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Evgeniy Mariinskiy, a Soviet fighter ace and Hero of the Soviet Union, shot down 20 enemy planes in aerial combat over the Eastern Front between 1943 and 1945. He frequently engaged enemy fighters and bombers, shot down many but was himself shot down several times. This is his extraordinary story. His vivid inside view of the ruthless war in the air on the Eastern Front gives a rare insight into the reality of fighting and tactics of the Red Army Air Force. In his own words, and with a remarkable clarity of recall, Evgeniy Mariinskiy describes what combat was like in the air, face to face with a skilled, deadly and increasingly desperate enemy. The reader can follow his career from an unskilled novice who has just arrived at his regiment through to him becoming an ace, and Hero of the Soviet Union, under the leadership of experienced commanders. The terrifying moments of action, engagements with enemy fighters, forced landings, nervous strain before attacks, loss of comrades and everyday life of pilots - all these aspects of a Soviet fighter pilot's experience during the Great Patriotic War are brought dramatically to life in his memoirs. In his memoirs Mariinskiy describes tactics which enabled him to have an upper hand in dogfights against experienced German pilots. The grand strategy of the campaigns across the Eastern Front is less important here than the sequence of engagements that were the firsthand experience of the author. It is this close-up view of combat that makes Evgeniy Mariinskiy's reminiscences of such value. Key sales points: A gripping and superbly readable memoir of the war in the air over the Eastern Front 1943-45, penned by a Hero of the Soviet Union and air ace credited with 20 victories / Covers the author's full aviation career including training and his initial experiences over the front, as well as his increasingly successful combat with a skilled enemy / Evgeniy Mariinskiy served with the 129th Guards Fighter Regiment 1943-45, undertaking 210 sorties, participating in 60 air-to-air engagements and shooting down 20 enemy aircraft. In 1945 he was awarded the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union.… (more)
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Red Star Airacobra is the memoir of Soviet fighter ace (20 victories) Evgeniy Mariinskiy. I can’t find out when the original Russian edition was published – it was obviously After Stalin but Before Glasnost. The guy with the mustache is never even mentioned, the Airacobra receives praise for its good cockpit design and visibility and heavy armor and armament (“praising American equipment”, according to Solzhenitsyn, got you an immediate trip to the gulag while Stalin was alive), but the other side is still “Hitlerite carrion crows” and Evgeniy anguishes that he won’t be accepted to The Party because his father was a Tsarist officer.
As might be expected, Soviet war stories are not all that terribly different from American or British – or, for that matter, German – ones. War is long period of boring routine punctuated by brief moments of utter terror. When not flying, the boys (Evgeniy hasn’t turned 21 when he goes on his first mission) drink homemade hooch, flirt with the ladies (there being somewhat more opportunities to do this in the Red Army), talk trash, and sleep. Annoyingly, air combat isn’t very well described. This isn’t Evgeniy’s fault; it’s a terrible translation. Whoever did it has no knowledge of English language military – or even civilian – aviation terms; thus combat maneuvers are almost completely unintelligible; for example, Evgeniy uses “the lever” instead of “the stick” and when a plane is “spiraling” it’s in a spin. Fortunately, the Soviet Airacobra flyers usually use easy to understand and brutally simple tactics – get in range of the enemy and pound him with the 37mm cannon. Initially, Evgeniy’s unit flies a lot of bomber escort missions, with the strategy being just to keep German fighters away from the Pe-2’s rather than trying to shoot them down; latter he’s intercepting German bombers trying to break up Soviet river bridgeheads and most of his victories are against Ju-87s and Hs-123s. He doesn’t have much good to say about German pilots, who are typically described as unwilling to engage unless they have overwhelming superiority. Late in the war he encounters the pilot of an Fw-190 he’d shot down amidst a group of POWs – and punches the man in the face.
No maps, alas – it’s very hard to understand exactly where Evgeniy is (to be fair, sometimes he isn’t sure himself), although most of the action takes place in the Ukraine and Romania. There are a number of photographs, mostly of Evgeniy and his buddies; in posed pictures they all have that peculiar Soviet WWII look, as if their face had just been chemically peeled and they were wearing undershorts made of reclaimed wood fiber – but there are some candids where the young men could be Americans or Brits or Germans.
Free from the Kindle store, and worth it; I wouldn’t pay the $50 list for the hardcover version unless you’re a compulsive collector of WWII militaria.