Of the several Frankenstein monsters created by the mad
political scientists of Versailles after World War I, Yugoslavia was among the
most horrific. A hopeless mishmash of ethnically, culturally, spiritually, even
linguistically disparate populations, they agonized under a facade of “the
self-determination of peoples:” By its 10th anniversary, Yugoslavia had
degenerated into an open tyranny, when the Serb monarch dissolved and replaced
parliament with a centralized, highly repressive dictatorship under the motto,
jedan narod, jedan kralj, jedan drzava, or “One Nation, one King, one
Country.”
Nothing could have been further from reality. Instead, this pressure-cooker of mutually antagonistic minorities-Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, Montegrins, Macedonians, Hungarians, Germans, Austrians, and Albanians, with Catholics, Orthodox Serb Christians and Muslims thrown into an incandescent brew-seemed guaranteed to ignite another European conflict in the same region. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as various folkish and religious groups jostled one another to maintain their identity and bare survival, Yugoslavia was torn by the same kind of violence that characterized the Balkans until at least the last decade of the 20th century.
None of these much-abused peoples yearned more than the
Croats to break free from Belgrade’s iron heel. Their moment finally arose with
the sun on April 6, 1941, when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Yugoslavia. His
troops were not opposed as conquerors but more often welcomed as liberators.
The Royal Yugoslav Air Force’s 3rd Bomber Regiment (Bombarderski Puk) had been
obliterated on the ground by attacking Messerschmitt fighters and Stuka
dive-bombers, because the Croatian commanding officer deliberately allowed his
aircraft to sit in the open as inviting, unprotected targets.
At the same time, another commanding officer, Major Mato
Culinovic, defied orders by refusing to fly his 205. Bombarderska
Eskadrilal63.BGI3. BP en masse to Greece. Three days prior to the invasion, it
was importantly aided by a Croatian defector, Colonel Vladimir Kren, who landed
his Potez Po.25-a French single-engine reconnaissance biplane-in Austria, where
he turned over sensitive intelligence information about the Royal Yugoslav Air
Force to the Luftwaffe. Before German forces reached Zagreb, its residents
proclaimed the Nezavisna Drava Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia
(NDH), on April 10.
Almost simultaneously, the Zrakoplovstvo Nezavisna Drava
Hrvatska, or “Air Force of the Independent State of Croatia” (ZNDH),
was formed and became operational almost at once. On the afternoon of that same
day, Cvitan Galic, a narednik voclnikll klase (flight instructor) in the Royal
Yugoslav Air Force, landed his biplane trainer at an airfield that had been
just seized by the rebels. They hastily replaced the Bucker Jungmeister’s
despised red-white-blue roundels with the ZNDH insignia-a black-leaf trefoil in
a white cross-and Galic took off before the engine could cool to complete the
new air arm’s first sorties, a few reconnaissance missions over territory still
held by the Jugoslovensko Armija.
His single-place Bucker Bü.133 had never been intended
for military operations of any kind. Its fabric-covered wood and tubular steel
frame mounted a Siemens Sh 14A-4 radial piston engine rated at 160 hp to give
the “Young Master” a 311-mile range at 124 mph, hardly performance
enough to save itself from even the mostly obsolete fighters of the Royal
Yugoslav Air Force. With that polyglot country’s collapse after 11 days of
resistance, a few pilots fled to the Soviet Union or the Middle East, but most
joined the ZNDH, headed by the same Colonel Kren who had defected to the
Germans prior to their invasion.
His first task was collecting all aircraft, spare parts,
machinery, and support equipment from the defeated Royal Yugoslav Air Force
that had survived the recent Blitzkrieg. These comprised British handme-downs,
such as a few dozen Bristol Blenheim light-bombers and worn-out Hawker
Hurricane fighters, plus Yugoslavia’s own Rogozarski IK-3 and Ikarus IK-2
fighters. The former was a relatively modern, low-wing monoplane with
retractable landing gear, but the Ikarus was a synthesis of Poland’s gull-wing
PZL P.8 and Czechoslovakia’s Avia B.534 biplane, both superior warplanes. The
reliable, stable, if slower Ikarus actually proved itself more useful for
antipartisan missions than the five faster but outdated Rogozarski IK-3s. The
original four IK-2s soldiered on against knots of homegrown insurgents into
late 1944, when the last Ikarus was destroyed by Allied interceptors.
Other indigenous aircraft included more than 200 Zmaj Fizir
light aircraft manufactured before and during World War II. Variants of the
rugged, 85-hp biplane served a multitude of roles, from trainer,
reconnaissance, and liaison, to amphibian ambulance and guerilla fighter.
Italian contributions to Croatia’s new air force included the CANT Z.1007, Fiat
BR.20, and Caproni Ca.310. The Z.1007 Alcione (“Kingfisher”) suffered
from poor directional stability that rendered it a marginally effective
medium-bomber at best. Its three Piaggio P.XI RC 40 radial engines were
maintenance-plagued and resulted in poor power-to-weight ratio, providing just
1,100 hp each, for an unimpressive maximum speed of just 285 mph. Although
defended by three 12.7-mm Isotta-Fraschini Scotti and two Breda-SAFAT 7.7-mm
machine-guns, and crew positions were protected with five- to eight-mm armor
shields, the Z.1007’s all-wood construction was prone to catch fire. Not for
nothing was the Acione known nonaffectionately by both Italian and Croat pilots
as “the flying barn door.”
More popular was the Fiat BR.20. Obsolete before the war
began, it was an under-powered, under-defended medium-bomber that nonetheless
served admirably in anti-insurgency operations, where enemy interceptors were
infrequently met. A more stable bombing platform than the larger Alcione, a
pair of Fiat A.80 RC.41 18-cylinder, radial engines enabled a pleasant-to-fly
Cicogna, or “Stork;’ to cruise at 211 mph-adequately fast to spoil
groundfire but slow enough to carry out the kind of pinpoint accuracy required
by attacks against mobile partisans.
A lone Caproni Ca.310 operated by the Croats likewise
excelled against “Communist bandits;’ due to its slow-flight
characteristics, cruising at just 177 mph, and lack of aerial opposition. The
sleek, twin-engine Libeccio, or “Southwest Wind;’ was valued for its
reconnaissance capabilities. More ancient were several dozen Fokker F.VII and
IX passenger planes from Holland. These part wood/part fabric-covered,
high-wing tri-motors could barely top 100 mph, but in their time, they achieved
historic results. Richard E. Byrd was the first to fly over the North Pole in a
F.VII on May 9, 1926, beating Roald Amundsen aboard his airship Norge by just a
few days. In June 1927, a Fokker made the first flight from California to
Hawaii. The following year, another F.VII was the first airplane to cross the
Pacific Ocean from the United States to Australia.
Although used by the ZNDH as transports throughout 1941,
some Dutch tail-draggers were assigned to the 1 Padobaranski Lovacki Sat, or
Croatia’s 1st Light Infantry Parachute Company, in January 1942. Forty-five men
equipped with rifles, submachine guns, light-machine guns, and light mortars
made their first mass-jump from three F.VIIs to demonstrate their completed
training on July 6, 1943, at Zagreb’s Borongaj airfield. Four months later to
the day, three brigades of the 1 Padobaranski Lovacki Sat-10 paratroopers per
Fokker-staged a surprise attack on a partisan stronghold near the border with
Hungary.
Supported by artillery, the paratroopers took Koprivnica
after three days of bitter fighting. They were redeployed in June 1944 to
Zagreb’s Borongaj airfield, where an additional three companies resulted in
their expansion and redesignation as the 1 Padobranska Lovacka Bojna, or 1st
Light Infantry Parachute Battalion. They continued to jump from Fokker F.VIls
and IXs against insurgents, but also took over Borongaj’s ground defense.
Outstanding paratroopers were honored with ceremonial guard duties for
government officials at the Croatian capital.
During 1941, Colonel Kren’s top priority was modernizing the
ZNDH in anticipation of up-to-date machines due to arrive from the Reich.
Beginning in July, the German Luftwaffe began training Croat volunteers at a
flight school opened in Zagreb. Graduates were sent to Furth, outside
Nuremberg, for advanced instruction. In October, the first 21 airmen left
directly from Furth for the Ukraine, where they were formed into a pair of air
force fighter squadrons, the 10th and 11th Zrakoplovno Lovacko Jato (ZLJ).
At Poltava, the 10th ZLJ was redesignated the 15th
Koatische.I JG (Croatian Jagdgeschwader, “fighter squadron”) 52,
under the Luftwaffe command of Major Hubertus von Bonin. Since radio equipment
was scarce, Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Goering sent the Croats 25 Benes-Mraz Be-50
Beta-Minors-nimble Czech two-seater, low-wing, prewar monoplanes with
transmitters/receivers-to liaison between squadrons. Fighters, too, were in
short supply, and until more became available, the new pilots had to make do
with only 10 Messerschmitt Bf.109Es and a single Bf.109F.
Although the former was no longer the world’s leading
fighter by late 1941, it was still superior at the time to anything in the
arsenal of the Red Air Force. The Bf.109F, or “Friedrich;’ however, was
then regarded as the most formidable warplane in the sky, a significant
improvement over its immediate predecessor. Armed with a pair of 7.92-mm MG 17
machine-guns above the engine and two MG 17s in the wings, “Emil” had
a maximum speed of 348 mph, thanks to its 1,159-hp Daimler-Benz 601Aa engine.
It was with this slightly elder version of the most famous Messerschmitt that
the Croats achieved their first “kills” on November 2, when Hauptmann
(Captain) Ferencina and Leutnant Baumgarten each destroyed a Polikarpov 1-16
fighter near Rostov.
Two weeks after the Croats scored their first aerial
victories, Baumgarten, Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant) Starc and Stabsfeldwebel
(Sergeant Major) Boskic shot down a trio of Rata fighters. On November 20,
Baumgarten claimed a fifth 1-16 to become an ace, dying in a mid-air collision
with his victim. Twelve days later, an R-10 was downed by Cvitan Galic, the
same former flight instructor (now likewise a Stabsfeldwebel), who carried out
the ZNDH’s first operations eight months before.
The R-10 was the Soviets’ standard light-bomber and
observation aircraft (“R” stood for razvyedchik,
“reconnaissance”), a low-wing monoplane with retractable landing gear
and a respectable range of 802 miles. It was armed with a 660-pound payload,
two 7.62-mm ShKAS machine-guns in the wings, and a single ShKAS in a rear
turret. The airplane’s designer, Josef Neman, had been arrested by the NKVD,
Stalin’s secret police, on December 11, 1938, because more difficulties, for
which he was held criminally liable, were encountered with the early design
than had been anticipated. The R-10’s plywood-covered construction combined
with a maximum speed of just 240 mph provided by a 730-hp Shvetsov M-25 radial
engine made it an easy target when undefended by fighters.
In Galic’s case, he was able to dispatch a pair of
protective Ratas, claiming two more three days later, when his squadron
comrade, Feldwebel (Warrant Officer) Jure Lasta, destroyed an 1-16 during the
same mission. The Red Air Force was markedly inferior to its opponents in terms
of tactics and quality equipment, to say nothing of the low morale and worse
training of air crews. With few exceptions, all the Soviets had going for them
was the sheer weight of numbers, against which the Croats and every other Axis
ally scored notable successes.
A case in point was something that began as routine escort
duty undertaken on October 25, 1941, by Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel)
Franjo Dzal and Feldwebel Veca Mikovic. They were assigned to rendezvous with a
Henschel Hs.126 flying reconnaissance near Matveyev Kurgan, but, unbeknownst to
them, bad weather had grounded the parasol-wing observation plane. While
patrolling on station, they encountered a formation of three Ratas and five
Chaikas, or “Seagulls.” Another Polikarpov design, the 1-153, was
among history’s worst military aircraft; a deeply flawed biplane issued to
operational units on June 16, 1939, long after the close of the Double-Decker
Age, but in time to be massacred by Japanese fighters later that summer during
the Nomohan Incident.
Among the Chaika’s long catalog of unresolved deficiencies
was the absence of any firewall separating the fuel tank mounted between the
cockpit and engine. In the event of an onboard fire, a powerful draft blasted
the interior of the fuselage through the wheel wells, instantaneously
incinerating the pilot and engulfing the entire machine. It was not for nothing
that aircrews descriptively referred to the “Seagull” as the Kometi,
the “Comet” Additionally given to chronic instability, exceptionally
poor visibility, and powered by an 800-hp Shvestov M-62 radial engine with just
a 60-hour service life, the 1-153 was nevertheless pushed through production to
become one of the most numerically significant warplanes in the Red Air Force,
which was equipped with 3,437 examples.
Soviet officers rarely pointed out the obvious to their
superiors. In a justifiably paranoid system where constructive criticism was
regarded as treason, according to aviation historians Dragan Savic and Boris
Ciglic, “any attempt to show initiative or criticize how the air war was
being run could lead to immediate transfer to punishment squadrons, the first
rows of infantry trenches or, worse still, NKVD death-squads:”
The Croatian Messerschmitts were more than 80 mph faster
than the stubby Chaikas, which dumped their payload in fright on Soviet
territory after Oberstleutnant Dzal set one of them alight. Red Air Force
policy forbade returning to base with unused bombs or ammunition. Pilots were
required to expend their entire ordinance at the enemy, even at the risk of
repeated, sometimes unnecessary passes over a target area, thereby increasing
the Russians’ already prodigious attrition.
The Soviet “Seagull” did not usually carry bombs,
but Dzal’s encounter revealed that his opponents perhaps represented a
ground-attack version, the I-153Sh, equipped with 5.5-pound anti-personnel
fragmentation bombs. In any case, they and their Rata companions fled from the
outnumbered Croats, until the sudden arrival of 10 more 1-16s. In the resulting
melee with 18 enemy fighters, both Dzal and Mikovic were able to fight their
way out and return with minimal damage to base.
The following April, Mikovic tangled with a more modern
enemy in the skies over Dyakovo village. With a maximum speed of 398 mph and an
outstanding service ceiling of 37,700 feet, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-3 was
faster than any Axis counterpart and the best fighter available to the Red Air
Force, despite its numerous faults, especially oil and fuel pressure
inadequacies that spoiled its performance at altitude. Feldwebel Mikovic had
little difficulty shooting down his first MiG.
Another aircraft widely employed by the Soviets was the Il-2
Shturmovik Notwithstanding its unique claim to fame as the single most produced
military aircraft design in all aviation history-with 36,163 examples
constructed between 1941 and 1945-the Ilyushin was a preposterous monstrosity.
Standing empty, the single-engine, two-seat ground-attack plane weighed just
under 10,000 pounds. More than 15 percent of its gross weight-some 1,540
pounds-was made up of armor protection for crew, radiators, and a fuel tank.
The pilot sat in a kind of tub 5-12 millimeters thick that additionally
surrounded the 1,720-hp Mikulin AM-38F, liquid-cooled V-12 engine. Naturally,
the aircraft could absorb a phenomenal amount of punishment and was not easy to
shoot down.
But a ponderous performance executed at very low altitudes
rendered the “Flying Tank” or “Cement Bomber,” as the Germans
called it, more vulnerable than Stalin believed to ground fire, while Luftwaffe
fighter pilots learned early to aim down into the cockpit and wing roots of the
less-than-impenetrable Zementbomber. Its underside, non-retractable oil cooler
was yet another Achilles’ heel exploited by Axis interceptors. The Luftwaffe’s
Otto Kittel specialized in hunting Ilyushins, so much so, he was renowned as
“the Annihilator of Shturmoviks;’ accounting for 94 of the ground-attack
warplanes. South of Shadishemskaya, the 15th Koatische./Jagdgeschwader’s own
Cvitan Galic shot down an Il-2 piloted by Lieutenant Grigoriy K. Kochergin,
later a “Hero of the Soviet Union:”
While the Ilyushin’s steel envelope could deflect small
arms’ fire and even glancing blows from larger-caliber rounds, rear gunners
were not equally protected, and suffered about four times as many casualties
than pilots. Nor were they provided with parachutes. These unfortunate crew
members usually came from penal companies composed of politically unreliable
“enemies of socialism” or “enemies of the people” who were
attached to every Soviet airfield on probation. They were required to serve
nine consecutive missions. Should they survive-an unlikely prospect-they were
supposed to be granted their freedom, but were, in fact, transferred
indefinitely to mine clearing or similarly hazardous duty. Attrition among
Ilyushin gunners was so high, Marshal of the Air Forces A. E. Golovanov had
installed in the cockpit rear of each Shturmovik a special, spring-driven device
that kept the 12.7-mm Berezin UBT machine-gun pointing downward after its
operator was killed, as a ruse to convince attacking Axis fighter pilots that
the dead gunner was still alive.
The Shturmovik’s RS-82 anti-tank rockets were, moreover, so
wildly inaccurate, they were usually fired only in the general direction of a
target, rarely hitting it, and then entirely by chance. To compound matters for
the Il-2s, Soviet flak gunners often mistook them for German aircraft, and many
were brought down by friendly fire, although precise figures for these
misidentification incidents do not appear to have been kept.
Stalin was so taken with his “Flying Tank;’ he was
convinced it alone could crush any Nazi attempt to attack the USSR. Over the
objections of Ilyushin engineers, who pointed out that their new aircraft had
not yet been produced in sufficient numbers for squadron strength, and pilot
training was virtually non-existent, he rushed the first few machines to
Western bases, where the Axis invasion was expected to begin. The first Il-2s
were stationed with the Red Air Force in Poland, but ground personnel were
unable to service or rearm them for lack of instruction, while insufficiently
trained flight crews, who had never fired their machine-guns, could only take
off and land.
When Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa broke over the Soviet
Union on June 22, 1941, most of the 249 Il-2s at the front were wiped out in a
matter of days. One squadron, ShAP, lost 55 of its 65 Shturmoviks by July 10.
Stalin’s love affair with the Cement Bomber was undiminished, however, although
he failed to understand that the burdensome armor provisions did not lend
themselves well to rapid mass production. In a personal telegram he sent to the
aircraft manufacturers, Shenkman and Tretyakov, the Premier raged, “You
have let down our country and our Red Army! You have the nerve not to
manufacture Il-2s until now! Our Red Army now needs Il-2 aircraft like the air
it breathes, like the bread it eats. Shenkman produces one Il-2 a day, and Tretyakov
builds one or two MiG-3s daily. It is a mockery of our country and the Red
Army! I ask you not to try the government’s patience, and demand that you
manufacture more Ils. This is my final warning!!!”‘
When deployed in large numbers, nonintercepted by Axis
fighters, or opposed by anti-aircraft artillery under 20 millimeters, the
Shturmovik could be devastating. It often attacked when lighting conditions
were dim, especially after sundown, at low altitude, confounding German flak
gunners, and carried 1,320 pounds of armor-piercing bombs quite capable of
demolishing Panther and Tiger I tanks. A Soviet staff publication reported that
during 1943’s Battle of Kursk, `on 7 July, enemy tank attacks were disrupted in
the Kashara region (13th Army). Here, our assault aircraft delivered three
powerful attacks in groups of twenty to thirty aircraft, which resulted in the
destruction and disabling of thirty-four tanks. The enemy was forced to halt
further attacks and to withdraw the remnants of his force north of Kashara.”
On that same day, Il-2s surpassed this score byknocking out
70 tanks from the German 9th Panzer Division in just 20 minutes. Outstanding
Shturmovik pilots were Senior Lieutenant Anna Yegorova (260 missions),
decorated posthumously, presumed killed in action, when she had actually
survived the destruction of her “Flying Tank” to become an inmate of
a prisoner-of-war camp; and Georgi Beregovoi (185 missions), who went on long
after the war to become a cosmonaut aboard the Soyuz 3 spacecraft in 1968. But
the DB-3F (or the Ilyushin Il-4, as it was known from 1942) was ponderously
weighed down by its plates of heavy armor protection surrounding the gunners,
which availed them naught against the 20-mm cannon fire of Zlatko Stipcic’s
Bf.109 on May 20, 1942.
A month later to the day, Croats on the Eastern Front
completed their 1,000th combat mission, with 52 confirmed kills for the loss of
three pilots wounded and, by the end of July, two killed; one of them, Veca
Mikovic. He was shot while attacking a Petlyakov Pe-2. The Petlyakov’s rearward
defense combined twin 7.62-mm Berezin UB machine-guns in the dorsal turret with
another in a ventral hatch and a single ShKAS machine-gun able to alternate
between port and starboard mountings in under a minute. It was this formidable
return fire from a Pe-2 that holed Mikovic’s Messerschmitt. Lacking sufficient
fuel to reach the safety of his lines, he crashed near Rostov in no-man’s-land.
He was flying one of the new Bf.109Gs, replacements for the doughty Emits.
With this improved version, Axis pilots substantially
widened the technological gap between themselves and their Red Air Force
opponents. The Gustav’s 1,475-hp Daimler-Benz DB 605 AM, 12-cylinder inverted
Vee piston engine gave it a maximum speed of 385 mph at 22,640 feet. Armament
was upgraded to twin 13-mm MG 131 machine-guns installed above the engine, and
a single MK 108 cannon firing 30-mm rounds through the propeller shaft. Pilots
of the 15th Koatische. /JG soon put their new mounts to good use, shooting up
enemy shipping in the Black Sea and downing 13 Reds on July 9 and 10 with no
losses to themselves.
Early the next month, Galic and Oberleutnant Albin Starc
destroyed one each of five aircraft engaged over Novo Pokrovskoye. Both victims
were LaGG-3s, like MiG-3s, among the better fighters available to the Soviets.
While its design was fundamentally sound and capable of improvements, the
LaGG-3 was badly underpowered, a dilemma designers sought to alleviate by
drastically lightening the airframe and installing less heavy armament.
Instead, they succeeded only in weakening the warplane and pulling its teeth.
Poor-quality wood-laminate construction led pilots to observe that
“LaGG” was less appropriate as an acronym for the design team of
Lavochkin, Gorbunov, and Goudkov, than a match for the aircraft’s description
as lakirovannygarantirovanny grob, a “guaranteed varnished coffin:”
Indeed, the wood frame shattered under high explosive rounds fired from a
Gustav’s nose cannon.
To execute a complete circle, LaGG-3s needed a full 20
seconds, by which time, however, they were more often shot down. The two
destroyed by Galic and Starc were followed on August 8 by the unit’s 100th
victory, when machine-gun fire from Hauptmann Josip Helebrant’s Messerschmitt
roasted a DB-3 bomber in the vicinity of Armavir. But a few weeks later, the
Croats lost their youngest pilot after an Ilyushin Il-2 fell to the guns of
Stjepan Radic. Hit by flak, the Gustav’s ruptured glycol tank lost too much
fuel, and the 20-year-old Feldwebel was forced to crash-land in enemy
territory, where his aircraft hit some treetops and exploded. A few hours
later, Helebrant claimed another Shturmovik.
