138th High-speed Bombers. It had been in combat since the first day of the war. The airmen flew bombing missions against the columns of German troops advancing from the Western frontier towards Kiev and losses in the regiment were very heavy. When almost no fighting machines were left in it, the regiment moved by railroad to Makhachkala99 and then across the sea to Astrakhan100 where the pilots were going to learn to handle the new Pe-2 plane — a dive-bomber of Petlyakov’s design. I disliked it — but I didn’t fly it, just watched it.
However, before the regiment had time to get quartered a new order arrived — to set about studying the Il-2
The Regimental Engineer began the traditional examinations on knowledge of the plane’s design, engine, aerodynamics. The engine of A. Mikoulin’s design had 12 cylinders — one of the most powerful engines of that time, developed specially for the
The Armament Engineer Senior Lieutenant B. D. Sheiko — still quite a young chap — checked our knowledge of gunnery. Like us, he had apparently just found himself in the ground-attack regiment.
“So, how should we aim when shooting rockets?” We asked him almost with one voice.
“Well, you put the crosshair on the armour glass101 over the target and get it roasted!”
“And how do you set the electric ejector for bomb delivery?”
“It depends on what you’re bombing. You can set it on single, batch or salvo”, he answered.
“Tell us, what’s the flight trajectory of a rocket launched from a dive? And how do you set up the rocket ejector?”
Questions poured as if from a horn of plenty and the young engineer went mad. “Who’s the examiner? You or me?” he asked, turning the kicker handle left and right. Not finding the right position he cursed, climbed out of the cockpit and went away from the aerodrome.
New examiners were waiting for us at the parking bay. The head of the aerial gunnery service, later to be a regiment’s deputy commander of flight training — Captain Koshkin — greeted us gloomily. He was a man of quite non-athletic appearance, in a uniform which hadn’t undergone cleaning and ironing since pre-war times. The phlegmatic captain, with his sad green-grey eyes and dolefully downturned lips, seemingly harboured some undivined grief. But you had to see Alexey Koshkin in combat! We’d been told about his duel with some remarkable Fascist contrivance. The Germans had designed a devilish machine which could destroy 12-15 kilometres of railway in one hour. And how much time and materiel, how many hundreds of soldiers’ labour it took to restore all that! It turned out this disguised steam-engine dragged behind it something like a huge plough-share that tore up everything in its way — both rails and sleepers. And once the Ground Troops Command asked the airmen to destroy the enemy’s machine. Regiment Command ordered Koshkin to destroy the engine. But how to find it? Only yesterday they’d seen the steel threads of rails and today there were none. Koshkin had flown many times and run himself ragged but couldn’t find the steam engine. But one day Alexey noticed a shadow in the beams of the setting sun. It was the large, improbable and ugly shadow of a steam-engine. “But where was the smoke? Where was the engine itself?” — Koshkin depicted his perplexity later. Having descended to low level, at last he saw what he’d been looking for so long. The Germans had installed a platform coloured like trees and bushes on top of the engine. The disguise was superb. Alexey attacked this ‘theatre’: he closed in from aside, took aim at the engine and opened fire. All in vain — the engine-driver sharply sped up and the shells sent by Koshkin shot past. He attacked again, again with no result.
The duel between the plane and the engine lasted for quite some time but when a shell hit the boiler a cloud of steam shot up and the engine stopped. However, Koshkin kept pounding it time and again: with the cannons, with the machine-guns — he launched rockets point-blank, so greatly had that German devilry vexed Alexey! The engine turned into a heap of metal. Having photographed the results of his work the captain made it home with not a single shell-hole, although the Germans had shot at our
That’s the kind of people who ended up in our regiment. It was impossible not to marvel at them, but I have to admit I began to doubt myself a little bit: would I cope with it like them, would I be able to?
After we passed our tests all our group was assigned to fly the UIl-2 — a training plane with dual control. It became known to us that Captain Karev would accompany our flights. The regiment navigator Captain Karev appeared before us surprisingly elegantly. He seemed to have on the same military uniform as Captain Koshkin — but his carefully-ironed blouse with snow-white under-collar, breeches with enormous flaps, polished box calf jackboots cleaned to shining and gathered into a ‘concertina’, peaked cap with a star on the cap-band, all this fitted him somehow especially smartly without breaching the regulations. For some reason I remembered his mischievous laughing eyes and his hooked nose from the first introduction. Karev walked me to the desired machine and stepped aside — as if to say, ‘let her get to know it on her own…’
And indeed I was looking at the plane and couldn’t get my fill of it. In front of me there was a beauty with an elongated streamlined fuselage, a glass cockpit and a pointed engine cowling sticking out far forward. The blued barrels of two rapid-fire cannons and two machine-guns menacingly jutted out of the front edges of the wings. Eight metal slats were fixed under the wings — guides for the rockets. I had already known there were four bomb bays in the central section. In there as well as up on two clamps under the fuselage six one-hundred kilogram bombs could be hung. Basically it was a cruiser, not a plane! I rubbed the cold panelling with my palm. Metal! Not like on the U- 2. The engine, the fuel tanks, everything was covered by durable armour. And a bird like that was entrusted to me! Staying silent for as long as was proper for a first date Karev asked at last: “Do you like it?”
“Very much!” I replied with a kind of special emotion.
“Well, let’s do some flying now and see if you like the
I made two circles in the dual-control plane, and after landing the regimental navigator asked me via the intercom to taxi to the parking lot and turn off the engine. “Well, now he’s going to rip into me!” I thought. “I didn’t suit the captain for some reason!” He hadn’t dropped a word during the flight and had only whistled tunes from some operettas.
“Permission to hear your remarks?” I said trying to look cheerful.
“But there aren’t any” Karev replied. “Go to the combat plane, tail number ‘6’ and make a circuit flight on your own. Altitude 300 metres, landing as normal.”
But I hadn’t expected such a rush in the transfer to a combat plane. The UIl-2 had seemed to be ‘blind’ and cramped to me and I asked Captain Karev in a hoarse voice:
“Comrade Captain, do one more flight with me in the dual-control.”
“No point ironing the air for nothing! Nowadays every kilo of petrol is counted”, the navigator cut me off.
“But, Comrade Captain”, I begged. “All the guys from our group got several accompanied flights, and Kulushnikov, he got the whole twenty five. Why won’t you at least let me fly once more on dual-control?”
“Double-quick to the plane!” the captain ordered, and at that I ran. The plane mechanic Vasya Rimskiy checked off to me the machine’s readiness. Putting on the parachute I climbed into the cockpit, buckled on the belts, tuned up the two-way for reception, checked everything off as we’d been trained and turned the engine on.
The sensation of take-off, the disappearance of your firm foothold, is amazing. The plane is still running across the rough field gaining speed, one more instant — and it detaches from the ground and the pilot is now carried on two steel wings. During the first circular flight I’d noticed how much faster this traditional route of four turns was completed — the U-2’s engine was no match for the Il-2’s. I had estimated the landing run precisely and landed exactly by the ‘T’-junction: as pilots say, ‘on three points’.
You wouldn’t wish a better one! I taxied out and saw the captain showing me with his arms: ‘do one more flight’. So I rolled for another take-off. Our aerodrome was situated almost on the shore of the Azov Sea, so during
