Chapter 108:
Chapter 108
Spring has come. The thaw has come.
The spring of Russia was not the lively season we thought of, but a terrible season where the whole land was covered with muddy mud. But anyway, spring has come.
The land was muddy and the spring rain was still cold, making it hard to say that it was suitable for human activity.
However, it was better weather for flying aircraft than the blizzard that had been raging for the past 41 years of winter.
The German army finally took advantage of the regained superiority and filled the sky with Bf109 fighters and Ju87 Stukas.
The target was the Soviet aircraft.
Hundreds, thousands of aces were born in the last year.
They were the result of one-sided slaughter of Soviet pilots who had desperately engaged in air combat with inferior performance aircraft to protect their homeland.
The Luftwaffe pilots shouted.
“Tomorrow we will be aces too!”
“Hahaha! Now our squadron will also produce aces, right?”
The aircraft that the Soviet army deployed in 1941 were ‘Soviet-like’ things.
They could be said to be excellent in terms of productivity, but advanced technology was excluded, reliability was a mess, and performance was also hard to say good.
Yak-1, I-16, MiG-3, LaGG-3 and other Soviet air force main fighters were not even all-metal from the beginning.
The Soviet Union’s power generation capacity was too low to produce things like aluminum that consumed electricity and make fighter jets.
The upper class made a mistake that they could replace metal with abundant wood. So the Soviet pilots had to pay with blood.
Thousands of aircraft were destroyed in six months after the outbreak of war, and valuable pilots also died by the thousands.
The Luftwaffe pilots were those who survived from the Spanish Civil War, fighting bloody battles with British pilots in the English Channel, North Africa, and so on.
The Soviet air force, which lacked experience and time, was nothing but a lump of experience points for them.
But now they have changed.
***
“Oh, oh, Billy!!!”
“My plane is stalling! Aaaaaah!”
The fact that new large-caliber anti-aircraft guns were deployed by the Soviets had already spread among the pilots.
However, due to the extremely limited air operations due to the winter blizzard, the Luftwaffe pilots did not pay much attention to such rumors.
How much can they make weapons when they are Untermensch Slavs?
They judged so lightly.
The ground dogs are starving and saying that, and aren’t we smashing both the Soviet air force and tanks?
Perhaps this would have been their perception if expressed in one word.
Complacency on the battlefield always pays a price in blood, but the Germans forgot that they had achieved initial success due to Soviet complacency.
“I wasn’t hit directly, why…!”
“It seems to explode when it gets close to us!”
“Damn it… The operation failed. Return to base!”
The first thing that greeted the Luftwaffe planes was a dense anti-aircraft fire network.
A Bf109 began to crash after being hit by a crossfire of hundreds of anti-aircraft machine guns.
They tried to avoid the machine gun fire and counterattack with machine guns while performing brilliant aerial maneuvers, but this time large-caliber anti-aircraft guns fired and restrained the German squadron.
Large-caliber anti-aircraft guns could blow up planes with just one hit, but they didn’t have to hit them.
Many pilots had consistently thought that ‘they just don’t have to hit’.
In an anti-aircraft gun that only hits one shot after firing hundreds or thousands of shots, will I die today by hitting me?
But the Soviets did something to their anti-aircraft shells that exploded them near planes even when fired at high speed. It was impossible to hit like that with existing fuses.
“How can they explode like that even when I’m doing evasive maneuvers like this!”
For example, if you set a fuse for a specific time, then the shell would explode in mid-air after firing and scatter fragments. But even if the anti-aircraft gunners aimed and set the time limit, there was no way that the plane would stay there as it was.
Pilots who knew well about such anti-aircraft guns tried to avoid them by performing brilliant acrobatic flights.
It wasn’t very successful though.
A second fighter exploded in a fire net. Is it 100mm or something?
Even if such a large anti-aircraft shell exploded at close range, it could blow up a plane.
Damn it, I’m out of luck today.
“What… what is that?”
“I don’t know. It looks like a new Soviet fighter…”
The squadron leader felt wronged.
He was angry enough to lose his comrades after being hit by an unexpected anti-aircraft fire, but he felt like he couldn’t face them if he didn’t shoot down at least one Soviet plane.
He also felt that he would be severely reprimanded in the subsequent blame if he had no previous achievements.
“Stuka, return to base. We have to catch those guys and dedicate them to Billy and Felix. Tomorrow!”
“We will be aces too!”
With the slogan, the Bf109 squadron began to raise their altitude.
The Soviet air force’s shoddy aircraft had not been able to perform well at high altitudes until then, and they had to be the prey of the German air force descending from high altitudes.
The essence of the boom and zoom tactic was that. Based on superior aircraft performance and engine performance, they raised their altitude and dived down to hit the flickering enemy aircraft and escaped with one blow.
The potential energy obtained by altitude was converted into kinetic energy, and the aircraft could achieve much higher speeds than when maintaining its own altitude.
Based on this speed, they turned the rudder and rose again, hunting enemy planes by going up with a boom and down with a zoom.
This was the basic air combat tactic of the Luftwaffe.
“Oh? Oh?”
“Squadron leader, they are following us?”
But the shock was just beginning.
The Soviet aircraft, which looked heavy, followed the Bf109s that were raising their altitude too easily.
The wooden planes that had been around until then should have stalled at this point due to lack of engine thrust…
“Hans, Rudolf, cover me. Once…!”
If I go any further, I won’t be able to get the best performance out of Bf109 either.
The squadron leader instinctively made a decision and started diving.
When diving begins, air combat takes place in a vertical direction where ascent and descent are repeated.
The Soviet plane also seemed to know that and started diving by turning the rudder.
It looked much bigger up close. What is it, a brown bear?
He laughed bitterly at the absurd thought while sweating in his hand.
Brown bear, brown bear, good name.
The brown bear fighter looked twice as big as the sleek Bf109.
What kind of engine do they have to be able to follow like that?
“Damn it…”
He was sure he had hit it, but as if it was impossible, the brown bear fighter dodged.
It spewed out bullets from eight machine guns.
It looked like a bear that didn’t care about the stings of a swarm of bees.
The bear was now leaping and jumping like a pack of wolves.
Many people overlooked this fact because of its dull image, but bears are more agile animals than they think.
Maybe if you were chased by a hungry brown bear in the taiga forest of Russia, you would understand that. I can’t recommend it though.
Anyway, as befitting his thought of a brown bear, the Soviet fighter began to dive at a fierce speed.
If the weight was twice as much, the engine output had to be twice as much to get the same speed.
And yet, the bigger size was advantageous in situations like this.
In the vertical direction, not the horizontal turn, it was advantageous to have a large size and less air resistance.
That way, you could get faster speed during the dive, and it was easier to use it again when ascending.
“Damn you brown bear bastards! Eat this!”
The Soviet squadron chased their prey like bears, jumping and bouncing in air combat with Bf109s.
That thing was not inferior to German aircraft in terms of performance.
The squadron leader wanted to reflect deeply on his arrogance until then. If it was a problem that could be solved by reflection.
Of course, it wasn’t that they suddenly had skills that they didn’t have before.
The Soviets probably formed units with the best pilots as much as possible when deploying such new models.
That guy must have been a pretty good pilot in the Soviet army too – he wanted to believe that.
But still, in terms of skill, Germany was overwhelmingly superior.
The squadron leader drew a line through the center of the brown bear fighter with his machine gun.
The fighter immediately started to smoke and crash.
It was dirty to be with you, and let’s never meet again.
The pilot must have died skewered by machine guns.
“Hoo, we have to kill those guys for sure. Otherwise…”
We will die.
As long as they have equal or better fighters than ours, we had to step on them as soon as possible.
Otherwise, we will be hunted.
He paid tribute to the Soviet pilot who went to the other world in his heart.
Damn you, I’ll probably follow you soon, so don’t be too resentful. You guys also our pilots…
“Four aircraft lost. Pilot loss is…”
They took four of us.
He would definitely find out where such a thing came from.
Who gave us a mission like suicide without telling us that there was such a thing – anti-aircraft guns or fighters?
Who are you fighting with blood while sitting comfortably in the rear and can’t even do that?
He was human too, so he had eyes and ears.
He couldn’t help but know about the coup d’etat wave that broke out in his homeland.
The news that Afwehr plotted against the chancellor and ordered the assassination of the head of imperial security spread throughout the barracks no matter how much they tried to shush it.
So there is no information about Soviet new models! You bastards… Damn it, his teeth were grinding.
***
Reports on Soviet new aircraft came up sporadically from all fronts.
The intelligence agents of the former Afwehr who did not detect this had to undergo another intensive interrogation.
The Imperial Security Headquarters, which had an excuse that their leader was killed, was somewhat less interrogated.
The intelligence department named the fighter <Brown Bear> as someone called it.
Soon it was known that the Soviets called it MiG-7, nicknamed ‘Molniya’ (lightning), but brown bear was such an appropriate expression that it quickly settled down.
The shock brought by the brown bear fighter was truly tremendous.
The Luftwaffe could no longer dominate the wide sky of the Eastern Front.
The engineers who analyzed the crashed aircraft somehow came up with only one answer. It is not worse than ours in any way.
There was one fortunate thing.
This aircraft was not a work made by the Soviets alone.
“It’s an American engine. The Soviets can’t make such a thing…”
“It’s American alright.”
The English words engraved clearly on the engine were too obvious evidence.
It was unknown whether it was licensed production or imported engines.
The intelligence department was still half-paralyzed.
Was it fortunate that they did not have such advanced technology alone?
Or should we take it as a warning that America can also deploy better things at any time?
The cooperation between the two countries seemed to have an upward effect.
How many of these new weapons are there is still not known exactly.
Maybe they are being produced anew at various factories today, so the numbers will keep changing… 500? 1,000?
Another important thing was how much production capacity the Soviets had.
The German fighters who fought with the brown bear fighters mostly returned victorious. But the exchange rate was much higher than the previous air combat. If time passes like this… Soviet superiority is expected.
The better pilots who rode the better aircraft could survive longer and grow into aces.
The Soviets had many more people, so there would be more people who survived and became aces.
The staff kept their mouths shut.
The commanders also understood their silence.
It took courage to talk about defeat in Nazi Germany now.
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