Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

AIR SUPERIORITY
The main thrust of the aircraft procurement plan was to acquire a
stable of fighters capable of a decent showing against the Luftwaffe’s
Bf-109, a task well beyond the abilities of the 1-15 and 1-16. In 1940 two
new fighters went into serial production, the MiG-3, a product of the
Mikoyan-Gurevich design bureau, or OKB, and the Yak-1 from the
Yakovlev OKB. The MiG-3 had a top speed of 400 miles per hour and
was a match for the Bf-109 above 16,000 feet. The Yak-1, whose design
was influenced by the British Spitfire and the Bf-109, was a low-wing
monoplane with a top speed of 400 miles per hour at 20,000 feet. In 1941,
another fighter was put in production, the LaGG-3, the product of the
OKB of Lavochkin, Gorbunov, and Gadkov. It was largely of wooden
construction and was rather heavy, which made its rate of climb somewhat
slow. Of the three, the Yak-1 was the best. It handled well, was easy to
maintain under austere conditions, and was the favorite of the pilots in the
crucial early years of the war. lo
Unfortunately for the VVS, the bulk of the planes it received in the
two and a half years before the German attack were obsolescent since the
new types did not begin to flow into combat units until early 1941. Even the
new planes that were acquired were not effectively used when the attack
did come, since their pilots were not yet fully trained in their use and, as
Marshal Zhukov noted, only fifteen percent of the pilots were trained for
night flying.” Of course, inasmuch as the overwhelming number of Soviet
planes destroyed by the Luftwaffe in the first days of’the war were sitting
on the ground, a larger number of new types in the inventory would not
have helped much.
Soviet Air Organization
In 1934 the People’s Commissariat of Defense [Narkomat Oborony], or
NKO, was formed with the objective of centralizing control of the military,
but in 1937 a further step in that direction led to the creation of a single
organ, the Committee of Defense of the U.S.S.R. Later in that same year,
however, the Navy got its own People’s Commissariat [Narkomat VMF].
Even before the German attack, in May 1941, Stalin assumed the chairmanship
of Sovnarkom [Council of People’s Commissars], the executive arm of
the government, thus combining control of both party and government in
his own hands. A week after the Nazis struck, the Politburo created a new
institution, the State Committee for Defense [Gosudarstvenniy Komiter
*OKB stands for Opytnoe Konstruktorskoe byuro, or Bureau of Experimental Design; the
plane produced by a bureau carried the initial letters of the designer’s name, e.g., Yak for Yakovlev
or Tu for Tupolev, etc.
184