Page 61 - The Chief Culprit

38 y e Chief Culprit

Stalin’s stupidity, the TB-7 would have been forbidden with one blow, and Stalin would not
have returned again and again to the question. But Stalin changed his mind eight times. Why
these doubts?
Exterminate millions of the best peasants, feeders of Russia? Order given—and the
murderous collectivization starts. Purge the command staff of the army? No problem. Sign a
pact with Hitler? No doubts. Stalin rarely had doubts. Repealing the order to build the TB-7
was the most difficult decision Stalin made in his lifetime.
e TB-7 had powerful enemies, and it is time to name them. e General Staff of the
Red Army was formed in 1935. Before the German invasion the post of Commander of the
General Staff was occupied in succession by Marshals A. I. Egorov and B. M. Shaposhnikov
and Generals of the Army K. A. Meretskov and G. K. Zhukov. All of them were opponents
of the TB-7. Other opponents of the TB-7, and of all strategic bombers, included many im-
portant aviation generals, including P. V. Rychagov, F. K. Arzhanukhin, and F. P. Polynin.
e People’s Commissar for Defense Marshal S. K. Timoshenko also opposed the TB-7.
Airplane designer A. S. Yakovlev, Stalin’s advisor on questions of aviation, was an avid oppo-
nent. And, of course, almost all Soviet military theorists, starting with V. K. Triandaphillov,
were opposed to strategic bombers.
e best of all arguments against heavy bombers was put forward by a professor, Brigade
Commander Alexander Nikolaevich Lapchinsky, the leading Soviet theorist of air warfare.
He wrote several brilliant works on the theory of military aviation. His ideas are simple and
understandable. Bombing cities, factories, and sources and storages of strategic resources is
good. But it is even better to take over all this and use it to enhance one’s own might. It is
possible to transform the enemy’s country into a smoking heap, but is it necessary? Bombing
roads and bridges is useful in any situation except one: when we are preparing an invasion
into enemy territory. In that case, bridges and roads should not be bombed, but taken over
intact, without allowing the retreating enemy to use or to destroy them. Bombing cities dras-
tically lowers the morale of the local population. is is true, who would argue with such a
fact? But a forceful advancement of our troops toward enemy cities demoralizes the popula-
tion more than any bombing. Lapchinsky recommended to Stalin to direct all efforts of the
Red Army not toward undermining the military and economic capabilities of the enemy, but
toward taking them over. e Red Army’s objective was to destroy the opponent’s armies.
e objective of Soviet aviation was to open the road to our armies and support their rapid
advancement.
Lapchinsky recommended not declaring a war, but starting a war with a sudden crush-
ing attack by Soviet aviation on enemy air bases. e suddenness and power of the strike
needed to be such that in the first hours it would destroy all of the enemy’s aviation, without
letting it leave the ground. Having destroyed the enemy’s aviation on the ground, we would
open the road for tanks, and advancing tanks in their turn would “level the enemy air bases.”
e target for our aviation should not be city districts, not electric plants and factories, but
the enemy airplanes on the ground, the hidden machine gun hindering the advancement of
our infantry, the column of trucks with fuel for enemy tanks, the anti-tank cannon hiding
in the bushes.
In other words, one should bomb specific targets, many of them mobile. Bombing
should take place not in the enemy’s rear, but in the closest tactical space, on the front lines.
For such work, one needs a light, maneuverable plane, whose pilot can use it to come close