Impact Strategy Page 3

  I carefully inspected my ShKAS machine gun before the flight and found its condition to be quite satisfactory. The other thing is that the rifle caliber of this machine gun was still too small for 1941. Even the high rate of fire did not compensate for this drawback. The increased power of aircraft engines allowed German designers to significantly strengthen the armor of the Messerschmitts, giving good protection to the pilot and the most important components of the fighter. That's why I ordered the captain not to jerk the plane on course - I needed the best possible accuracy, because I could only hit the enemy aircraft in vulnerable spots, and it wasn't easy to hit them.

  The Germans, inspired by the successful start of the battle, decided not to delay in destroying the Russians and distribute the targets among themselves. I do not know how they agreed on this in the absence of communication, but the leader of the pair of Messerschmitts continued to pursue the Yak, and his wingman slightly corrected the course and began to approach our Pe-2 from behind.

  At 400 meters the German pilot felt comfortable enough, not too afraid of the machine guns of the Russian bomber. He was in no hurry to shoot himself, either - after all, the distance was great, and his ammunition supply was not infinite. I turned the machine gun on the turret slightly and fired a short burst toward the enemy. It wasn't very accurate, but it gave the computer a lot of information to make adjustments to the guidance system.

  The German did not even flinch when several tracers flashed to the right and above his plane. My machine gun's belt was mixed with rounds of armor-piercing, incendiary, and armor-piercing tracer bullets. It was thought that this approach contributed to the combined defeat of the enemy aircraft, although I would have preferred to limit it to armor-piercing ammunition only.

  The enemy plane was only 350 meters away. A little more, and the enemy will try to hide in the dead zone, where my fire will be hindered by the tail of my own plane. I wasn't going to let that happen. A burst! The hits were visible even to the naked eye. I aimed for the cockpit, as the Messerschmitt was descending with its nose down, and the engine wasn't obscuring it. A second later, the enemy disappeared from my sight. He never fired a shot, but the computer only repainted its marker yellow - apparently, it wasn't sure of my shooting score.

  “"Blackbird-2", are you alive?” the marker of the last Yak also turned yellow, but after a couple of seconds it turned green again.

  “He made holes in my wings, the bastard,” the pilot replied. “The plane obeys the rudders. The engine works.”

  The leader of the pair of Messerschmitts stopped chasing the Yak and joined his wingman, who was barely keeping his plane in the air. The plane itself did not appear to be seriously damaged, but the pilot was apparently injured. The fighter was yawing from side to side, and was pressing closer and closer to the ground. The computer repainted its mark a gray-yellow color, deeming the target practically unfit for duty.

  “We're going home,” I ordered, and then the German pilot finally lost control of his plane.

  The fiery flower of an explosion blossomed below - the wingman of the pair of Messerschmitts fell into the woods. I cursed quietly to myself. It was not difficult to predict what the surviving enemy would do now.

  I took a quick look at the situation. We changed course again sharply, and the other pursuers must have lost us. It took another five minutes to reach the front line, but it was clear that the bothersome Messerschmitt would not leave us alone.

  “Lieutenant, get down on the ground! "Blackbird-2", don't let him come at me from the side - let him try to attack from behind.”

  The German did not attack from the side. Taking advantage of the fact that near the ground our speed did not exceed 450 kilometers per hour, the Messerschmitt gained an altitude of about one kilometer and rushed to attack from top to back. He apparently considered the death of his wingman to be an accident, insane luck, for which the gunner of the Russian bomber should pay with his life.

  “Waiting for orders!” the Yak pilot reminded me of himself.

  “Go up a little higher and attack him if he changes course and comes in from the other side.”

  “Understood. I'm on it.”

  The pilot and navigator of the Pe-2 were silent. After destroying one of the Messerschmitts, they had no desire at all to interfere in the battle management or to challenge my actions in any way.

  “This is "Blackbird-2". Strong vibration when climbing. Engine loses power!”

  “"Blackbird-2", hold on a little longer. I need you here for a few more minutes.”

  “The altitude is 600 meters.”

  “That's enough. Stay out of the attack. Just let the German see you.”

  The enemy is 500 meters away. That's a long way. It is possible to hit it, of course, but the killing power of ShKAS bullets is no longer the same at that distance. The Pe-2 flies to the front line, nestling almost to the treetops of a small forested area. As luck would have it, the cloud cover thinned and the German is falling on us from above, as if at an exercise.

  400 meters. I guess it's too early to shoot - I don't want to scare off the enemy. If he refuses to attack and tries to come in from the side, it will be much more difficult - in the Pe-2 defense this is another weak point.

  300 meters.

  “This is "Blackbird-2". Permission to attack! He's going to shoot you!”

  “Stand down!”

  The distance is 250 meters. I think it's time. The aiming markers aligned on the enemy plane. The computer shows the probability of hitting the target at the edge of my field of view. Almost 90%. A burst! It is beginning to get dark, and tracers paint the sky with bright strokes. Missed! How did he make it?! What did he feel? I don't have an answer, but at the last moment the Messerschmitt twitched to the side and the burst went by. Now he's going to go into a blind spot, and it's going to be really bad. A wounded Yak is no help to us, hence.... A burst! Some rags fly from our own tail - a couple of my bullets stroke against the keel of the plane. A hundred meters away, a hot fire is blazing right through the sky. Still, the incendiary bullets that could set even a protected gas tank on fire came in handy. The German shoots back. It looks like he's just guessing, but our long-suffering tail catches another hit.

  “How's the plane?”

  “It obeys the rudders,” answers Lieutenant Kalina in a slightly hoarse voice.

  Below us there is a bright flash - a shot-down Messerschmitt has met the ground.

  ***

  Staff Sergeant Silin, call sign "Blackbird-2", followed the landing of the bomber and also led his fighter to the ground. The plane obeyed him reluctantly, as if it had suddenly become many hundreds of kilos heavier. The landing gear struts came out smoothly, good thing there was no problem with that at least, and the Yak rolled hard on the ground of the runway.

  A little to the side, Silin noticed the plane of Junior Lieutenant Kostrov, all blackened, with the cockpit canopy splattered with oil. So Ivan made it to the airfield, and even managed to land the damaged plane. That's good, though of course they won't get their commander back.

  The Staff Sergeant struggled to get out of the cockpit and took a couple of steps toward the men running toward him.

  “Are you hurt?” Silin was asked by an unfamiliar technician who ran up first.

  “No,” the pilot shook his head in the negative, “but it looks like the fighter needs some serious repairs.”

  “You've been through a lot.”

  “We lost our commander. He was killed with the first burst - no luck. But we took out two of them, too.”

  “Well, if they confirm it,” the technician nodded toward the Pe-2, "I think they'll give you both wins. Who distinguished himself?”

  “They did,” said Silin with a crooked grin.

  “I don't understand...”

  “And what is there to understand? Both fascists were driven into the ground by the Pawn's gunner. That's how it happens.”

  Chapter 3

  As Sudoplatov told me in the morning, the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command had already prepared another plan to unblock the troops, encircled in the Kiev pocket, without my brilliant advice. This time the plan was to launch simultaneous strikes from outside and inside the ring at night to negate German air superiority in the initial phase of the operation.

  Beria hesitated for a long time before informing Stalin of my proposal, but it required virtually no changes to the already developed plan, and the head of the NKVD decided that it couldn't get any worse.

  After heavy losses suffered by Soviet long-range aviation at the beginning of the war, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief forbade the use of the TB-7 without his direct permission, so the Commissar of Internal Affairs had to resolve the issue directly with the Chief. Despite Beria's fears, Stalin hardly hesitated.

  “Go ahead, Comrade Beria,” he nodded as he listened to the Commissar's report. “We are obliged to take every opportunity to increase our chances of a successful operation. Within reasonable limits, of course, and under your personal responsibility.”

  As a result, the implementation of my plan ended up in the hands of the NKVD, and I still had to report to my direct superior.

  “Comrade Senior Major of State Security,” I began my report as soon as we were alone, “the reconnaissance flight was successful. The data for the night bombing strike is sufficiently collected. One fighter was lost. The pilot was killed. The other planes sustained varying degrees of damage.”

  “I'm surprised you came back from there at all,” Sudoplatov answered grimly. “Mark on the map what you saw, and you can rest for a couple of hours. TB-7s and Yer-2s will be over our airfield at exactly zero o'clock. By that time you should already be in the air.”

  ***

  The Headquarters of the Supreme High Command p
lan was not bad, but it had no chance of success because of the incorrect background information underlying it. The Red Army's intelligence could not uncover the Germans' plan and did not notice how the Wehrmacht's Fourth Panzer Group, which had been advancing on Leningrad until then, suddenly disappeared from under the besieged city and was redeployed to the Moscow direction. The cunning Germans left one of the radio operators of the Panzer Group near Leningrad, who had a specific easily recognizable 'handwriting' - individual features of signal transmission -, and the radio reconnaissance did not reveal any dramatic changes in the German forces.

  The enemy was preparing for an attack on Moscow, gathering virtually all of its tank forces into a single fist, except for Kleist's First Panzer Group, which had gone south to capture the Donbass. But even without it, such forces were concentrated on the Moscow direction, to which the 21st and 40th Armies could not oppose anything. In addition, General Rommel's divisions, which had just arrived in France from North Africa, were reinforced with new tanks and other equipment and were preparing to move to Bryansk and Vyazma.

  Only the need to finally eliminate the grouping of Soviet troops near Kiev, which was encircled and already split into two parts, was holding back the whole German armada from rushing to the Soviet capital.

  However, the Soviet command did not know all this, and now the two armies were preparing to launch an unblocking strike, while the troops of the Bryansk Front had to actively bind up the German forces in order to make it difficult for the enemy to transfer reserves to the threatened directions. The armies in the pocket assembled few combat-ready formations to break through. Driver mechanics poured the last liters of fuel into the tanks of several dozen surviving combat vehicles, and artillerymen gathered the pitiful remains of ammunition for the few serviceable guns from field depots. I knew I couldn't get everyone out of the pocket, but I was going to give at least some of them a chance.

  When Lieutenant Kalina's Pe-2, hastily repaired, took off, the entire horizon to the west was already thundering with explosions and glowing with white chemical light from the many hundreds of "chandeliers" suspended over the battlefield by our troops and the Germans.

  We took off just in time. Two flights of TB-7s and four Yer-2s were approaching the front line a couple of kilometers behind our aircraft at an altitude of 6,000 meters. Ten long-range bombers, as I requested. All together they carried 40 tons of high-explosive bombs weighing from 250 kilograms to a ton.

  So far the armies of Kuznetsov and Podlas have been successful. The plan called for two powerful converging strikes in the general direction of Romny. Both commanders managed to stealthily move the BM-13 divisions assigned to them into position at dusk. The Germans, confident in the effectiveness of their aerial reconnaissance, did not expect massive artillery fire, and the barrage of rockets that fell on their heads literally wiped out the enemy's forward positions.

  Tank brigades assigned by the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command for this operation rushed into the gap that had formed. T-34s and KVs, which the Germans had great difficulty with, accounted for about half of these brigades.

  Nevertheless, the initial success threatened to quickly wane. Information about strike directions had already reached German headquarters, and right now the fine-tuned mechanism for countering Soviet counterstrikes, which had already been worked out by the Wehrmacht to the finest detail during the first months of the war was beginning to work.

  The enemy could not use aviation because it was dark, but it was not the first time the Germans had fought in weather conditions that prevented their fighters and bombers from flying, and they had many other effective means to repel the attack, chief among which were 88mm antiaircraft guns, which could be launched on direct fire, and motorized formations, which could be moved quickly to the breakout points to deliver flanking blows to the Soviet forces that had broken through.

  It was this scenario that I intended to prevent.

  “"Shark One", this is "Hornet". Are you ready to receive target coordinates?”

  “"Hornet", this is "Shark One",” the heavy bomber group commander responded without delay, “I can hear you all right. Ready to receive coordinates.”

  ***

  The commander of the Third Armored Division of the Wehrmacht, General von Schweppenburg, listened to the chief of staff's report and moved quickly into the room, where the maps of the battle area were laid out on the table. Several large wooden houses, from which the inhabitants had been evicted beforehand, were occupied by division headquarters, providing at least minimal comfort in the barbaric conditions with which von Schweppenburg had so often had to put up in this wild country.

  True, the warning came not from Colonel General Guderian, but from some Berlin fop from the Abwehr, so von Schweppenburg didn't take it too seriously. As it turned out, the Abwehrman was right.

  The locations of Soviet strikes had already been mapped. The Reds' plan was not original. Using the night attack to break through the front in two places 30 kilometers apart, then introduce tank brigades into the breakthrough, link up behind the back of the infantry division, block it, reach the inner perimeter of the pocket and break through a corridor to their surrounded armies, attacking from the rear against the infantry units holding it.

  “Put me through to the headquarters of the Fifth Tank Regiment!” demanded Schweppenburg.

  “The telephone connection is broken, Herr General!” the communications officer on duty reported a minute later. “Troubleshooting is already underway, but it will take time.”

  “Then get on the radio! Do I have to teach you your job, Stabsfeldwebel?”

  “There is interference on the air, Herr General. We have been calling the Fifth Regiment Headquarters continuously, but there has been no answer so far.”

  “Then send a liaison agent with orders to Colonel Brown to raise the regiment on alert immediately. At 2:30 I want to see his tanks right here!” Schweppenburg turned to the chief of staff, showing the point on the map from which the arrow of the Russian tank strike began, “This road must be cut as quickly as possible and the 44th Infantry Division must be unblocked. The Austrians aren't bad soldiers, but I wouldn't want to test their resilience in an encirclement for long...”

  The General's speech was interrupted by a growing whistle, clearly audible even through the closed windows. None of the four 500-kilogram bombs dropped from a height of two kilometers hit the headquarters buildings directly, but that was not required. The shock wave flattened the wooden buildings, knocking even the stone stoves off their foundations and burying the division commander and his staff officers under a pile of rubble.

  ***

  It must have seemed to the commanders of the brigades and divisions going into attack, as well as to the common Red Army soldiers and tankers who tried to break the German defense in a night battle and get through to their encircled comrades, that the operation was going according to plan, the enemy was retreating and, in some places, fleeing. We need to push harder, and the enemy's resistance will be finally broken.

  When viewed from orbit, a completely different picture emerged. The balance of forces was not at all in favor of the Soviets, especially in tanks and mobile units. Having received a painful blow which was actually not a fatal one, the Wehrmacht began to turn toward the offender to inflict a crushing defeat on him.

  “"Shark 3", this is "Hornet". Seven and a half degrees to your left. You're almost over the target. Strike with two FAB-500s. Stand by.”

  “"Shark 3" understands the order. Standing by.”

  “"Shark 3", ten seconds... Bombs away!”

  I just did not have time to correct the strikes of ten bombers at the same time. Sometimes they had to be taken out on the second or even third approach. The accuracy of the bombs dropping also did not always make it possible to hit the target the first time. Sometimes my commands were executed with slight delays or not quite accurately, and then again I had to attack the target again, which meant that the Germans below already knew about the danger, which reduced the effectiveness of the strikes.