Attack of the Airacobras
Soviet Aces – American P-39s – The Air War Against Germany
By Dmitriy Loza – Translated By James F. Gebhardt
University Press of Kansas
Review by Ned Barnett
(Review Copy provided by review author)
Why would a World War II Soviet tank crewman write a book about Soviet fighter pilots who used a much-disparaged (at least in the West) and apparently obsolete “transition-era” fighter aircraft? Perhaps because that tank commander served, during the Great Patriotic War, in an American-built Sherman tank. Though he doesn’t make an issue of it (though he does mention it in the introduction), Loza knows at first hand how nearly 50 years of post-war Soviet policy downgraded both the contribution of Lend-Lease equipment … and of the brave Soviet soldiers, sailors and airmen who manned those “officially-despised” but apparently nonetheless essential American and British contributions to Soviet success in the Great Patriotic War.
If that’s not the reason he wrote this book (I think it is), it’s still a good one – and whatever the reason that inspired this old tanker to write about aerial combat, this is a remarkable book about a plane that – by virtue of what the Soviets were able to do with it – has to be one of the most misunderstood and under-rated combat aircraft of World War II, and maybe of all times.
Starting in late 1941 but really ramping up in early 1943, the Soviet Union received nearly 5,000 Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter planes, primarily through America's Lend-Lease program, though the earliest arrivals were hand-me-downs from the UK. The Soviets quickly adapted the planes that nobody else wanted into a remarkably lethal weapon system. This became an odd coupling of capitalist planes and Marxist pilots – a coupling that became uncomfortable to the post-war Soviet Union, leading to many “myth-understandings” about the P-39 in Soviet hands.
This was a classic “transition-era” fighter, built for the last war, not for the next one. Bell developed their P-39 as a short range pursuit (interceptor) aircraft intended to fly coastal defense missions at relatively low altitudes. However, by Soviet standards, the P-39 was equipped with a powerful engine and deadly hard-hitting weapons. In the hands of gifted Soviet fighter pilots – who’d learned to survive in the crucible of war and who “didn’t know any better” than to think that they had a great plane on their hand, the P-39 was able to out-fly, out-fight and eventually dominate the Luftwaffe from the Kuban Peninsula and the Caucusus foothills to Eastern Europe and Berlin.
Primarily, in order to tell this remarkable story in microcosm, this book is a narrative of the operational history of the incredibly-successful 9th Guards Fighter Division of the Soviet Air Force (the VVS) from the time in early 1943 when elements of the 9th Guards first took the P-39 into combat (at a time when the Americans were phasing it out of front-line combat units as fast as possible) to the very end of the war. The 9th Guards had some of the best pilots in the Soviet VVS, including two of the Soviet Union’s four top aces – Aleksandr Pokryshkin and Gregoriy Rechkalov – which suggests something about the men, and about the aircraft they flew so loyally and so well.
In spite of the apparent obsolescent nature of the P-39, the 9th Guards took 354 “Kobras*” into combat in the final battle for Berlin – and scored it’s last two victories, over Prague, on May 10th, two days after the war officially ended.
*“Kobra” is not a term found in this book – however, the term is widely and authentically used in Osprey’s recent book “Soviet Lend-Lease Aces” – where it has the ring of authenticity. This otherwise excellent book is all but bereft of “insider” military slang so beloved of military aviation buffs.
Everybody who’s ever studied the American and British use of American-designed combat fighters in World War II knows that the Brits – at a time when they were desperate for anything that could fly – rejected the Bell Airacobra out-of-hand, sending most of them to the Soviets in late 1941 and giving the rest back, as the Bell P-400, to the Americans, who were even more desperate for modern fighters. The unloved and unwanted P-400 fought in the early days of 1942 over New Guinea – along with some early-model made-for-the-USAAF P-39s – while others performed remarkable service in Guadalcanal, primarily in the ground support role. Other Americans used the P-39 over North Africa and Sicily, but traded them to the French and turn-coat Italians as soon as they could, preferring to fly almost anything else with wings.
However, the Soviet fighter pilots loved the P-39 – but not, as latter-day myth-makers would have it, for it’s supposed ground-attack and tank-busting abilities (hint – the Soviets didn’t have armor-piercing ammunition for the P-39’s 37mm cannon, but they did have AP for the twin 37s mounted in their world-class IL-2 Sturmovik). Instead, the Soviet pilots loved the P-39 as an air-to-air weapon, and fearlessly took it against often superior numbers of Bf-109F and G-model Messerschmitts – or even the against the much-vaunted Focke-Wulf Fw-190s. Those Soviet fighter pilots loved the heavy nose armament – sufficient, even without wing guns (often removed in combat) for shattering the best-protected Luftwaffe fighters and bombers with a single on-target burst of fire. They loved the P-39 for it’s (comparative) long range, and it’s unexcelled cockpit radios – no less a figure than Aleksandr Pokryshkin, the undisputed “Father of Soviet Fighter Aviation” and the number-two Ace in the Soviet VVS in World War II, said that the Kobra’s radio was its best feature. They even loved it for it’s remarkably clear cockpit glazing – something far superior to that produced by existing Soviet technology. They loved the Kobra’s armored protection, they loved its turning ability – and didn’t seem to think it was sluggish or had poor altitude performance. The Airacobra’s abundant liabilities – at least those found by other Allied fighter pilots – either didn’t exist for the Soviet pilots, or they found these “liabilities” to actually be real strengths.
Pokryshkin, who was promoted to Marshal of Aviation in December of 1972 at the end of a remarkable career, clearly thought the Kobra was something special. He scored most of his 59 official victories (more like 72 actual victories) in the Kobra. At the very end of the war – as a highly-respected major-unit combat leader – he literally went to the mats against his political masters (a dangerous thing to do, even for a multiple-winner of the coveted “Hero of the Soviet Union” honor). The Commissars wanted all the Soviet aircraft in the skies over Berlin to be Soviet-built (they wanted all the tanks to be Soviet-built, too, though some of their best units served in “obsolete” Shermans). Pokryshkin put his life on the line – literally – in order to keep his unit flying “obsolete” P-39s in the skies over Berlin. Knowing he’d be going up against the latest fighters in the German armory, flown by the best surviving pilots in the world, Pokryshkin wanted to stay in his beloved P-39 rather than convert to the supposedly superior Yaks and LaGGs. Perhaps he knew something about the diminutive, hard-hitting P-39 that escaped American air-combat “experts.”
Like the Brewster Buffalo and the Curtiss Hawk 75 in the hands of the Finns, P-39 Airacobras – when in the hands of the 9th Guards Fighter Division’s pilots – was a plane without equal. These fighter jocks were among the highest-scoring pilots in the Soviet Union – they fought a long and bloody no-holds-barred struggle against some of the best pilots the Luftwaffe could field (including top-scoring ace Erich Hartmann) – and right up till VE Day, they swore by their Kobras. It’s almost enough to make you wonder if surfer-singers Jan & Dean had read the history of the 9th Guards Fighter Division before they recorded “Hey Little Cobra (don’t ya know you’re gonna shoot ‘em down?).”
This remarkable book doesn’t tell you why the Kobra was so effective in the hands of these Soviet aces – instead, it shows you how this remarkably small fighter made such a big mark in such a huge war. While the book follows a rough chronological combat history – from early 1943 to the end of the war – it doesn’t flow as a single narrative. It reads more like a series of interesting and somewhat interconnected articles – but that’s not a bad thing, as this flexibility gives Loza the opportunity to bring in details of how the VVS operated in wartime – fascinating minutia I’ve seen nowhere else. Do you want to know how many spare/replacement Allison engines the 9th had on hand for the final battle over Berlin – or how they came up with the formula that told the Commissars just how many spares to have on hand? This book spells it out. Want to know about how food supplies were handled – or how gasoline was sent to the front – or how the VVS had its own medical service to ensure that recovering pilots were returned to their own units? This book spells it out.
In fact, in addition to covering aerial combat, this book covers it all. Did you know that the “communist” Soviet Union paid cash bounties (“bribes”) to successful pilots and aircrews – even ground-crews? While – except for the frankly mercenary American Volunteer Group (the Flying Tigers) – the capitalistic Western Allies would never think of (let alone condone) cash awards for combat success, the communistic anti-materialistic Soviets paid out 5,000 rubles for 120 successful combat missions and 1,500 rubles to the man who shot down a bomber. Sink a sub and you get 10,000 rubles. Even the mechanics got “bribed” – 100 missions without an abort was worth 1,000 rubles to a crew chief or engine mechanic – and if 75 percent of a unit’s ground crewmen qualified for cash bonuses, their supervisors were in for a 1,500 ruble bonus themselves. What’s that? The sound of Lenin spinning like a lathe?
While highlighting lots of fascinating facts about the air war over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the last two years of the war, mostly, however, this book follows dozens – maybe hundreds – of individual aerial combat engagements. This is a book about aerial combat, and it delivers on this promise – in spades!
The Leitmotif is clear – outnumbered formations of 9th Guards Fighter Division Airacobras are attacked by (or attack) larger and more powerful Luftwaffe units; and, through superior tactics, the Soviets usually score a 3.5 to 1 victory margin, even when facing 3-to-1 or even 5-to-1 odds. It also shows what happens (in tragic detail) when even the most experienced combat leaders forget hard-won lessons, and pay a staggering blood-price for their lapse in judgment. It’s not all one way; however, after two years of horrendous losses, a particularly brutal kind of Darwinian selection occurred – those Soviet pilots who’d survived the Luftwaffe onslaught flying I-15 and I-16 fighters in 1941 and 1942 were now ready, in 1943, to decimate their hated foe with planes that others felt were – at best – marginal. And, while the Soviet military system had many flaws, the author is at great pains to describe how the success of aces and leaders was passed on to not only green replacement pilots but also to other units across the length and breadth of the 2000-mile front line. When a pilot or a unit found something that worked, the Soviets were – by 1943 – quick to integrate that lesson into combat units from the Kuban to Murmansk.
This book dissects aerial combat in remarkable detail – it’s depth and breadth are little short of stunning – and it is that very depth and breadth that make the notion of the P-39 Airacobra as a competent and competitive war-fighting machine right up until the final battles over Berlin “almost” believable. The Americans and the Brits weren’t wrong. For their kind of warfare, the P-39 was – at best – an also-ran. But in a war where fighter strips were built just five or ten miles behind the front lines – on both sides, the P-39 could thrive. In a war where combat in the weeds was more common than combat in the stratosphere, the P-39 could excel. And in a war where quick slashing hits at bombers or fighters took the place of endless swirling dogfights, the P-39 was a combat-master.
Along with more than 300 pages of fascinating, detailed text, the book has several useful maps, dozens of “I’ve never seen ‘em before” photos, and some tables that will be remarkable to the true WW-II aerial combat buff, including a list of every Soviet ace who scored even one shared kill on a Kobra. That list is remarkably long – and when you read elsewhere the stringent rules followed for confirming kills, you’ll realize that this isn’t propaganda-mill victories, but flesh-and-blood triumphs over the truly hated Germans (and if you don’t really believe that the Soviet-in-the-street hated the Germans no matter how bad Stalin was, read this rampantly non-political book that nonetheless shows the Soviets’ profound and reverent love of the “Motherland” – and makes it clear that to invade the “Motherland” is no different than raping your mother).
The publisher says this is based on interviews with Soviet veterans and extensive access to squadron histories and logbooks – and I believe it. This book is part of the University Press of Kansas’ Modern War Studies series.
A great book – well worth the price: Retail $34.95 – new at Amazon for $26.56.
University Press of Kansas – http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu
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