La-5/7 vs Fw 190: Eastern Front 1942-45 (Duel)
Language: English
Pages: 80
ISBN: 1849084734
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Soviet fighter aviation suffered terribly at the hands of the Jagdwaffe in the first year of the war in the east, and with the arrival of JG 51 and its Fw 190s on the Stalingrad Front in September 1942 things only got worse for the hard-pressed Red Army Air Force pilots. However, help was on its way in the form of the re-engined LaGG-3 fighter, which was fitted with a powerful air-cooled M-82 radial engine. Designated the La-5, the new fighter was capable of withstanding more punishment than the fragile LaGG-3, and it was also appreciably faster and had a greater rate of climb. It was more of a handful to fly, however, but the new generation of better trained pilots who were led into combat by the survivors of 1941-42 quickly found the La-5 (and, later, the improved La-7) very much to their liking. Arriving in the frontline in August 1942, the new Lavochkin fighters soon found themselves pitted into action on the Central Sector against the equally new Fw 190As of JG 51. The first clashes took place in November of that year, and from then on the Focke-Wulf fighter would regularly clash with its counterpart from Lavochkin.
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Captioned as ‘an La-7 of an unidentified Guards regiment on the Baltic Front, 1944’, this aircraft may have been the personal mount of Vasiliy Zaitsev (36 individual and 19 shared kills), deputy commander of 11th GIAD. Most of his fighters featured a white nose marking identical to the one seen here. Several Fw 190A-0 preproduction aircraft are seen here at Bremen. All the A-0s were manufactured at FockeWulf’s Bremen plant. The nearest aircraft, Wk-Nr. 0010, was fitted with a BMW 801C-1 engine,.
I./JG 51 Orel SMOLENSK REGION Efremov 286th IAD 1. Fliegerdivision IV./JG 51 Trubchevsk Lipetsk 279th IAD Elets 16th Air Army Maloarkhangelsk NovgorodSeverskiy Shchigry Kursk Voronezh CENTRAL CHERNOZEM REGION Lgov Oboyan Stary Oskol 8th GIAD Sumy Novy Oskol U K R A IN E Byelgorod I./SchlG 1 II./SchlG 1 Akhtyrka Luftflotte 4 30 miles 0 30 km Volchansk Valuyki Bogodukhov VIII. Fliegerkorps 0 2nd Air Army 302nd IAD Poltava Kharkov 295th IAD 207th IAD N 17th Air Army.
Armies were supported by 6,719 aircraft divided between 17 Air Corps and eight individual auxiliary air divisions. Amongst this number were 517 La-5s (479 serviceable) and 227 La-7s (189 serviceable). As previously noted, the Fw 190 Schlacht units were kept busy trying to slow down the advance of the Red Army as it closed on Berlin. Indeed, according to VVS-KA records, 13,950 sorties were noted by the 1st Byelorussian Front alone in the first ten days of February, and most of these were made by.
Armies. Lavochkin losses to all causes (including non-combat) totalled 484 aircraft for July–August, whilst the Luftwaffe had 368 Fw 190s destroyed (again, this number includes operational write-offs) on the Soviet–German front during the same period. The outcome of aerial battles on the Eastern Front often depended more on the skills of the pilots strapped into the opposing fighters, rather than the technical superiority of their respective machines. This was particularly the case over the Kursk.
48 hours, and during this period Nowotny claimed 14 kills – five of them escorting La-5s. The Lavochkins seen being downed in this specially commissioned artwork were the ace’s 206th and 207th victories. By the time Nowotny left the Eastern Front in November 1943, his overall tally stood at 255 kills. (Gareth Hector) German rank Reichmarschall Generalfeldmarschall Generaloberst General der Flieger Generalleutnant Generalmajor Oberst Oberstleutnant Major Hauptmann Oberleutnant Leutnant.