It was Tamara Pamyatnykh, one of the members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces. The brave lad had refused the vodka, it turned out, because the brave lad was not a lad at all. As the pilot would later recall, "Nobody could understand why the brave lad who had taken on a Nazi squadron wouldn't drink vodka." The people on the ground, who had witnessed the skirmish, rushed over to help the stranded pilot. The pilot bailed out, landing, finally, in a field. The outnumbered Soviets downed two Nazi planes before one of their own lost its wing to enemy fire. The tiny planes' flimsiness was in some ways an asset: their maximum speed was lower than the stall speed of the Nazi planes, meaning that the pilots could maneuver their craft with much more agility than their attackers. They sent their planes into dives, returning fire directly into the center of the German formation. The pilots did what anyone piloting a plane made of plywood would do when confronted with enemy craft and enemy fire: they ducked. until the pilots found themselves confronted by a collection of German bombers. Their passage was on its way to being a routine patrol. Two pilots, members of the Soviet Air Force, were flying their planes- Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, built mainly of plywood and canvas-over a Soviet railway junction.
It was the spring of 1943, at the height of World War II.
0 kommentar(er)
