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Russian pilots flew like Cossacks. They liked to toss off bottles of vodka, hurtle down the runway, take off simply by hauling up their wheels. In combat, Red flight leaders flew above and behind their men to make sure no one shied away. They were never the finely honed flyers Germany had for her Luftwaffe (the average life of a Stormovik pilot was seven missions), but there were always plenty to take the place of those who died.
More important, a handful of talented Russian aircraft designers—led by Mikoyan, Lavochkin and Yakovlev—rose to the occasion, producing fighters that were rugged and maneuverable, though still second-rate planes by German and U.S. standards. The best ones were derived from Western models. But in tactical air, the defense-conscious Russians took a back seat to no one. One of the best ground attack planes of World War II, the armor-plated Stormovik, came off the drawing board of another Russian, Sergei Iliushin. German Panzer divisions called it "the black death." In one ten-day period, the Stormoviks knocked out over 400 Nazi tanks. The Russians also learned to build planes in a hurry. By 1945, Russia's factories were turning them out at the rate of 40,000 a year, and her first-line air strength rose to 20,000 planes.
U.S. Air Chief Hoyt Vandenberg, then Deputy Chief of Air Staff, went to Moscow to explain strategic bombing to the Russians and convince them that it was worthwhile. Today, he sighs, "maybe I did too good a job." The Russians put on a great show of being disinterested in Vandenberg's photos of gutted Nazi factories. "All altitudes above 15 feet over the tree tops is wasted," they said. But in the battle for Berlin, when the Luftwaffe had already been crippled by the R.A.F. and the U.S. Air Force, the Russians proved that they had been listening. For 60 days, Russian artillery and 100 Soviet air armies (about 12,000 planes) rained down shells and bombs on Berlin, At war's end, the Red army marched in over a city of rubble.
Coffee & Old Rags. High among the prizes snatched from Germany by the victorious Russians were the newfangled Nazi jets. Red pilots reported speeds up to 500 m.p.h., no vibration, no yawing torque.
For Russia, with its backward industry and limited oil reserves, the jets are an answer to a Communist prayer. Jets are rugged, have fewer moving parts, only a few of which have to be machined to fine piston-engine tolerances. They do not necessarily need high-octane gas, but fly on kerosene, wood alcohol, or, as one U.S. officer puts it, even "on coffee or old rags." The NKVD was instructed to round up everyone in Germany who knew how to build jets. U.S. and British bombers had done the Russians an unintentional favor by making the Nazis push their factories deeper into Eastern Germany. A few German plane builders escaped, but 80% of the Nazi aircraft industry—then well ahead of the U.S. on jet development—was whisked behind the Iron Curtain. The Russians got Designer Sigfrid Günther of Heinkel; they moved the Junkers works to Kuibyshev. The V-2 laboratories and factories at Peenemunde were carted away to help Russian rocket research. Dozens of the new Messerschmitt-262 jet fighters were shipped off to Russia.