Page 86 - The Chief Culprit

Winged Genghis Khan y 63

ferocious, bloodthirsty hyenas that do not have remarkable strength or speed, but have pow-
erful fangs and act in groups against a victim weaker than they are, against him who does not
anticipate attack and is not prepared to deflect it.
What does all this have to do with the Soviet plane Ivanov Su-2? e Ivanov was almost an
exact copy of the Japanese air aggressor. In the summer of 1936, nobody could have pre-
dicted what would happen at Pearl Harbor five years later. In the summer of 1936, the
Nakajima B-5N did not yet exist. ere were only plans, which the Japanese did not an-
nounce. erefore, it was impossible to suppose that Soviet designers were copying the
Japanese. Copying demands time, and even if it had been possible to steal technological
documentation (which would have meant mountains of papers), even then the translation
(from Japanese!) would have taken several years. e Nakajima B-5N in Japan and the si-
multaneous varieties of the Ivanov plane in the USSR were created almost in parallel: the
first flight of the B-5N was in January 1937, and the first flight of the Ivanov was on August
25 of the same year. erefore, we are not talking of copying, but of two very similar yet
independent processes of development.
On Stalin’s orders, several variants of the Ivanov airplane were created. Each designer
jealously guarded his secrets from his competitors, but every Soviet designer came up with
the same winged hyena: a light bomber, bearing more resemblance to a fighter in appearance,
size, and flight characteristics. Every Soviet designer chose the same scheme independently
from his competitors: a monoplane with a low wing location, one radial engine in a dual row,
with an air-cooling system. is is no miracle. It’s just that all the designers were given one
task: to create an instrument for doing the same job. Since the job was the same, the instru-
ments created by different designers to perform it were also quite similar.
In the summer of 1936 the Nakajima B-5N had not yet flown once, and there was little
information known about it. ere was nothing record-breaking about the design of the new
Japanese airplane, nothing that could have attracted Stalin’s attention. But in 1936 Stalin
was already thinking in the same terms as the Japanese admirals. In 1936, Stalin ordered his
designers to create the same type of airplane that one beautiful morning would suddenly ap-
pear above the enemy, at a moment when the enemy does not anticipate an attack. is was
the exact same scenario Stalin planned to use to enter World War II.
A relatively slow-speed plane can be a horrific weapon. Hitler subscribed to the exact
same school of thought. He had his own winged jackal—the Ju-87. is was a single-motor
plane, which bore more resemblance to a fighter than to a bomber. e crew of the plane was
two people. Its defense weapons were weak: one machine gun to defend the rear hemisphere
and two wing-mounted machine guns. e bomb load was less than one ton. It was of that
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generation of airplanes that did not pull up their gear during flight. It had a laughably slow
speed. But groups of ten Ju-87 carried out sudden raids against sleeping air bases and with
these raids they cleared the skies. After the first strike against the airbase, they flew above the
enemy’s territory in complete calm and did not need record speed, since there was nobody
to chase them. e Ju-87 ruled above Poland, Norway, and France. In Britain it encountered
resistance. It was impossible to crush the British air bases with a sudden attack—the condi-
tions were not fit for carrying out surprise raids. After participating in several raids, the losses
of Ju-87 were so high that an order was given to stop using them above the British Isles.
In the spring of 1941 came the Yugoslavia and Greece campaigns. e Ju-87 delivered
a sudden strike and once again they were successful and loved. In May they carried out a