armies await­ing the encirclement of the Soviet Southwestern Front by the advancing troops on the left (northern) flank. But on July 2 the German Eleventh Army, on the right flank, attacked toward Mogilev Podolskiy on the Dniester River. StG 77—the first Stukas to participate in Luftflotte 4’s Soviet campaign—had been deployed from the central combat zone to strengthen air cover for this new offensive. At the same time, the Roma­nian Third Army started advancing toward Chernovtsy to the north. On its left flank, the Hungarian Army crossed the Soviet border, a most significant result of the Romanian fake “Soviet” air raid six days earlier.

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Фото М. РЫЖАКА (ТА00)

К Following their first hostile encounters with the FARR, the Soviet pilots reported that the Romanian airmen lacked the experience of Luftwaffe К tiers and thus were an “easier’ enemy. The Romanian Air Force suffered heavy losses, and most of its units were withdrawn from first-line ■ sen-ice after a couple of months. This He 112, piloted by Adjutant Aviator Aldea Cherchez of Grupul 5 Vanatoare, was brought down behind I the Soviet lines near the Moldavian village ofVulcanesti on July 2,1941. This TASS photo was published in Leningrad Pravcfe on August 13, §• 1941. (Photo: TASS/Leningrad Pravda.)

Resistance in the Moldavian skies was fierce during the first days of July. On July 2 Oberleutnant Kurt Lasse, Oberfeldwebel Erwin Riehl, and Feldwebel Wilhelm Baumgartner of 9./JG 77 had an encounter with seven MiG-3s led by the famous Starshiy Leytenant Aleksandr Pokryshkin of 55 1AP, which were escorting nine SBs. Baumgartner shot down Mladshiy Leytenant Stepan Komlev’s MiG-3 (the pilot bailed out and survived), while his comrades claimed three Soviet bombers. (Soviet sources show the loss of two SBs.) Pokryshkin made an unsubstantiated claim of a Bf 109. Altogether on this day, the Jagdgruppen of Luftflotte 4 claimed another fifty-six victories against three losses.

Given the uneven odds they faced, the achievements by the Soviet airmen are impressive. On July 3, the sec­ond day of the Romanian ground offensive against Moldavia, the FARR lost eleven aircraft, including four

British-manufactured Bristol Blenheim bombers, against a reported eight Soviet aircraft shot down.

The next day, General-Mayor P. S. Shelukhin, the commander of VVS-Southern Front, dispatched all his bomber units in a major effort to block the advance by the German Eleventh Army in Moldavia. The Bf 109s of 1II./JG 77 had a field day, claiming seventeen SBs and DB-3s in this area.

According to Soviet sources, the defenders lost 1,218 aircraft in the Ukraine during the first two weeks of the war. In spite of bloody losses, the fighting spirit among the VVS airmen never swayed. An example of this is Mladshiy Leytenant Dmitriy Zaytsev of 2 LAP of 36 LAD/ Kiev PVO, who on July 4 directed his 1-16 right into a Ju 88 above the city of Kiev.

One of the most successful Soviet fighter pilots in the Moldavian battle zone was Starshiy Leytenant

Anatoliy Morozov of 4 IAP, who scored seven personal and two collective aerial victories before the end of July 1941, and eight other planes destroyed on the ground. During a melee with He 11 Is of I./KG 27 escorted by eleven Bf 109s of IIL/JG 77 in the air over Moldavia on July 7, Morozov shot down one bomber and, with no ammunition left, rammed a fighter with his MiG-3. He successfully bailed out and even managed to capture the German fighter pilot, Oberfeldwebel Georg Bergmann of 9./JG 77. 2./KG 27 registered one He 111 shot down.15 During another engagement that day, 55 lAP’s Leytenant Kuzma Seliverstov attacked six Bf 109s and claimed to have shot one dow’n.

During these days, reinforcements were hurriedly brought in from the Soviet Far Past to the VVS on the southern combat zone. The strength of the WS in this sector rapidly increased to more than 1,000 operational aircraft, of which 671 belonged to VVS-Southern Front. Between June 22 and July 9, VVS-Southern Front car­ried out more than 5,000 sorties in the Romanian border area, claiming 238 enemy aircraft shot down.

Mcanw’hile, the Luftwaffe units were rapidly w’om down by the daily rate of attrition. In the beginning of July, many units in Fliegerkorps IV and V were already dow-n to one-third of their original strength.

It is obvious that the German airmen did not have the same “morale fiber” as their Soviet counterparts. Even if they inflicted considerable losses to the enemy each day—on July 5 alone, Fliegerkorps V claimed the destruc­tion of eighteen trains and more than five hundred trucks—the German airmen continued to experience te­nacious and never-ending resistance wherever they ap­peared. The men in the Luftwaffe bomber units simply could not grasp this. After the first ten days of combat, a feeling of despair had spread within the Kampf- geschw’ader. In the air, new Soviet fighters manned by aggressive pilots appeared each day. From the ground, the He Ills and Ju 88s w’ere constantly subjected to intensive fire, not only from antiaircraft artillery and machine guns but also from small arms. The Red Army directive to its soldiers to open fire with any arms at any enemy aircraft sighted proved to have a tremendous psy­chological effect if not always a material one. In the chronicle of KG 51, Wolfgang Dierich noted that the mood among the personnel dropped considerably. “The first worn-out, physically and psychologically exhausted crews w’ere withdrawn from combat and transferred to Germany.”16

But the Luftwaffe still dominated the skies, mainly due to the efforts of its fighter pilots. By July 9, rail; traffic west of the Dneiper River had been substantially blocked.

On July 10, as Marshal Semyon Budyonny arrived to assume command of the new’ Red Army Southwest-] em Zone—as supreme commander of the Southwestern and Southern fronts—the Soviet situation had grown increasingly desperate. The new supreme commander of | the army air forces on the Southwestern Zone, General j Mayor Fyodor Falaleyev, ordered TB-3 heavy bombers j into action against the German advance against Kiev on i the northern flank of Army Group South. During a late, afternoon mission in the Zhitomir area on Thursday, July 10, the Rotte composed of Oberleutnant Franz Beyer] and Unteroffizier Werner Lucas of ll./JG 3 came across | twelve of these “dinosaurs” from 14 ТВАР. The Soviet bombers flew without any fighter escort, and the two German pilots claimed five of them shot down.17 In fact,’ Soviet sources show that seven TB-3s were downed, though the bomber gunners claimed one Bf 109 de-; strayed.14 Franz Beyer would eventually amass a total of 81 confirmed victories. His wingman, Lucas, would even j surpass him, reaching a total score of 106.

If the men of the Kampfgeschwader felt despair, the combat spirits of the Jagdflieger stood at their peak. What counted here were aerial victories, and the German fighter] pilots had never previously experienced such rich hunt-1 ing grounds. On the same day as Beyer and Lucas of II/ j JG 3 butchered the TB-3s, Hauptmann Walter Oesau of 1II./JG 3 blasted five Soviet planes out of the sky, fora total of sixty-eight victories. Further to the south over Moldavia, on July 10, II1./JG 77 claimed twenty-onei kills, including nineteen DB-3 bombers.

At 1530 hours on July 12, Hauptmann Oesau and his w’ingman, Oberleutnant Georg Michalek, spotted a formation of SB bombers escorted by three I-16s while on a free-hunting mission over the forward tank spear­heads of Panzergruppe 1. Oesau radioed his wingman to start w’ith the fighters. Oesau’s Bf 109 came out of the sun. A short burst, and the first 1-16 fell in flames. Before the two remaining Ishak pilots realized w’hat was happening, the 20mm rounds from Oesau’s nose can­non tore them both apart. Oberleutnant Michalek 1 confirmed Oesau’s victories to a total of seventy-five. 1 Walter Oesau’s war-time biographer, Friedrich Griese, j described w’hat followed: “Then the bombers are left alone j with Oesau and his compatriot. They attack one by one: |

first Michalek, followed by Oesau, then Oesau again. After twenty minutes, seven enemy aircraft lie burning on the ground. The two fighter pilots only disengaged when they simultaneously had emptied their ammuni­tion. The hunting was over.”19

When Hauptmann Oesau was posted as a Geschwaderkommodore to occupied France two weeks later, his total score stood at eighty-six, of which forty – four had been achieved during the past five weeks.

On the same day as Oesau and Michalek ripped the Soviet bomber formation apart, the medium bombers of Luftflotte 4 extended their rail-interdiction campaign to the east of the Dneiper River to prevent the arrival of Soviet reinforcements. Army Group South recorded that Luftflotte 4 had managed by July 13 to prevent any possibility of a large-scale Soviet counterattack by destroy­ing the railroad system.

The VVS responded by renewing its aerial offensive

Soldiers from a Waffen-SS unit examine a downed Bf 109 F of JG 53 Рік As. The Luftwaffe encountered some of the stiffest Soviet resistance during Operation Barbarossa in the air over the Ukrainian capital Kiev. (Photo: Roba.)

against Romania, with the primary aim directed at forcing Luftwaffe units to be withdrawn to this area from the front. The first among these new attacks was crowned with success. During the after­noon of July 13, six Soviet bombers raided the Romanian Astra, Romana, and Orion oil refineries on the southern outskirts of Ploesti. The attack destroyed seven­teen lubricating oil storage tanks and twelve loaded railway tanker wagons, with a total of 9,000 tons of oil set ablaze. The Unirea oil refinery would remain on fire for three days. Nevertheless, this was not sufficient to force a withdrawal of German or Romanian fighter units from the front line. Only two of the attack­ers against Romania on July 13 made it back to base; the other four were shot down by fighters. From mid-July, the Soviet bombers—DB-3s from WS-ChF and 4 BAK—resorted mainly to noctur­nal raids against objectives in Romania.

On the main front in the Ukraine, the Soviet troops continued to withdraw in the direction of Kiev. Some of the best VVS units were concentrated in this sector, a fact that was soon noticed by the German fighters. On July 14 Hauptmann Walter Oesau ran into unexpect­edly stiff opposition during an aerial encounter in the Kiev area. His Bf 109 was badly shot up, and the Ger­man ace barely managed to return to base. The medics at his airfield removed small splinters from his face, some a few inches from his left eye. Afterward Oesau confessed that during the return flight he had almost fainted out of fear of having to land in enemy-held territory.

The next day, one of Oesau’s most promising young pilots, Oberfeldwebel Hans Stechmann, achieved three vic­
tories in the same area. With one of them, JG 3 had reached its thousand-victory mark.

Leutnant Franz Schiess of the Stabsschwarm of JG 53 recorded a bitter engagement with a pair of Soviet biplane fighters over Kiev in his diary on July 15,1941: “We encountered two I-15s and an SB. The Kommodore shot down an 1- 15 and the bomber in a few minutes. I grappled with the second fighter. He flew very skillfully, and I never got a chance to fire. Whenever 1 approached to about 100 meters, he turned against me. Hav­ing gone through this with the fellow sev­eral times, by which time I was already east of the Dnieper, I chose to disengage.”20 During the second mission that day, the Stabsschwarm/JG 53 challenged a for­mation of lshaks. The Bf 109 flown by the Geschwaderkommodore, Major Gunther Freiherr von Maltzahn, was hit in the ra­diator and the pilot made a forced landing. The events on the southern combat zone during the first four weeks of the war stood in contrast to the central and northern combat zones. Here, the best-equipped Red Army units, led by some of the most experienced commanders, had succeeded in con­siderably slowing the German armored offensive. Hav­ing suffered severe losses Army Group South failed to achieve more than a breakthrough and a slow advance toward Kiev on the left (northern) flank. The main fac­tor in the limited German success in this sector had been the effective use of Fliegerkorps IV and V. To Marshal Budyonny and his WS commander, General-Mayor Falaleyev, it stood clear that the main threat to the Ger­man advance had come from the air.