Fighter Pilots. "Cover Me, I'm Attacking!"

“Only old men went into battle”—alas, in life everything was far more terrifying than in that great film. After the defeat of Soviet aviation in the summer of 1941, when the Germans gained complete dominance in the air and our aviation regiments burned down to the ground in a matter of weeks, after the hardest defeats and catastrophic losses, graduates of training schools were sent in to replace the fallen—young men with a total flight experience of less than 20 hours, who almost had no chance of becoming “old men.” How did they stand up against the aces of the Luftwaffe? At what cost did they turn the tide, so that in the end they became masters of the sky? Only the very “Stalin’s falcons” themselves know.

But although no one would dare call them “suicide bombers” or insult them with a comparison to kamikazes—in those who took their first combat flights in 1941–1942, only a few survived until Victory.

In this NEW book, leading military historian you will see the Great Patriotic War from the cockpit of a Soviet fighter—you’ll learn how many kilograms the pilot lost in each combat sortie and what kind of language was on the air during combat; how the heart freezes after the command “COVER, ATTACK!” and the eyes darken from the overload on the way out of the attack; what is worse—fighting “on verticals” with “Messerschmitts” and “Focke-Wulfs,” breaking the formation of German bomber squadrons bristling with anti-air fire, or covering “peas” and “hunchbacks” that dive into the very furnace; what it’s like to burn in a hit machine and make a forced landing “on the belly”; how “Stalin’s falcons” lived, died, and won—and what price was paid for every victory star on the fuselage…