G-11s, along with the Antonov A-7 constituted a majority of Soviet transport gliders. They were mainly used from mid-1942 for supplying Soviet partisans with provisions, weapons, equipment and trained men, towed mainly by SB or DB-3 bombers. Most intensive use was from March to November 1943 in Belarus, in the Polotsk-Begoml-Lepel area, on the Kalinin Front. Several hundred Soviet gliders (of all types) were used in night supply flights there. After landing, the gliders were destroyed and pilots were sometimes returned by aircraft. The only known instance of a glider returning from the field occurred in April 1943, when a famous glider and test pilot Sergei Anokhin evacuated two wounded partisan commanders in a G-11, towed by a Tupolev SB bomber, piloted by Yuriy Zhelutov, on a 10 m (33 ft) short towrope.
Gliders were also used to supply partisans in some areas in 1944 and to transport sabotage groups behind enemy lines. G-11 gliders were also used in at least one small-scale airborne operation, the Dnepr crossing, carrying anti-tank guns and mortars.
A less typical action was an airbridge from Moscow to the Stalingrad area in November 1942, to rapidly deliver anti-freeze coolant for tanks, during the battle of Stalingrad.
The G-11 enjoyed relative success as a light transport glider design, having more capacity than the Antonov A-7, and its transport compartment was a better fit for cargo, although light guns could only be carried in parts due to small hatches.
While this glider transport experiment [Russian transport of
infantry in gliders attached to bombers] first attracted attention and caused
much comment among aviation writers and experts, the military leaders among
other great powers took little heed of the glider potential, except for the
war-minded Germans.
Just after dark one day in the spring of 1943, gliders took
off from an airfield whose name, if it had one, is now lost. Their destination
was secret. The Soviet Union was fighting for its life. No one was yet
convinced that her armies had conclusively stemmed the German onslaught. The
gliders carried Matjus Sumauskas, president of the Supreme Soviet of the
Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, Henrikas Zimanas, editor-in-chief of
Komunistas, and seventy others. They were all Lithuanians and members of
Operative Group II, organized to launch partisan movements in German-held
Lithuania.
Some 600 miles behind German lines, the gliders cut away
from their tow planes. It was black below. Some came in to fairly good
landings. One crashed, killing all. Zimanas’s glider hit an obstacle and was
virtually demolished, with the pilot killed and the passengers badly bruised or
severely injured. The accident hurt Zimanas’s spine and leg. Despite his
injuries and the arrival of an evacuation aircraft, he remained with the
mission, assisting as best he could as a radio operator while the other
partisans made their way to the Kazyan Forest. Regaining strength, although
limping and in severe pain, Zimanas caught up with the main force in the Kazyan
Forest. He then went with it to Lithuania.
Nothing was ever known in the West during the war of these
isolated but daring partisan operations behind German lines that were
frequently launched with gliders. It was through those missions that the use of
transport gliders was finally coming into its own in Soviet military
operations, the culmination of years of preparation.
Like the Germans, the Soviets had long been avid gliding and
soaring enthusiasts. The Soviet Union was one of the few countries to compete
with the Germans with any degree of success in the development of gliding. The
meager amount of information allowed to seep out of the Soviet Union gave no
idea of the great activity centered around glider development there. Soviet
progress appears to have anticipated that of Germany by perhaps as much as five
years, a fact of immense historical significance.
In the Soviet Union, the state took a direct interest in
soaring. Under its support, Soviet glider pilots began to gain international
recognition shortly before World War II. In 1925, the Soviets held their first
national glider competition in the Crimea.
While Germany originally used the glider as a subterfuge to
improve its aeronautical technology and skill resources, the Soviets embarked
upon a substantial glider development program for entirely different reasons.
Germany’s interest in the glider was rooted in those of its qualities that
could serve military ends and took absolutely no notice of its commercial
value. In the Soviet Union, it was the other way around. Military use became a
coincidental offshoot. Soviet commercial aircraft could fly passengers and
cargo into areas that had no trains and where roads were impassable in bad
weather. The aircraft was solving historical communication problems that had
reined in domestic development over the centuries. The aircraft was meeting a
vital economic and political need at a critical point in the history of the
Soviet Union. The Soviet expansion of commercial air transportation strove to
keep up with the increasing demand to fly more and more passengers and cargo.
Short in technological skills and lacking the industrial
capacity and production know-how to turn out the increasing number of aircraft demanded
of a strained economy, the Soviets turned to the transport glider as offering a
way to double air-cargo capacity, using substantially less resources in
airframe materials, aircraft, engines and fuel than would be necessary to
achieve the same cargo lift with powered transport aircraft.
By then, Soviet-built gliders had been towed long distances
in single tow. Experiments were started in double and triple tows, with the
thought that ultimately a single aircraft could tow many transport gliders
carrying passengers in “glider train” formation. So rapidly did they progress,
that by 1939 they had managed the art of towing as many as five single-place
gliders with a single aircraft, a feat never matched elsewhere and an
accomplishment not surpassed outside of the Soviet Union since.
Although Soviet interest focused chiefly on sport gliding in
the 1920’s, the government decided to expand Soviet gliding activities in the
1930’s. In 1931, a dramatic upsurge occurred when the Komsomol passed a
resolution calling for an unheralded expansion of the gliding movement during
the Ninth Party Congress, held in January. The Komsomol announced a threefold
purpose in its resolution: first, it sought to build an enormous pool of glider
pilots through training programs; second, it hoped to gain useful information
for its aeronautical research program through research and development and the
testing of new glider models; and third, it was setting out to capture as many
world records as it could.
To back up the program, the government built a glider
factory in Moscow in 1932. It set production goals at 900 primary trainers and
300 training gliders per year. It named Oleg K. Antonov, an aircraft engineer
and designer who was to become famous for his glider designs, to head design
and engineering at the plant.
Shortly after the Komsomol resolution was passed, eighty
leading glider and light-plane designers assembled at Koktabel. They studied
twenty-two glider designs and selected seven for construction and tests to be
made in 1932. In retrospect, the pace at which the whole movement progressed
gives some indication of the importance the government placed on the program.
In thirty-six days of tests, Soviet glider pilots flew 662
flights, averaging more than an hour each in the seven gliders to be tested.
Together with testing conducted on other gliders from distant parts of the
Soviet Union, they established six new Soviet records. During that year, V. A.
Stepanchenok in a G-9 glider looped 115 times and flew upside down for more than
one minute in a single flight. Soviet glider pilots went on to perform new and
unexpected aerobatics and carried out long-distance tows and a multitude of
other feats. By 1939, Olga Klepikova flew a glider 465 miles to capture the
world distance record, a feat that was unbeaten for twenty-two years. On the
same occasion, B. Borodin flew two passengers for more than four hours in a
single flight and, with that feat, the transport glider was born. It was then
up to some perceptive person to recognize the significance of the flight, and
it appears that this was not long in happening.
Although Soviet authorities saw the transport glider as a
solution to commercial needs for more air lift, they apparently concurrently
saw that the transport glider had some military potential. Military and
commercial development began simultaneously in the very early 1930’s, perhaps
in 1931 or 1932, and ran on closely parallel paths. The Moscow glider factory
was their design and production focal point. In 1934, the Moscow glider factory
produced the GN-4, a five-place glider that could transport four passengers and
was designed for towed flight.
The idea for a multi-passenger towed glider, as opposed to
the two-passenger soaring glider already flown, must have blossomed in 1932 or
1933, inasmuch as Groshev (designer of the transport glider GN-4), had one on
the drawing board then. The GN-4 appears to have been a modest development
compared with others then on the drawing board, for General I. I. Lisov, in his
Parachutists—Airborne Landing, published in Moscow in 1968, reveals that as far
back as 1932 the work plan for the Voenno Vozdushniy Sily (VVS) design bureau
included the G-63 glider, a craft that could carry seventeen soldiers or a like
amount of cargo. What is even more remarkable is that the bureau was daring
enough to include a requirement for a fifty-man glider, the G-64, which was to
be towed by a TB-1 bomber.
While there are those who would criticize such bold
statements as an attempt to bolster the Soviet ego with another first or
discount them as pure propaganda, there is evidence based on what was to come
that the statements did not come from unrealistic fantasy. In 1935, the Soviet
magazine Samolet (Flight) discussed the use of gliders for carrying passengers,
citing an eighteen-passenger glider, and having a photograph in support. The
article goes so far as to give an illustration of a transport glider train
drawn by a four-engined aircraft. This would mean that the 1932 VVS design
requirement was realized, in part, by 1935 or earlier, since gliders cannot be
designed, built and tested overnight. On 9 October 1935, the New York Times
reported that a 118-passenger glider with a ninety-two-foot wingspan, the G-3,
had been built by the experimental institute in Leningrad and test-flown
several times. It was to have been flown from Leningrad to Moscow the same
month. This was undoubtedly the glider reported in Samolet.
In his book Without Visible Means of Support, Richard Miller
mentions that the Soviets experimented in 1934 with a thirteen-passenger troop
glider, grossing 8,000 pounds. In that same year, the Soviets could boast ten
gliding schools, 230 gliding stations and 57,000 trained glider pilots.
Around 1934, a new concept took hold, fostered by Lev
Pavlovich Malinovskii, head of the Scientific Technical administration of the
Grazhdanskiy Vazdushniy Flot (Civilian Air Fleet). Malinovskii conceived the
idea of using a low-powered freight glider plane, easy to produce and cheap to
operate, that could solve some of Russia’s long-distance fast freight needs.
The fully laden glider would carry around a ton of goods and be powered by a
single 100-horsepower engine. The engine would assist the tow plane during
take-off. Once safely airborne, the glider would cast off and deliver its cargo
to a distant terminal under its own power.
Because most of the models were underpowered, only one or
two went beyond the experimental stage. Several apparently grew into sizeable
ten-passenger models, and there is a strong likelihood that these models, with
engines removed, became the first of the larger twenty-passenger transport
gliders developed in the Soviet Union and observed during the mid- 1930’s.
While Soviet designers and engineers were busy at the task
of creating and producing the new aircraft, military leaders went about the
task of building airlanding and parachute forces to use them. By 1933, the
first of these formations appeared. The Soviet Union startled the world when
1,200 soldiers landed by parachute with all weapons and equipment during
maneuvers around Kiev. Later in the year, aircraft transported a complete
division, together with armored vehicles, from Moscow to Vladivostok, a
distance of 4,200 miles. Minister of War Kliment Voroshilov was fully justified
in stating at a congress in 1935:
“Parachuting is the field of aviation in which the Soviet
Union has a monopoly. No nation on earth can even approximately compare with
the Soviet Union in this field, far less could any nation dream of closing the
existing gap by which we are leading. There can be no question at all of our
being surpassed.”
That gliders were used in these maneuvers is not confirmed,
although they may have been. Because of the secrecy surrounding them and the
fact that they were so similar to powered aircraft in appearance, their
presence among the powered aircraft could have passed unnoticed. Terence Otway
states, however, that “by 1935, [the Soviet Union] had gone a long way towards
creating an effective airborne force, including parachute troops carried in
gliders.”
In the Caucasus maneuvers of 1936, the paratroopers
participated publicly. From that point forward, however, all exercises and
maneuvers of the arm were carried out in strict secrecy. Keith Ayling reports
in They Fly to Fight on a large number of personnel carried in gliders, in one
instance, in 1936. They were undoubtedly from the same Caucasus maneuver.
After dropping the veil of secrecy over airborne
developments, the Soviets did not entirely neglect the fledgling airborne arm,
contrary to foreign observer indications. By 1940, they approved an airborne
brigade of 3,000 men, of which more than a third were glider troops. By mid
1941, in a doctrinal turnabout, glider troop elements disappeared from Soviet
troop lists, although glider manufacture continued. Only recently has
information become available that in 1941, just before the war started, the
Soviet Union had already built a glider tank transport, the world’s first,
which was capable of transporting a light armored vehicle. Shortly after this
flight, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and no more experiments with that
glider were conducted. However, the daring experiment, far ahead of those of
any other nation manufacturing gliders, gives some indication of the extent of
the Soviet Union’s interest in, and progress with, the glider as a military
tool.
To what extent German military leaders learned from Soviet
transport glider developments is not certain, but those developments certainly
could not have gone unnoticed, in view of a curious succession of events
involving both the Soviet Union and Germany. In a much overlooked clause, the
Treaty of Rapallo of 1922 enabled the German military to produce and perfect in
Russia weapons forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. To that end, the Soviets
turned over the remote, disused Lipetsk airfield, about 310 miles southeast of
Moscow, in 1924, where they established a flying school and also tested
aircraft. Through these activities, the Red Air Force gained information about
German technical developments.
In 1923, the Germans opened a “Moscow Center” liaison office
in Moscow, manned by German officers who reported to the Defense Ministry in
Berlin. Junkers and other German aircraft manufacturers built factories in the
Soviet Union, staffed by German officers and aircraft engine experts. Many
officers, such as August Plock, Hermann Plocher and Kurt Student, who were
later to become generals and who occupied important posts in the Luftwaffe,
served in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s. General Student, who masterminded
Hitler’s glider attack on Eben Emael while an infantry officer, visited the
Lipetsk airfield every year from 1924 to 1928.
Three factors strongly suggest that early German development
and use of the transport glider followed Soviet developments by three to five
years. The Soviets must have had their transport glider on the drawing board
perhaps as early as 1932 to enable them to produce their five-passenger GN-4 in
1934 or earlier. The Germans produced their Obs (flying observatory) in 1933 or
1934, a glider that was not a true transport vehicle but closer to a scientific
laboratory. Second, foreign observers saw Soviet transport gliders in flight in
1935 or 1936, carrying perhaps as many as fifteen to eighteen passengers. The
nine-passenger German DFS 230 glider did not appear before 1938, and it proved
to be a substantially smaller model than those seen in the Soviet Union up to
that time. Third, the Russians had large airborne organizations in planning in
the early 1930’s and actually flew them in the large airborne drop at Kiev in
1935, while it was not until 1938 that the Germans finally organized their 7.
Flieger-Division.
Although Soviet military leaders conducted few and only
marginally useful air assaults during the war and the glider saw only limited
use as a military transport to support these operations, it did play some role.
For the Dnjepr River crossing operations of 24 September
1943, the Soviets planned to use thirty-five gliders to transport heavy guns
and equipment. In planning, the glider landings had been sandwiched in between
the first and second massed parachute drops. Apparently, the glider phase was
not implemented. Apart from this, it was used extensively in partisan support
operations and in many raids.
German forces found guerrillas annoying and persistent.
Although guerrillas lived off the land to a great extent, the regular military
force kept them supplied with weapons and ammunition by glider and, where
possible, by powered aircraft. The magnitude of these operations and the
importance played by the glider can be judged by the fact that in
counterguerrilla operations conducted just in and around Lipel alone, the
German forces overran one field that held more than 100 gliders.
Gliders transported rations, weapons, medical supplies and,
at the same time, provided partisans with key personnel and important orders
and information. Gliders landed by night on emergency airfields and during the
winter on the ice of frozen lakes. This support enabled the partisans to carry
out successful attacks on railroads, roads, airfields, bridges, convoys,
columns of troops, rear area command agencies and even troop units. The Germans
suffered heavy losses of personnel and materiel. The Germans flew
reconnaissance missions to discover air-drop and landing fields in
partisan-held areas, attacked airlift operations wherever they were identified,
used deception by setting up dummy airfields and giving fake signals and
eventually activated a special antipartisan wing, comprised of 100 Ar 66’s. The
results achieved against the guerrillas, especially in the central sector of
the front, remained unsatisfactory. In the final analysis, this use of airlift
by the Russian Air Force must be considered a success, since the relentless
night airlift operations enabled the partisans to carry out their tasks.
After the war, Soviet interest in gliders did not immediately
wane, and new models were reported, though sources of these reports are few and
hard to find. As late as 1965, the Soviets had three glider regiments, which
they have since deactivated.
