The old fellow wanted to say something else but, unable to cope with the emotions that had engulfed him, waved his hand, bowed from the waist in all four directions and kissed his sons three times. Uproar and applause from the whole crowd, — and the orchestra took up a flourish. “Chair him, chair him!” a cry came from the crowd and they picked the old man up in their arms.
From that day on Ivan and Vladimir Pokashevskiy were assigned as the crew of their dad’s plane: Ivan as pilot and Vladimir as aerial gunner. And now I was watching through my binoculars: the bombing range team was checking the results of the Pokashevskiys’ work — excellent! All the hits were on target! Suddenly a Sturmovik flew up and approached the range without my permission. “Birch’s here! Birch’s here!” I said rapidly. “Advise who’s flying over the range?”
There was no reply, and by now the plane was already making a turn and diving at our tower. Had he gone mad? He seemed to have confused the ‘T’ sign on the tower with a cross on the range. “Everyone to the trenches!” I ordered and saw the two-way-station driver, a technician and someone else throw themselves into the trench.
A bomb exploded: the blast wave swept away a tent standing nearby and rocked the tower — bomb splinters also hit it full on. For some reason I grabbed not the rails but the microphone and the telephone, and rushed here and there with them, shouting:
“Signaller! Send a red flare, a flare! Send him away from the range!”
The flares soared. The pilot understood his error and retired. Well, he hadn’t done a bad job at all — it was just a pity that it had not been on the right target. But… training is training!
The next group was led to the range by the comesk Captain Berdashkevich — a kindhearted Byelorussian from Polotzk. Misha was heartbroken: his father, a partisan, had been killed in action, and his mother had been shot for her partisan connections.
“Flak from the right!” setting the scenario for his group, and the novices conducted an anti-flak manoeuvre, changing both their altitude and course. “Out of the sun, right — four Fokkers!” The leader’s voice was heard again, and the whole group rearranged itself into a defensive circle.
A ‘life-buoy’, as we called such a circle, is a variety of battle order worked out for defending against Messers. Let’s assume that an enemy fighter tries to attack our Sturmovik — then a plane following him along the circle is in a position to cut the attacker off with his frontal fire. We may pounce on targets from this circle too — I saw twelve Sturmoviks already diving, their rockets darting at the ground, and a ripple explosion resounded mightily over the area. Then cannon and machine-gun fire destroyed the targets and, at the moment of pulling out of the dive, bombs separated from all the aircraft at once. When the dust settled I saw no targets through the binoculars…
May flew by imperceptibly. The young pilots had learned to shoot and bomb accurately, and begun to keep formation not only when flying straight but also when manoeuvring. They’d learned to attack targets in groups up to a squadron in size. Now the regiment was ready to take off to the front and at last we received approval. The 197th Ground Attack Division, which now included our 805th Ground Attack Aviation Regiment, had just been formed. It was destined to join the 6th Aerial Army commanded by General F.P.Polynin: we knew that we would fight as part of the 1st Byelorussian Front.
The 197th Ground Attack Aviation Division was commanded by Colonel V. A. Timofeev. Many pilots remembered him from aviation schools such as Postavskoye and, during the war, Orenburgskoye, which he had been in charge of. When Timofeev was introducing himself to the flying personnel he seemed to me to bear some resemblance to a Tsarist officer as they had been shown in the movies. His tunic and breeches were strictly fitted to his figure, the box-calf jackboots with high heels and knee caps shone as if lacquered, there were leather gloves on his hands.
“You can tell straightaway: he’s from the rear”, said my plane’s mechanic Gorobets, standing next to me.
“No! Don’t you see, the Colonel’s got the Order of Lenin and a ‘XX years of the RKKA’149 medal on his chest?” Pilot Zoubov objected. “He fought on the Kursk Salient, was a Deputy Division Commander there. And he received his Order of Lenin back in pre-war times in Transbaikalia. He was in charge of an aviation brigade after graduating from the Air Force Academy and made it the best in drill preparation in Blucher’s150 Far East Army.
“Why are you mentioning Blucher? He was an enemy of the people, after all!”
“He was no enemy of the people at all”, “Misha declared stubbornly. “He was a real people’s hero: my own uncle — my mum’s brother — a kombrig151 used to tell me about him when I was a kid — and I believed him and still do. And Timofeev, by the way, was arrested in 1938 too and spent two years in Chita prison before he was released as a baselessly victimized man, restored in his rights and appointed head of an aviation school. Shvernik152 himself — a teacher of Vyacheslav Arsenievich — backed him! But apparently there was no one to stand up for Blucher…”
“They say Timofeev fought during the Civil War?” someone asked Zoubov.
“He did. He was a scout on the Eastern Front, then a Deputy Commissar in the 15th Inzenskiy Regiment.”
“How do you know all that?”
“How could I not know? I was a flying cadet at the Orenburg School. Vyacheslav Arsenievich used to tell us about the Civil War, gave very interesting lectures.”
“What about?”
“Various things — I’d never heard anything of the kind before. And how to hold your knife and fork properly, how to smoke elegantly without leaving marks on your fingers. We were taught how to dance and how to invite a partner to a dance.”
“What’s this, the war had been on for two years and you were learning to dance?” Tolya Bougrov, a pilot with extensive burn scars on his face, asked angrily.
“Maybe, he also taught you how to choose a good wife?” Zhenya Berdnikov grinned.
“Sto-o-op the chatter!” The regimental Chief-of-Staff Major Kouznetsov loudly cut off our sotto-voce conversation, and everyone fell silent. Such was our introduction to Vyacheslav Arsenievich Timofeev…
The 197th Ground Attack Aviation Division successfully relocated to the Byelorussian aerodromes. The weather wasn’t spoiling us those days. A layer of thick fog lay dolefully over the airfield, and the Sturmoviks, having taxied out to the start point, had to turn their engines off. But then the wind blew and dispersed all the misty haze. The airmen of our division took off on combat missions one group after another. The Sturmoviks were bombing the vanguard of the enemy’s defences, neutralising the enemy’s artillery fire, blocking them on the roads, burning vehicles and tanks, wiping out infantry… Our routine work had started.
We co-operated with the famed General Chuikov’s Army (the 8th Guards)153 — from the Czartorysk field aerodrome. It seemed to us, the airmen, to be a bit quieter over here after the fighting over Taman and the Kerch Peninsula, but it was far away from being so. On one sortie Captain Berdashkevich was leading a group of nine Sturmoviks to the target. They’d been given a complicated mission — to destroy a ford on the Bug river, and thus to impede the retreat of the enemy troops. Misha had meticulously ‘played out’ the whole route with the pilots: he had shown it them on the map, scribbled on the ground with a twig the distinctive landmarks, the flak guns’ estimated positions. Then each of the wingmen repeated the ‘flight’, and only when Berdashkevich had made sure that everyone had understood everything, did he order: “Off to your planes!”
150
Translator’s note — one of the Soviet Marshals executed during Stalin’s purges in 1937.