"Father of Nations" coined a new technical term
Is it possible to “cross” a tank with an airplane? For many years this idea itself seemed absurd. However, in the end, we, in the pre-war USSR, still found specialists who were able to solve such a "technical puzzle". Among them was Nikolai Sklyarov, a veteran of the Soviet industry who had worked for almost 70 years at the All-Union Institute of Aviation Materials and had been developing new types of armor protection for several decades.
The correspondent had a chance to meet with Nikolai Mitrofanovich and learn from him unknown details of how that “shield of the Motherland” was “forged” that helped to defeat the Nazis.
The civil war in Spain “unexpectedly” showed the military leadership of the USSR a sad fact: the dashing “Stalin's falcons” in their light vehicles have little chance of surviving in a real battle.
“Back in the early 1930s, VIAM, on its own initiative, began developing especially strong alloys,” recalled N. M. Sklyarov. - The leaders of our institute believed that air battles would play an important role in the upcoming wars, and therefore it is necessary to provide for reliable protection of pilots from enemy bullets in the design of combat aircraft. However, some of the leading Soviet aircraft designers, including Lavochkin, Petlyakov, categorically disagreed with such conclusions … They argued that the "red-star" pilots should defeat the enemy due to the high art of maneuvering, personal courage … And if, they say, hide the pilot behind bulletproof walls, then he, that look, will turn into a coward and simply forget how to fly as it should! The dispute could have continued for a long time if in 1936 a civil war had not begun among the Spaniards, in which the USSR actively supported the Republicans, supplying them with military equipment and sending its tankers and pilots to this distant country.
The air battles unfolding in the southern sky did not give cause for optimism. Taking part in the battles on the side of General Franco, German fighters, armed with more powerful machine-gun installations, easily made a sieve out of Soviet "hawks", and no amount of courage could help here. It was then that our "flyers" guessed to arrange at least handicraft protection from bullets. The savvy aviators constructed improvised armored backs from pieces cut off from the hull of a damaged armored boat. Even such primitive homemade products have saved the lives of air fighters more than once.
- Stalin found out about this, and after a few days, on his behalf, the People's Commissar Voroshilov met with our Viamov group, which was engaged in the development of armor, and we told him about the idea of installing protective backs in the cockpits of aircraft. A few months later, on May 2, 1938, Air Force Commander Yakov Smushkevich came to the plant in Podolsk to personally receive the first batch of such armored backs … But nothing like this existed in any other country in the world at that time. The same Germans - no matter how hard they tried - failed to develop an industrial technology comparable to ours for the manufacture of armor steel for aircraft. Meanwhile, the USSR conceived a completely fantastic project: the aircraft designer Ilyushin proposed to make a fully armored attack aircraft …
Night fire
So that a journalist who is not devoted to the intricacies of armored production could appreciate the uniqueness of this project at its true worth, Nikolai Mitrofanovich had to immediately arrange a small educational program:
- To get especially strong steel - armor, you need to harden it: first heat it up to almost a thousand degrees, and then quickly cool it - for example, in oil. The problem is that severe deformation occurs and the armored parts lose their original shape. It is practically impossible to assemble an airplane body from such "curvatures", observing all the highest accuracy requirements imposed on its geometry. And attempts to stamp fragments of the fuselage from already hardened sheets were doomed to failure due to the fragility of such steel …
It would seem, indeed, a hopeless situation. However, the staff of the VIAM laboratory managed to create a special steel grade that retained its plastic properties even when rapidly cooled to 270 degrees. This made it possible to stamp blanks from such metal in a special press - right in the process of hardening.
The first attempt to make a part from a new alloy in the factory almost ended in a scandal. Experienced workers, accustomed to the old technology, did not want to put a hardened part under the press in any way: “It's fragile! Will instantly shatter into dust! Still, what good, and the machine will fail, and we have to answer!..”The young specialist Sklyarov had to demonstrate to them the amazing properties of new steel: first, the red-hot workpiece was dipped into oil for cooling, and then Nikolai Mitrofanovich struck it with a sledgehammer with all his might. The part did not crunch and did not fall apart into fragments, but only bent over, proving its plasticity. After that, work started …
“During the experimental work on preparing new types of materials for industrial production, sometimes completely unforeseen problems arose,” my interlocutor shook his head. - Once in the factory shop, where an experimental batch of our armor plates was being prepared, an emergency happened. At two o'clock in the morning, a bathtub with five tons of saltpeter, which was used to cool metal blanks, suddenly caught fire. The arriving firefighters were going to shoot down the flames with water. However, I categorically forbade them to do this, because I understood: if water gets into the burning saltpeter, a chemical reaction will begin, accompanied by the release of a large amount of hydrogen, and therefore, after this, a crushing explosion cannot be avoided, which will destroy the entire building! It remained to wait until all the contents of the bath burned out.
- Of course, for the head of the fire brigade, such an order looked like sheer stupidity: here a fire is blazing with might and main - at a military plant, by the way! - and the head of the armored laboratory forbids extinguishing it. And this is not stupidity, but sheer sabotage!
- Although there was no serious damage from the fire in the shop, the next day the People's Commissar of the NKVD Yezhov came to deal with my "sabotage" in the night fire. Having been summoned to him, I tried to explain as clearly as possible the logic of my prohibitions on extinguishing saltpeter with water. Apparently, my “highly scientific” report did come to the understanding of the formidable Chekist: silently, he nodded his head to me, thereby showing that my “sin” was forgiven and the incident was over, turned around and walked away from the office …
"Fantasy" from Podolsk
Having mastered the manufacture of new armor blanks, in the summer of 1940, at the Podolsk plant, two hulls of Il attack aircraft were assembled from them for testing. Just at this very time, the leaders of our leading armored factories - Izhora and Kirovsky - sent a letter to Stalin, in which they argued that Ilyushin's proposal to create a fully armored aircraft was an absolutely impossible fantasy! Both of them received advice from the Kremlin: go to Podolsk and make sure that your “fantasy” has already become a reality.
Soon in Voronezh, at one of the best aviation enterprises of the Soviet Union, serial production of "flying tanks" - Il-2 attack aircraft was launched. (But the "advanced" Americans were able to master the production of armored aircraft only much later - in the 1950s.)
During the Great Patriotic War, the Luftwaffe pilots nevertheless adapted to shoot down attack aircraft, entering them into the “dead zone” from the tail side. Our specialists had to develop a modification of this combat vehicle - "Il-10". On the "top ten" there was an additional rear seat for the gunner-radio operator. In addition, shielded armor was used as protective "armor" for the new aircraft.
“They made it two-layered,” Nikolai Mitrofanovich started to explain again. - The outer layer is designed to destroy the shell that hit the plane, and the inner layer takes the impacts of the fragments formed during the explosion … I even had to report on the principle of operation of such a material at a special meeting with Stalin himself. Joseph Vissarionovich was pleased with what he heard: “Oh, so you came up with active armor? Good!..”By the way, this term itself -“active armor”- has since taken root in the everyday life of metal specialists, but few people know what Comrade Stalin personally invented it.
