Word: pokryshkins
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...week all around for high-scoring Allied flyers. The Russians announced that two more Red pilots, a Lieut. Gulayev and a Captain Richkalov, had equalled Major Alexander Pokryshkin...
Because of apparently different standards, the Allied records are lower. The top Allied ace, Russia's Major Alexander Pokryshkin (TIME, May 15), is credited with 53, he said last week. (No Westerner rightly knows how Russian airmen's scores are figured.) Britain's Group Captain Adolph Gysbert ("Sailor") Malan and the late Brendan ("Paddy") Finucane, each with 32, are the Western Allies' top scorers; the U.S.'s are Major Richard Ira Bong and Captain Robert S. Johnson, each with...
...late Brendan ("Paddy") Finucane. Canadian Flight Lieut. George ("Screwball") Beurling shot down 31 before he was grounded, and Wing Commander Standford Tuck had 29 when he was forced to bail out over Germany. U.S. aces had a chance to surpass any of these records, but Russian Major Alexander Pokryshkin's record of 59 was apparently safe for a long time...
Steady-nerved and self-confident, Pokryshkin is as fatalistic as most combat pilots. In combat he is cautious and calculating, likes to feel out his enemy be fore the kill. In the Army's Red Star recently he analyzed some airmen's failures : "They have not absorbed . . . the feel of a fighter. . . . They are not sly or calculating enough, and they act in a stereotyped manner. ... It is clear that such airmen cannot fight successfully...
...Pokryshkin has earned a chestful of medals (including the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross), a bust in his native Novosibirsk. But the highest prize comes through his earphones when he slashes into enemy formations. Then the German flight leaders identify his plane with its cluster of red stars-one for each aircraft downed -and shout "Achtung, Achtung-Pokryshkin...