Air Fronts: Theaters of Operation - European Theater of Operation: Hubert Griffith - R.A.F. in Russia - 1. Design of an Expedition
R.A.F. IN RUSSIA; by HUBERT GRIFFITH; DEDICATED TO WING-COMMANDER H. N. G. ISHERWOOD, D.F.C., A.F.C., Order of Lenin, and MAJOR - GENERAL KUZNETSOV, Red Air Force ; to the Fighter-Boys of No. 151 Wing, R.A.F. and to their Soviet opposite numbers. LONDON 1942.
CHAPTER I - DESIGN OF AN EXPEDITION
DECEMBER morning. A grey day over Murmansk Sound, in the northernmost point of North Russia. The landscape is an endless blend of grey against grey - the waters of the Sound grey almost to black, the grey shape of a British cruiser lying out in midstream, the low desolate hillsides that lock the Sound a lighter grey (in a thaw lately the dazzling whiteness of the snow of a few days ago has turned to grey slush with the grey under-rock showing through it), and the sky above is thick with hurrying grey clouds heavy with more snow. About as desolate a scene as could be found anywhere inside the Arctic Circle.
Troops are going aboard the cruiser, the last detachment of " No. 151 Wing, R.A.F." the main body of which is being withdrawn and embarking, as its work has come to an end. A couple of English Hurricanes are cutting about through the driving clouds, visible one minute as dark grey silhouettes, lost the next.
There need have been nothing remarkable about this. For months past the sky over Murmansk has been streaked with British Hurricanes, flown at first by British fighter pilots, then, in increasing numbers, by Russian fighter pilots. It might easily be any patrol of the countless patrols carried out from Vianga aerodrome lately. But it is a specialized operational patrol, designed to give cover in case German aircraft, operating from behind a line only about fifteen miles away, think of coming over to speed the parting guests with a few bombs, or ranging the German gunners on them. In view of the conditions —the dense clouds that hang the sky-any such German raid is an extreme unlikelihood, almost an impossibility. But the patrol has been arranged, and the arrangement is kept to. Partly for the sake of safety (because it is as well to take nothing for granted), partly out of courtesy, partly as a farewell flicker of fun - the patrol is being flown by Major-General Kuznetzov, of the Russian Fleet Air-Aim, the first Russian to fly a British Hurricane three months ago and the commander of that sector of the front since the day the British Wing arrived, and by Captain Safonov (now Colonel Safonov), Russian air-ace, and " Hero of the Soviet Union," the possessor of a distinction equivalent to our own V.C.
It was the end of the British Wing's mission. And it was a convincing and off-the-record tribute to the mission's success - a Major-General, and a pilot of the equivalent celebrity of our own Mallan or Nicholson, think that it would be a nice idea personally to fly the last patrol above our heads, as the Soviet equivalent of " God speed " to the journey. It was a symbol and a gesture. Wars are not won by " symbols " and " gestures," but as between Allies on the battle-field they can help it along encouragingly.
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A short, informed, but not-too-official record of the doings of No. 151 Wing, R.A.F. in North Russia may be of some interest to the general public. In the first place it must be stated that the Expedition was a small one, with a definite and limited task to perform - it was an " interlude," and " episode," rather than an even minor campaign. It was a " short story," with a beginning, a middle, and a planned end ; rather than having anything in it of the broad epic sweep of the " Battle of Britain " or the epic told in " Bomber Command." From its very nature - its transience, the limited number of officers and airmen that took part in it - it formed a more or less family-party, a small number of men sent out to do a particular job in company with their Russian opposite numbers ; and in consequence individual character and individual personality stood out and became important - formed, in fact, the very texture of the Expedition - as they could never have done if events included the year-long movements of army-corps and armies. The episode of the first Russian officer flying the first Hurricane was in its way as important a " peak " to the Expedition as any actual engagement in which the Wing took part.
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To summarize the intended and the achieved activities of the Wing, then : - the Wing was formed in England in the last days of July, 1941, to go out to Russia for two purposes. First - and the most important - was to teach our new Allies how to fly, erect, and maintain Hurricane aircraft. England was in process of sending out some hundreds of Hurricanes as one of our early instalments of aid, and it was obvious that these would have been useless as a contribution unless they could be taken over on arrival by a very large body of trained Russian personnel - trained not only to fly them (a matter of only a few days instruction to crack pilots), but trained, as ground-staffs, to un-crate them, assemble them, take them to pieces again as the necessity arose, and in general, to " service " and overhaul them and all their wireless and technical equipment, with expert and practised skill. All aircraft and all aero-engines that take the sky obey the same general principles - but it was this specialized know-ledge of a particular and complicated type that it was the Wing's first business to provide.
Luckily, it was a job that was able to go forward quite ceaselessly and without intermission from the day that the Wing landed. The Wing Engineer-Officer and the Wing Wireless-Officer (and their interpreters and interpretresses) were among the hardest-worked members of the Wing. The Russians had got together a collection of extremely able technicians to undergo this instruction (knowing that these in their turn would have to pass on their knowledge to countless other cadres of other units), and once they got started there was no stopping them. They worked, in the words of our own Commanding Officer, " LIKE HELL." One of them surprised his tutor by getting 98 per cent. in a written exam.-paper - and that on an engine that he had only known for a few weeks, and through the always difficult medium of interpreted instruction.
The second, more spectacular though less basic, part of the job of the Wing was to try, as far as adverse conditions allowed, to give an exhibition of the destructive qualities of the twelve-gun Hurricane in action - in other words, to shoot down Huns.
Conditions, as had probably been foreseen by the higher authorities, made this more than difficult. To begin with, the base selected was an aerodrome slightly north of Murmansk, and Murmansk itself is roughly 170 miles north of the line of the Arctic Circle. (The choice was obviously dictated by such needs as being near to the port of disembarkation, getting the Wing into action quickly, as it was already so late in the year, and others of a like nature. If the interested reader asks why the Wing was not pushed straight down to Central or Southern Russia, where the weather and climate might have been better, a word or so on Russian transport, distances, and rail-communication later in the narrative will enlighten him. It took one section of the Wing personnel three days and nights to get by train from Archangel to Murmansk, a distance of only three hundred miles as the crow flies : and certain Wing stores took fourteen days to do the same distance. . . .)
Being so far north, meant that snow came down early in the year, and snow-blizzards and continuous days of non-flying weather became a frequency. Being so far north meant that the temperature during the stay fell to as low as 27 degrees (Fahrenheit) below freezing ; and, again for the same reason, before the end of the stay the days had shortened to no more than two or three hours of daylight. In all the circumstances, it might have been better flying-weather, and it might even have been worse. In the event, there were about five or six days on which full contact with the enemy was possible by offensive-patrols.
In those five or six days, fifteen German aircraft were shot down by our Hurricane pilots for certain, many others either certainly damaged or probably destroyed, for the loss of only one of our own.
If these figures - of fifteen-to-one in certain victories, leaving out the " probables " altogether - seem to a lay reader to be calculated on a scale that is either flattering or almost fantastic, he can be told exactly how they were calculated from a single instance :
Late one afternoon, " B " Flight, 81 Squadron, had come down from a patrol, claiming three victories. Two of these were unexceptionable. There was no possible doubt about them. They had been seen by independent witnesses to crash into the ground, and the wreckages had been identified on the ground. About the third there was a dispute. The young Scottish pilot who had engaged the third aircraft swore that he had got to close quarters, had squirted his twelve guns into it in a long, close-range burst of fire, and had only desisted when he had seen the enemy machine go down in an out-of-control spin in a cloud near the ground. His story was confirmed, in detail, by his flight-commander, a pilot of long experience. But it was the Squadron Leader, a pilot of even greater experience, who had to give the decision on what claim to put in to Intelligence :and his comment on hearing the story was : " Yes . . . but they can take an awful lot of lead and still get away with it ; we'll only have to claim him a ` probable.' "
The encounter then, was entered in the records as a " probable," and the matter would have finished there. It was only the next morning, when the wreckage of the third enemy machine had been definitely identified on the ground, that the claim was allowed to go forward as a certain victory.
And as regards the " probables," seeing that the country was wide and wild and almost incredibly uninhabited - and moreover studded with lakes--it is highly likely that many of the " probables," either through falling into a lake or simply through falling into an uninhabited district as large as an English county, could never be claimed as certainties because there was no one there to confirm them.
The record of fifteen-to-one stands, therefore, as an under-statement rather than an exaggeration. And of the rest of the Wing flying, the escorts to Russian bombers that our pilots were asked to do more and more towards the end of the stay, between 30 and 40 in all, there is this to be said - and it was said by a Russian bomber-pilot : " When the Hurricanes are escorting us, we never even bother to look up overhead. We concentrate on going straight on to our objectives." There could be no higher praise of one Ally by another. During all the time of the escort-patrols, the Wing never lost a Russian bomber. . . .
On the whole, in its way, both in its teaching and in its demonstration, the Expedition was a small classic of a manoeuvre. It would be interesting to have access to Russian confidential reports on the matter ; but it is difficult to believe that, in the ticklish business of first liaison with a new Ally, we would have been found in any major matter to have put a foot wrong.
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So much for the technical aspect of the expedition. But, as always, there remained a lot else. As always, character, minor event, irrelevant incident, jokes, non-sense, and the sheer surprise of the unexpected and significant, stand out as much as any major happenings. Members of the Wing do remember, very vividly, one of our bomber-escorts landing after it had been " jumped " by the enemy, and had turned and fought its way out, shooting down three Huns in the process. But they remember almost equally vividly the Russian General arriving for a business conference, and bringing with him a baby-reindeer as a present for our Commanding-Officer ; and our C.O. dashing about in the snow with the reindeer before returning to resume serious work ; and the cheerful laughter, at all times and on all occasions, of certain young pilot-officers echoing down the corridors of the gaunt barrack building that was our officers'-quarters and that we called the " Kremlin " ; and the walks across the gleaming snow among the silver-birch trees to the Mess for meals ; and the Russian steam-baths in the local wooden-built Russian village ; and the friendliness and co-operation of ninety-nine per cent. of every hundred Russians that we met--if it were said a hundred per cent. it would not be far wrong.
And we remember also a farewell lunch-party given by our C.O. in the " Kremlin." There were present the Russian General of Aviation who had been responsible for us during the whole of our stay, and a British Admiral, and several high British Naval officers ; and we remember the toasts, our own C.O. giving, in very few words, the health of Joseph Stalin, and the grey-headed, spare-built Russian General giving " the King "—and remember feeling that this was an occasion, light in its way, but of extraordinary significance.
For these were no speeches of mere politicians - lipservice, politeness, " tact," call it what you will ; but the words of commanding-officers in the field - men who had had to rely on one another and trust one another, to the extent of life-and-death, for several months past.
The Russian General, if he had given mistaken orders to the Wing, might by his commands have jeopardized the lives of English pilots. Our own pilots, with their own lives, had protected the lives of Russian bomber-pilots. One does not get meaningless phrases talked between men who have collaborated in the field. The short speeches represented the culmination of something that had taken months for its building up.
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The following narrative is mostly-in diary form. It gives the day-to-day happenings of the Wing, from its first (slightly dazed) assembling at a Yorkshire aerodrome in August, its voyage and re-assembling (for it arrived by different and various routes) at its aerodrome in Russia ; the months that followed ; what we ate, how we lived, what the Russians said to us, and what we - as far as language allowed - tried to say to the Russians ; the place we lived in ; and our mode of life.
If it is unimportant, we can only say that we were the first of all British Air Forces to arrive in Russia - we were unique and unprecedented in our own way ; and that for this reason alone, most of us found it interesting.
