What an excellent, lengthy interview! Took me more than an hour to read it all, as i wanted to do it carefully and not miss a thing.
That guy is what, 89 years old and he still remembers so many things and most of all, interesting and "daredevil" ones along with the usual tactical stories that we find in war time memoirs.
My hat is off to these guys, they didn't only have to fight against some of the most dangerous enemies in the world at that time, but they also had to fight against the weather, poor logistics and even some of their own countrymen...it's always the most near-sighted people that get the powerful positions and make decisions based only on rules and regulations, while the ones who already do all the dangerous work have to take the extra risk due to these actions. I've read quite a few of your interviews and while many pilots seem neutral or even nostalgic of the old days and the previous government system, most of them have bad things to say about political commisars or officers who were getting awards for doing nothing or sending the rest to certain death and rightly so.
Translation is not perfect but it's good enough to understand 100% of the story, so no issues there.
A little thing that might help would be to have a short summary of places mentioned in the interviews and the names of the people involved in the story, maybe in diagram form to make it easier to do. Of course, i understand that this is extra work for you guys and i'm not nitpicking.
The reason is that it would help a lot in understanding the area of operations and the people involved, as we see a lot of names that rise through ranks and get transferred between units (or even across entire fronts) during the course of the story, only to return at later dates. For example, i had to double-back and read again certain paragraphs to make sure that the person i was reading about was indeed the one mentioned in a previous point of the story.
In any case, just interviewing these people is excellent work on its own. This interview is a lengthy one but still a terrific read (i couldn't stop reading once i started), especially since Mr. Batyevskii faced such interesting situations. It contains loads of different stories... from training and tactical considerations to daring stunts and immense feats of strength and courage. It combines the stuff that movies are made of with the realism and grim considerations of real war. Just talking to these great people and making it possible for us to know all this is good enough in my book, keep up the good work
08-04-2010, 02:50 AM
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