Word: stormoviks
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...rampage, Iliushin began to toy with the idea of a flying tank-buster. The seed of the idea was the memory of a frying pan with which many a Russian flyer armor-plated his plane seat in World War I. Out of the frying pan came the fiery Stormovik, which has destroyed so many Nazi tanks that the Germans renamed it der schwarze Tod (the Black Death). Heavily armored, bristling with cannon, the Stormovik is deadliest at a perilous 80 ft. or lower...
...Russians also learned. They kept air patrols along the principal German supply routes, harried the Junkers with fighters and Stormovik assault planes, sought out and incessantly bombed the fields where the German transports landed. Where the German routes crossed Red Army territory, the Russians lined the way with hidden ack-ack batteries. Sometimes guerrilla ack-ack units planted batteries behind the German lines. German pilots flew through snowstorms to outwit the Russian hunters. The Luftwaffe constantly changed its routes, began to dispatch transports singly or in small groups rather than in large formations...
...feature: it has only two propellers, with two liquid-cooled (1,200-h.p.) engines geared to each propeller. The 177 is larger than the Flying Fortress, is almost as fast (about 300 m.p.h.). The Henschel-129, a twin-engined attack plane, is the Germans' answer to the Russian Stormovik. The 129 has a speed of 275 m.p.h., can carry 770 Ib. of bombs, carries a 37-mm. cannon and two machine guns when flying against tanks, two 20-mm. cannon and two machine guns at other times...
...have met Red airmen, and they are good. At Stalingrad our boat took aboard 100 or so pilots and mechanics who had just been in action at Voronezh. They were members of a famous Stormovik group commanded by Colonel Boris Rivenshstein, one of the Soviet Union's greatest airmen...
This record is all the more remarkable because the principal business of Stormoviks is not to shoot down Nazis. The Stormoviks are ground-strafers. With their two cannon and two machine guns, they swoop down to ten or 15 meters, then blast away at tanks, motorized vehicles, grounded planes and troops. One of our visitors was a young lieutenant who had the tail of his Stormovik shot away when he was hardly ten meters (32 ft.) off the ground. Nevertheless he landed well inside the Russian lines, with his hip and both sides of his face injured, and walked back...