Boris was not a good shot but then again he didn’t have to be, did he? He was probably the best pilot in the world at crashing into another plane. It was a very strange claim to fame but there it was. He flew with such precision that he could put his plane, closing in on the target, at a combined speed of over 600 miles an hour, in precisely the place and angle he needed. In his last ram attack he actually was able to land his plane quite nicely after taking down a Ju 88. It really was a remarkable skill to be able to crash into and opponent and live, at the kind of speeds that modern planes had to obtain to stay in the air.
The formations of Amerikosi bombers were in a shallow dive to gain speed and to get out of range of most of the Soviet fighters and interceptors. The tactic had worked very well and the Tarans where the only conventional Red Air Force planes in contention for an attack at the moment. The MiG 9s had got a few but not anywhere near enough. A number of the Fargos had gone down in flames to the guns of the P-80 jet fighters who found themselves in the enviable position of being in the majority for once in this war.
What this decrease in altitude did mean, was that the Fins were in their element. At 15,000 feet the La 7 had no equal outside of a jet fighter. They gained speed on the pack and had the best angle of attack on the bombers imaginable. Luck plays such a big part in the art of war and for once in this bombing raid, it was with the Soviets. The American jet fighters were still consumed with dealing with the MiG 9 Fargos and the Tartan squadron following Boris each had time to pick their targets. They were not harassed and came boring straight in. This allowed them the luxury of lining up their attacks and then side slipping to throw off the aim of the big bombers gunners.
It’s hard enough trying to hit a small fighter plane coming in from the front quarter high and low. Add in a side-slip and you’re pretty much untouchable. The reason that fighters weren’t successful more often in this kind of attack was twofold. The escorting fighters usually prevented you from taking the time to line the attack up and second it was even harder to hit a target with your own shells when you were side-slipping towards it.
If you are trying to collide with a target it didn’t matter so much; in fact if you were practiced, it was the only way to miss the wings and hit the tail area. Once past the wing a quick flick and you could hit the aileron with the heavily reinforced wing root of the La 7 Fin in a slicing maneuver that the Fin should win 9 times out of ten. And Boris’s squadron did. They got 9 hits with 8 outright kills and that Tartan surviving. There was another slow motion death of a bomber and an outright miss with an easy kill for a trailing P-80 on the 10th member of the squadron.
Boris got his fourth ramming kill with an absolutely perfect strike on the Winnie May that barely damaged his wings. His prop was gone but he could glide with ease towards a possible landing in some farmer’s field. Six of the other Tartans fared well, with three going down with their intended victims. All were able to get out of their damaged planes and complete their trip to earth beneath a stark white canopy of silk and destined to fly again. Nikolai Zelenko died as he bled out with a piece of the Milk Maids rudder in his neck.
The other Tartans took down another 14 bombers in twenty more semi controlled collisions and 7 Soviet pilots died along with 84 American crewmen in a matter of 2 minutes of utter chaos and horror for the bomber crews. The US had never seen this kind of attack in such a controlled and obviously choreographed manner. Some has seen the odd Kamikaze but never such an organized dance of death. It profoundly affected the thought processes of the surviving crews. This was of course, one of the main reasons to keep such a primitive form of attack in the Soviet arsenal and it was amply demonstrated here. This attack would stay in the minds of perhaps a thousand American flyers for the rest of their lives and profoundly affect every one of them forever. This was real war. No killing from afar, no shooting some machine out of the sky but physically ramming your opponent. This was personal, and this was how the Slav fought the Germans, Napoleon, the Golden Hoard and now the Americans.
First it was the noise of the bombers engines that made everyone start to move a little faster. It was like a storm on the horizon. You could hear the distant thunder before you saw the clouds and felt the rain. Most of the ground crews had made it out of the kill zone and had started to spread out as ordered so as not to make an attractive mass target for the expected marauding Amerikosi jet fighters. They got out of their vehicles and started to move towards cover; ditches, trees, bushes, rocks but not buildings. Buildings were as much of a target as their vehicles and many had recalled enduring the same type of event that was about to befall them from the previous war only this time it was not the Stuka but something much faster and deadly.
Many had heard that the Yankee jet carried jellied gas called napalm and many had loaded their own IL10 Beasts with a similar substance. No, a building was not where you wanted to be during the coming storm. A storm made by man to kill other men. A storm of destruction only rivaled by the atomic bomb, earthquake and volcano. Some has seen the remains of Toulouse and a few has seen what had happened in Caen to the Germans. Hopefully they had gotten out in time because if they hadn’t they were dead men who were still breathing but only their last few breaths.
As the engine sounds grew louder and louder you can almost see the bomb bay doors opening and the great silver bombers start to disgorge their explosive filled metal jacketed pills into the sky. Each bomber was carrying forty 500 pound bombs and when they started to fall you could hear them. The men and women on the ground knew what was coming. Most had experienced some kind of massive barrage of high explosives either from German rockets or artillery and even some from bombs but all knew that this would be off the scale compared to those.
The first string of bombs hit a few seconds before the rest and must have been a mistake by an excited bombardier. It landed by happenstance in a grove of trees far from the intended target but right amongst a few of the crews that serviced the Tartan ramming squadrons killing three. And then all hell broke loose on the former airfield complex as 500 lb bomb after bomb after bomb after bomb started to explode in a rolling thunderstorm only rivaled by nature herself. It was one massive explosion that knocked anyone off their feet for miles around the affected area. A constant explosion as one gave way to another. Many of the ground crew went temporarily mad with some running around screaming at the top of their lungs.
One crewmen had gone back to retrieve a picture of his girl. All he could do is watch as the rolling barrage came towards him like something of out of a Cecil B. DeMille movie. A parting of the Red Sea as it were only with great gobs of earth, cement, buildings and a few trees mixed in with exploding gasoline and diesel fuel. By the time the bombs were 100 feet from him he was deaf and as he knelt to await his fate he was fascinated by all the flying debris; from the milk cow, they kept out back, to the replacement engine of a Pe-8 heavy bomber lifting into the sky and falling lazily down with in feet of him. Soon he was unconscious but not dead. He in fact would survive in an oasis of untouched earth caused by the premature release of those early bombs. Everything else was obliterated in an instant from fuel to songbirds flying overhead. 1 months’ worth of supplies for over 5,000 planes was destroyed in 15 minutes at both massive air complexes that were hastily constructed and completed just last week. Life truly is a game of inches at times.