Eastern front aviation

Quote from: warhawk on December 13, 2007, 11:04:17 AM

Thanks for the links. I agree that It would be difficult to work on that topi in 20 to 40 pages, but some people are just born crazy... Grin

Hehehehe, we would not be here if we were not born crazy? Grin

Some other important and useful information you may get out of development data for first a/c of new generation - MiG-1/3, Yak-1 and especially LaGG. Don't forget to mention political intrigues of Yakovlev against Lavochkin.

Below you can find Introductions from books "Soviet Air Force Fighters" by William Green and Gordno Swanborough. It’s a two part book that covers only main fighter types, but in great detail. (I've scanned and OCR traced.) I feel this introductions round up most important factors and details regarding your subject.

Regarding PDF, I can give you:
Avia Master 2007-04 (article only)
Halhin-Gol - Voyna v vozduhe (Khalkhin-Ghol - Airwar)
V nebe Kitaya 1937-1940 (In the sky of China) - covers Soviet volunteers in China, prior to above incident

Also, I just bought "Japan against Russia in the sky of Nomonhan" by Dimitar Nedialkov:
http://rdsc.md.government.bg/EN/Activities/Publication/607DNedialkovJAR.php
http://pacificwrecks.com/reviews/in-the-skies.html

Cheers!
Renato



INTRODUCTION (book 1)
When German forces initiated Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941 and the assault on the Soviet Union began, the Luftwaffe enjoyed almost total supremacy in Soviet skies. The fighter element of the Soviet Air Forces, or Voenno-vozdushniye Sily (V-VS), was immersed in a major re-equipment programme resulting from belated appreciation by the Soviet leadership of the fact that its aircraft had fallen woefully behind world standard. Immense effort had been directed towards rectifying this situation in the two years immediately preceding Soviet involvement in World War II. New fighter designs had been hastily committed to large-scale production by a dramatically expanding aircraft industry which perforce employed a very high proportion of semi-skilled and unskilled labour; fighters suffering defects that were an inevitable consequence of the hurried tempo of their development; defects compounded by low manufacturing standards that were equally inevitable in so rapidly expanding an industry. The shortcomings of this new generation of fighters posed serious problems for the V VS and these, exacerbated by the inadequacies of Soviet fighter pilot training, contributed substantially to the decimation of the V-VS fighter regiments in the opening phases of what the Soviet Union chose to call the "Great Patriotic War".

This new generation of fighters comprised the progeny of newly created and thus relatively inexperienced design bureaux, and wartime development of the single-seat fighter in the Soviet Union was to be characterised by the continuous refinement of two fundamental designs bearing the appellations of Lavochkin and Yakovlev. While other major combatants were to phase into service entirely new fighter types as the conflict progressed, the Soviet Union alone was unable to afford such luxury; all effort had to be directed towards maximising fighter output and the disruption of assembly lines and ensuing loss of production associated with the introduction of totally new aircraft were not to be tolerated. Thus, frontline demands for improvements in fighter capability to
compensate for changing operational conditions and progressively more advanced enemy warplanes as they were committed to the air war over the Soviet Union had to be accommodated by a process of continuous refinement of existing aircraft.

These aircraft were essentially simple to manufacture and easy to repair in the field; they were thoroughly orthodox in concept and of wooden or wood-and-steel tube construction with fabric and plywood skinning. By western standards they were austerely equipped and they were built in very large numbers with upwards of 60,000 being delivered from 1941 until the end of hostilities. Despite the substantial production quantities of these aircraft, however, there was little standardisation, minor differences appearing on individual aircraft of even small production batches. This resulted from the serious shortage of skilled labour throughout the aircraft industry and the considerable confusion that prevailed — the individual sub contracting plants supplying components, assemblies etc., frequently working to different tolerances and ignoring fine measurements — and the fact that a considerable amount of handwork was applied on the final assembly line (e.g., skin panels, cover plates, joints, etc., being trimmed or shaped to fit an individual aircraft, interchangeability thus becoming limited). While a main plant, on occasions, switched to a new sub-type of the fighter that it was manufacturing, the sub-contractors as likely as not continued the manufacture of parts for the preceding sub-type owing to the previously-mentioned confusion, with the result that these had to be adapted on the main assembly line. Thus, it was possible for the individual aircraft of one production batch to embody different wings, cockpit frames, armament, internal equipment, etc.

By the/standards of the day, the materials and constructional methods employed in the manufacture of Soviet wartime fighters were primitive, but the use of more modern light-alloy stressed-skin structures was not within the capabilities of the Soviet aircraft industry at the time, apart from the fact that such were ruled out by the Soviet Union's chronic shortage of light alloys. However, if Soviet fighters were to be adjudged rudimentary by enemies and allies alike, they were to prove ideally suited to the conditions under which they were forced to operate; conditions that would have grounded their more sophisticated western contemporaries. Their simple, thoroughly orthodox concept was deceptive in that it suggested that Soviet fighter designers lacked creativity, whereas, in fact, they were no less innovative than their western counterparts, but their inventiveness was subjugated by the exigencies of the times. Indeed, although Soviet designers were largely pre-occupied with the development of combat aircraft that were simple to manufacture, maintain and fly, some highly innovatory ideas did reach the flight test stage. For example, under the aegis of Professor Viktor Bolkhovitinov the world's first rocket-propelled interceptor fighter was flown and the series of variable geometry or "folding" fighters created by the design bureau led by Vasili Nikitin must surely be numbered among the most ingenious fighters of their era. Again, such mixed-power fighters as the I-250(N) developed by the Mikoyan-Gurevich bureau to utilise Khalshchev nikov's so-called "accelerator" were far removed from what was considered the conventional.

This first part of a two-part Fact File devoted to all types of indigenous fighter operated by or developed to experimental status for the Soviet Air Forces is primarily concerned with the products of the design bureaux led by Semyon A.Lavochkin and the partnership of Artem I.Mikoyan and Mikhail I. Gurevich, whose fighters, when first opposed by the Luftwaffe enjoyed indifferent success. Whereas the Mikoyan-Gurevich team largely concentrated its wartime efforts on creating specialised high-altitude fighters which were to receive low development priority owing to more pressing needs, Lavochkin was to overcome early setbacks and achieve outstanding success by the continuous refinement of one basic design; a process epitomized by the La-7 which played a major role in the closing stages of the Second World (or "Great Patriotic") War.

INTRODUCTION (book 2)

The commencement in 1941 of what the Soviet Union chose to designate the Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voina—"Great Patriotic War"—found the Soviet Air Forces, or Voenno-vozdushniye Sily (V-VS), possessing by far the largest fighter arm in the world. Although Soviet air strength at the time Germany's Wehrmacht launched Operation Barbarossa has never been officially admitted, by general consensus, some 8,000 V-VS combat aircraft were deployed in the western Soviet Union and of these approximately 59 per cent, or about 4,700 aircraft, were single-seat fighters. The devastating pre-emptive Luftwaffe attack on V-VS airfields with which Barbarossa was initiated annihilated slightly more than half of this force, but discounting reserves that could be called up from the east, what remained was still numerically a very impressive fighter element and particularly so when the fact is taken into account that the total strength of the Luftflotten committed to Barbarossa was no more than 1,940 aircraft of all types. Yet, a very much smaller Luftwaffe fighter force established and maintained for a considerable period almost total air superiority in Soviet skies; for the fighter element of the V-VS, the first year of the "Great Patriotic War" was a debacle.

How was it possible that a numerically vastly inferior German fighter force could establish such ascendancy? Quantitatively formidable though the V VS fighter element undoubtedly remained, qualita tively it was at low ebb; aircraft obsolescence was compounded by low serviceability, the inadequate training of pilots and lack of cohesion in operations. Belated Soviet appreciation of the fact that the equipment of the V-VS fighter regiments had been outstripped by world progress had necessitated the retention in production of aircraft that were at best obsolescent while attempts were made to eradicate the principal defects suffered by immature successors. The preponderance of the regiments was equipped with the Polikarpov 1-16, which, a remarkable fighter in its day, had long been overtaken in capability by developments abroad. Those regiments not operating this monoplane were, or for the most part, equipped with the Polikarpov 1-153 biplane, the product of a misconception that had arisen from experience gained by the V-VS during the Spanish Civil War. By comparison with the Messerschmitt Bf 109 by which they found themselves opposed, these fighters had little to commend them other than their maneuverability, yet they were to bear much of the
brunt of the fighting well into the second year of the "Great Patriotic War"—small wonder, therefore, that the losses suffered by the Soviet fighter arm were of such magnitude that it was incapable of mounting much more than token defence.

It was primarily the fighter element of the V-VS, however, that first revealed the fantastic recuperative powers of the Soviet air arm—a dramatic numerical revival, which, more important, was accompanied by a major upgrading in quality; a combination which radically transformed the situation in the skies above the Soviet Union, forcing the Luftwaffe onto the defensive. It is true that, at the time Barbarossa was initiated, there were nearly a thousand modern Soviet fighters deployed in the frontier military districts and as many more had left the factories. Unfortunately for the V-VS, of those on the strength of the frontier district regiments, 886 were MiG-ls and -3s, manifestly unsuited for the type of combat to which they were committed, while, of the new 'frontal' fighters, the LaGG-3s and Yak-Is in which so much hope was placed, there were but 94 available. These 'frontal' fighters had been hurriedly assigned to the frontline units but were still suffering shortcomings reflecting the haste with which they had been designed and committed to production.

The LaGG-3, as described in Part One of this two part Fact File, was never to overcome certain fundamental defects, although it was to give birth to a family of highly effective if rudimentary radial engined fighters. The Yak-1, on the other hand, if by no means devoid of deficiencies and equally-simple of concept, was to prove outstandingly successful once it had overcome its initial teething troubles and amen able to an extraordinary incremental design process in which the fundamental airframe was progressively modified to result in a variety of derivatives, which, together with their progenitor, were to provide over 58 per cent of all Soviet single-seat fighters produced during 1941-45.

It is to this family of fighters from the design bureau of Aleksandr Yakovlev and those evolved under the aegis of Nikolai Polikarpov that they replaced that the bulk of this Fact File is devoted, together with the less successful progeny of the latter and the prototypes evolved by such designers as Dmitrii Tomashevich and Pavel Sukhoi; prototypes which, if unsuccessful in attaining series production status, nevertheless revealed the not inconsiderable creativity of which Soviet designers were capable.
?