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The first aerial combat on the Eastern Front.
Flying an obsolete I-153 biplane in the hazy morning sky over Ukraine on 22 June 1941, Soviet Air Force Lieutenant Rubstov probably claimed the first aerial victory in the war between Germany and the Soviet Union. In connection with the text are shown a few images from the results of the devastating German air raids on Russian airfields on 22 June 1941: MiG-3's, I-16 and Uti-4 (that last two from 122nd IAP, on Lida airfield)
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n the early hours of 22 June 1941, the Soviet Air Force was totally caught by surprise by the Luftwaffe attack against their airbase system. During the first hours, around 1,200 Russian aircraft were destroyed, more than 800 of them on the ground, according to Soviet figures. But despite the surprise attack and the lacking communications, Russian pilots scrambled at several places. At one airfield, a formation of Russian fighters attempted to take off in the midst of a raid. The bombs fell upon the starting planes and they were all left destroyed, in perfect take-off formation, at the end of the runway. At another airfield, Sergei Dolgushin and his comrades ran towards their I-16 fighters. 'At three o´clock, the alarm went off,' he recalled. 'We all ran towards our airplanes. At 4:20, when the Messerschmitts appeared over the air field, I had to take off. While I was taking off, during that first dogfight, I was hit 16 times.' Quite contrary to the general belief, bitter dogfights raged in the skies all along the front during these early morning hours. In general, the Soviet fighter pilots managed surprisingly well on this first day.
At Kurovitsa airbase, the units under command of the Air Force of Kiev Special Military District (VVS KOVO), were alarmed even before the German bombers had reached this target. However, the pilots of the ground-attack regiment 66 ShAP (Shturmovyi Aviapolk) figured it was a training alarm, and came too late - which resulted in 34 of the regiment´s Polikarpov I-153s and I-15bis being bombed to pieces by the Ju 88s of Kampfgeschwader KG 51 'Edelweiss'. As the bombs fell, the fighter pilots of 164 IAP, who had arrived at Kurovitsa airfield in due time, were airborne, climbing after the enemy in their small I-16s.
In general, the Soviet Air Force material was of terribly low technical quality. The main Soviet fighter aircraft, the Polikarpov I-16 monoplane - the plane with the many names: called Ishak ('Jackass') or Jastrebok ('Young Eagle') by the Russian pilots who flew it, and Rata ('Rat') by the Germans who had adopted this from their allies in the Spanish Civil War, the men on the Republican side in the latter conflict named it Mosca ('Fly'), while it was called Abu ('Gadfly') by the Japanese airmen who met this type over China and Khalkhin-Gol - was inferior to the standard Messerschmitt Bf 109 F fighter in all aspects except maneuverability. According to German fighter pilots´ reports, 'the plane easily caught fire if struck from above or from the side'. Regarding the biplane fighter I-15bis, 'a few rounds fired into the sides were often enough to set them on fire'. (However, it is worth noting that the Polikarpov fighters held one important advantage over the Bf 109: their engines were air cooled. Once the Bf 109 was liquid cooled, a hit in the radiator was enough to send a Messerschmitt down to the ground. Frequently, Messerschmitt 109s hit in the radiator force-landed and were only slightly damaged, not appearing in the German loss lists; this isone of the main reasons to the gap between Soviet victory claims and Luftwaffe loss figures.)
Air-to-air radio - a standard equipment in all German aircraft types - was something of a luxury to Russian airmen; only the unit commanders´aircraft were equipped with radioes, and these were very unreliable, which naturally made cooperation in the air difficult and on several occasions enabled German fighters to sneek behind a Soviet formation and shoot down one plane after another, the last one caught by the same surprise as the first one. But notwithstanding their inferior equipment, once in the air, the Red fighter pilots put up a stiff fight. The I-16 Ishaks of 164 IAP were followed by some of the remaining biplanes of 66 ShAP.
'Skilful and aggressive attacks by Russian fighter units', Wolfgang Dierich´s chronicle of KG 51 comments, 'ensured that the struggle for air supremacy was no easy game.' The first attack was made by Lieutenant P. N. Rubstov of 66 ShAP. He sprayed a Ju 88 with machine gun bullets until it finally caught fire and went down and crashed within sight of the Kurovitsa airfield. Thus, Lieutenant Rubstov probably achieved the first aerial victory in the Russo-German war.
The Polikarpov fighters kept pursuing the Junkers bombers on their return flight to the west. In a matter of minutes, one bomber after another was shot down. The Germans left a trail of white parachutes and blazing flames in the hazy sky. Out of 28 Ju 88s dispatched by IIIrd Gruppe/KG 51, 7 were shot down during this first mission - five of them from the 9th Staffel.
In the middle of all this, the German fighter escort appeared. The fast Messerschmitt 109s came shooting down from above with hammering cannons and machine guns. The first I-16 was shot down by Oberleutnant Robert Oljenik of 1st Staffel, Jagdgeschwader JG 3. As it buried itself into the ground, Oljenik had achieved his sixth out of totally 41 confirmed victories in World War 2 - and probably the first German aerial kill in this conflict. At 04:30, Feldwebel Ernst Heesen of 2./JG 3 destroyed a second I-16 Ishak / Rata. As it went down, the glow from the raging fires at Kurovitsa airfield, 20 miles further to the east, could still be seen in the darkness. A third I-16 fell victim to Feldwebel Detlev Lüth of 1./JG 3.
Even if compared with the number of sorties flown, the losses sustained by the Luftwaffe on the forst day of the war with the USSR were very heavy: 78 combat aircraft were listed as totall losses, with a further 89 damaged. This in fact was an even higher figure than that of the fateful so-called 'Battle of Britain Day', 15 September 1940, when the Germans lost 61 planes destroyed and 11 damaged.
Of the German aircraft destroyed, 24 were fighters, 35 bombers, 7 Zerstörern (Messerschmitt Bf 110), 2 Stukas and 10 of miscellaneous types. Added to these losses were the Rumanian aircraft shot down on this day: 4 Bristol Blenheims, 2 PZL P-37 Los, 2 Savoia-Marchetti S.M. 79B, 1 Potez 633, 1 IAR 37 and 1 IAR 39.
The German bomber pilot Wolfgang Dierich later wrote of the sentiments among the Luftwaffe fliers that evening: 'At midnight, the men went to bed, half-dead of fatigue. Their last thoughts before they fell a sleep were: "What may have happened to our missing comrades? Are they still alive? What will the next day bring us? How will this all end?"'
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