Fighter Pilots: Cover Me, I'm Attacking!

“They’re the ones who go into battle—alas, in life everything was far worse than in this great film. After the defeat of Soviet aviation in the summer of 1941, when the Germans took full control of the skies and our air regiments burned to the ground in a matter of weeks, after the hardest defeats and catastrophic losses—graduates of training schools came in to replace the fallen, with a total flight time of less than 20 hours, and they almost had no chance of becoming “old hands.” How they stood up against the aces of the Luftwaffe, and at what cost they managed to turn the situation around, so that in the end they became the masters of the sky—only the “Stalin’s falcons” themselves know. And yet, although no one would dare call them “suicide men” or insult them by comparing them to kamikazes, among those who received their combat baptism in 1941–1942, only a few made it to Victory. In the NEW BOOK by a leading military historian, you’ll see the Great Patriotic War from the cockpit of a Soviet fighter: how many kilograms the pilot lost in every combat sortie, and what swearing was heard over the air during a battle; how the heart freezes after the order “COVER, ATTACK!” and how the eyes darken from the overload when leaving an attack; what is worse—fighting “on verticals” with “Messerschmitts” and “Focke-Wulfs,” breaking up the formation of German bomber squadrons bristling with anti-aircraft fire, or covering “pawns” and “hunchbacks” that climb into the very inferno; what it’s like to burn in a shot-down machine and make a forced landing “on the belly”; how the “Stalin’s falcons” lived, died, and won—and what price was paid for every victorious star on the fuselage…