MY AVIATION LEGENDS

There are certainly different paths to an interest

in aviation history and scale modeling. Mine, as

with many other people, was set by memoirs of

famous aviators. I'm talking about the legends

that influenced me when I was a teenager. Famous aviator is a relative term, it can vary by

country of origin, cultural background, or personal preference of the individual.

My initial, almost thrilling experience was Pierre Clostermann's The Big Show. In the mid-1980s, a friend of mine in high school lent me

this novel, and I would say that to that day I have

read few books that have drawn me into the plot

as much as The Big Show. The battles against

the Luftwaffe, the mentions of names like “von

Graf” and Nowotny, the final stage actions over

Germany, that all shaped my interest in aerialwar. The Big Show was published in Czechoslovakia for the first time in 1968, and then again

in 1970, before the so-called normalization (and

associated censorship) began to restrict or ban

such a venture. Borrowing the book and taking

notes therefore had a bit of a conspiratorial air.

I understood that it was far from easy during the

clashes with the Luftwaffe and the German armed forces. Some of the movies on Czechoslovak TV and in the cinemas at the time portrayed

the adversaries a bit like targets for a practice,

but I didn't really go to believe it at all.

Also, our Czechoslovakian compatriots, former World War Two airmen and also authors of

memoirs like Antonín Liška or František Fajtl

were heroes for me. I understood it took a lot

of courage to go into exile and fight against

the enemy that occupied their native country.

Surviving the post-war communist camps was

usually as difficult, as to survive German POW

camps. If not even worse… This was double true

in the case of Fajtl, who became RAF Squadron

Leader and managed to return to the UK after

being shot down over occupied Europe. In 1944,

he commanded the Czechoslovak independent

fighter regiment that was operating Soviet fighter planes in the rear of the enemy during the

Slovak National Uprising. With a story like that,

a movie producer might have fired the screenwriter because he felt that such a story could

not happen. Fajtl also ended up in a communist

concentration camp after the war.

Later I managed to get hold of the book “Sloužím vlasti” (I Serve My Country) from 1950,

illustrated by famous Czech painter Zdeněk Burian. It was written by Ivan Nikitovich Kozhedub.

It interested me a lot because he was the most

successful Allied fighter pilot with 62 victories

to his credit. I liked the book very much, it showed between the lines that it was not easy to

fight against Luftwaffe even from 1943, because

that was the time Kozhedub arrived to the frontlines. I liked the guy a lot, and still I do.

INFO Eduard - December 2021

Another high school classmate helped me to get

access to an unusual book. It was published by

Czechoslovak magazine Letectví a kosmonautika (Aviation and Space) as a series in 1968 and

1969. The author was a Japanese naval fighter

pilot Saburō Sakai. There were many interesting books that were allowed to be published in

our country in late 1960s. Of course, there were

limits, which is why the book was not published

under its original title “Samurai!” but as “Zera

and Pacifikem” (Zeros over the Pacific). These

exotic memories came to me on photocopied

pages almost twenty years after their publication which was still the era, when “xeroxes” were

strictly controlled in order to avoid copying of

any anti-state printed matter. Sakai's memoirs

were published in shortened form here, but they

were almost as fascinating as Clostermann´s

The Big Show to me. Saburō Sakai may have

been on the opposite side of the barricade from

the Allied airmen, but for many reasons that are

captured in the lines of his memoirs, he has become a legend to me. And he had two more victories to his credit than Kozhedub. The needle of

my aviation compass pointed to Japan, and still

partly points there today.

At the end of 1989, the communist regime

collapsed in our country, and anything could be

published. On the other way, many people started to ignore everything of the Soviet origin,

which is usually synonymous with Russian by

many here. I come from anti-communist family,

so I understand their mood, but I also feel it's

just not fair in case of the service and sacrifices

of Soviet airmen.

When the book “Křídla v boji” (Wings in Combat),

written by fighter pilot Alexander Ivanovich Pokryshkin, came out in 1990, I jumped on it. He

had been flying since the beginning of the war,

which was June 1941 in his case. It was written

about him that he had 59 victories and was second in the ranking to Kozhedub. I devoured

the memoirs, taking notes as I went through it.

If I remember correctly, the book could count

about 75 of Pokryshkin's individual victories!

I was impressed and felt a little sorry for him

too. I had the feeling that his combat results

were crossed off from above.

Thirty years have passed since then and I have

read many more memoirs, publications, and documents, I met war veterans and wrote a little

too. I also experienced many surprises during

this period of life.

Clostermann used for some parts of his book

other people's reports, accounts, or experiences as if he had experienced these himself. The

number of his victories was less than originally

reported. And whether he had all the command

posts he recounts in his novel is still discussed

today. The confrontation with contemporary records is indeed interesting.

Saburō Sakai didn't have 64 victories and even

stated several times that he didn't know where that number came from. He said himself that

he might have scored approximately 28 victories in total. Historical records available today

show that such a number roughly corresponds

to actuality if we add up all kind of victories he

achieved alone or in collaboration with other

pilots. Some of the events described in the English edition of his memoirs did not happen and

Sakai did not authorize them. For example, the

group aerobatics over an enemy airfield is probably a fabrication.

In the past decade, historians from the former

Soviet Union have taken a close look at newly

available contemporary records. It seems that

Ivan Kozhedub achieved as many as 64 individual victories, but Pokryshkin, originally the

second one in the order, shot down only 45

opponents. Today it is known that there were

five other fighter pilots on the list between the

two. To my surprise, one of them even had more

than 60 individual kills. His name was Grigory

Andreevich Rechkalov.

Analyses of air battles and comparisons of claimed victories with losses of the opponents are

a separate chapter. This is an important and adventurous discipline, but I do not want to mention it here. We could get bogged down in arguments about how many planes Erich Hartmann

actually shot down, or how many Luftwaffe planes were downed by Czechoslovak fighters, for

example.

Does this all mean that Clostermann, Sakai or

Pokryshkin are less of legends for me today?

Not at all. Regardless of whether serious research and critical insight reduces or increases

the actual number of victories, their memoirs

are still great and powerful stories worth reading, studying, and passing on. And while doing

that it is an opportunity to experience own research story as a result.

Jan Bobek

eduard

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