And 153
We built airplanes, rescued Chelyuskinites, delivered Papaninites, we had Chkalov, a great pilot of his era, who flew across the North Pole to America. "We are not beggars, we have thousands of them!" - it's about airplanes. Cinema was shown - "If tomorrow is war!" And when it struck, it turned out that all those thousands were not good for hell. And 15, And 16, And 153 … Why were they only baked in such quantities? And our newest, most secret Yaks, LAGGs, MIGs burned down on the front-line airfields on the very first day.
And on that first day it turned out that our pilots did not know how to fight. And not because they studied poorly, but because they were taught the wrong thing - they crammed the history of the party, worked out the speeches of the leader, brought up loyalty to the homeland, but they showed more and more on their fingers how to get behind the enemy, and not in the air … will turn into quality, we will crush it in large quantities, we will shower it with hats.
And here's the result: at the beginning of the war, the German Air Force command awarded the Grand Cross to pilots who shot down 25 enemy aircraft, by November 1941, in the midst of the battle for Moscow, the bar had been raised to 40, and by 1944 - to 100. They raised their score too quickly. some German pilots.
In his memoirs, Gerd Barkhorn, commander of the 2nd fighter squadron, where Hartmann served, wrote: “At the beginning of the war, the Russian pilots were imprudent in the air, acted constrainedly, and I easily shot them down with unexpected attacks. But still we must admit that they were much better than the pilots of other European countries, with which we had to fight. In the course of the war, Russian pilots became more and more skillful air fighters. Once, in 1943, I had to fight in Me 109G with one Soviet pilot in LAGG Z. The side of his car was painted red, which meant a pilot from the Guards regiment. Our fight lasted about 40 minutes and I could not beat him. We got up on our planes everything we knew and could. Still, they were forced to disperse. Yes, it was a real master!"
And this despite the fact that our pilots did not like LAGG and called it “Flying Aviation Guaranteed Coffin”. I must say that all the parameters of mass aircraft were lower than those of the Germans, and this inequality, contrary to popular belief, remained until the end of the war, when, under the bombing of the Allied aviation, they managed to release about two thousand jet fighters, the speed of which reached 900 kilometers per hour!
So all our talk about the fact that the Hitler's aces had such large personal accounts only because they made notes on the number of engines - they shot down a four-engine plane, so they counted it as four at once - this, excuse me, is from the evil one. More often than not, ours wrote down the plane, shot down in a common heap, to the personal account of the most eminent - you look, he will become a Hero. By the way, to receive the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, as far as I know, it was enough to shoot down 25 enemy vehicles of any class.
Let's try to figure out why the victors' army had three times more losses than the defeated ones. And in aviation, the gap is even more significant …
It all started as if it were not bad for us. In the skies of Spain, the volunteer pilots of our Air Force, despite the fact that the famous "donkeys" - fighters I 16 - were inferior to German aircraft in speed, gave the Nazis a good light. The Germans themselves did not hesitate to admit the advantages of our pilots in flight skills. Here is just one piece of evidence.
In the center I. F. Petrov and S. P. Suprun with a parachute. Germany. 1940 g.
In the spring of 1940, BP Suprun, our famous ace, at that time Hero of the Soviet Union (he received the second Star posthumously already during the battles during the Great Patriotic War), also visited Germany as part of a delegation of Soviet specialists. The Germans showed us their Me 109 fighter. Our specialists rated the car rather restrainedly. Then the somewhat annoyed designer E. Henkel suggested that Suprun test the newest He 100 fighter. Here is what he himself wrote about this in his memoirs:
But what can I say, if the commander of the Luftwaffe Hermann Goering, as already mentioned, passed flight universities on the territory of our country, under the guidance of Soviet instructors!..
And suddenly everything changed so dramatically with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. For the first months, the German aces had an undeniable advantage in the air. Why did it happen?
There are several reasons for this, in my opinion. Firstly, almost all aviation was concentrated on the front-line airfields, where it was destroyed in the first days, or even hours after the outbreak of hostilities.
However, the famous historian Roy Medvedev believes that such a concentration was a necessary measure due to the fact that our Air Force began to receive new equipment for which the old runways were not suitable. They began to urgently modernize them (and at many airfields at once), as a result of which a huge amount of equipment was concentrated on the remaining (mainly civilian) airfields …
Perhaps this is so. Nevertheless, in any case, bungling is evident. There is no escape from the fact that by June 1941 70-80 percent of the aircraft of the USSR were inferior in their flight performance to the same type of aircraft in Germany. And those few pilots who were still able to take off and engage in battle with superior enemy forces, often had to use only the "secret Russian weapon" - a ram.
However, this weapon is of the same kind as the infantryman's attempt to close the embrasure of an enemy pillbox with his own chest. The ram, as a rule, led simultaneously to the loss of his own car, despite all the instructions, and even to the death of the pilot. It is no coincidence that our pilots resorted to this last resort for the most part only at the beginning of the war, when the enemy had overwhelming air superiority. If in the first year of the war 192 rams were made, then in the last - only 22 …
Over time, our designers and production workers managed to turn the tide. The front began to receive more and more new, more advanced equipment, and by the end of the war, not the German, but the Soviet air force had an overwhelming advantage in the air. However, one should not think that we already had nothing to learn from the German specialists.
Pe-2
Usually, when it comes to this type of aircraft, one immediately recalls the famous "pawn" - the Pe 2 aircraft designed by V. M. Petlyakov. However, let's not forget that the Petlyakovs appeared at the front later than the famous Laptezhniks - the Yu 87 dive bombers.
Moreover, engineer Joseph Goldfain unearthed an interesting story about this …
Shortly before the Great Patriotic War, LP Beria summoned aircraft designer A. N. Tupolev and ordered to urgently make a "high-altitude, long-range, four-engine, dive bomber." Here is how Deputy General L. L. Kerber told about it: “Tupolev returned evil, like a thousand devils … Beria's idea was clearly untenable. A lot of arguments "against" and not a single "for". Unless the Germans and Americans have single-engine dive bombers, we should surpass them and create another not even the tsar bell, but the tsar dive bomber. " According to Tupolev, "making such an airplane was sheer madness."
Dive bombers Ju-87 after returning from a combat mission.
Indeed, during a dive, the machine experiences enormous overloads, which means that its design must be especially strong, which is impossible to achieve with a four-engined aircraft. A high-altitude bomb carrier must certainly have a sealed cockpit for the crew, equipped with remote control of weapons, and it, such a control, was not produced in the USSR. There were other equally compelling arguments against the creation of this aircraft, but Beria stubbornly insisted on his own. Tupolev pulled as best he could, referring to the workload on the Tu 2, and then the war broke out …
Tu 2
Of course, what happened first of all could be explained by the technical illiteracy of the chief of the NKVD, if not for one circumstance - then the Germans were working on the project of such a dive bomber!
It turns out that in the summer of 1935, German aircraft designers were ordered to create a heavy bomber with a range of 2500 kilometers, capable of bombing and diving. In the summer of 1937, the Heinkel company began work on the Xe 177, equipped with an original power plant - four motors, placed in pairs, rotated two propellers.
In November 1939, the plane made its first flight, and then there was a streak of failures: five prototypes of the new machine crashed, and two - during a dive, 17 test pilots died.
In the end, the air brakes were removed from the Xe 177 and turned into a regular bomber, which from March 1942 was mass-produced. In total, the Luftwaffe received 545 bombers of several modifications (other figures are also given in the literature). The most successful was the He 177 A5, manufactured since February 1943 as a torpedo bomber and carrier of two air-to-ship missiles.
Heinkel He 177
Heinkel had proposed three years earlier a variant with four motors mounted in the wing singly and with a pressurized cabin; however, until the end of the war, only a few experienced Xe 274 and Xe 277 with conventional cabins had time to be made.
We do not have detailed information about the combat use of the He 177. But the fact that many (according to some sources, up to half) were lost due to accidents speaks for itself.
Why did Hitler want such a monster? The absence of strategic bombers in the Luftwaffe is usually explained by the shortsightedness of the leaders of the Third Reich. However, this obscures the essence of the matter, because German designers worked on such a technique, only to no avail. It is known that the accuracy of dive bombing is much higher than from level flight. Therefore, the leaders of Nazi Germany could be tempted to use a small number of diving He 177s to effectively hit strategic targets deep behind enemy lines.
Since there were no objective reasons to replenish the Soviet Air Force with a similar combat aircraft, it remains to assume a subjective one. Pay attention to the strange coincidence - in 1939 the first sample of the He 177 flew, and after a while Beria instructed Tupolev to create the same one. If we assume that the agents of his department managed to get top secret information about the German superdive bomber, then the seemingly incomprehensible stubbornness of Beria becomes quite understandable …
