Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (23 page)

Lenin and the Bolsheviks also exploited the escalating hostilities with the newly created Polish Second Republic. Poland had been broken apart a century before and pieces absorbed into Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. As those three nations hemorrhaged following the Great War, the time seemed ideal for a new Poland to rise.

Borders were a problem, as was the economy, the disparate cultures, the military, the infrastructure . . . the list was long. But the border issue was a top priority for Jozef Pilsudski, the ex-soldier turned chief of state. The British had proposed the so-called Curzon Line, based on ethnicity and language, to define Poland. Most Poles, Pilsudski included, were anxious that their nation extend to the farthest borders they’d enjoyed during the sixteenth century.
^*
This meant Lithuania, the Ukraine, and big slices of Germany and Austria. Pilsudski wanted this not only for security but also to foster nationalism—and for economic reasons as well. He needed a seaport on the Baltic and the extensive mineral resources produced by Silesian mines.

Taking advantage of Russia’s own civil war, the Poles crossed the Nieman River during March 1919, moving toward Pinsk in southwestern Russia. Pilsudski initially had the campaign his way and stopped advancing as Denikin threatened Moscow. But by late 1919 the writing was on the wall that the Bolsheviks would be victorious, and Pilsudski found himself facing most of the Red Army.

As the Russians transferred troops to their European border, Pilsudski launched a surprise offensive of his own deep into the Ukraine. In two weeks he’d made it to the Dnieper River and captured Kiev, but by late May Gen. Semyon Budyonny’s First Red Cavalry broke through the Polish lines, forcing them to abandon the city. Trotsky sent five armies, totaling about 160,000 men, through Lithuania and Belarus under the command of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a former tsarist officer. Threatened by his fast-moving cavalry, the Poles were outflanked and driven back toward Warsaw.

But now it was the Russians’ turn for miscalculation. Lenin had a dream of spreading Communism into Europe by uniting with pro-Communist Poles and Germans. He’d been warned that there wasn’t enough indigenous support for this and that nationalistic pride was stronger than ideology. Lenin also grossly underestimated the profound distrust of all things Russian by the Germans and especially by the Poles. Regardless, Tukhachevsky’s armies crossed the Bug River on July 22, headed for Warsaw. Tukhachevsky planned to split and encircle the city, attacking from the northwest to avoid the heavily fortified northern defenses.

Pilsudski, now a marshal, began the defense of Warsaw, which, to nearly everyone’s mind,
was
Poland. He now had more than 300,000 men at his disposal; some were badly armed and poorly trained, but there were others, including a Polish legion that had seen line service on the Western Front. He also had the fledgling Polish Air Force and a hodgepodge mix of SPADs, Fokkers, Albatros fighters, and Italian-made Ansaldos A-1 Balillas. The Balilla was the only indigenously produced Italian fighter of the Great War and received mixed reviews. Compared to its Nieuport, Sopwith, and Fokker counterparts, the A-1 was mediocre at best. But the Polish war was primarily a ground conflict, and agility in air-to-air combat took second place to bombing and strafing. The Balilla was relatively sturdy and mounted twin Vickers machine guns. The British Bristol F2B was the most numerous scout/reconnaissance aircraft.

The Poles also had the Kosciuszko Squadron
.
Named for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish soldier who fought against Poland’s partition in 1792, the squadron was composed of mainly American volunteers.
^*
These included Maj. Cedric Fauntleroy and Capt. Merian Cooper.
^*

On August 12 the Red Army attacked the Vistula bridgehead at Praga, east of Warsaw. Heavy fighting occurred north of the city, and the lines of the Polish Fifth Army were broken on August 14. By calling in reserves and cracking the Russian ciphers, Pilsudski bought enough time for his own counterattack. The Bolsheviks also failed to coordinate their breakthrough and lost the advantage that might have won the battle. General Budyonny’s vicious 1st Cavalry might have made a difference, but it missed the fight altogether.

Polish air support around Warsaw, including the Kosciusko Squadron, dropped nine tons of bombs during nearly two hundred combat sorties. This slowed the enemy advance, giving the ground units time to move, and on August 16 Pilsudski began a bold assault. Stabbing northward through the Russian lines, covered by aircraft and tanks, he penetrated some 75 miles in three days. This cut off the entire Sixteenth Red Army, threw the Russians into confusion, and took the pressure off Warsaw.

General Puchucki of the 13th Polish Infantry Division wrote:

The American pilots, though exhausted, fight tenaciously. During the last offensive, their commander attacked enemy formations from the rear, training machine-gun bullets down on their heads. Without the American pilots’ help, we would long ago have been done for.

The Russians quickly realized they’d been split, outflanked, and outfought, so by August 18 many Red units had fled for the border. Others were trapped and forced to fight, their tattered survivors eventually limping into Prussia or back east across the Bug River. Tukhachevsky’s entire Fourth Army was trapped and had to surrender. All told, the Russians lost nearly 100,000 men, more than 200 artillery pieces, and 10,000 vehicles.

From an aviation standpoint, the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War were purely tactical fights, albeit with immense strategic consequences. There were very few fixed fortifications, and much of the fighting was done with cavalry and fast armored vehicles. Close air support and combined warfare assaults were used in the Great War, but it was still a comparatively new science. So bombing triangles, fragmentation patterns, and strafe mechanics (see Appendix B, “Anatomy of a Surface Attack”) were all being worked out to take advantage of the increasing effectiveness of airpower.

The salient fact in both of these cases was that aircraft were essential from the very beginning, with no paradigms or prejudices to overcome. True, there were constant disagreements about
how
aircraft were to be used, but no one suggested fighting without them. As on the Western Front, fighter aircraft were decisive, but whether they were
crucial
is a point of debate. The Russian Civil War was not won or lost in the air, and the Reds would likely have been victorious anyway—the vastness of Russia and geopolitical realities would have seen to that. The war for Polish independence is another matter, and it certainly would have ended differently without tactical air support. If Warsaw had fallen, then Soviet Communism would have spread west a generation earlier than it did, and how far would it have extended? Likely straight through the Slavic lands, and maybe to Paris itself.

Yet it didn’t. And Europe would never again be the same.

“
MISERY ACQUAINTS A
man with strange bedfellows.” So said the shipwrecked sailor upon awakening in a monster’s cave.
^*

The truth of this line certainly applies to one of the strangest alliances in military aviation. As we’ve seen, Germany was denied all aircraft manufacturing following the Great War. Thousands of fighters were confiscated or destroyed by the victors, leaving, it was hoped, no possibility of a future air threat. Without an indigenous industry, there would be no need for research and development, nor for large training schools. All pilots in Germany were members of sports flying clubs or enrolled in the Civil Aviation Pilot Training Center. This environment, plus the supervision of the Allied Control Commission, made training military flyers impossible—which was the point.

Already humiliated, feeling defenseless and betrayed, the Weimar Republic reached out to the newly created Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Another pariah, distrusted and without allies or official recognition, the Soviet government eagerly accepted the invitation to cooperate.

Signed in 1922, the Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and the postwar Russian government repudiated any claims, territorial or financial, imposed by the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the separate peace the Bolsheviks had concluded with the Central Powers, giving Lenin time to finish his revolution and releasing millions of German soldiers to fight on the Western Front.

A secret protocol of the Rapallo treaty also provided for the establishment of German training and testing facilities within Russia. Lipetsk Air Base, south of Moscow, was selected, and housing, hangars, and maintenance facilities were discreetly constructed. In June 1925 the
Hugo Stinnes IV
, a German steamship, left Stettin bound for Leningrad carrying fifty carefully crated Fokker D-XIII aircraft. Anthony Fokker had no qualms about supplying the planes, though the sale was run through dummy corporations and was ostensibly intended for the Argentinean air force.

The Fokker was a good choice. A typical design of fabric-covered steel tubing, it had wooden wings and fixed gear. Powered by a twelve-cylinder British Napier Lion engine, the plane could manage 160 mph with a service ceiling of 24,000 feet. It handled well and made a good advanced fighter trainer, especially with Great War combat vets as instructors. Major Walter Schtaar was just such a pilot, and he became the first commander of the Lipetsk Flying School. Known to the Germans as Wivupal, the Scientific Experimental and Test Establishment for Aircraft was supposed to train Soviets as well and provide them with all test results.
^*
This was the price for conducting whatever business the Reichswehr deemed necessary beyond the prying eyes of the Allies. In truth, it was a one-sided arrangement, and the Soviets received very little useful information or technology.

The school operated for eight years and only trained some two hundred pilots and observers. The real value was derived from testing new airframes, engines, and weaponry. The Arado 64, Germany’s first postwar fighter, was evaluated here to circumvent the Versailles restrictions. Also of note was Dissimilar Air Combat Training (DACT), which brought the Soviets and Germans together for practice combat and provided invaluable experience for both sides. Training against your own pilots and platforms is fine, but DACT gives pilots a taste of fighting the unknown—something and someone different. Consequently, a pilot will not encounter a different aircraft for the first time in a real battle. This offers a split-second advantage in reaction time, which in an air battle can mean life over death.

The new German air force, the Luftwaffe, took this training seriously. They even discovered the inestimable value of using gun cameras for debriefing and evaluation purposes, just as the RAF had been doing since 1917. Modern machine guns, aerial photography, and bombs were tested on a range the Soviets provided. Ominously, both air forces also collaborated on airborne poison gas delivery. But despite the initial military benefits, such cooperation could never last—the ideological chasm between the two nations was too great.

By a joint declaration between Soviet Russia and her various satellites, the USSR had been formed. Lenin died in 1924 and Trotsky resigned as War Commissar after failing to contain the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Josef Besarionus Jugashvili—known to the world as Joseph Stalin.

While Stalin consolidated his power in the newly formed Soviet Union, far to the west another man sat in a prison cell writing a book. Adolf Hitler would eventually be released, of course, and would become chancellor of Germany in 1933, ending the Weimar Republic, and his book,
Mein Kampf
, became a bestselling blueprint for his intentions. Stalin and Hitler hated and feared each other, so relations naturally deteriorated to a point where the Lipetsk school shut down in 1933.

Aside from research and development, there was another significant consequence of this ill-fated joint effort. Scores of military officers would be executed during Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, among them many of the most talented Soviet pilots produced at Lipetsk. These were pilots whose skills and knowledge of the Germans would have saved thousands of Russian lives in the conflict yet to come, and perhaps changed the course of history.

EARLY ON AUGUST
7, 1936, the SS
Usaramo
docked in Cadiz harbor. Sailing from the Petersen Dock in Hamburg at midnight a week before, she was a cargo ship owned by the Woermann Line, a German company. Ninety-one men disembarked that morning and quietly boarded a train bound for Seville and the Cristina Hotel. Their papers said they were journalists, photographers, artists, and even a few salesmen; all tourists belonging to the Reisegesellschaft Union, a travel association. But they were not.

They were mercenaries.

General Francisco Franco, ex-commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion and former chief of staff of the Spanish army, had landed the month prior at the head of the rebel Nationalist Army. As a lieutenant colonel, he had saved the remnants of a defeated Spanish army during the Rif War of 1923 and now, at thirty-one, Franco was the youngest general in Europe. Nationalism in Spain, like Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, was born from democratic failure, in this case the Spanish Second Republic. Signed in 1930, the Pact of San Sebastián consolidated revolutionary groups in their effort to remove the monarchy. The resulting constitution provided for women’s suffrage, guaranteed the right of free speech and assembly, legalized divorce, and emasculated the Spanish nobility. The Nationalists were generally opposed to all of that and while they included some fanatics, they were also monarchists, clerics, anti-anarchists, and other right-wingers; they were neither National Socialists like the Germans nor Fascists like the Italians.