With the arrival of daylight on June 1, 1942, fierce air battles unfolded across thousands of kilometers of front. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

The Soviet Red Air Force launched a large-scale sortie, not only attacking the Kirkuk oil fields in Iraq and the Palatin oil fields in Iran, but also launching large-scale air assaults on various targets in Poland, Baltic, Lithuania, Western Ukraine, East Prussia, Romania, and Finland.

In the air against these Soviet planes was the Luftwaffe Titan Hans. The 6th Air Force commanded by Jeshunek. As early as March 1942, the 6th Air Force, which was under the command of the German Eastern Front Headquarters, was greatly strengthened, and by mid-May it had an unprecedented 3,300 aircraft in common use, accounting for nearly a third of the total number of aircraft in the hands of the Luftwaffe and naval aviation (more than 10,000 aircraft)! Among them, the number of high-performance fighters such as the FW-190, BF-109, HE-219 and Fokker Zero is more than 2,000.

By the end of May, the air forces of Finland, Romania, Croatia, and Hungary (Germany's republican states had no independent navy and air force, and the defense forces had only land forces), as well as the volunteer air forces sent by the two neutral countries of Sweden and the Netherlands, were also under the command of the 6th Air Force. By this time, the number of advanced (40s level) commonly used aircraft in the 6th Air Force had reached 4500, including 2500 fighters.

However, compared to the 12,000 commonly used aircraft deployed by the Soviet Union on the Northern, Western and Southwestern Fronts, Yeshunek's 4,500 aircraft were still a little less.

And Jeshunek, who had a relatively small capital, had no way to compete with the Soviets for air supremacy on all fronts. As a last resort, he could only divide his defense zone into two air superiority zones and one air guerrilla zone.

One of the two air superiority zones is the Baltic Sea air superiority zone, which includes the area near the Finnish capital Helsinki, Baltic, Lithuania, and East Prussia. About half of the fighters under the 6th Air Force are deployed at airfields in these areas. Moreover, in order to avoid being wiped out by a surprise attack by the Soviet Air Force, all of these fighters were deployed at airfields far from the Soviet border - since both the Fokker Zero and the He-219 had a large range, and the FW-190 had a range with the addition of auxiliary fuel tanks, the fighters deployed in depth could still conduct air combat on the front line.

The other air superiority zone is the central air superiority zone, which includes central Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Bohemia and other regions. The remaining fighters of the 6th Air Force are deployed in this area, and the principle of in-depth deployment is also adopted.

As for the air guerrilla zone, it is Poland, Western Ukraine, northeastern Romania. In these areas, there are only false targets on all airfields, and there are basically no real aircraft. However, this does not mean that Jeshunek handed over air supremacy in these areas, in fact, Yeshunek's purpose was to use these areas of ground that were temporarily controlled by the German army as a battlefield to consume the living forces of Soviet pilots. In these areas, the fighters of the German 4th Air Force, not defenders, but hunters, under the guidance of ground-based radar stations, attacked the group of Soviet bombers that broke through. Wipe out as many Soviet planes as possible over German-controlled territory - which meant that for every plane shot down, the Soviet Red Air Force lost one less good pilot.

This set of tactics to eliminate pilots was the most commonly used by the Luftwaffe in the English Channel and the North Sea in this time and space, and the British Royal Air Force was crippled by this set of tactics. In the beginning they had good pilots but no good planes, and now they have good planes but no good pilots available.

And now, the same fate is about to befall the Soviet pilots!

"Erich, you kid listen to me, don't entangle with the Yak-1 later, this kind of aircraft has good low-altitude performance, just let the Fokker Zero deal with it." Our targets are Soviet Il-2, Per-2 or SB bombers, get it? ”

At an altitude of 5,000 meters, Herman flew a well-performing FW-190 fighter. Second Lieutenant Graf was at this time on the radio and his wingman pilot Erich. Hartman calls. Erich. Hartmann was only 20 years old, he was still in high school when the war broke out in 1939, and he joined the Luftwaffe half a year later, and today is his first time in the field.

And Herman. Graf was already a glorious Nazi German fighter pilot by this time. Although he did not participate in the Polish campaign, he participated in most of the subsequent battles, from the skies over France to the desert of North Africa, and also participated in the bombing of the British mainland (not many people participated), and the combat experience is very rich. However, there have been hundreds of combat missions before and after, but Graff's record is a big duck's egg, and there is no result!

Most of his contemporaries and current service in the Luftwaffe/Naval Air Force had more than 10 victories, and at least 30% of them had earned the Blue Max Medal.

And Graff ...... It's also quite famous, he is the holder of the Luftwaffe/Naval Aviation fighter pilot's record for "no shooting"! In the entire campaign of the Western Front, 21 sorties were fired in a row without firing a shot. As a result, his superiors thought that his skills were too poor and kicked him back to the pilot school for re-education, and the instructor who taught him how to fight a plane turned out to be his classmate when he first joined the Kalsruhe Air Force Non-commissioned Officer School.

Because he maintained a record of 21 consecutive "no shooting", and often "ran empty" in subsequent combat missions, Graf, an old bird with rich "experience in avoiding wars", became the "old hen" of the 52nd Fighter Regiment to which he belonged, and was specially responsible for taking rookie pilots to the sky to experience the atmosphere of the battlefield - it was very safe to follow him anyway, the probability of encountering enemy planes was very small, and most of them could not fight......

"Second Lieutenant Graff, enemy aircraft spotted ahead!"

At this moment, the voice of Flight Sergeant Steinbadz, another pilot in the Graff detachment (4 aircraft detachment), sounded from the earphones of Second Lieutenant Graff.

"At 9 o'clock, at an altitude of about 4000 meters, there were about 20 ...... Oh, they found us! There were about 8 planes flying towards us! ”

Graf's detachment was confronted by 12 Il-2s and 8 Yak-1s, which had been ordered to bomb a fortified ring fortified by the Polish Wehrmacht. Because of the voluntary withdrawal of the Luftwaffe, most of Poland's air supremacy now belongs to the Soviet Red Air Force.

After successfully blowing up a number of airfields in Poland and destroying thousands of "model airplanes" on the ground. The commander of the Western Front of the USSR, Major General Kobetz, believed that on the Polish battlefield, German air power was largely suppressed. So he ordered the start of the second phase of the air raid mission, sending a large number of Il-2 attack aircraft, escorted by Yak-1 fighters, to attack the ground targets of the Polish Defense Forces. Because the targets that need to be attacked are scattered and the scale is not large. Therefore, the fleet of sorties is relatively small, with a scale of more than ten or twenty aircraft.

And the experienced Luftwaffe staff officers had long anticipated this, and they themselves fought in Poland, on the Western Front, in North Africa, in the North Sea, in the English Channel, and in the Atlantic. So the Luftwaffe came up with their old method, the tactics of high and low in double detachments.

To put it simply, 4 FW-190 or BF-109 form a "high-altitude (in fact, medium-altitude) detachment", and 4 Fokker Zeros form a "low-altitude detachment". The two detachments coordinated the attack, the high-altitude detachment was responsible for the high-altitude detachment, and the low-altitude detachment was in charge of circling and fighting below. The same tactics were used by the British, who had fought the old war with the Germans, and now they are using Spitfires in conjunction with low-altitude Mustang (P51).

However, although the Soviet Red Air Force also knew that there was such a way of fighting, they thought that disassembling the eight planes and using them was to disperse the forces, and it was better to concentrate the eight planes to kill one of the detachments first, and then go to fight the other.

So now 8 Yak-1 fighters are bravely rushing to 4 FW-190A-4 fighters!

"It's the Yak-1, be careful not to get entangled in them, hit and run!" Second Lieutenant Graf didn't want to engage this kind of Soviet aircraft with superior combat performance, he just wanted to shoot down an Il-2 with the powerful firepower of the FW-190A-4, but now he had no choice, and he had to fight if he didn't fight.

He is now flying the long-range combat model of the FW-190A-4, with two MG17 machine guns, two MGFF cannons and two MG151 cannons, which are enough to shoot down relatively solid enemy aircraft. And this FW-190A-4 is also very fast, and can fly up to 6000 km / h without the MW50 afterburner system at an altitude of 670 meters. This was almost 100 km/h faster than the Soviet Yak-1, so Ensign Graf quickly bit the ass of one of the Yak-1s, but at the same time a Yak-1 followed him behind.

However, Ensign Graf did not choose to dodge, but wanted to kill the Yak-1 in front of him first. But after he pressed the firing button, the 2 machine guns and 4 machine guns did not react. Only then did he notice that his old bird had actually opened fire after the insurance was lifted. And just then, he noticed a string of tracer bullets brushing past the cabin cover! This is the Yak-1 in the back firing!

"Damn it!" Graff noticed that the string of tracer bullets was very close to him! This does not bode well. Just then he suddenly heard an explosion from behind, but there was nothing unusual about his plane, and he looked back to see that the Yak-1 was falling in flames.

"Ensign, I've shot down an enemy plane, it turned out to be easy to hit, now it's time for you to fight." Rookie Erich, who only went to the battlefield today. Hartman's elated voice came out of Graff's headphones. (To be continued.) )