Why Half the Soviet Union’s Top Fighter Aces Flew the American P 39

 A type that the United States Army Air Forces had quietly decided was not good enough to give to the men flying out of England against the Luftwaffer. Kverish was the first ever air-to-air ramming carried out by a P39 in any air force in any theater of the war. It would not be the last extraordinary thing this airplane did in Soviet hands and not by a wide margin.

 By the time the war ended, Soviet pilots flying that same aircraft type with red stars on their wings had built up a record that nobody at Bell Aircraft, nobody in the Royal Air Force, and very few people in the United States Army Air Forces had imagined was possible. The two highest scoring fighter pilots of the entire Allied war effort were Soviet airmen Ivan Koabub and Alexander Priskin.

 The second of those two had spent the larger part of his career and most of his victories in the cockpit of a P39. The fourth highest scoring Soviet ace, Gregori Rekolov, had built almost his entire score in the same airplane. So had Nikolai Gulivv, the third highest. So had the brothers Dmitri and Boris Glinka. So had Alexander Klub.

 If you list the top 10 Soviet fighter aces of the war, more than half of them did the most important flying of their lives in this aircraft. This is the part that should not, by the logic of test reports and pilot evaluations and serious military journalism have been possible. The same airplane the British had rejected, the same airplane the Americans had pulled from frontline use in Europe became in Soviet hands the deadliest American-built fighter of the entire Second World War.

 To understand how that happened, we have to go back to a wind tunnel in Virginia in 1939, where a single decision made for sound engineering reasons quietly produced two airplanes at once. The first was a fighter that would fail in the war the West expected. The second was a fighter that would dominate the war the Soviets actually had to fight.

 The Bell Aircraft Corporation was a small firm in Buffalo, New York, founded in 1935, and run by a man named Larry Bell, who had a taste for unconventional designs. In the late 1930s, Bell pitched the United States Army Airore a fighter unlike anything else flying. The engine would sit behind the pilot in the middle of the airframe with a long drive shaft running forward beneath the cockpit floor to the propeller.

 The space the engine vacated in the nose would be filled with a single heavy cannon large enough to throw a 37 mm shell. The aircraft would land on tricycle gear with a wheel under the nose when every other operational fighter in the world was still sitting on its tail. The whole layout existed to put one big gun pointing forward to give the pilot uninterrupted forward visibility and to let the airplane sit level on the ground.

 The first prototype called the XP39 flew on April 6, 1938 at Wrightfield in Ohio. It carried a turbo supercharger, a device that compressed extra air into the engine at high altitude so the airplane could keep its power up in the thin air above 20,000 ft. With the turbo working, the prototype was hitting nearly 400 mph and reaching high altitude in 5 minutes.

 The air core was impressed. They ordered further development. They were also concerned that the airplane was producing more aerodynamic drag than its competitors and that more speed could be coaxed out of it with cleaner external lines. In June 1939, Brigadier General Henry Arnold ordered the prototype delivered to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

 the Federal Aerodynamics Agency that would eventually become NASA at its fullscale wind tunnel facility at Langley Field in Virginia. The famous photograph of the XP39 suspended inside that tunnel was taken on August 9 of that year. Naka’s engineers found drag almost everywhere they looked. They recommended a long list of cleanups, new canopy lines, the radiator and oil cooler intakes moved from the fuselage flanks into the wing roots.

 a slightly longer fuselage. Together, those changes would lift the top speed by 16%. Naka also pointed at the turbo supercharger. The way it was mounted with external ducting and a large air scoop was an aerodynamic embarrassment. Naka’s engineers said in their report that the supercharger needed to be enclosed within the airframe with proper internal ducting for cooling air and exhaust gases.

 The trouble was that there was no internal volume left in the XP39 to do that. Larry Bell at a meeting in August 1939 with Nara and the Army Airore proposed a different fix. He proposed that the production aircraft simply not carry a turbo at all. A single stage singlese mechanical supercharger geared to the engine would be enough to deliver useful performance at low and medium altitudes.

 and the airplane would be cheaper, lighter, and easier to build. The army agreed. The decision sounded reasonable in the summer of 1939. Nobody yet knew where the next major war would be fought or at what altitude. The production P39 would have a critical altitude of about 12,000 ft, the height above which engine power began to fall off rapidly.

 Below that ceiling, the airplane would be a clean, fast, well-armed fighter. above it, the aircraft would handle worse with every thousand feet it climbed, and the Allison V1710 engine would steadily lose its breath. In 1939, that trade-off did not look catastrophic. It became catastrophic when the war that was actually about to be fought turned out to be fought in Western Europe, almost entirely above 20,000 ft, where heavy bombers cruised and where escort fighters had to follow them.

 The first British pilots to test the airplane in 1941 looked at the performance numbers above 15,000 ft and recoiled. The Royal Air Force had spent the previous summer fighting the Luftwaffer in the Battle of Britain at altitudes where their Spitfires had a clear edge. They could not imagine taking a fighter into combat that ran out of breath at exactly the height where their enemy preferred to fight. Number 6001 squadron.

 The County of London squadron took delivery of its first British Air Cobras at Duxford in August 1941. On October 9, four of the squadron’s airplanes flew across the channel and strafed German barges off the French coast near Dunkirk. That was the entire combat record of the P39 in Royal Air Force Service. By March 1942, the squadron had been re-equipped with Spitfires.

 The British had ordered 675 of these aircraft. They kept fewer than 80. The rest were redirected either back to American hands for use in the Pacific or increasingly to the only ally that had no choice but to take whatever fighters it could get. That ally in the autumn of 1941 was the Soviet Union. Hitler had invaded in June.

 By December, the Vermacht was 150 km from Moscow. The Soviet Air Force had taken catastrophic losses in the opening week of Operation Barbar Roa with most of its frontline strength caught on the ground at airfields the Luftwaffer had photographed in advance. The remaining Soviet pilots were flying obsolete biplanes, early war monoplanes that could not turn with a messmitt and a handful of new designs whose factories had been hurriedly evacuated east of the Eural Mountains and were not yet producing in serious numbers. Stalin

needed airplanes. Any airplanes. When the British asked whether the Soviets would take their unwanted Air Cobras, the answer came back the same day. They would take all of them. The first P39s reached the Soviet Union in early 1942, sailing into Merman on the Arctic convoys. By the autumn of that year, a second route had been opened, far more reliable, that ran from a Bell factory in upstate New York by way of a string of frozen airfields across Western Canada to Fairbanks, Alaska, and from there across the Beering Straight to

Siberia. The Americans called it the Alaska Siberia air route. The Russians called it Alib. Soviet ferry pilots took the airplanes off the Americans hands at Ladfield in Fairbanks after a Soviet acceptance commission had gone over each one and flew them in formation, escorted by twin engine bombers with better navigation gear across some of the harshest terrain on Earth.

 Over the course of the war, almost 8,000 American aircraft would travel that route. Of those, nearly 5,000 were P39s and their bigger sibling, the P63 King Cobra. The whole operation was an act of trust between two countries that did not trust each other. Conducted at minus40° C with ferry pilots from both sides dying in white outs and engine failures over the tundra.

 What the Soviets received and what they slowly came to understand was not quite the airplane the Americans and the British had rejected. The war it was about to fight was a different war. The Eastern Front in 1942 and 1943 was not the Western Front. The Luftvafer and the Soviet Air Force fought the great majority of their battles between 2,000 and 4,000 m between roughly 6,500 and 13,000 ft.

 There were no thousand bomber raids by Soviet aircraft on German cities. There were no high alitude escorts trailing along behind heavy bombers. The flying was tactical, close to the ground in support of land battles that turned on a single road junction or a single river crossing. The fighters strafed columns. They covered ground attack aircraft like the ilioinil 2.

They duled with German fighters and stooka dive bombers in the same low slab of sky where the war was actually being fought. And in that slab of sky between the deck and 15,000 ft, the P39 was a different machine than the one the British had hated. It was fast, comfortably faster than a messmitt at low altitude. It dove well.

 The 37 mm cannon in the nose could destroy a German fighter with a single hit and was lethal against bombers. The four-wing mounted machine guns added enough firepower to ruin most targets, though ground crews often removed two of them to save weight, treating the airplane as the precision instrument it was becoming in their hands.

 The tricycle landing gear, which Western critics had mocked as over complicated, turned out to be a gift on rough Soviet airfields, where mud, slush, and uneven snow made tailhe landings dangerous and slow. The fully enclosed cockpit with its car door let pilots fly through Russian winter weather without freezing solid in the way they had in older Soviet types.

 The radio supplied as American factory standard equipment actually worked, which was something almost no Soviet-built fighter could yet honestly claim. Soviet pilots who had been reduced to communicating during dog fights by hand signals and wingwaggling were suddenly able to talk in real time, to coordinate attacks, to call out targets, to warn each other of threats.

That single change, more than any individual piece of armament, transformed how Soviet fighter regiments fought. The airplane also had teeth that bit its own pilots. The P39’s center of gravity sat very close to the engine in the middle of the fuselage behind the cockpit. If the aircraft was loaded incorrectly, or if too much ammunition had been fired without compensating, the airplane could enter a flat spin from which recovery was nearly impossible.

Soviet training units lost pilots to this and Bell could not engineer a fix. The only fix was to teach pilots to respect the airplane’s narrow envelope and to stay inside it. One of the most thorough Russian language sources on what the airplane was actually like to fly is a long post-war interview with a Soviet veteran named Nikolai Galodnikov who flew the type in the Northern Fleet Air Force in the same Mansk sector where Krvashe had died.

 Golodnikov said in that interview that the Cobra, especially the Q5 variant, was the best fighter he had ever flown and that it surpassed all the German fighters he had encountered. He described the 37 mm cannon in characteristic terms. Normally, he said, one strike on an enemy fighter and that fighter was finished.

 He said the same was true of bombers, watercraft, almost anything you cared to point the airplane at. He described the radio as a transformative piece of equipment, more important to how the squadron fought than the armament was. And he described the way Soviet ground crews learned to balance the airplane in the field, weighing belts of ammunition by hand, removing wing guns when the regiment commander gave permission and adjusting trim weights to keep the center of gravity where it needed to be.

 The airplane that Bell had built in Buffalo was not exactly the airplane the Soviets ended up flying in combat. The airplane the Soviets ended up flying had been quietly modified in the field by men who understood that this American product had to be made to fit a Russian war. That description turned out to be more important than anyone had planned.

Because what happened over the next two years on the Eastern Front was that the airplane the West had decided was second rate ended up in the hands of the very best Soviet pilots in the war. and those pilots remade it and themselves into something the Luftwaffer would learn to fear.

 The Kuban region in southern Russia in the spring of 1943 was where it began to be visible. The Kuban is the territory east of the Crimean Peninsula, north of the Caucus Mountains, fertile and flat, cut by rivers running into the Sea of Azov. From April to June of that year, the Germans and the Soviets fought a series of air battles over the Kubern that were among the most intense of the entire war.

 By some accounts, there were as many as 50 separate air engagements in a single day, each involving 50 to 100 aircraft per side, and the cumulative casualty rate was high enough that German fighter regiments operating in the sector were burning through replacement pilots at rates their own training schools could not sustain. The fourth Air Army on the Soviet side included the recently re-equipped 16th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, which had received American Era Cobras in the early spring.

 One of the regiment’s pilots was a 30-year-old Siberian born in Novo Cibersk on March 6th, 1913 named Alexander Ivanovich Priskin. Pushkin had been flying since 1939. He had survived the disaster of 1941 in obsolete fighters. He had been shot down by German anti-aircraft fire over the Pratt River on July 3 of that year. Force landed his crippled MiG 3 behind enemy lines and spent 4 days walking back to his unit on foot.

 He had been disciplined for arguing with his superiors about tactics because he believed the standard Soviet doctrine of slow horizontal turning fights was getting Soviet pilots killed for nothing in return. He was a methodical man with a notebook habit. He drew his engagements on paper after each mission, analyzing what had worked and what had not.

 His friends in the regiment called his dugout the design bureau because the walls were covered with charts and sketches. By the time he climbed into the cockpit of a P39 in the spring of 1943, he had spent four years thinking about how to fight the Luftwafer and most of two years not being listened to. The Ara Cobra changed that.

 The airplane was a perfect physical fit for the doctrine he had been quietly developing. He believed in vertical fighting, in trading altitude for speed and speed for altitude, in striking from above and disengaging by diving away. The P39, with its strong dive, its powerful nose armorament, and its excellent radio, was the airplane he had been waiting to fly.

On May 4, 1943, Perishkin led a flight of eight errors against three squadrons of Junker’s 87 Stooka dive bombers escorted by Mess. In one engagement, his flight downed 12 German aircraft. Pokin himself was credited with five. None of the Soviet aircraft was lost. Within a few weeks, the 16th Guards Regiment had become the most feared Soviet fighter unit on the Kuban front.

 What Priskin did over those weeks and over the year that followed was distill a way of fighting into four words that Soviet airmen would memorize for the rest of the war. Altitude, speed, maneuver, fire. He wrote them in his notebook. He drew them on the wall of his dugout. He taught them to every pilot who passed through his squadron.

 And the Soviet Air Force eventually disseminated them through internal manuals and aviation journals so that other regiments could read them and adopt them. Across Soviet aviation, the phrase became known as the thunderstorm formula. Before the war ended, it had quietly replaced the older horizontal dog fighting doctrine that the Soviet air force had brought into the war, and it had done so using an American airplane that nobody in Britain or the United States had wanted to fly.

He was not done. He invented a formation called the Kuban skaya etaska, the Kuban stepladder in which Soviet fighters were stacked at staggered altitudes so that an enemy who escaped the lowest layer would find another above him and another above that. He developed a pendulum patrol pattern in which fighters swept back and forth along a line, always keeping either altitude or speed in reserve, ready to convert one into the other in the moment of attack.

 He insisted on the use of ground radar to vector his flights onto incoming German raids, a piece of common sense that the Soviet air force had been astonishingly slow to adopt. By the end of 1943, the Kuban stepladder had spread across the entire Soviet fighter force and Priskin had begun a transformation from line pilot to teacher to legend.

 Soviet sources have long claimed that the Germans were so frightened of him that they created a radio warning broadcast by ground observers when his aircraft was in the air. The phrase in the Russian retellings is akung pushkin in deluft attention pokin is in the air after which younger German pilots were said to have standing orders to break off and head for home.

 The phrase appears in dozens of Russian language books and articles. Aviation historians who have looked for it in Luftwaffer documents have not been able to find it. It is most likely a piece of wartime Soviet narrative that ended up in the official biography and stayed there. What is documented and verified by the Russian presidential library is that Priskin was credited at the war’s end with 59 individual aerial victories with 48 of them scored in the cockpit of a P39.

 Modern Russian archival researchers working from regimental flight logs place his confirmed total in the mid-40s. Either figure made him the second highest scoring Allied pilot of the entire war behind only Kedub. He was named a hero of the Soviet Union three times on May 24, 1943, on August 24, 1943 and on August 19, 1944. He was the first man in Soviet history to receive that title three times.

 If you had a grandfather, a great uncle, or a family friend who flew with the Soviet Air Force, with the United States Army Air Forces, or with any of the Lend Lee air crew who fied these airplanes from Buffalo to the Eastern Front, I would consider it an honor to read their story in the comments below this video. The names matter. The units matter.

 The small specific things they remembered matter more than any official archive. Those memories belong to the people who carry them and they deserve to be preserved in the place where they will be heard. Pokushkin was not alone. The strangest part of the P39 story is that he was not even the highest scoring pilot in his own regiment.

 That distinction belongs to Gregori Andreovich Rekelov who had served with Porrishkin in the 16th Guards Regiment and who had nearly been thrown out of the air force at the start of the war for a medical reason that had nothing to do with flying. Rkolov suffered from color blindness, a condition he had concealed throughout his training.

 On June 22, 1941, a routine medical commission caught him and ruled him unfit for combat duty. The same morning the Germans crossed the border. Rekolov stayed in the cockpit. He flew Polycarpov biplanes against Mess. He was wounded, sent to a hospital, came back and eventually transitioned to American era Cobras alongside Priskin.

 Of his 56 personally credited victories, 50 came in P39s. He flew 452 combat sorties and fought in 122 air battles. He was twice named a hero of the Soviet Union and ended the war as a guards major. His personal P39 carried the letters RGA on the tail painted there by his ground crew. The famous wartime photograph that has often been mistakenly captioned as Priskin’s airplane with rows of victory stars beneath the cockpit rim is actually Wretchkovs. There were others.

 Nikolai Dmitriovic Gulivv, a powerful broad-shouldered ace from the Don Cosak Denitsa of Ax Skaya in Rosto Oblast, transitioned to the P39 in the summer of 1943 with 16 personal victories already on his record from earlier service in Yakovv fighters. He flew his last combat sort in mid August 1944. ordered to attend a higher military academy because the Soviet high command had concluded he was too valuable to keep losing in the air.

 In just over a year flying Aracobras, he had added close to 40 more individual kills, a rate of victory that few pilots in any nation’s air force have ever matched. During the spring 1944, fighting over Romania, he had a sequence of sorties that have become part of the regimental folklore. On May 30, he led a flight that intercepted a German formation over the Pratt River and emerged from the engagement with multiple kills credited to his own gun camera.

 On May 31, near Skullani, he engaged a flight of junkers and messes, downed four of them, and was wounded badly enough that he lost consciousness in the cockpit shortly after landing. He was back in the air within days. Twice a hero of the Soviet Union, he survived the war, lived through several decades of post-war military service, retired as a colonel general, and died in Moscow in September 1985.

 There were also the Glinker brothers, Dmitri and Boris, who served together in the 45th Fighter Aviation Regiment, redesated the 100th Guards Regiment during the Kubern campaign. Both received error Cobras in February 1943. Dmitri, the more famous of the two, scored 20 enemy aircraft destroyed in roughly 40 engagements during the Kuban battles in the spring of 1943 alone.

 By wars end, he had 50 victories, 41 of them in the P39. Boris, also a hero of the Soviet Union, transferred in mid 1944 to command the 16th Guards Regiment, replacing Wretchkov. Each brother had his own assigned aircraft with his own ground crew and his own kill markings. Alexander Kubof, another 16th Guardsman and one of Priskin’s closest comrades in the air, ended the war with 31 personal victories in the P39 before he was killed on November 1, 1944 in a landing accident while learning to fly the Lavotchkin L 7 that the regiment had been ordered to convert

3. If you list the top 10 Soviet aces of the war, more than half of them did the most important flying of their careers in the same American airplane that the Royal Air Force had given up on after one combat mission. They were not flying it because they had no choice. By 1944, the Soviets had access to the Lavodkin LA 5 FN, the LA 7, and the Yakov Yak 3.

 All of them excellent designs in their own right. Pokushskin himself in the late summer of 1944 traveled to the Lavotkin factory to take personal delivery of the new Lassan that Moscow wanted his division to switch to. His Polycarpov U2 trainer crashed on the journey. By the time he arrived at the factory days later, he had been presumed dead and the airplanes had been reassigned.

 He went back to his Ara Cobra and stayed with it. He resisted Moscow’s pressure to convert his division for the rest of the war. He had taught his pilots to fight on the P39. He was not going to switch them onto an unfamiliar airplane at the moment when their accumulated experience was paying its highest dividends.

 The reasons the airplane worked for them when it had failed for the British were not mysterious. They were the same set of reasons listed by every Soviet veteran who ever wrote honestly about the airplane after the war. The fighting was at low altitude where the lack of a turbo supercharger did not matter. The 37 mm cannon was devastating against German fighters and bombers alike.

 The radio worked. The cockpit was warm enough to fly in for hours in winter weather. The tricycle landing gear handled rough fields. The forward visibility with no engine in the way, was the best of any fighter the Soviets ever flew, and the airplane rewarded skill. The same characteristics that made it lethal in a flat spin to a careless pilot made it exquisitly responsive to a careful one.

 A man who learned to respect the P39 was rewarded by an aircraft that would do anything he asked of it inside its envelope. The Soviet’s best pilots given the time and opportunity to learn that envelope inside out became some of the deadliest air-to-air fighters in the entire war. The airplane alone does not explain what happened.

 There was something else moving in those years on the German side as much as on the Soviet side that helps to explain why this particular reversal could happen at this particular moment. The Luftwaffer in 1943 was already a different organization than the Luftwaffer of 1941. It had lost its experienced pilots in waves on the Eastern Front through the autumn and winter of 1941 in the Cauldron of Stalingrad through the winter of 1942 and 43 and now over the Kuban.

 New German fighter pilots were arriving at frontline units with shorter training pipelines than their predecessors had received. By July 1944, average German fighter pilot training time had dropped to roughly 110 to 120 hours, less than half what it had been in 1939. Some replacement pilots were arriving with as few as 80 hours total.

The cause was not lack of will. It was the steady destruction of the German training base, by Allied bombing of synthetic fuel plants, by the stripping of veteran instructors for combat duty, and by the disbandment of advanced flight schools to free up airframes and fuel for the front. The Williamson Murray volume on the Luftwafer’s strategic defeat traces the curve in detail.

 The line goes down hard from 1942 onward, and it never recovers. The Luftwaffer’s tactical doctrine had been built around small numbers of highly trained pilots, achieving outsized effects through skill and aggression. That doctrine assumed the men flying it would be the same men year after year, accumulating experience and passing it down to new arrivals.

 By 1943, those men were dead in hospitals or had been transferred to the Western Front to defend German cities against Allied bombing. The pilots arriving on the eastern front in their place were not failing because they were cowards. They were failing because the system that had produced their predecessors had stopped functioning and nobody at the top of the German air force was willing to admit it.

 While that was happening, the Soviet side was doing the opposite. Prishkin’s tactical innovations were being printed in internal air force manuals, taught in classrooms, demonstrated at training units, and absorbed by an entire pilot generation. The 16th Guards Regiment ran what amounted to an internal academy with its top aces returning from the line to teach new arrivals not only how to fly the airplane but how to think about combat.

 The radio, that single piece of American equipment that the Soviets had previously lacked, made tactical coordination possible at a scale that fundamentally changed how Soviet fighter regiments fought. where in 1941 a Soviet flight leader had been reduced to waggling his wings to give signals. By 1943 he could call out an enemy formation by altitude and bearing and watch his squadron react in seconds.

The P39, in other words, had walked into a war it was now suited for in the hands of an air force that had finally figured out how to use what it had against an enemy that was beginning to come apart from within. None of those three conditions had been true in 1941. By 1943, all three were true at once. And the result was the strange historical outcome we are still trying to explain.

 An aircraft considered second rate by the people who built it became the highest scoring Americanbuilt fighter by victories per pilot in any air force in any war. The Germans noticed their reactions, as recorded in their own postwar interviews and memoirs, are not what one might expect. They did not blame the airplane. They did not, for the most part, blame their own training or their leadership, though some of the more candid did.

 What they kept describing was the steady transformation of the opposition. The Russians of 1941 had been comparatively crude opponents. The Russians of 1944 were not. through the Kuban battles of 1943, through the Soviet offensives of 1944 into Bellarus and Ukraine, through the final Berlin operation in 1945. The same observation appears in German air crew reports and postwar interrogations.

The Soviet fighter regiments equipped with Aera Cobbras attacked from altitudes the Germans had not expected. They struck quickly and dove away rather than committing to turning fights. They communicated by radio. They concentrated on bombers and stookers and would not be drawn into duels they could not win.

There is a representative recollection in a recorded interview given many years after the war by Walter Kinsky, the German fighter ace who flew with Yagashwada 52 on the Eastern Front and who served as the flight leader of the young Eric Hartman in 1943. Kinsky asked about typical Soviet behavior in air combat made the point that most Soviet pilots in the early and middle war broke off and headed home after a few minutes of engagement if they could not gain an early advantage.

 But he also recalled as the rare exception a 15-minute dog fight with what he called an expert Russian pilot. A fight long and skilled enough that he remembered it for the rest of his life. The exceptions were becoming less exceptional as the war went on. The Bergstrom and Hardesty volumes that draw on both Soviet and German archives trace the same arc.

 The Red Air Force that had been mauled in 1941 had become by the time the Aracobras were flying in numbers an organization whose best regiments could meet the Luftwaffer on equal tactical terms. The Germans had no equivalent to Prishkin in those final years. Eric Hartman, who would end the war with 352 confirmed victories, the highest scoring fighter pilot of any nation in any war, was a brilliant tactician of the slashing single pass attack.

 But he was a hunter, not a teacher. He did not transform Luftvafa doctrine in the way Porrishkin transformed Soviet doctrine. He survived inside a system that was already in decline by personal skill, not by changing the system around him. When the war ended, Hartman’s victories represented the achievement of one extraordinary individual operating inside a collapsing air force.

 Pokin’s victories represented the achievement of one extraordinary individual who had operated inside an air force that he himself had helped reshape. So, here is the answer to the question this video opened with. Why did half the Soviet Union’s top fighter aces fly an airplane the West had given up on? The answer is not one thing.

 It is three things that all happened at the same time and that the West did not see because it was looking elsewhere. The first is that the airplane the West rejected was rejected for problems that did not apply on the Eastern front. The lack of a high altitude turbo supercharger did not matter at the altitudes where the Russian war was actually being fought.

The cockpit features that Western pilots found odd were assets in Russian winter conditions. The big nose cannon that American pilots found awkward was lethal in the head on attacks the eastern front favored. The radio, the tricycle gear, the warm cabin, all of them were exactly what an air force fighting at low altitude in deep cold needed.

 The British and American test reports were not wrong. They were testing the wrong question. They had asked whether this airplane could fight the Luftwaffer over the English Channel at 25,000 ft. The answer correctly was no. Nobody had asked whether it could fight the Luftwaffer over the Kuban at 3,000 ft. The answer there when finally tested was yes and emphatically.

 The second is that the men who flew it were not ordinary pilots being given an ordinary airplane. They were the most experienced and most thoughtful airmen the Soviet Air Force had. Men who had survived 1941 when the survival rate was vanishingly low. men who had spent years thinking about what the Luftwaffer was doing to them and how to do it back.

 Pushkin had been keeping a notebook for four years before he ever flew an Ara cobra. Rekolov had been wounded, hospitalized, and returned to combat twice. Goulev had built his early kills in an older Soviet type before transitioning. These men did not fly the P39 the way an average pilot would have flown it. They flew it the way a craftsman uses a tool he has spent half his life learning to respect and the airplane gave them in return exactly what their craft required.

 The third reason is the one that is hardest to see and the most important. The P39 arrived in Soviet hands at the exact moment when the Soviet Air Force was finally figuring out how to fight. The radios let them coordinate. The tactical innovations let them fight vertically rather than horizontally. The training pipeline had begun producing pilots in numbers and quality the Germans could no longer match.

 The airplane and the air force were ready for each other at the same moment, and they walked into a luftwaffer that was beginning to come apart at the seams. None of those three conditions by itself would have produced the result that history records. All three together produced one of the strangest reversals in the history of military aviation.

 An airplane the West had quietly written off became in Soviet hands the deadliest Americanbuilt fighter of the war. The numbers are worth sitting with for a moment because they tell you what those three reasons added up to in concrete terms. By the time production of the P39 ended in August 1944, Bell had built 9,558 era Cobras.

 Of those 4,773, more than half of all the P39s ever made were dispatched to the Soviet Union. Soviet pilots flying that airplane shot down more enemy aircraft than the pilots of any other American fighter in any nation’s service. The fighter that one British squadron had tried for one combat mission in October 1941 became the mount of the second highest scoring fighter pilot of the entire Allied war effort on either side in any theater.

The names worth speaking aloud at the end of this story are not all famous. Yim Krvashev who rammed a Messmitt over the Corelian forests on September 9th, 1942 to save his commander Pavl Kutoakov is not in many history books outside Russia. He died in the same air-to-air collision that killed his target.

 His body was never recovered. He was named a hero of the Soviet Union postumously. Alexander Klub who scored 31 victories in the 16th Guards Regiment before dying in a landing accident in November 1944 is not famous outside Russia either. The Glinker brothers, Dmitri and Boris, who built up extraordinary records in the same regiment during the Kuban battles are not the names that come up when most Americans think about the air war.

Nikolai Golivv, who scored close to 40 kills in just over a year on the type before being pulled from combat by Stalin’s high command, is not a household name anywhere outside the world of serious aviation history. These were the men who made the P39 into what it became. They did it by doing what their counterparts in the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces had not done, which was to find the airplane’s strengths and fight inside them.

 Instead of asking the airplane to be something it was not, they did it on rough airfields in winter weather under political pressure that included the constant threat of being demoted, court marshaled, or shot for failure. They did it with crude support, irregular fuel, food shortages, and equipment that often had to be cannibalized from wrecks because spare parts had not arrived from across two oceans.

 They did it because they had to, and because the airplane, treated with the right respect, gave them back what they put in. There is one other thing to say about how this story has been remembered. The P39 was not a bad airplane that the Soviets somehow made good through sheer willpower. It was a specialized airplane that the West had asked to do the wrong job, and the Soviets, by accident and necessity, ended up giving it the right one.

 The mistake belonged to the people who had ordered it, not to the people who built it, and not to the people who flew it on the Eastern Front. Naka had not made an unreasonable engineering call in 1939. They had simply not predicted the war that was actually about to be fought. And once the war began, the bureaucratic and industrial momentum of producing the airplane they had specified meant that nobody was going to put a turbo supercharger back into the design in time to matter.

 So the airplane went where it was needed and where it could fight, and it found the men who could fly it. Pavel Kakov, the commander whose life Yfim Krashie had saved on that September afternoon over the Carellian front, survived the war. He went on flying after 1945, transitioned to jet aircraft, and rose through the postwar Soviet Air Force with a quiet and methodical career that mirrored the way he had flown.

 In 1969, he was named commanderin-chief of the Soviet Air Forces. In 1972, he was promoted to Chief Marshall of aviation. He held both posts until his death from a stroke on December 3, 1984, two weeks after his second hero of the Soviet Union medal had been approved. He had spent 42 years in uniform after his wingman’s ramming and 41 of them at higher and higher commands in an air force that he helped rebuild from the wreckage of the war into one of the largest and most modern in the world.

The airplane he had flown that morning over the Curelian front. The airplane in which his wingmen had given his life to save him eventually took its place in the museums and the memorials of two countries that had spent most of the intervening years pointing nuclear weapons at each other. The Ara Cobra had not been a great fighter in any abstract or universal sense.

 It had been the right fighter in the right hands at the right moment. And the men who had figured out how to fly it had also been by the same accident of timing. The men who had figured out how to win. If this video gave you something new, hit the like button. It helps stories like this reach the people who care about getting the history right, the inconvenient parts as much as the clean ones.

Subscribe if you want the next chapter. There are many more stories like this one, about ordinary equipment in unexpected hands, about the men who made the difference between an airplane on a specification sheet and an airplane in combat, and about the small forgotten decisions made in wind tunnels, conference rooms, and frozen cockpits that quietly decided how the war was Fun.