ISBN 0-935553-51-7
232 pages

Foreword; Glossary and Guide to Abbreviations; Prologue; photos; maps; tables; orders of battle; color plates; Notes; Sources; Acknowledgments; Index

Appendices: Luftwaffe Combat Losses on the Eastern Front, January-June 1942; The Structure of the Luftwaffe; The Structure of the Soviet Air Forces; Rank Equivalency; The Highest Military Awards

   Black Cross, Red Star: The Air War over the Eastern Front, volume one was a strong winner in our Top Ten awards for the best new WWII books of 2000. The second volume in the series by Christer Bergstrom and Andrey Mikhailov gives every indication of making another run for Top Ten honors this year.
   The first volume offered an unprecedented amount of carefully documented detail about both the Luftwaffe and the VVS during the first six months of the war on the Russian Front, ending at the turn of the year. The second volume picks up where the first left off, both chronologically and in terms of the detailed information provided about both air forces.
   The book opens with "The Legacy of Barbarossa" and explores the overall situation before delving into separate chapters on the state of the Luftwaffe and VVS in early 1942. These are followed by a nice exposition on "Equipment and Methods" covering radios, radar, armament, tactics, and so on.

   A common conception of the Eastern Front in World War II is that of a rather primitive or crude type of warfare, and this is to a certain extent true regarding technology. Some of the most refined technical developments of the early 1940s never were used or were only used on a limited scale, and the use of radar was scarce throughout the war. Most air surveillance was carried out by visual sightings from observation posts at the front. In early 1942 the Soviets had RUS-2 early warning radar stations installed at a few specially protected targets, such as Moscow and Leningrad. RUS2, which was set up in fixed installations, mounted on trucks (called Redut), or in deployed in a portable version (called Pegmatit), had a range of between sixty and ninety miles.
   On the Eastern Front the Germans only made use of radar in northern Norway and for brief periods at Leningrad. The German Freya early warning radar, operating on a 2.4-meter wavelength, had a range of eighty to a hundred miles. Because of the higher priority given to the defense of the Fatherland against RAF night bomber raids, there were no dedicated German night fighter units on the Eastern Front in early 1942.
   In the field of navigation, bombsights and gun sights, the situation was better, and both sides had quite similar equipment. While fighters and ground-attack aircraft navigated visually, the German bomber crews were provided with a radio navigation beacon however of a more simplified nature than in western Europe. Hansgeorg Batcher of I./KG 100 describes the situation: "We were provided with only one radio beacon for navigation, not the three-axis beacon that was common in the Western Theater of Operations." On the Soviet side, the night bombers of the DBA navigated through an increasingly well-organized network of radio homing beacons from late 1941. On occasion, Soviet partisans even marked the target with flares or by lighting fires.
   With the introduction of the German gyroscopic reflector bombsight Lotfernrohr Lotfe 7 H, which automatically calculated drift during high-altitude horizontal bombing, the German medium bombers achieved a considerably increased bombing accuracy in 1942. Soviet bombers were outfitted with similar bombsights — OPB-1M or OPB-2M for daylight bombing, and NKPB-3, NKPB-4, or NKPB-7 for nocturnal bombing. But such Soviet aircraft like the U-2 light night bomber, a converted biplane trainer, had no bombsight. The U-2 pilot simply aimed by counting the seconds after the target had disappeared below the forward edge of the lower wing. It was virtually the same with the Il-2 and German fighter-bombers such as the Bf 109.

   With this introductory material out of the way, the authors begin their account of air operations during the Soviet winter offensive. As always, Bergstrom and Mikhailov look at the action from both sides of the lines, and in a number of cases are able to offer two perspectives—Soviet and German—for the same events.

   On May 17 Gollob claimed three R-5 biplanes. Soon afterward, he and his wingman found a formation of Soviet fighters.
   In contrast to the common fighter tactic of attacking from above, Gollob preferred low-side attacks — to be sure that no one tried to attack him from the blind spot beneath his airplane. A pilot of JG 77 wrote the following account of an event he witnessed when Gollob and his wingman applied this tactic: "They positioned themselves at a low altitude beneath a Russian formation. Then they started climbing in spirals, carefully maintaining their position beneath the enemy formation. Before the tranquilly flying Russians even suspected any mischief, the two planes at the bottom of their formation had been shot down and the two Germans were gone."
   Gollob hit the Soviet fighter — a LaGG, he thought — in the belly, saw it go down, and returned home to report his ninety-third victory. When he returned to base, he learned that Bar meanwhile had bagged three MiG-3s, and two other MiG-3s had been claimed by II./JG 77's Hauptmann Heinrich Setz, increasing his tally to seventy-two.
   One of the victims of these deadly aces on this day was the Yak- 1 pilot Serzhant N. K. Chayka. After suffering severe wounds from the machine guns and automatic cannon in a Bf 109, Chayka struggled at the controls of his damaged Yak-1. He managed to bring it back to his airfield but lost control of it during landing and crashed into another Yak-1. Both planes were destroyed and Chayka was killed.

   Besides following the overall course of the air war, the authors also devote entire chapters to some especially important or interesting topics such as air operations in the Crimea, the Demyansk and Kholm airlifts, air-sea operations in the Baltic, and action at Murmansk and in the far north. The final chapters chart the resurgence of the Luftwaffe and its victories at Kerch, Kharkov, Sevastopol, and over the Black Sea, and find the Wehrmacht poised to launch its summer offensive.
   Throughout the book, the authors paint the larger strategic picture in broad strokes, follow the overall ebb and flow of the air forces, track specific air units, and zoom in for some very close-up views of particular missions and air-to-air combat. Along the way the reader finds an excellent assortment of photos with informative captions, maps, air OBs, and solid numbers for strengths, sorties, victories, losses, and tonnages. This volume also adds several pages of color profiles of German and Soviet aircraft by Claes Sundin, Jim Laurier, and Tom Tullis.
   In their final chapter in this volume, the authors study the lessons learned by both sides in the first year of the air campaign, noting that the Luftwaffe in the middle of 1942 still held the upper hand, but its overall superiority was on the decline and could only be maintained by increasingly difficult measures. The authors also compare loss rates, claims, and over-claims and review the faulty Soviet tactics and lack of pilot training that continued to place the VVS at such a horrible disadvantage in fighter versus fighter combat. Nevertheless, the grinding attrition of day after day of air operations meant that the Russian Front could prove just as deadly for German fighter pilots as combat in the West or in the Mediterranean:

   During the first days of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union in June 1941, there were a number of cases when Luftwaffe units on the Eastern Front were dealt relatively heavy losses in a single day. But with the loss of the cream of experienced VVS pilots and unit commanders, heavy single day losses did not happen again on the Eastern Front (except for the Ju 52 transport units at Demyansk) until later in the summer of 1942. Instead, there was a steady rate of attrition of generally two or three combat losses in each Luftwaffe Geschwader on the Eastern Front each week during the first half of 1942. Thus many German airmen apprehended the air war over the Eastern Front during this period as less hazardous compared to the air war over Western Europe with the Murmansk sector as the only exception. But statistics show that the accumulated effect of relentless combat sorties carried out in the East brought the chances of survival down to the same level as in the West at this stage. Thirty seven pilots of JG 26's three Gruppen, operating against the RAF over the English Channel, were killed or reported as missing during the first half of 1942. JG 54, operating three Gruppen on the Eastern Front, lost exactly the same number of pilots — thirty-six — during the same period. I./JG 27 lost seven pilots in the North African skies, and II./JG 5 lost thirteen pilots in the Murmansk sector of the Eastern Front.

   The second volume proves the first was no fluke. Bergstrom and Mikhailov have maintained their momentum through another six months of air combat with no loss of detail or quality. While they've added the very nice color profiles, it would be great to see them offer for each month more in the way of tabular air OB data with unit IDs, where those units were deployed, their main tasks, and with what aircraft they were equipped.
   All in all, however, like the first volume, there is a great deal here which will be of extreme interest to every student of air warfare and the Russian Front.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Pacifica Military History in the US and Classic Publications in the UK.
   Thanks to Classic for providing this review copy.