On each and every attack our valorous Red Army will answer with three times more powerful blows!
Be a pilot, contribute to the power of the air force!
Long live the powerful aviation of the socialist country!
Head-on deliberate midair collision is a weapon of heroes. Glory to the Stalin’s falcons, threat to the fascist predators!
Soviet propaganda posters
“I have done my best during the past few years to make our air force the largest and most powerful in the world. The creation of the Greater German Reich has been made possible largely by the strength and constant readiness of the air force. Born of the spirit of the German airmen in the First World War, inspired by its faith in our Führer and commander in chief, thus stands the German air force today, ready to carry out every command of the Führer with lightning speed and undreamed of might.”
Order of the Day from Göring to the Luftwaffe, August 1939
When Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, began in 1941, the Germans had staggering early success against the Soviet air forces, claiming to destroy approximately 5,000 aircraft in the first week, mostly caught on the ground and lined-up in neat rows. Soviet and German official records are surprisingly in close agreement, with for example, a Soviet figure of 1,300 losses on the first day, versus German claims of 1,100.
As aerial combat developed, the victory scores of leading German pilots such as Erich Hartmann, Gerhard Barkhorn and Günther Rall were, and still are, often criticised by both Soviet veterans and historians. Due to the extent of the large-scale air battles over-claiming was common. German tactics allowed pilots to concentrate on kill totals, while Soviet tactics demanded the accomplishment of the mission, so that if a fighter shot down a bomber, but other bombers reached their target, it was not considered to be a successful sortie. Günther Rall also considered the opposition to be generally ill-prepared.
“The Russian pilots at the beginning of the war were poor, they had bad tactics and obsolete aircraft. We triumphed at first because they were totally unable to defend themselves, and were in complete disarray. We scored victory after victory in the air because they had no strategies or tactics. But they learned very quickly with new equipment, the LaGG, MiG and Yak series, and were then adequate opponents. The LaGG-5 and La-5 were impossible to catch. I chased them at full power but they were always out of range, it was very frustrating.
“There’s no doubt they learned very quickly how to fight us, so they were soon serious opponents. They copied our tactical formations, and it became evident to us that they had become very confident and powerful. In contrary to the West, they were rude and crude, controlled by the political commissars!” (This is an oft-stated belief, although in reality the commissars had almost no controlling power.)
What is clear from veterans’ accounts, is that the outbreak of war was almost completely unexpected. Benedikt Kardopoltsev’s unit was certainly taken by surprise, and thrown into chaos for some time.
“We used to live in the tents near our airfield, and one night we were raised by the alarm. We were gathered together and told: ‘War has begun!’ It was Sunday, five o’clock in the morning. Some were told to help load ammo, some helped technicians to prepare ’planes, some had orders to camouflage ’planes.
“My commander asked: ‘Who knows how to use the Degtyaryov machine gun?’ I said: ‘I’m ready!’ He gave me two cadets to carry cartridges and the machine gun: ‘Hide about 2 kilometres from us, and if you see some saboteurs, kill them. In about two hours we will relieve you.’ One hour passed, two…eventually twelve, and it was getting dark. We were thirsty and hungry, but we had no orders to leave our post. Finally, we just went back to the base, and met our commander, who said: ‘Where were you? Were you AWOL?’ ‘You sent us to the guard post in the morning!’ ‘Well, yes, I had forgotten.’ So we went to the canteen, where there was nothing left, and we ended up going to bed hungry. That was my first day of war.
“When the Germans got closer, we prepared for evacuation. For three days we waited for a train, and when we were losing hope it finally came. Technical staff disassembled our aircraft and we loaded them onto the train, then we went to Azerbaijan. We had to fight for food there, less than three months from the war’s beginning, and already there was nothing to eat.”
Initially serving as a mechanic, Mikhail Pomorov was later retrained to become a pilot and flew the Yak 9. He summed up some of the hard lessons and difficult times he went through.
“My first flight check was made by Sergey Nikolayevich Aleshin, a pilot of the old school. He made me wear a silk scarf, and when we returned he said, ‘What kind of a pilot are you, if after flying with your commander you don’t have blood on your scarf? If you are not looking around, you will get killed!’ The other thing he said was, ‘You have to land by your ass, not head! You have to feel the distance from the ground by your ass. And remember, your butt is the most important gauge in the cockpit. If something goes wrong, you will have this funny feeling down there long before gauges will react.’
“War as a whole was won by village boys, although most of the pilots came from the cities, it was easier to get to an aero club there. Some images still appear in my mind; winter, the coast of the Baltic Sea, and a pilot who was running to the toilet to pee every ten minutes because of stress. Death was very close to us, not even because of the Germans; if the engine failed in the open sea, you were dead! Or the other image, we got drop tanks to escort bombers, and from a certain point we had to drop them, and return home. We could not wait until this moment came!”
Alexei Valyaev had a similarly difficult time at first, and his first encounter with the Luftwaffe showed that the Germans had their share of less-experienced pilots.
“On my first regiment, first IAP (istrebitel’nyi aviatsionnyi polk – fighter air regiment), first flight, first kill. My enemy must have been the same as me – young and inexperienced. He got lost, same as I did, and he got just in front of me, so I shot him down. It was an Fw 190, I flew an La-5; it just appeared in front of me. I was so happy! ‘I made it, I made it!’ I saw how my shells hit him, the yellow or orange tracers were well visible. He made some wild manoeuvres, and then spun down.
“When I came to 180th GuIAP (guards fighter air regiment) I was a wingman and Nikolai Gorev was killed on a bombing mission; he was among the first to be killed in our IAP. They went too far, and while they were absent, clouds covered the airfield. He baled out but pulled the ripcord while he was in the cockpit and got caught by the tail of the falling aeroplane.
“Near Lvov there is a small town – Hodorev. Near that town there was a lake, with a river going out of that lake, but that river ended soon. I was looking at that lake, and it seemed too suspicious to me, ‘Why does this river end? Where does the water in this lake come from? We should strafe it.’ So I did. I was returning from a mission, and strafed a boat on that lake, and suddenly it blew up. The fireball was far above me. When I turned around the flames were at a height of 220 metres. It burned for several days, as it was a fuel depot, that was a whole lake of fuel. Germans made camouflage this way – a thin layer of water above and a pumping station on the shore.
“An inspector came from Kiev, ‘How many kills do you have?’ ‘Two.’ ‘You have twelve now.’ Everybody from our regiment was given some kills by this inspector. We gathered to discuss this situation, and decided that nothing good would come of it. This inspector was informed from Moscow that High Command would not tolerate it, so we ended up with the same amount of kills that we had before.”
Alexei Kukin had a very short war as a MiG 1 pilot with 176 GuIAP before he was invalided out of flying as a result of injuries sustained when he was shot down just a few months after the outbreak of hostilities.
“When the Finnish campaign ended my friend Dmitrii Pikulenko, said ‘Who will be next? Germans? I wonder what it will be like to fight them?’ We all got the chance to find it out. I made my first combat flight in a MiG 1 on 23 June, and caught a Ju 88 above Leningrad sea port. I shot at them until the enemy gunner hit me back. He damaged a hydraulic line, so that one leg did not come down on the landing and I had to land on one wheel. The engine was damaged, and one bullet went through the windscreen and hit the armoured headrest, barely passing my head. Everything started at 7,000 metres – I noticed a green dot, moving above grey water at 4,000 metres and dived to investigate. I was shooting at him, but I couldn’t bring him down. I thought ‘Damn! What should I do? I’ve wasted almost all my ammo, but it will not go down!’ The problem was my gun sight was way off. I started aiming tracers, and had to move my head to the side. If I had not done this I would have got a bullet right between my eyes.
“The MiG was great higher up; it was great up to 7,000 metres. If you flew below 1,500 it was a different story. If you had to do a split-S, you needed 1,200 metres of altitude. There was a warning notice in the cockpit that if your aircraft did not recover from spin before your altitude reduced to 2,000 metres, you must bale out. But we flew at any height, spun at any height and recovered. We only had armoured seat backs. When I was shot up by an enemy gunner I looked at the damage done by him, and noticed that there was quite a big space between the engine and cockpit, so I asked an engineer of my squadron to put seat back armour there to protect my chest.
“The commissar of the air corps ordered a strafing sortie. After a few minutes he cancelled this order. So bombs were first loaded, and then unloaded. Of course, taking off with a half loaded aeroplane was forbidden. At this time twenty Me 110s came, and began strafing; they always came in large numbers. Seven of our pilots took off and downed seven ’110s. They burned seven of our ’planes on the ground in return. This happened within the first couple of weeks of the war beginning. A search for the guilty person began. The commissar said that he was ‘white and fluffy’, so Neustruev was found to be responsible for the losses. There was no written order, and you couldn’t use someone’s words as proof. Ivan eventually got ten years imprisonment for that; with the possibility to clear himself in combat.
“I shot from head-on above at a Ju 88, and saw how the canopy was ripped open by the tracers, but it kept flying. It was a common problem; you were spraying the enemy with bullets like a shower, but the effect on them was not good enough to bring the ’plane down.