Orel air Battle

Orel air Battle

https://proza.ru/2021/02/27/399

During the liquidation of the German bridgehead in the Orel region in July and August 1943, the Orel Air Battle unfolded. In this major air battle for 36 days, Soviet aviation in the Orel direction made 61 thousand sorties, dropped 15 thousand tons of bombs on the enemy. Enemy lost 1,411 aircraft during this time, of which 1,331 were destroyed in air battles and 80 at airfields. All attempts by the German command to regain the lost initiative ended in failure. The Soviet Air Force firmly held air supremacy.

The air offensive in all the main areas near Orel began. Massive strikes by Soviet night bombers played a significant role in aviation training. And at dawn, dozens of large groups of stormtroopers took to the sky. They literally hung over the German defensive line without a break, intensifying the fire of Soviet artillery. The actions of the stormtroopers were covered by fighters, who drove the German aircraft from the battlefield.

The joint artillery and aviation processing of the first defensive strip of the Germans was so thorough that Soviet ground troops were able to break successfully through its front edge. They occupied enemy trenches and dugouts and moved the battle into the depths of the German defense. When fighting began on the ground inside the enemy's defenses, aviation, continuing to fight for the initiative in the air, joined in supporting the actions of infantry and tanks.

One of the episodes of the Orel air battle was described in July 1943.  It was an article by Boris Polevoy, a war correspondent for the newspaper Pravda.

"I saw one of the intense battles in the midst of the attack on Orel from an aviation observation post. From here, from the top of a high-rise overgrown with curly young oak..., there was a wide view of the uneven hilly horizon, the brick houses of the village of Nikitinka broken by artillery.

This village, located on the eastern slope of the hill, was one of the powerful fortified nodes created by the Germans on the "inner armored line of the Orel wedge." Our forward movement was delayed at this village... The Germans, by all means, wanted to return the village...

The landscape, sweltering fields, forests, villages seemed dead until the branches at the edge of the forest trembled and from there, unfolding like a fan along the crest of the hill, German tanks poured out. They went forward, humming, swaying, flashing with reddish flashes of shots, and behind each of them, behind its armor, infantry was moving. A moment later, the field, the neighboring hills, the woods – everything came to life from the German chains running over, under the cover of tanks, rushing to the village. Over the noise of the battle, we did not hear the howling of the engines, and I saw the German fighters when they were already hanging over the battlefield.

The aviation commander picked up his headphones, listened and suddenly smiled:

– Well, now we take the floor.

And exactly in response to his remark, a group of our hawks appeared in the air. Without hesitation, without slowing down, they pounced on the Germans, crashed into their formation, grappled with them and whirled in a hot air battle. Tangles of fighting planes, in which it was almost impossible to distinguish from the German from the ground, began to rise up slowly. And while there, at a high altitude, there was a battle, stormtroopers broke out from behind the hill and attacked the Germans. They, as the pilots put it, "scraped on the very ground", "put" their bombs almost on the towers of German tanks. Shells, tracing a smoky trail in the air, tore into hundreds of red-hot fragments over the heads of German infantrymen...

When we now try to evaluate the participation of all kinds of our air weapons in the historic battle for Orel, it becomes clear that our aviation brilliantly conducted an air offensive and provided our ground units with great assistance in liberating of Orel. It is not by chance that a German pilot who flew to our side in the midst of the fighting said:

"You can hate Russian aviation, but you can't disrespect and not be afraid of it."

Скачано с www.znanio.ru