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

SOVIET AIR FORCE
pocket in early 1942, the Luftwaffe had to call on both planes and instructors
in some of its flying schools, a reinforcement that was costly in both
training aircraft and pilot-instructors. As flying training courses in Germany
were shortened, the pilots entered combat insufficiently trained and
casualties rose rapidly. For example, German fighter losses in the July-
December 1941 period came to 447 in combat and 378 from noncombat
causes, while in the January-June 1944 period, losses stood at 2,855 in
combat and 1,345 noncombat-related, losses far greater than any increase
in the inventory would seem to warrant.”” The increased casualty rate led
to further slighting of pilot training with concomitantly still higher pilot
losses.
Any evaluation of the Allied role in weakening Luftwaffe fighting
capabilities on the Eastern Front immediately runs into an almost
hysterical Soviet denigration of the Allied contribution to the air war. As
the official history of the VVS in World War I1 has it: “Bourgeois falsifiers
of World War I1 history attempt by any means at their disposal to minimize
the role of the Soviet Air Force in the defeat of the Luftwaffe.”lll
Their argument is that the Luftwaffe was already losing the air war over
Russia by 1943, which was prior to any effective Allied bombing of the
German homeland, and the increased German output of aircraft in 1944 and
1945 at the height of the Allied bombing amply demonstrates its ineffectiveness.
There is little mention in Soviet accounts of the withdrawal of
German aircraft from the Eastern Front between 1943 and 1945 for operations
in the Mediterranean Theater and for defense of the homeland. Nor is
there any acknowledgment, except in a derogatory form, of the contribution
of Lend-Lease aircraft. But to the non-Russian it would seem obvious
that the absence from the Russian front of large numbers of the Luftwaffe’s
best planes and most skilled pilots must have provided a great assist to the
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Other contributing factors in the Soviet air victory were the qualitative
improvements in aircraft, equipment, and tactics as the war wore on. By
1944, the Yak-9 and La-7 were worthy matches for the Bf-109G and the
FW-190. Improved radio communications and increased use of radar by
late 1943 were of enormous importance in command and control. The
emulation of German fighter tactics, although learned somewhat slowly,
helped the Soviet pilot immensely. As Pokryshkin points out, the working
out of new combat procedures under substantially new conditions “was a
complicated process.”112 Complex or not, by 1943 the Soviet fighters were
flying in pairs, thinking in terms of altitude and vertical attack, and learning
not to expend their ammunition while far from their target.
Finally, some of the blame for the German defeat in the air must be laid
on Adolf Hitler. Hitler was ground-forces oriented and until late in the war
left aviation pretty much to the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Reich
Marshal Hermann Goering. Goering in turn, because of his “supinity” and
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