Page 93 - The Chief Culprit

70 y e Chief Culprit

with a normal bomb cargo, was up to 2,250 km. Its defense weapons were eight machine
guns. Its bomb load was two to four tons. In 1941, all these characteristics placed the TB-3
among the top class of airplanes in the world. What about speed? One must concede that the
speed was not too great. In 1932, when the airplane was being integrated into the army, the
speed seemed unthinkable, but by 1941 concepts of speed had changed. e maximum speed
of the TB-3 was 288 km/h.
Let’s compare Stalin’s “obsolete” heavy TB-3 bomber with Hitler’s best heavy bomber.
Well, Hitler did not have any new heavy bombers. (A heavy-bomber development program
was cancelled after the 1936 death of its proponent, Walther Wever.) ere is nothing to
compare with. en let us compare the characteristics of the “obsolete” TB-3 with the char-
acteristics of the best, though obsolete, German heavy bombers. But Hitler did not have any
obsolete heavy bombers either, not a single one. He had, of course, dreams, ideas. He had
sample models. But nothing went past the experimental stage, so in 1941 Hitler did not have
a single bomber with four engines. Hitler in 1941 did not have a single bomber with a range
of 4,000 kilometers. Hitler in 1941 did not have a single bomber with a bomb-carrying ca-
pacity of 4 tons. e TB-3 had little speed. But Hitler’s heavy bombers had no speed, because
they did not exist.
Stalin had the “obsolete” SB bomber (mid-range). At approximately the same bomb
load and range of flight, the SB surpassed the German Ju-87 bomber by about 70 km/h. 13
By June 22, 1941, the Germans had deployed 324 Ju-87s as a part of their assault against the
Soviet Union; Stalin had 6,656 SB planes.
14
On top of the newest fighters, Stalin had the “obsolete” I-16. e situation on June 22,
1941, was that the air force of the western border regions of the USSR alone had at its disposal
a total of 4,226 fighters, of which 1,635 were I-16s. Add to that another 344 I-16s in the air
forces of the Northern, Baltic, and Black Sea fleets, to a total of 1,979. Here is what British
15
pilot Alfred Price, who in his lifetime flew in over forty types of airplanes and spent over four
thousand hours in the air, thought about this airplane. His opinion of the “obsolete” Soviet
fighter: “ e most powerful weapon among the series of fighters in the world in September
1939 was possessed by the Russian I-16, which twice surpassed the Bf-109e and almost three
times the ‘Spitfire-1.’ Among all prewar fighters in the world, the I-16 was unique in the sense
that it alone had an armor protection around the pilot. ose who think that the Russians
were backward peasants before the Second World War and only moved forward under the
influence of using German expertise need to remember the facts.” To this it must be added
16
that by 1941 the I-16 had not and could not have become obsolete.
Starting in 1937, the I-16 was produced with a cannon and machine-gun armament.
e legendary British Spitfire in 1940, during the course of the Battle of Britain, had no can-
non. e great American Mustang and underbolt fighters even by the end of the war had
no cannon. e I-16 had an amazing lifting power of 553 horsepower per ton of weight. is
was a record statistic, and not a single warplane in the world had such power. By the end of
the war, not a single plane in the world had reached such a result—the Spitfire Mk-IX and
Bf-109K came close, but only when the engine was working in an extreme regime that could
not be turned on for longer than seven minutes.
e I-16 surpassed any German fighter and most other airplanes of the world in terms
of its longevity. All German fighters had an extremely vulnerable coolant system. If just one
bullet hit the radiator, pipeline, pump, or any other part of the cooling system, the liquid