Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (40 page)

The Mozhaisk Line was a rough defensive perimeter about 40 miles beyond the city, running from the Oka River in the south to the Sea of Moscow in the north. Covering this position, the Red Air Force was flying some four hundred sorties per day to stem the German advance. In contrast, the Luftwaffe was managing at least a thousand sorties per day, often more, and shooting down hundreds of Soviet aircraft. The Ilyushin IL-2, hopeless as a dogfighter, was proving itself a very capable ground attack aircraft. Called the Shturmovik (Storm Bird), the IL-2 was a 13,000-pound monster that actually had armor built into the structure in key places rather than plated over. It was so heavy that it carried relatively light bomb loads and could only manage 250 knots at best. But it was difficult to shoot down, and more than 43,000 of them would roll off the lines, making the IL-2 the most produced aircraft in history.
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Anna Yegorova was barely twenty-five years old during the Battle of Moscow. She’d been a prewar pilot and had been accepted to fly air transport aircraft and liaison aircraft. Shot down one day while carrying a message to the front, she evaded the strafing German fighter, then walked the rest of the way to deliver her message. Transferring to the Shturmovik, she became part of the all-male 805th Ground Attack Regiment and went on to fly more than 250 combat missions. Shot down again near Warsaw in 1944, Yegorova bailed out; she caught fire on the way, and her parachute didn’t fully open. Barely alive, she was put in Stalag III-C, near Kustrin on the Polish border. She survived until liberation in 1945, when her immediate reward for her sacrifice and service was a Soviet filtration camp and interrogation. Eventually released, Anna Yegorova was invalided out of the military and permitted to remain a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Also surprisingly lethal were the Po-2 biplanes—if flown at night. One of the most successful units was the all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment, flying some 23,000 combat sorties during the course of the war. They were nicknamed the “Nachthexen” (Night Witches), and the Germans hated them. In their miserable open-cockpit biplanes, the Witches would cut their engines and glide down silently on the enemy positions. Often the only warning given was the wind whistling through the struts or sudden, violent bomb blasts.

Some of these pilots were teenagers—the youngest was only seventeen—yet they often flew a dozen combat missions in a single night. One of the pilots would later recall, “You have to understand the German mentality . . . you are supposed to sleep at night; this is
Ordnung
, order, something sacred for the Germans. But we Russians didn’t follow the rules. And suddenly in the middle of the night, we would disrupt their sleep with the sound of our propellers. The Germans went straight out of their minds.”

But despite Marshal Zhukov’s best efforts, the Germans still broke through the Mozhaisk Line, forcing the Soviets east across the Nara River. The situation in Moscow was desperate as food ran out, air attacks continued, and casualties mounted. There were fewer than 500,000 soldiers and 1,000 tanks, but the Germans were suffering horribly from hunger, a lack of winter clothing, and especially a shortage of fuel. Wehrmacht infantry divisions were fortunate if they had half their effective strength, and the German tanks were in worse shape—so bad that Guderian’s Second Panzer Army finally lurched to a halt within sight of the city on October 29, 1941.

For two weeks both sides gasped for breath, bandaged their wounds, and tried to keep warm. While the Soviets hurriedly reinforced Moscow with anything possible, the Germans tried to straighten out their immense logistical mess. By November 15 the Wehrmacht was ready for one final assault, and the muddy ground had frozen hard enough to support tanks. In the center of the three-pronged attack, panzers captured a bridgehead over the Moscow–Volga canal and the Germans crossed. However, Kuznetsov’s First Shock Army, consisting of some six rifles brigades, an infantry division, and several tank battalions, savagely countered and forced the Germans back across the bridgehead.

Guderian came up from the south and managed to get as far as Kashira by November 26. But Major General Nikolay Belov’s 2nd Cavalry Corps countered with everything remaining and stopped the Germans. By December 9 the Orel–Tula railway was under threat, and Guderian stopped advancing to protect his principal source of supply. From the north the Third Panzer Army took Klin, and some units advanced to within 12 miles of Moscow before they halted. A reconnaissance unit seized the railway station at Khimki, five miles west of the city and the farthest advance of the Wehrmacht during the campaign.

With the temperature now below –30º F, there was no real hope of capturing Moscow. More than a hundred thousand cases of frostbite afflicted the exhausted Germans, and several thousand amputations were performed. Added to this, the Red Army had been reinforced by at least a dozen divisions, more than a thousand tanks, and nearly fifteen hundred aircraft from their Siberian forces. Stalin had delayed the transfer for six weeks, fearing a Japanese attack from Manchuria, but the top Soviet spy, Richard Sorge, informed the Kremlin that there would be no attack until Moscow was taken.
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He also revealed that Tokyo had other intentions for immediate military action, and on December 7, 1941, this was proven true at Pearl Harbor. If the Japanese had attacked the Soviet Union instead of the United States, there would have been reinforcement possible, and Moscow likely would have been lost to the Germans.

Despite Hitler’s insistence that they hold their ground, the Wehrmacht withdrew west of the Oka River by December 15 and began receiving the winter equipment long delayed in Poland. Several generals, including Guderian and the army commander in chief, were fired. Hitler ranted, but it didn’t change the situation, and by Christmas 1941 the strengthened Red Army took back the majority of lost ground around Moscow. As the year turned, the front stabilized, with Army Group North dug in around Leningrad, Army Group South besieging Sevastopol and approaching Rostov, and Army Group Center holding west of Moscow.

That same month, January 1942, saw Lilya Litvyak among the first pilots (and the only female) to train on the new Yak-1 fighter. Capable of 400 mph, armed with a ShVAK 20 mm cannon and two machine guns, it was versatile, fast, and tough. The training base at Engels was just across the Volga from Saratov, and in April, following their conversion to the Yak, the 586th Fighter Regiment became part of the PVO at Saratov, now an important industrial city.
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Typical of fighter bases, there was much drinking, dancing, singing, and socializing. This was, and is, all common enough among those who have a very good chance of not living to see their next birthday. Lilya was especially welcome, as she was extremely pretty and apparently had a very pronounced effect on men. One of her stock answers to the hordes of smitten men was, “Let’s get the fighting over with first, darling—then maybe we can think about love, eh?”

While Lilya was learning the tactics of Luftwaffe Messerschmitts and developing countertactics against her lovesick male comrades, Adolf Hitler issued Führer Directive 41, which stated bluntly: “Our aim is to wipe out the entire defense potential remaining to the Soviets, and to cut them off, as far as possible, from their most important centers of war industry . . . with the aim of destroying the enemy . . . in order to secure the Caucasian oilfields.”

By early May, as the ground hardened, the panzers were moving east again. Operation Fridericus, the master stroke for finally dealing with the Soviet Union, was under way. It caught the Russians by surprise, as Stalin felt that Moscow would be the target of any German spring offensive. Hitler’s plan was for Army Group South to thrust east toward the Volga, then south into the Caucasus Mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas. Fifty mixed divisions of Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, and even a Spanish unit combined with six German motorized infantry divisions and nine panzer divisions for the main thrust. The plan was to take advantage of the summer weather and make spectacular penetrations south and east through the richest areas of the Soviet Union. This would catch Stalin off balance and cripple him economically. Once the south was secure, then the necessary forces would redeploy in the north to finish off Moscow and Leningrad.

It was a perfectly plausible plan, except for the German habit of underestimation. First was the miscalculation of the immenseness of the Soviet Union. The sheer distances involved, and the corresponding logistical problems, were staggering. Army Group South was already some 1,500 miles from the Rhineland, and local supply lines were hundreds of miles long. Ammunition, spare parts, and especially fuel were all in short supply. The other critical underestimation concerned Soviet tenacity. Stalin had been persuaded to modify his illogical stand on surrender, and as a result, many Red Army units were able to withdraw to fight another day.

Nevertheless, the campaign started well, as most Wehrmacht actions did. When the Russians counterattacked from Kharkov, the First Panzer Army punched through and encircled the city. By early June more than 225,000 Soviet prisoners had been taken and some 1,200 tanks destroyed. Fearing a flank assault, the German High Command then made a momentous mistake and split the force. Army Group A continued south across the Don River into the Black Sea region. The goal was to destroy the four Soviet armies that were fleeing in that direction, seize the Maikop oil fields, and capture the port of Tuapse. Army Group B, composed of Generaloberst Freidrich Paulus’s Sixth Army and Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, would charge due east. They were to cross the great bend of the Don River and head for a city on the Volga that was the key to the whole region, an ancient city with a new name.

Stalingrad—and it would change history.

LILYA LITVYAK FLEW
her Yak-1 into hell over the Volga on September 10, 1942. She and eight others were transferred from the PVO to the 437th Fighter Regiment out of Verkhnaia Akhtuba, south of the city. The reception from their male counterparts wasn’t the best, as the battle hadn’t become desperate—yet. Mechanics didn’t want to service planes flown by women, and one male pilot even refused to fly a Yak that had been preflighted by “one of those girls.” The regiment commander, Maj. M. S. Khostnikov, supposedly shook his head and said, “We’re waiting for real pilots and they sent us a bunch of girls.”

The attitude is understandable. Stalingrad was slowly being encircled on the west side of the river, no real help was in sight, and the odds were terrible. Since the German Sixth Army had arrived on August 23, more than two hundred VVS aircraft had been lost. Among other foes, the VVS was also facing the renowned Ace of Spades pilots (
Pik As
) from JG 53. The wing was part of the big assault, and Erwin Meier was flying with 2 Staffel when he met Lilya Litvyak over Stalingrad on September 13.

Veterans from Spain, the Battle for France, and the Battle of Britain, the
Pik As
were hardened fighter pilots. During the Battle of Britain Goering discovered that the wife of the
Geschwaderkommodore,
Major Hans-Jürgen von Cramon-Taubadel, had distant Jewish ancestry. Goering made the entire wing remove their Ace of Spades emblem and replace it with a red band around the nose of each aircraft. After their commander was removed, the pilots retaliated by immediately painting over the swastikas on the tails. They were typically hard-fighting, irreverent, and unafraid of the Nazi hierarchy, or anything else, for that matter. One month into Barbarossa, the wing had shot down its one thousandth enemy aircraft.

But the Russians were fighting back—hard. As the German 16th Panzers crunched over the rubble on the outskirts of the city, they ran into the 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment. Though effective against aircraft, the 37 mm guns had a tough time with the extra armor plates carried on most Panzer III/IV tanks. After knocking out all the guns, the Germans were shocked to find they’d been fighting teenage girls. The twin thrusts were largely successful, and by mid-November Paulus had advanced to the Volga shore and controlled nine-tenths of Stalingrad.

It was over a year now since Barbarossa had ground to a halt, and once again winter threatened the Germans. Low clouds, fog, and killing temperatures made most flying difficult if not impossible. Luftflotte IV managed about 1,500 daily sorties but had lost at least 40 percent of its operational aircraft, and the strength of the Sixth Army had fallen by half. The VVS decided to form the 9th Guards Fighter Regiment, an elite unit composed solely of veterans and aces. Commanded by Lev Shestakov, the leading Soviet ace from Spain, the 9th was supposed to do battle with famous German units such as JG 52 and JG 53.

Apparently Shestakov wanted Lilya Litvyak and Katya Budanova in his regiment, given their blossoming reputations. “Watch out for the girls,” he told his male pilots. “And don’t offend them. They fly excellently and they have already killed some Fritzes.” By this time prewar prejudices had disappeared and all that mattered was a pilot’s ability to kill the enemy and not his (or her) comrades. This attitude was shared by most Russians, and in an eerie parallel to Hitler’s Nazi ranting, the Russians were told, “If you have not killed at least one German a day you have wasted that day. If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. Kill the German.”
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By mid-November the snow was falling. The Volga had frozen, making transport of men and ammunition somewhat easier, and the Soviets did the unexpected—they counterattacked with Operation Uranus at 7:20 a.m. on November 19, 1942. Spearheaded by the 1st Guards Tank Army, the Soviet Southwest Front slammed into the Romanian forces on the German left following an eighty-minute artillery barrage.

As their northern flank collapsed, the German 48th Panzer Corps tried to stem the Russian armored assault, but with less than a hundred tanks, it just wasn’t possible. The Stalingrad Front launched its southern attack at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. The Romanian 6th Cavalry Corps crumbled, and the 29th Panzer Grenadiers counterattacked. But with “allies” being routed on all sides, the Germans had to fall back to escape annihilation.