Out of the Blue: The Forgotten Story of the Soviet Air Force in World War II

The activities of the Soviet Air Force (Voyenno-vozdushnyye sily or VVS) rank among the least-chronicled aspects of World War II. In the early 1980s, Von Hardesty, curator of the Aeronautics Division of the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum, wrote Red Phoenix, a groundbreaking account of the VVS from 1941 to 1945. Hardesty has teamed up with Ilya Grinberg, a professor in the department of technology at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, to significantly revise this classic narrative, which necessarily drew from uncritical and ultra-patriotic Soviet memoirs. In Red Phoenix Rising: The Society Air Force in World War II (University of Kansas Press, 2012), Hardesty and Grinberg have taken advantage of declassified Russian archival material made available over the past three decades to provide a comprehensive and riveting account of the VVS's epic confrontation with the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht. We publish Hardesty's overview of the book, "Out of the Blue," along with an interview that senior editor Donald A. Yerxa conducted with Grinberg in July 2012.

The Russo-German War (1941-1945) began with an awesome display of air power. On the morning of June 22, 1941, in the predawn darkness, Luftwaffe bombers struck forward air bases of the Soviet Air Force (Voyenno-voz-dushnyye sily—VVS). The highly scripted plan for invasion, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, targeted the VVS as the first victim of the war. The preemptive raids brought fiery devastation to the exposed and ill-prepared Soviet air defenses. Huge numbers of aircraft were destroyed in place. A few Soviet aircraft did get airborne, only to be swiftly shot down by marauding German fighters. Estimates vary, but one Russian archival source suggests that by the second day the VVS may have lost as many as 3,922 aircraft, with the downing of only seventy-eight German planes. This brutal attrition would persist throughout the summer months with the final tally of Soviet losses edging toward 10,000 planes. The initial salvos of the war transformed the VVS air bases into graveyards of burned out and damaged aircraft. In the annals of air warfare, there was no precedent for such devastation. The resulting image of ruin and humiliation became fixed in Western perceptions of the Soviet Air Force.

If, however, we transport ourselves forward in time, to May 1945, we encounter another image of the Soviet Air Force. This portrait is equally vivid and dramatic, but at odds with the extraordinary wreckage and paralysis wrought by Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet Union launched the long-awaited assault on Berlin. The battle-seasoned VVS, now organized into highly mobile air armies, deployed over 7,500 operational aircraft. Soviet fighters swept the last remnants of the Luftwaffe from the skies. And, more important, the Soviet air juggernaut of fighters, bombers, and ground-attack aircraft flew thousands of sorties in direct air support for the advancing Red Army. As the war drew to a close, the VVS boasted an inventory of 20,000 aircraft, the largest tactical air force in the world. Now for the first time, the VVS exerted unchallenged air

Soviet IL-2 ground-attack airplanes preparing to takeoff, February 1, 1945. © Yevgeny Khaldei/Corbis.

s-premacy over the vast periphery of Soviet-controlled territory from Berlin to the Far East.

These two snapshots of the Soviet Air Force, separated by nearly four years, evoke a sharp contrast, one not easy to reconcile or explain. The first image from 1941 is familiar to us; the second, less so, for many complicated reasons. Even Western accounts of World War II dealing narrowly with the theme of air power are prone to ignore this forgotten episode. For Russians, the air war in the East has remained a meaningful part of a larger national epic, the Great Patriotic War. For the VVS, the war years were a time of great fluidity and challenge, a context for one of the most remarkable military reversals in history.

There is a lost human dimension to the story as well. Few are...