Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (39 page)

Determined to consolidate his power, Stalin had long conducted political purges. Beginning in 1937, he introduced political commissars into military units. Essentially party hacks, commissars held a command status above that of the commanding officer and could veto any decision made. They also reported to a different chain of command, independent of the Red Army, and their assessments could, and did, prove fatal to many professional officers.

The Red Army alone lost thirteen of its fifteen army commanders, 88 percent of its corps commanders, and more than 80 percent of its divisional commanders to Stalin’s paranoia. Some 36,000 officers were removed or executed, including 90 percent of the generals and more than 80 percent of the colonels. The air force in particular was hard hit, losing about 6,000 veteran officers and most of the top remaining aircraft designers. Andrei Tupolev’s designs had won seventy-eight world records, yet he was arrested for treason and forced to continue designing from a prison cell. The results were unsurprising. Morale suffered, training often became a matter of form, and equipment obsolesced.

Nevertheless, in 1941 the Soviet military could still field about 6 million men and more than 200 divisions. Nearly 3.3 million soldiers made up 132 divisions along the frontier with Germany alone. The air force had been organized into the Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily (VVS), which was the military air force of the Soviet Union, and the Protivo-Vozdushnoy Oborony (PVO), in charge of air defense. Though the VVS was committed to expansion, by mid-1941 nearly a quarter of its units were paper squadrons, and the majority of the 11,000 aircraft in the field were hopelessly outclassed. About 2,000 modern fighters such as the Yak-1, MiG-3, and LaGG-3 had been manufactured but had yet to be accepted and delivered to frontline squadrons in substantial numbers.

The aviation regiment (
aviatsionnyi polk
) was the basic element of the VVS. Similar to an RAF wing, it was usually formed by three squadrons (
eskadrilya
), each of which was in turn made up of three flights (
zveno
) of three aircraft each. Situations varied, of course, and by 1943 the Soviets would discard the three-ship group as a basic unit and fly four ships like everyone else.

Even if the aircraft were there, who was to fly them? The purge had taken most of the combat-experienced pilots and higher-ranking officers. Training was inconsistent and largely inadequate. Pilots in the Kiev Special Military District logged an average of four flying hours during the first quarter of 1941. And this wasn’t unique—those in the Western Special Military District managed only three hours per pilot per month.

Many hard-core Nazis considered the German invasion of Russia as a true and proper cause, Western civilization against the godless Asiatic Communists. Others saw it as gaining
Lebensraum
—the “living space” of land, agriculture, and resources that the German nation was entitled to take. Others still were simply fighting whomever they were told to fight. Regardless, Hitler left no doubts as to his feelings in a March 30 speech to his generals:

The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion; the struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law . . . will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.

In the predawn darkness of Sunday, June 22, 1941, Lilya Litvyak was a carefree geology student in Moscow. Suddenly, hundreds of miles to the west, the sky along the Soviet frontier lit up from the flashes of 42,000 artillery pieces and mortars. While aircraft surged overhead and 3,400 tanks clanked forward, 3.8 million soldiers in three German army groups began their blitzkrieg to the east. More than 90 infantry divisions and motorized divisions, 17 panzer divisions, and some 3,200 combat aircraft slammed into the Red Army along an 1,800-mile front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Army Group Center, with 51 divisions and Luftflotte II, was to drive into the heart of the Soviet Union toward Moscow. Army Group North, with 20 divisions and Luftflotte I, was to capture Leningrad. And Army Group South, with 40 divisions and Luftflotte IV, was to roll over the Ukraine, capturing desperately needed agricultural land before driving east for the Volga River.

When the Germans invaded, Stalin froze. Initially he did nothing, convinced that the attacks were skirmishes designed to provoke him. Communications lines were down or disrupted, so any information Moscow received was likely bad information. Also, the overcentralized system that Stalin himself had insisted upon didn’t function without direction from above, which wasn’t happening. The result was chaos.

There were only a dozen or so airfields within 25 miles of the western border that could be used for air support, and many of these lacked ammunition, fuel, or adequate anti-aircraft guns. More than forty bases were in various stages of construction and, amazingly, hadn’t been put on full war alert. Extensive German photoreconnaissance had revealed these weaknesses, and the hammer blows from the initial strike fully exploited them.

The Luftwaffe attacked in carefully planned waves, using 800 bombers and 500 fighters to strike more than 60 Soviet airfields. Warnings had been issued, troops were to be put on combat-readiness footings, blackouts were to be implemented and aircraft dispersed—but the orders weren’t obeyed effectively. So hundreds of aircraft were caught on the ground, lined up in perfect peacetime rows and were summarily destroyed. First-day losses were approximately 1,200 Soviet planes to 63 Germans. By the end of the second day this had risen to 3,922 Red Air Force losses against 78 from the Luftwaffe.

The ground situation was equally unbalanced. The Soviets fell back nearly everywhere, and the Germans had advanced upward of 350 miles by the first week in July. Despite averaging 15 miles per day, with each soldier carrying 50 pounds of equipment, weapons, and supplies, infantry units were far behind the panzers—in some cases by hundreds of miles. The sheer size of the enemy’s territory was staggering, and logistics were a nightmare. Despite the growing problems, the Wehrmacht overran Lithuania and Latvia then encircled the strategic linchpin of Minsk, which surrendered on July 9. The following day Army Group North assaulted Leningrad but was stopped two days later along the Luga River defensive belt. Soviet counterattacks also stopped Army Group South around Kiev and Odessa. One month into the war, Hitler changed his strategy and made Leningrad the priority due to its psychological and industrial importance. Generaloberst Hermann Hoth’s 3rd Panzers and Guderian’s 2nd Panzers were ordered away from Army Group South’s push toward Moscow. Guderian was to be sent south toward the Pripet Marshes and Kiev, while Hoth was to drive north to Leningrad. Most German armor units were at half their starting operational strength by this time, and the field commanders knew that time was not on their side. Reminiscent of the confusion during the Battle of Britain, a nineteen-day delay followed, during which Hitler changed his mind, issued conflicting directives, and shifted priorities.

Despite having suffered more than 2 million casualties by this time, the Soviets held on, capitalized on Hitler’s vacillation, and began to counterattack where they could. Yet, on August 8, more than 125 He 111 and Ju 88 bombers also attacked Moscow for the first time, dropping 104 tons of bombs and some 50,000 incendiaries on the Soviet capital. By the sixteenth, Stalin had issued his infamous Order 270, which stated that any Russian soldier who surrendered or was captured would be a deserter guilty of treason.
^*
At the end of the month the Germans had cut the Leningrad–Moscow rail line, and the front had evened out except for the Soviet pocket around Kiev. During this time Lilya and others like her were relegated to conventional jobs for women within the Soviet system. More than 60 percent of the doctors in the USSR were women, and by this point almost half of the factory workers were as well.

Though they stubbornly gave way, the Soviets were still falling back. In an amazing, though not always orderly, logistical feat, nearly 1,500 factories of all types were disassembled from threatened areas and moved east beyond the Ural Mountains. The vast railway network that moved millions of men west to fight returned east with entire steel, electrical, and chemical factories in pieces. Whole cities, like Tankograd, sprang up to build munitions, aircraft, and tanks.
^*
Eighty percent of Soviet industry was taken out of harm’s way in this fashion.

Aware that they were running out of time, the Germans fought on. The Kiev pocket shrank, and by September 16 three Soviet armies were cut off and surrounded. At month’s end five entire Soviet armies, some fifty divisions, had been destroyed and more than 600,000 soldiers captured—the largest single amount taken together in history. As the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow, 3 million Russians had been taken prisoner to date. Leningrad was besieged, Sevastopol cut off. And Lilya Litvyak joined the hundreds of thousands of Muscovites digging trenches.

As September changed to October, Hitler became more obsessed with the capture of Moscow. He felt, and many on the Army General Staff agreed, that if the city fell, then the Soviet Union would collapse. After all, it had worked with the French, so why not the Russians? In retrospect, it was another severe miscalculation—akin to believing that terror-bombing London would break British morale the year before. Operation Typhoon, the assault on Moscow, began on October 2 and was led by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, Great War veteran and commander during both the Polish and French campaigns. A Prussian aristocrat who spoke French, Russian, and reasonable English, Bock had Army Group Center at his disposal. With three panzer groups and three armies, plus some 550 combat aircraft of Luftflotte II, he planned a double pincer movement to cut off and envelop the city.

But his army had suffered a half million casualties in the ten-week, 400-mile campaign. His remaining men were dirty, infested with lice, and slowly freezing. Newspapers, operations orders, and any other type of paper that could be had was stuffed into uniforms in a pathetic attempt to keep warm. This because Gen. Alfred Jodl, operations chief of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), forbade the issue of winter clothing because that conflicted with his guarantees that the Soviet Union would be subdued by winter. Supply wagons had long since broken down and had been replaced by Russian farm carts pulled by horses. Cold, sick, and short of supplies, the Germans attacked nevertheless.

But the snow began to fall on October 6, just as it had on Napoleon 129 years before. The
rasputitsa,
the “time of no roads,” had come. When the snow melted, the hard-packed countryside, which was so ideal for tanks, turned into a muddy quagmire up to three feet deep that would not harden again until after the frosts. Low clouds and poor visibility made air support problematic. On October 8, as the panzers circled north and south of the city, a desperate People’s Commissariat of Defense (under Stalin’s direct order) established the 122nd Aviation Group—the first all-female combat aviation unit in history. It was to be commanded by Marina Raskova, and she was to choose her own pilots.

Three regiments would be formed: the 586th (Fighter), 587th (Bomber), and 588th (Night Bomber). But by the fifteenth, the lead German tank units were threatening Moscow and the 122nd was evacuated to Engels, about 400 miles southeast down the Volga River. Here they settled into military life and the world of combat aviation. Haircuts were given, uniforms were cut down to fit, but the women could do nothing about the huge winter boots. The reception from male Soviet officers was varied. Many didn’t care—a body that could pull a trigger or fly a plane was welcome, no matter what the shape. Some were outwardly hostile and offended that a woman thought she could equal a man on a battlefield. Most were undecided, feeling that time would tell whether the girls, as they were called, could cut it.

The girls were educated, literate, and accomplished. They were musicians, poets, and generally graduates of an institute or university. Based on aptitude, prior records, and performance, they were divided into three categories: pilots, navigators, and administrative/other. Lilya, like Marina Raskova, was an accomplished aerobatic flyer, so she made the selection into fighters. Basic flying was taught to those with no previous experience, but there was no formation or gunnery training. This was all done in an open-cockpit Po-2 biplane during the Russian winter.

While the aviators froze, the Soviet defenders of Moscow fought. Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group swung southeast around Moscow toward Orel but ran into heavy resistance from the 1st Guards Rifle Corps. The “Guards” title had been resurrected from the old tsarist Imperial Army days by Stalin to denote those units who had fought with special tenacity and bravery. During the 1917 Revolution, Guards officers had the skin flayed from their hands by the vengeful masses in a mockery of the white gloves they wore. The irony was no doubt lost on Stalin.

Soviet army groups were organized into fronts and given geographic areas. Until now, VVS units were assigned to a front and placed under direct control of the army commander. The newly created Bryansk Front filled the gap between the Western Front around Moscow and the Southwestern Front east of Orel. Together all three fronts could muster seven hundred fighters from both frontal and PVO squadrons. Command-and-control being as spotty as it was, the Western Front VVS commander also concentrated all air assets in his region under his direct control.

The VVS was painfully aware that it needed a far more responsive and efficient system if they were to beat the Luftwaffe. Eliminating interference from the army commanders was a positive step, as was concentrating the several fighter regiments on the Central Aerodrome in Moscow. With hangars, maintenance facilities, and relatively easy access to spare parts and munitions, the field was only minutes away from the action. Pilots could, and did, fly four to five combat sorties per day. As Von Hardesty aptly observes in
Red Phoenix Rising
, “For three months the Soviets had traded geography for time. Time was now short.”