The General turned and took only two steps before abruptly turning around. “One more thing, Comrades ... I know you have been away for some time, but ... there is to be no communication with anyone until this mission is completed.” He scanned the eyes of the younger men to ensure they understood the importance of what he had just told them. “As far as anyone knows, you are still in England for at least another two weeks. You will discuss nothing about your mission ... not with anyone.” Krylov didn’t wait for a response and turned and strode out.
No one spoke until they heard the door to the outside close. “Did you see the perimeter guards?” one of them asked and received several affirmative responses. “There are tanks lined around the field,” another noted.
Kovpak held up a hand and said, “Wait.” They turned to him and he whispered, “Quiet.” When the sound of the General’s staff-car starting came to them he scanned their faces with a stern look. “Comrades,” he began, shaking his head, “there is no need to appear to General Krylov that we have become a bunch of curious English school boys.” A few of them nodded reluctantly in agreement.
Captain Vladmir Bochkov, leader of the second element shook his head. “Comrade Major,” he said, then added with a hint of disgust, “I feel like a prisoner.”
Kovpak considered the comment carefully; from the air he had seen the armor as well, and in fact, Krylov had told him they would be kept out of touch for security purposes. As he began cataloging the looks on their faces he decided to let them know a little more than they should. “Have you noticed something else?”
Several of them looked at each other with a bit of bewilderment and a sly smile formed on Kovpak’s face. “For this entire mission – since we left for Duxford. There are no Commissar Officers with us.” He let that sink in for a moment then added, “Not during the training, not on the ship, not at Keg Ostrov ... and not even here.”
One of them smirked with unconcealed disdain, “They could not have survived the voyage,” and got a round of laughingly derisive comments in agreement.
“Comrades, this is more than just adherence to secrecy. I have known Krylov for a long time. I also know he reports directly to General Leonov.” He noted the acknowledgements among the group then continued. “A lot has changed since we left ... no Commissars ... consider that ... Leonov has taken the fangs out of the dogs.”
That was a surprising piece of news to the pilots. General Leonov was widely known and considered to be one of the most effective officers; it seemed possible that the leadership failures brought on by the imposition of the political overseers might be finally coming to an end.
Kovpak elaborated on how the General had used his influence to reduce some of the absurdities of political interference that had sometimes crippled military effectiveness. “We are going to complete this mission without them,” he said authoritatively then began moving toward the door to the tarmac area and called back to them, “For me, I want a clean uniform. My last shower was on that wretched ship.”
- # -
After the meal the pilots began assembling in the long-unused briefing room and quickly got a fire going in the iron heating stove. Several of them stood near it and others dispersed and began to arrange chairs behind the rows of long tables in an effort to have it resemble a room more fitting for a briefing of fighter pilots by a General.
“No one has been here in a long time,” someone noted, brushing at the dust on a chair and getting comments and nods of agreement.
As the stove began taking the chill from the immediate space around it, the sound of approaching footsteps from the hall drew them to attention even before Kovpak could issue the order.
“Comrades," General Krylov announced as he strode briskly into the room then turned and sniffed as he closed the door. Looking at the stove and said, “I see someone still knows how to light a fire ... you did not grow entirely soft in Duxford,” he added pleasantly and noted a number of smiles. He stepped onto the small riser at the front of the room. “Take your seats, Comrades,” he ordered almost casually, then spun his hat onto one of the tables and removed his gloves and heavy outer coat.
As the twelve men quickly seated themselves behind the narrow tables Krylov grasped the edge of a curtain at the back of the platform and quickly slid it to one side to expose a large map of the western part of the Soviet Union. He then turned and scanned the group. “The time has come, Comrades, for you to learn what you will be doing for the next few days.”
The pilots were more than just curious; their military careers had taken an unexpected and radical turn. One day facing the onslaught of the Luftwaffe and the masses of anti-aircraft weapons that had been deployed deep into their country, the next being ordered to England to become some kind of vanguard of an expected wave of new aircraft. In one sense it was distressing but in another welcome because they knew their skills were being called on to be handed down to hundreds of new pilots. The Motherland could not survive without this inoculation, they had been told by Krylov in their initial briefing in Moscow in the early months of 1942; if they could multiply themselves with these new aircraft their unquestionable duty was to do so.
The reality of course was they had no say whatsoever. Military orders—especially in the Soviet military—were never questioned no matter how absurd. They all knew of officers and some even had friends who were dispatched to the gulag or redistributed to penal ground combat units to die quickly for failure to accept even ridiculous commands. All of them had either known of or heard first-hand accounts of officers who had simply disappeared as well as some who had committed suicide as a choice in their manner of execution. The tiny few who had come back from the gulag were more than reluctant to explain their absence or reveal who might have been responsible for it.
Until very recently the war had been an unmitigated disaster for the Soviet military. In no small part due to the lack of experienced commanders. Many of the qualified senior officers the twelve pilots had served under were ignored or overruled by incompetent, politically-motivated hacks, or worse, were swept up in the purges orchestrated by the paranoid General Secretary.
Thus, in late September of 1942, after their training in England and surviving a harrowing voyage among the prey for the German U-boats in the arctic, they all shared a sense of urgency in addition to curiosity. They were also impatient to find out how this new training command was going to be deployed, not to mention how and when the promised potential of advancing in rank would come about.
But for some, frustration was simmering and not just from the annoying isolation and heightened level of secrecy.
Unlike the lithe but relatively crude little Polikarpov aircraft they had become so familiar with and adept at flying, these American planes were vastly more complex – and they now knew first-hand would be troublesome for inexperienced or inattentive aviators. Twenty pilots had journeyed to England and only twelve had returned with planes. One had been killed in a landing accident and another disabled permanently when another aircraft collided with his on the ground. The other six were not chosen to continue the mission for reasons the rest of them had various opinions about, mostly surrounding the inability to master the differences and complexities in the short time allowed.
Unlike any fighter they had seen, instead of having a tail wheel, the Airacobra’s undercarriage had a wheel under the nose. While on the ground the plane sat relatively level instead of pointing upward. That configuration required rather radical changes in takeoff and landing procedures as well as mastery of new skills that had to replace what had become ingrained habits.
The pilot of a P-39 didn’t lean out of the cockpit and twist the plane back and forth to try and see forward while taxiing then just line up into the wind and gain speed across the field. Instead, the Airacobra needed a smoother surface, preferably prepared strips or tarmac. Getting into the air in the Polikarpovs required nudging the stick forward to raise the tail prior to pulling back for takeoff while these new plane
s had to build up more speed and almost start flying before easing back on the stick to launch. Crosswinds had to be dealt with differently and takeoff and landing patterns and directions more carefully considered.
One of the pilots who had washed out had come to call the plane the “zheleznyĭ sobak” (iron dog), and he was not the only Soviet fighter pilot who used the epithet in the early going.
The pilots had grown accustomed to comparatively crude machines that did things almost at their beck and call; with the Airacobra a new pilot either adapted quickly to their new mounts’ characteristics or they were sent back to their home units – or they died. Every pilot dispatched to England for this mission knew the conversion to this entirely new kind of plane was not without risk.
The most daunting issue that washed out several pilots was the sheer complexity of the plane and its systems. The liquid-cooled Allison V-12 that sat behind them had an on-board starter and didn’t require having the prop turned by hand. No trucks with powered shafts were required to connect to and spin recalcitrant radial engines to life. Powered by an on-board battery, the inertial starter system cranked the engine to life - if one followed the procedures correctly, that is. It was not a fool-proof process, sometimes resulting in flaming blasts coming from the exhaust tubes behind them.
Once the massive engine was running, temperature was controlled by adjusting ducts that carried air across the plane’s radiators. There were also multiple instruments and indicators they had never seen before that they had to learn to not only interpret, but react to appropriately.
A Curtiss Wright development, the propeller on their batch of P-39’s was considered to be a major technological advance. Instead of being driven by hydraulic pressure that relied on the engine running, propeller pitch changes were made using an electric motor then were locked in place. Until a change in pitch was needed, the system used no electricity. But as advanced as it was, in some early versions if it weren’t carefully maintained there was an unfortunate tendency for it to fail, resulting in what was termed a “prop overrun.” If a pilot was not properly trained to deal with the situation it could be catastrophic; during takeoff or landing it was too-frequently fatal.
As with all technical advances, some involved trade-offs that required time to overcome in terms of unexpected adaptations in the field. The P-39 required hundreds of feet more to get airborne than the planes they were accustomed to and the landing gear wasn’t as sturdy and forgiving. But the nearly nose-level angle and the forward position of the cockpit nearer the leading edge of the wings vastly improved visibility for maneuvering on the ground and especially downward while in the air.
There were other advantages: Having to hand-crank the Polikarpov’s landing-gear mechanism forty times to raise or lower it was more than just annoying and the rush of air coming from the I‑16’s wheel wells while doing it was unpleasant to say the least. But more important than the improved comfort of the pilot for this mission was the fact that the P-39 could fly much faster and farther than other planes they might have available; even the very new Yak-1b, while almost as fast, could not match the range.
For the mission’s planners and lead pilots, one of the most important features was the radio the Americans equipped the planes with. To save weight, Soviet crews had routinely removed their bulky radios from aircraft because they rarely worked properly, but now, instead of hand signals or wing waggles that were sometimes obscured by their goggles in the open cockpits, they could actually communicate reliably amongst planes and with the ground at considerable distances. Orders from a commanding officer could be instantly received by everyone in the flight. Equally important, reports of sightings from among a formation or even several kilometers away meant there would be fewer surprises and the leader could make assignments to focus the attention of the flight segments.
In a relatively brief time, the new plane’s overall advantages became more and more apparent to them as they were familiarized with managing the risks. That didn’t mean fighter pilots considered the people making the decisions about aircraft to be geniuses – when a dangerous flaw in design or production wasn’t found or corrected, it was the pilot that died, not the bureaucrat signing the orders for the planes.
For the twelve pilots, having mastered the Airacobra, the mystery that had been on their minds for weeks and months was about to be solved.
“I can tell you are more than just curious about the rest of the mission,” Krylov said as he scanned the eyes of the men, knowing among them were several who had distinguished themselves in the crucible of combat.
His own trials had been in the Spanish Civil War, in Russian aircraft that had been more than a match for their opponents of that era. He also knew the men in the room had been influenced by the required study of his and his comrades’ tactics and exploits.
“I will not waste your time and mine, Comrades. I will also not insult your intelligence. There is a reason you have no communication with the outside. This is an operation known to few. The mission was conceived in secrecy ... that is all you should need to know. With the exception of course, of your individual mission orders ... which you will receive just before takeoff.”
There were glances among the group and Krylov recognized them as the ordinary interactions of men who served together and shared in the knowledge that they weren’t being told the entire story. Not that it would interfere with their duty; it was simply a part of the camaraderie of those ordered into battle with scant information about why.
“As you already know, you are divided into four elements of three planes. Make sure you understand this, Comrades – each element’s duty is nothing more than to ensure the element leader’s aircraft reaches the mission objective.”
He looked at the faces more closely and to ensure there was nothing in the way of misunderstanding he explained further. “The Luftwaffe may succeed in sending aircraft deeper and deeper into the Motherland. We have had reports of reconnaissance aircraft as far east as Ulyanovsk,” he said as he gestured in an arc toward the map. “Because of this, two defenders will escort their leader and assure at least that aircraft reaches the objective – Tehran, Iran.” He stepped to the right and pointed to the destination at the lower-left corner of the map.
The looks on the faces of the pilots were various states of confusion and disbelief. “Yes, Comrades ... Iran,” Krylov confirmed by tapping the map. “You will take four divergent routes involving multiple waypoints ... stocks of fuel, hydraulic fluid and glycol have been distributed. Those waypoints will only be revealed to your flight leaders tomorrow.”
With another glance around he added, “I anticipate all twelve of you will arrive. Comrade Stalin insists on at least four.” Before a discussion arose or any questions were asked Krylov continued. “As Major Kovpak knows, in order to provide additional speed and defensive maneuverability, the wing armament is being removed tonight from the four lead aircraft.
Captain Boris Kuznetskov, the leader of Element four, seemed prepared to ask the question no one else would and as a handful of his fellow officers looked to him he asked, “Comrade General?”
Krylov looked at him knowingly and then around at the others. “You want to know what is so important about those four planes.” The looks on the faces of the officers reinforced the shared importance they placed on the question but he didn’t answer immediately. “I understand.”
He stepped off the low platform, lifted a chair down then sat in front of them and crossed his legs as he took out a cigarette. Almost instantly several lighters were offered by the pilots closest to him.
“I see you have acquired the American’s secret weapon,” he said, grinning slyly about the Zippo lighters. He took one from the nearest hand and lit his cigarette and examined the lighter momentarily then handed it back. Just to make a point, he reached into the front pocket of his tunic and extracted one very much like theirs’ except for the fact it was gold-plated and had a U.S. Army Air Corps insignia affixed to it
and his name in Cyrillic text engraved below it. “I went with a delegation to the United States some time ago. This was a gift from the American General Arnold.” He tossed it to one of the men and it was soon being passed around admiringly.
“I suppose ... some of you still have several cartons of American cigarettes with you ... somewhere,” he said only half-jokingly and noted some sheepish looks. “I will trade one of my tins of the lighter’s fluid for one carton of the Camel or Chesterfield brand,” he announced and watched the men look at each other. “I have twelve available,” he suggested and could see from the quick glances and nods that accommodating deals would be made. “We’ll make our arrangements at the morning meal,” he added knowingly.
The tenor of the meeting had been successfully altered and as his lighter made its way back to him he began again. “As far as everyone outside of this room knows ... the Kremlin, including Comrade Stalin himself, has placed extraordinary faith in getting as many of these planes into the fight as quickly as possible. There is indisputable truth to that. The depot in Tehran is going to be receiving them in numbers—unassembled, mind you—in the very near future. There are trained contractors to assemble them ... but as yet ... as yet there are not enough Soviet pilots to test and certify them. Other than you.”
He drew a long pull on his cigarette, inhaled then blew the smoke upward. “A handful of officers in the Red Air Force will know this very soon, but the enemy must not. There are Nazi spies and sympathizers everywhere, Comrades.” He stood up and gestured toward them with a sweep of his hand. “You and your planes must get to Tehran. You must then train and qualify the pilots we will soon be sending you. They must get their aircraft back to their units and into battle ... those planes coming from our allies are of no use sitting on the ground in Iran,” he added emphatically as he turned and pointed to the lower part of the map.
After another drag on the cigarette he continued. “As you have discerned,” he said then cocked his head toward the side without looking at the subject of his implication, “and as Comrade Kuznetskov is bold enough to ask, there is more.” He paused again and seemed to let his last statement simmer among them. “And ... and now, and because you are unable to communicate with anyone prior to your mission, I will tell you more.” With his eyes narrowed the General gave them all a questioning look. “I will, that is ... I will, as long as I am assured of your oath of silence.” His face then took on a scowl of deadly seriousness. “By my telling you this, you will take this to your graves, Comrades.”