Little Moment in History on the Eastern Front

[Soviet Ace]

Originally Posted by olife

my bud soviet ace ,i have a question for u : i hear during ww2 many russians pilots do a "TARAN" attack,they crash their plane intentionaly into the ennemies planes to win during the dogfights like the japanese pilots,have u more infos about it,is it real or a propaganda idea?

Yeah man, they really did intentionally ram into enemy bombers, fighters, etc. to down them so they couldn't do anymore damage to the Motherland. Luganski, the Yak-3 pilot I mentioned before did it a lot with his IAP. (And that's why on the site I provided, it calls him the Master of the "Taran" Attack. They did it a lot in the early years of the war, because they'd be fighting for so long, that their plane was either out of ammo, or they were too damaged, they couldn't fight anymore, so their best bet to down one more plane was to ram it. Lots of people died doing it, but there were even people in the Red Air Force, that never got a single plane shot down with their guns, but became aces solely because they did the Taran attack!

Once the La-5 and better planes started coming out, and the Red Air Force got an overhaul in tactics and discipline, Taran attacks weren't used so much. But German pilots of fighters and bombers were always nervous when flying on the Easter Front, because they never knew if they'd be the victim of one of the collisions. For some reason, whenever I read about pilots doing a Taran attack, they're usually flying a MiG-1 or MiG-3, or some crummy plane like that.

And actually, Lilya Litvak "The White Rose" got a kill over Stalingrad when she rammed a 109 returning home. She bailed out, survived, and then died a while later in 1943 after being jumped by some 'hidden' 109s.