The Soviet Period Military Experience.

The Bolshevik Party, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, seized power in November 1917. It immediately began peace negotiations with the Central Powers and took control of the armed forces. Once peace was concluded in March 1918 by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the demobilization of the old Russian imperial army began.

THE RED ARMY

Adhering to Marxist doctrine, which viewed standing armies as tools of state and class oppression, the Bolsheviks did not plan to replace the imperial army and intended instead to rely on a citizens’ militia of class-conscious workers for defense. The emergence of widespread opposition to the Bolshevik seizure of power convinced Lenin of the need for a regular army after all, and he ordered Trotsky to create a Red Army, the birthday of which was recognized as February 23, 1918. As the number of workers willing to serve on a voluntary basis proved to be insufficient for the needs of the time, conscription of workers and peasants was soon introduced. By 1921 the Red Army had swelled to nearly five million men and women; the majority, however, were engaged full-time in food requisitioning and other economic activities designed to keep the army fed and equipped as Russia’s beleaguered economy began to collapse. Because they lacked trained leadership to fight the civil war that erupted in the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks recruited and impressed former officers of the old army and assigned political commissars to validate their orders and maintain political reliability of the units.

The civil war raged until 1922, when the last elements of anticommunist resistance were wiped out in Siberia. In the meantime Poland attacked Soviet Russia in April 1920 in a bid to establish its borders deep in western Ukraine. The Soviet counteroffensive took the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw before it was repelled and pushed back into Ukraine in August. The Red Army forces combating the Poles virtually disintegrated during their retreat, and the Cossacks of the elite First Cavalry Army, led by Josef Stalin’s cronies Kliment Voroshilov and Semen Budenny, staged a bloody anti-Bolshevik mutiny and pogrom in the process. The subsequent peace treaty gave Poland very favorable boundaries eastward into Ukraine.

The onset of peace saw the demobilization of the regular armed forces to a mere half million men. Some party officials wanted to abolish the army totally and replace it with a citizens’ militia. As a compromise, a mixed system consisting of a small standing army and a large territorial militia was established. Regular soldiers would serve for two years, but territorial soldiers would serve for five, one weekend per month and several weeks in the summer. Until it was absorbed into the regular army beginning in 1936, the territorial army outnumbered the regular army by about three to one. For the rest of the decade the armed forces were underfunded, undersupplied, and ill-equipped with old, outdated weaponry.

During the 1920s most former tsarist officers were dismissed and a new cadre of Soviet officers began to form. Party membership was strongly encouraged among the officers, and throughout the Soviet period at least eighty percent of the officers were party members. At and above the rank of colonel virtually all officers held party membership.

A unique feature of the Soviet armed forces was the imposition on it of the Political Administration of the Red Army (PURKKA, later renamed GlavPUR). This was the Communist Party organization for which the military commissars worked. Initially every commander from battalion level on up to the Army High Command had a commissar as a partner. After the civil war, commanders no longer had to have their orders countersigned by the commissar to be valid, and commissars’ duties were relegated to discipline, morale, and political education. 

During the 1930s political officers were added at the company and platoon levels, and during the purges and at the outset of World War II commanders once again had to have commissars countersign their orders. Commissars shared responsibility for the success of the unit and were praised or punished alongside the commanders, but they answered to the political authorities, not to the military chain of command. Commissars were required to evaluate officers’ political reliability on their annual attestations and during promotion proceedings, thus giving them some leverage over the officers with whom they served.

THE 1930s

The First Five-Year Plan, from 1928 to1932, expanded the USSR’s industrial base, which then began producing modern equipment, including tanks, fighter aircraft and bombers, and new warships. The size of the armed forces rapidly increased to about 1.5 million between 1932 and 1937. The rapid expansion of the armed forces led to insurmountable difficulties in recruiting officers. As a stopgap measure, party members were required to serve as officers for two- or three-year stints, and privates and sergeants were promoted to officer rank. The training of officer candidates in military schools was abbreviated from four years to two or less to get more officers into newly created units. As a result the competence and cohesion of the leadership suffered.

In the 1930s Soviet strategists such as Vladimir K. Triandifilov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky devised innovative tactics for utilizing tanks and aircraft in offensive operations. The Soviets created the first large tank units, and experimented with paratroops and airborne tactics. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) Soviet officers and men advised the Republican forces and engaged in armored and air combat testing the USSR’s latest tanks and aircraft against the fascists.

The terror purge of the officer corps instituted by Josef Stalin in 1937–1939 took a heavy toll of the top leadership. Stalin’s motives for the purge will never be known for certain, but most plausibly he was concerned about a possible military coup. Although it is very unlikely that the military planned or hoped to seize power, three of its five marshals were executed, as were fifteen of sixteen army commanders of the first and second rank, sixty of sixty-seven corps commanders, and 136 of 199 division commanders. Forty-two of the top forty-six military commissars also were arrested and executed. When the process of denunciation, arrest, investigation, and rehabilitation had run its course in 1940, about 23,000 military and political officers had either been executed or were in prison camps. It was long believed that perhaps as many as fifty percent of the officer corps was purged, but archival evidence subsequently indicated that when the reinstatements of thousands of arrested officers during World War II are taken into account, fewer than ten percent of the officer corps was permanently purged, which does not diminish the loss of talented men. Simultaneous with the purge was the rapid expansion of the armed forces in response to the growth of militarism in Germany and Japan. By June 1941 the Soviet armed forces had grown to 4.5 million men, but were terribly short of officers because of difficulties in recruiting and the time needed for training. Tens of thousands of civilian party members, sergeants, and enlisted men were forced to serve as officers with little training for their responsibilities. Despite the USSR’s rapid industrialization, the army found itself underequipped because men were being conscripted faster than weapons, equipment, and even boots and uniforms could be made for them.

The end of the decade saw the Soviet Union involved in several armed conflicts. From May to September 1939, Soviet forces under General Georgy Zhukov battled the Japanese Kwantung Army and drove it out of Mongolia. In September 1939 the Soviet army and air force invaded eastern Poland after the German army had nearly finished conquering the western half. In November 1939 the Soviet armed forces attacked Finland but failed to conquer it and in the process suffered nearly 400,000 casualties. Stalin’s government was forced to accept a negotiated peace in March 1940 in which it gained some territory north of Leningrad and naval bases in the Gulf of Finland. Anticipating war with Nazi Germany, the USSR increased the pace of rearmament in the years 1939–1941, and prodigious numbers of modern tanks, artillery, and aircraft were delivered to the armed forces.

WORLD WAR II

In violation of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact signed in 1939, Germany invaded the USSR on June 22, 1941. Much of the forward-based Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground on the first day of the onslaught. All along the front the Axis forces rolled up the Soviet defenses, hoping to destroy the entire Red Army in the western regions before marching on Moscow and Leningrad. By December 1941 the Germans had put Leningrad under siege, came within sight of Moscow, and, in great battles of encirclement, had inflicted about 4.5 million casualties on the Soviet armed forces, yet they had been unable to destroy the army and the country’s will and ability to resist. Nearly 5.3 million Soviet citizens were mobilized for the armed forces in the first eight days of the war. They were used to create new formations or to fill existing units, which were reconstituted and rearmed and sent back into the fray. To rally the USSR, Stalin declared the struggle to be the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, comparable to the war against Napoleon 130 years earlier.

At the outset of the war, Stalin appointed himself supreme commander and dominated Soviet military operations, ignoring the advice of his generals. Stalin’s disastrous decisions culminated in the debacle at Kiev in September 1941, in which 600,000 Soviet troops were lost because he refused to allow them to retreat. As a result, Stalin promoted Marshal Georgy Zhukov to second in command and from then on usually heeded the advice of his military commanders.

The Soviet Army once again lost ground during the summer of 1942, when a new German offensive completed the conquest of Ukraine and reached the Volga River at Stalingrad. In the fall of 1942 the Soviet Army began a counteroffensive, and by the end of February 1943 it had eliminated the German forces in Stalingrad and pushed the front several hundred miles back from the Volga. July 1943 saw the largest tank battle in history at Kursk, ending in a decisive German defeat. From then on the initiative passed to the Soviet side. The major campaign of 1944 was Operation Bagration, which liberated Belarus and carried the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw by July, in the process destroying German Army Group Center, a Soviet goal since January 1942. The final assault on Berlin began in April 1945 and culminated on May 3. The war in Europe ended that month, but a short campaign in China against Japan followed, beginning in August and ending in September 1945 with the Japanese surrender to the Allies.

THE COLD WAR

After the war, the armed forces demobilized to their prewar strength of about four million and were assigned to the occupation of Eastern Europe. Conscription remained in force. During the late 1950s, under Nikita Khrushchev, who stressed nuclear rather than conventional military power, the army’s strength was cut to around three million. Leonid Brezhnev restored the size of the armed force to more than four million. During the Cold War, pride of place in the Soviet military shifted to the newly created Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF), which controlled the ground-based nuclear missile forces. In addition to the SRF, the air force had bomber-delivered nuclear weapons and the navy had missile-equipped submarines. The army, with the exception of the airborne forces, became an almost exclusively motorized and mechanized force.

The Soviet army’s last war was fought in Afghanistan from December 1979 to February 1989. Brought in to save the fledgling Afghan communist government, which had provoked a civil war through its use of coercion and class conflict to create a socialist state, the Soviet army expected to defeat the rebels in a short campaign and then withdraw. Instead, the conflict degenerated into a guerilla war against disparate Afghan tribes that had declared a holy war, or jihad, against the Soviet army, which was unable to bring its strength in armor, artillery, or nuclear weapons to bear. The Afghan rebels, or mujahideen, with safe havens in neighboring Iran and Pakistan, received arms and ammunition from the United States, enabling them to prolong the struggle indefinitely. The Soviet high command capped the commitment of troops to the war at 150,000, for the most part treating it as a sideshow while keeping its main focus on a possible war with NATO. The conflict was finally brought to a negotiated end after the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, with nearly 15,000 men killed in vain.

Gorbachev’s policy of rapprochement with the West had a major impact on the Soviet armed forces. Between 1989 and 1991 their numbers were slashed by one million, with more cuts projected for the coming years. The defense budget was cut, the army and air force were withdrawn from Eastern Europe, naval ship building virtually ceased, and the number of nuclear missiles and warheads was reduced—all over the objections of the military high command. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, exposed the horrible conditions of service for soldiers, particularly the extent and severity of hazing, which contributed to a dramatic increase in desertions and avoidance of conscription. The prestige of the military dropped precipitously, leading to serious morale problems in the officer corps. Motivated in part by a desire to restore the power, prestige, and influence of the military in politics and society, the minister of defense, Dmitry Iazov, aided and abetted the coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. The coup failed when the commanders of the armored and airborne divisions ordered into Moscow refused to support it.

Why did the Soviet Air Force fail in 1941?

On June 22, 1941 the German aviation went bombing Soviet cities. Germany started a war against the USSR. Source: RIA Novosti

The Second World War marked both the launch of Russian military aviation, and its most difficult period. In 1941, the Soviet Air Force suffered a devastating defeat. In the first six months of the war, it lost nearly 70 percent of its combat aircraft. On June 22, the day of the outbreak of hostilities, the losses amounted to 1,200 aircraft, more than half of which did not even manage to get airborne.

The Germans also suffered serious losses during the same period – almost 4,000 aircraft, which exceeded the Luftwaffe's losses in all previous campaigns. But, nevertheless, the balance was not in favor of the Soviet side. The June 22 losses were a great shock for Soviet generals. After flying around his devastated airfields, the Belorusian Military District's air force commander committed suicide in despair.

The German air force - the Luftwaffe - was rightly considered the world's best. Due to their high fighting qualities, the Germans turned a threefold superiority in the Red Army's aviation to zero by winter, achieving numerical parity, which, considering the Luftwaffe's general qualitative superiority put them on the path toward air supremacy.

German pilots located targets using properly functioning tracking stations, which neutralized the tactical superiority of Soviet aviation on various sectors of the front. The Red Army's pilots showed great heroism, frequently ramming enemy planes, but all this could not reverse the overall situation.

Reasons for defeat
The Red Army had widely varying air assets. They included both new (for example, the Il-2, dubbed the "Flying Tank") and outdated machines - three times as many as new. However, even modern models had significant drawbacks: the quality of Soviet aircraft engines left much to be desired; the aircraft had poorly functioning radio communication. Soviet fighter plane armor was so vulnerable that even relatively weak machine guns mounted on German bombers could pierce it.

The training of flight personnel was provided on a just-in-time basis: pilots barely had time to learn how to operate their new machines. Shortly before the war, Soviet pilot schools had worked overtime, producing thousands of new pilots. The volumes of graduates were such that many were not made officers, so as not to inflate staff levels. Not all of the young pilots were professionals. This had already become clear during the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish War, when a small Finnish air force caused serious problems for Soviet aviation, despite its overwhelming numerical superiority.

Deep-rooted problems
However, the question of why 1941 was such a tragic year for the Soviet Air Force is more complicated. It should be borne in mind that the creation of a fully-fledged air force in the USSR began just 10 years before the war.

Aviation plants were often built on greenfield sites and had neither sufficient materials nor the necessary number of qualified engineers and workers. In addition, aviation is one of the most technically complex types of modern weapons. Its creation requires a developed chemical industry, electronics and metallurgy. All this was also created in the Soviet Union on a just-in-time basis.

Designers studied largely by trial and error. Disadvantages of aircraft engines limited their freedom of action, and attempts to solve them in the short term led to grave consequences. The lack of qualified commanding staff was a major problem.

Stalinist repression did not create the problem, but it certainly exacerbated it. Training and combat experience of the Soviet pilots were not at a high enough level and they were still absorbing lessons learned during combat on the side of Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War a few years earlier.

Developing Tactics for the Il-2

A sight feared by the Wehrmacht a flight of Il-2s race over the battlefield during a low-level attack in the autumn of 1941.

The Il-2 was central to VVS RKKA’s rearmament plans, with 11 attack aircraft regiments scheduled to be equipped with Shturmoviks within five frontline military districts by the end of 1941. Six other regiments deployed further from the front, and in the far eastern regions of the USSR, were to convert to the Il-2 by mid-1942.

In addition, eight short-range bomber regiments were to also have re-equipped with the type by early 1942. As of 22 June 1941, when Germany attacked the USSR, VVS RKKA attack aviation in the five military districts facing the invaders were operating 207 1-15bis and 193 1-153 fighters. These formations had received just 20 Il-2s by the time war broke out, five having been delivered to the Baltic Special Military District, eight to the Western Special Military District, five to the Caucasus Special Military District and two to the Odessa Military District. But not one had been included in the duty rosters of the units in what was soon to become the frontline. This was due to a lack of trained pilots.

4th BBAP (Blizhnebombardirovochniy Aviatsionniy Polk – Short-Range Bomber Air Regiment) of the Kharkov Military District was the only unit to have modern attack aircraft on strength on 22 June, having received 63 Il-2s, but its pilots had not yet fully converted onto the type. According to official sources, 60 pilots and 102 engineers had been trained to operate and maintain the Il-2 by 22 June, but none had returned to their frontline units by that fateful date.

And even if they had reached 4th BBAP prior to the German invasion, pilots had not received any instruction in Il-2 combat tactics since there was no manual to study! Pre-war tactics were totally unsuited to the Il-2, and did not exploit its capabilities to their fullest extent.

The fact was that the People’s Commissar of Defence had only signed the order for Il-2 combat tests on 31 May 1941. NII VVS (NauchnoIspitatelniy Institut Voenno- Vozdushnykh Sil- Air Force Scientific Testing Institute) issued the corresponding order on 20 June. By decree of the People’s Commissar of Defence, dated 17 May 1941, independent flight crews and flights of the Caucasus Special Military District were to complete Il-2 service testing by 15 July 1941.

In actuality, tactics for the Shturmovik had to be worked out in the crucible of war in the first year of the conflict in the east, with regiments bearing heavy losses in both pilots and aircraft during this period.

With all frontline Il-2 units attached to combined services armies, combined air divisions and reserve and attack air groups of the Supreme High Command General Headquarters, Air Force command was totally unable to maneuver its forces efficiently and focus its main efforts on the primary German lines of advance.

In the early months of the war, Il-2s operated in groups of three to five aircraft, with Shturmoviks attacking their targets one at a time from a minimum altitude of20-25 m (65-80 ft) up to 150-200 m (500-650 ft), using all their weapons in a single run over the target. Whatever the height at which they started their attack, pilots would always fire their guns and drop their bombs from low level. In the absence of enemy fighters or strong anti-aircraft defences, pilots would make two to three attack runs.

When operating at low level, Il-2 pilots could capitalise on the element of surprise to evade enemy fighters. Should they be intercepted close to the ground, invariably there was no room for effective combat maneuvering by the attacking fighters.

Low-level attacks were problematic for the Il-2 pilots as well, however, as they found navigating to and from the target area no easy proposition. The short time they spent over the latter also made it difficult for commanders to coordinate their individual attack runs effectively. Combat experience, and follow-up firing-range tests, demonstrated that low-level operations did not allow the Il-2 to capitalise on its capabilities. The fact was that such tactics were the wrong ones, and could only be justified by the small number of Il-2s then in service, and the poor organisation of escorting fighter units. Western Front Air Force headquarters put it this way in a directive dated 8 August 1941;
‘Il-2 attack aircraft suffer especially inept employment. Il-2 pilots are afraid of being shot down, and often unreasonably resort to low-level flight and lose their bearings, with the result that their missions fail.’

From August, therefore, in an effort to improve the effectiveness of attacks on small targets, groups of Il-2s were led by a mission controller in a Sukhoi Su-2, a Petlyakov Pe-2 or a fighter. They would designate the target by dropping bombs or AZh-2 incendiary spheres on it.

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The Afghanistan Air War

Following the Soviet Union’s direct intervention into Afghanistan in December 1979, the war escalated rapidly, culminating in large battles involving massive use of tactical aircraft.

Soviet interest in Afghanistan dates back many years, and Russian involvement even longer. In the middle of the last century, this rugged, mountainous country was the scene of much of the `Great Game’ between the expanding empire of the Tsars and the imperial might of the UK. At stake were the riches of British India, and the fer­vent Russian desire for a warm-water open-ocean port. While the successors to the Tsars are un­likely to want to conquer India today, they would certainly like to see the subcontinent and South West Asia fall into their sphere of influence. Afghanistan and neighbouring Iran both have long, common borders with the USSR and she would become paranoid if either became (one again, in the case of Iran) a military satellite of the USA. And, of course, beyond these two buffer states lies the Persian Gulf, highway of the Western world’s most vital commodity, namely oil.

In 1978, the Afghan monarchy was overthrown, but the new republican government under General Mohammad Daud remained on friendly terms with Moscow. Aid continued, and the armed forces acquired large amounts of new Soviet equipment. The air force in particular was strengthened: by the end of the 1970s it had strength of over 180 combat aircraft, including Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17, MiG-19 and MiG-21 fighters, Sukhoi Su-7BM close-support aircraft and Ilyushin 11-28 bombers.

In spite of this, it was army and air force officers who led the April 1978 coup which saw Daud dead and power in the hands of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) under Mohammad Nur Taraki. The hard-left PDPA was itself split into the Khalq faction (under Taraki) and the Par­cham faction under Babrak Karmal. This division was reflected in the armed forces, particularly the army. Unfortunately for the PDPA, this weaken­ing of central rule and of the instrument by which that rule is enforced created just the kind of situa­tion on which the fiercely independent Afghan hill tribesman thrives. Historically, when central power has been weak, the tribes have gone their own way and in 1978, inflamed by a hastily enacted Marxist land reform programme, their way was rebellion.

March 1979 saw the rebels strong enough to seize the western city of Herat, massacring hun­dreds of government soldiers in the process. Un­fortunately, the mob also slaughtered about 30 Soviet advisers together with their families.

There must have been pressure within the Soviet Politburo to make an intervention at that moment. After all, there were over 1,000 Soviet advisers in Afghanistan, and they and their families were at risk. The immediate action taken did not go so far: Army General Yepishev during a visit to Kabul arranged to bolster the regime with an agreement to supply 100 T-62 tanks and 18 Mil Mi-24 ‘Hind’ assault helicopters. Outsize items such as tanks and artillery were brought into Kabul by the giant Antonov An-22 ‘Cock’ transport aircraft. A guerrilla attack on the base at Shindand convinced the Soviets that more assistance would be required, and a further 18 ‘Hinds’ were supplied, including some potent `Hind-D’ gunships.

Intervention by Agreement

Further guerrilla attacks during that summer, including an attack on Bagram during which Pathan rebels claimed three MiG-21s shot down, seemed to be the start of an inexorable slide into anarchy. Worse, to Soviet eyes, was the fact that many of the rebels seemed motivated by the spirit of Islamic fundamentalism which had so recently top­pled the Shah of Iran. The prospect of a second Khomeini-style theocracy on the borders of the Soviet Central Asian republics (with their large Moslem populations) could be seen as a threat to the cohesion of the USSR itself. Fortunately, the USSR and Afghanistan had signed a mutual friend­ship treaty in December 1978, article four of which states ‘…when the security of contracting parties was endangered they would take appro­priate measures …’. This, in the Soviet view, gave them the legal right to intervene and restore stability, Soviet style, on its southern border.

Whilst the Moslems of Afghanistan will have seen little significance in the date, the mass mili­tary entry into their country took place according to classic Soviet doctrine. After prepositioning troops a few weeks before at the air base granted to them at Bagram and Shindand, the initial Soviet mass airlift of some 6,000 combat soldiers in 300 transport aircraft movements took place over the period 24-26 December 1979, when the entire Christian world was politically and militarily im­potent. Simultaneously, up to 15,000 troops advanced from the Soviet border with armour and air support elements of MiG-21 ‘Fishbed’ fighter-bombers and Mi-24 ‘Hind’ transport and gunship helicopters. When the West returned to normal after Christmas, it found itself facing a fait accompli.

Sledgehammer Ineffective

Not so the fiercely independent Afghans who, aided by deserters from the local army, put up strong resistance in the country areas. During the months following the invasion, ‘Hind-A’ and the more heavily armed ‘Hind-D’ helicopters were using armament such as 57-mm (2.24-in) rockets against guerrillas, whilst Mi-8 ‘Hip’ helicopters (some of them from the nominally civilian airline, Aeroflot) provided logistic support. Realising the strength of opposition, Soviet leaders ordered a build-up of the supply airlift from home bases, aug­menting the workhorse Antonov An-12 ‘Cub’ force with Ilyushin 11-76 ‘Candid’ and giant Antonov An-22 ‘Cock’ transports. In order to relieve government forces under siege at Ishkashin, a paratroop force of 5,000 men was deployed.

The Afghan air force has remained loyal to the pro-Moscow puppet government in Kabul, so that there are no tales to be told of air-to-air combat against Soviet Frontal Aviation. Rather, the con­flict involved close-air support of the army against guerrilla strongholds, often with helicopters as the prime air weapon. High-performance combat air­craft have had their part to play, though pitting a Mach 2 Sukhoi Su-24 ‘Fencer’ against ragged hill tribesmen is akin to, the proverbial case of taking a sledgehammer to a nut and missing.

A brief recorded appearance of the Afghan air force was in February 1980, when MiG-21 and Mi-24 machines (the latter armed with AT-3 ‘Sag­ger’ anti-tank missiles), overflew Kabul during a national strike. Later Afghan MiG-17 ‘Frescoes’, MiG-21, and Mi-24s took part in raids on the Pakis­tan border area, over which countless Afghan refugees and guerrillas had fled.

Helicopters: a Vital Resource.

Early 1980 set the pattern for subsequent years as Soviet troops prepared for the spring offensive, amid claims from the USA that they were using chemical and biological weapons against the Muja­hideen guerrillas, mostly fired in 57-mm rocket rounds from Mi-8s and Mi-24s.

Without the helicopter gunship, the Soviets may have withdrawn years earlier. Its firepower and mobility and initial invulnerability put the guerrillas on the defensive. The Soviets used helicopters extensively and ruthlessly against the unprotected guerrillas. But like all innovations in war, this advantage also did not last long. The guerrillas adapted. They fought at night when the helicopter was least effective. Guerrilla intelligence discovered the time and location of planned Soviet attacks and set up air defense ambushes and dug protective bunkers. The guerrillas received newer and more powerful weapons which they used against the helicopters.

During May, Mi-24s were first seen with rearward-facing machine guns fitted in response to the guerrilla tactic of allowing helicopters to overfly their con­cealed positions before opening fire. Partner of the ‘Hind’ in the helicopter war is the Mil Mi-8 ‘Hip’, which has appeared in both assault and attack versions.

The scale of operations had increased suffi­ciently by August 1980 to involve up to 28 Mi-24s at a time as usual, with Mi-8s in close attendance in a move to crush a mutiny by Afghan troops at Ghanzi, and the guerrillas gained a major propa­ganda victory during the same month when they shot down an An-12 as it was approaching Kabul airport. At first the prime anti-aircraft weapon had been the twin-barrel 20-mm cannon, but further armaments were quickly made available through Pakistan from sources as diverse as Saudi Arabia, China, Iran and Egypt. The Chinese were particu­larly helpful in supplying Soviet-style SA-7 ‘Grail’ shoulder-launched SAMs, whilst Egypt may also have delivered similar weapons amongst the ex-Soviet equipment which it sold to the CIA for onward transmission from the first moment of con­flict. The successes of the SA-7 have been varied, and many Soviet aircraft dispensed flares whilst operating close to the ground to decoy the heat? seeking missile. Some ‘old-timer’ Mujahideen gave up their SA-7s whilst attacking helicopters for a more traditional weapon, namely the elephant gun!

A year after the Soviet army arrived in Afghan­istan, its force of Mi-24s had increased fourfold to 240 and six airfields were reported to be under construction for further consolidation (and, claimed the USA, to provide a springboard for sub­sequent adventures farther to the south). Heli­copter gunships proved themselves the most suit­able aircraft for close support, being used to drop small parties after the landing zone had been cleared by the aircraft’s guns. Gunships were also important for clearing side valleys of resistance as Soviet ground forces pushed up main valleys.

‘Frogfoot’ identified

Western intelligence had previously identified a Soviet parallel to the Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt and dubbed it `Ram-J’ until it became better known as the Sukhoi Su-25 `Frogfoot’. A trial deployment is said to have been made as far back as 1980, but the type was most certainly used in the spring offensive. Working in conjunction with the Mi-24, this jet attack aircraft experi­mented with methods of co-ordinating the two dis­parate types, and the results will doubtless be noted for potential use in the Western theatre.

Superior Soviet firepower represented by armoured vehicles and aircraft failed to subdue re­sistance, and even the occasional MiG-23 ‘Flog­ger’ was being claimed as shot down by guerrillas. During the siege of Khost, late in 1983, An-12 transports were forced to make some 150-180 sorties per week to supply the garrison. Other An-12s have had to make paradrops of supplies.

This was a disturbing development for the Soviets as the Mujahideen had previously re­treated to their strongholds for the winter. The remedy was seen to be more Mi-8s, MiGs and Su-25s, which had arrived by early 1984, and new tactics of suppression. Twice, early in the year, helicopter gunships indiscriminately strafed and bombed Istalef as a punishment for the village har­bouring guerrillas, whilst a comparatively large force (estimated as 120 Mi-8s) supported 300 tanks moving against Najrab. At the same time, the occupying element had grown to 135,000 men to compensate for an estimated two-thirds deser­tion by the local army.

Air assault tactics and helicopter gunship tactics changed and improved steadily throughout the war. However, the Soviet never brought in enough helicopters and air assault forces to perform all the necessary missions and often squandered these resources on unnecessary missions. Helicopter support should have been part of every convoy escort, but this was not always the case. Dominant terrain along convoy routes should have been routinely seized and held by air assault forces, yet this seldom occurred. Soviet airborne and air assault forces were often the most successful Soviet forces in closing with the resistance, yet airborne and air assault forces were usually under strength. Air assault forces were often quite effective when used in support of a mechanized ground attack. Heliborne detachments would land deep in the rear and flanks of Mujahideen strongholds to isolate them, destroy bases, cut LOCs and block routes of withdrawal. The ground force would advance to link up with the heliborne forces. Usually, the heliborne force would not go deeper than supporting artillery range or would take its own artillery with it. However, the Soviets sometimes inserted heliborne troops beyond the range of supporting artillery and harvested the consequences. And, although the combination of heliborne and mechanized forces worked well at the battalion and brigade level, the Soviet preference for large scale operations often got in the way of tactical efficiency. Ten, large, conventional offensives involving heliborne and mechanized forces swept the Pandshir Valley with no lasting result.

Over the Soviet border, 36 Tupolev Tu-16 `Badger’ bombers and 100 lighter strike aircraft (including Su-24s) took their positions in southern bases during mid-March. A month later, on 20 April, they launched the spring offensive in the guerrilla-controlled Panjshir valley with a series of mass bombing attacks, whilst helicopters flew some 100 sorties per day in follow-up operations. Rotary-wing strength had by now reached about 340, and these were operating at higher altitudes following several successes by Mujahideen using small arms. The introduction of level bombers for counter-insurgency is reminiscent of Malaya and Vietnam.

Airborne Command

As well as the Su-25, the USSR had tried out many other new weapons in Afghanistan. For example, 500-kg (1,102-lb) incendiary bombs proved particularly successful at destroying rebel villages, which burned for days following an air strike. Helicopter-sowed mines were also intro­duced, and these denied the Mujahideen their transport routes. An-12s have been used as airborne command posts in a way similar to the C-130 ABCCC used in Vietnam. Reports from India sug­gest that the ‘Mainstay’ airborne early warning version of the 11-76 transport, carrying its radar in a large rotodome above the rear fuselage, akin to the West’s Grumman E-2 and Boeing E-3, were used along the Pakistani border to provide warning of any impending interception from that country’s General Dynamics F-16 fighters.

Soviet penetration into Pakistan was wide­spread, as both air and ground forces adopted ‘hot pursuit’ tactics to follow bands of rebels across the loosely-defined border in those areas of Pakistan from which they operate. MiGs and F-16s have battled in the air more than once, several MiGs and one F-16 falling. Previously rebels had operated from Iran, but Tehran tried to stop this for fear of Soviet retribution following a particularly deep and heavy ‘hot pursuit’ strike in 1982.

In 1988, in the new Soviet era of peace and politi­cal reform, the Red Army and its attendant aircraft began the long and perilous retreat along the Salang highway back to the Soviet Union, leaving President Najibullah and the Afghan army to face the now co-ordinated Mujahideen. Soviet equipment losses for the entire war included 118 jets, 333 helicopters. Initially the rebels were successful, moving close to Kabul, Kandahar and Jalalabad.

Finally, the guerrillas received the Stinger shoulder-launched air defense missile-a very effective weapon against low flying aircraft. The masterful employment of Stinger by the Afghan freedom fighters heavily tilted the balance in favor of the Mujahideen.

However, dissension amongst the different factions allowed the govern­ment to regain lost ground, and even with the use of deadly Stinger missiles, the Mujahideen have been occasionally routed by Afghan air force air­craft. MiGs, Sukhois and ‘Hinds’ continue to pin down guerrillas surrounding the cities, and by the autumn of 1989 the situation was one of stalemate. Aeroflot and Soviet air force transports continued to supply Kabul, and the crippling shortages of early in the year have been eased considerably.

The Kuban Air Battles

P-39D-2 "White 37" of Guards Snr.Lt. V.I. Fadeev, CO of the 3-rd Squadron, 16 GIAP. Kuban', April-May, 1943

Major air campaign that marked the shift from German to Soviet air superiority on the Eastern Front during World War II. During April and May 1943, as the Germans struggled for their last North Caucasus foothold, Luftflotte 4 (Fourth Air Force) clashed with the Soviet 4 and 5 Air Armies, the Black Sea Fleet Aviation, and Long Range Aviation. Air activity was intense, often seeing as many as 100 air combats a day.

German forces began with about 900 aircraft, including the latest models of the Bf 109G and the Hs 129, and featured some of their top units, including Jagdgeschwader 52 with Erich Hartmann. The Soviets began with about 600 aircraft, swelling to 1,150 in May. The Soviets also committed their newest aircraft, including the first use in the south of the Douglas A-20, as well as the Bell P-39D, flown by Aleksandr Pokryshkin’s air division.

The Soviets showed a new aggressiveness in flying offensive fighter sweeps, and they introduced new tactics, including German-style four-plane formations and Pokryshkin’s Kuban Ladder, a stacked formation. Also playing a distinguished role was the Soviet women’s night-bomber regiment. The campaign ended suddenly on 7 June, at which point the Soviets had claimed 1,100 German aircraft destroyed; the Germans claimed 2,280 victories, but the tide of the air war had turned against them.

References Hardesty, Von. Red Phoenix: The Rise of Soviet Air Power, 1941–1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982.