Rybin, Y. Luftwaffe ace Walter Schuck researched / Christer Bergstrom, Yuriy Rybin. - Sweden : [s. l.], 2019. - 190 p. : ill.

WALTER SCHUCK with a large formation of aircraft, the whole III./JG 5 was airborne to engage them. What is clear is that the Soviets managed to sink two steam ships. As we have seen on several occasions, large-scale air battles mostly resulted in duplicate vic­ tory claims. Until around this time, there is some con­ cordance between German victory claims and Soviet loss records. However, during some of the great convoy air battles in the summer of 1944 the German and Soviet records suddenly go widely apart, sometimes quite conspiciously. During the two air combats on 17 June 1944, JG 5 claimed thirty-four and twenty-live victories respectively, while Soviet records list only nine own air­ craft losses. In the case with certain Soviet units - like 46 ShAP - the German claims seem to more or less match the Soviet loss records; meanwhile, against German claims of 17 Soviet fighters shot down in the last combat on 17 June 1944, only one Soviet fighter is registered as lost. The Soviets reported 18 German fighters shot down, while III./JG 5 lost five aircraft. The official figures for the air battle on 27 June definitely are suspicious. More than one hundred and fifty aircraft - about 25 Me 109s and 131 Soviet planes - clashed in a fierce battle which raged for over thirty min­ utes between 18,000 to 6,000 feet altitude. The fighter pilots of III./JG 5 claimed 27 Soviet aircraft shot down, including five by Jockel Norz and two P-40s and two Airacobras by Schuck. However, if we are to believe the loss statistics of both sides, the only aircraft which actu­ ally were shot down in this huge battle was an Airacobra of 255 IAP, an A-20, and an Me 109 of III./JG 5 .. . It should be noted that as far as Schuck recalls, this was at a time when inadequately trained rookies was the only replacement JG 5 received for its pilot losses, and these rookies succumbed in masses. The young pilots often lacked even the most elementary knowledge of air combat tactics. They were all filled with eagerness to fight, but would rarely listen to the advise from the more experienced airmen. The rookies seemed to have only one thing in mind: To shoot down an enemy as quickly as possible. That led them to foolishly fly straight towards the nearest enemy aircraft, without bothering to keep a watching eye for that enemy’s wingmen. In that way, one rookie after another was shot down - often several in one and the same air combat. At midnight on 27/28 June, ninety-one Soviet naval aircraft attacked the German ships in the port of Kirkenes. In another great air battle, III./JG 5 claimed the destruction of twenty-two Soviet aircraft. Three of the ten Airacobra claims were submitted by Schuck, as well as one of the five claimed “Bostons”. In Soviet unit statistics, only the losses of four Airacobras and one Douglas A-20 (“Boston”) can be found. By bag­ ging an Airacobra and two Yak-9s in an encounter with the Northern Fleet’s 2 GIAP, 20 IAP and 27 IAP four hours later, Schuck again had made quite an impressive achievement - eleven victories in twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, his friends Franz Dorr and Jockel Norz even superceded that by scoring twelve victories each in the 24-hour period 27-28 June 1944. Thus, Norz reached his 100th victory. In the evening of 28 June, Dorr and Norz were mentioned in the daily bulletin from the Headquar­ ters of the German Armed Forces. June 1944 was Walter Schuck’s most successful month ever, in terms of aerial victories. A total of 31 Soviet aircraft were logged to have fallen before his guns in that month alone. Only two losses sustained by III./JG 5 could be found in German records for all these great air battles and 27-28 June 1944, but the Soviets reported 13 shot down. The air battles over the German coastal convoys continued with unabated intensity whenever weather permitted throughout the damp and cloudy summer of 1944. When sixty-five Soviet naval aircraft were sent out against the port of Kirkenes in the evening of 4 July, the whole III./JG 5 was airborne in time to ward off the attack. The Me 109s dived out of the clouds, striking down on the first attack wave - consisting of 25 A-20 “Bostons” from 9 GMTAP and 36 MTAP, escorted by 40 Airacobras of 2 GIAP and 255 IAP. Schuck was cred­ ited with the destruction of the two first “Bostons” in this air combat, at 1900 and 1902 hours. One of them was the aircraft which was piloted by Kapitan Pyotr Kyalchugin. He was one of 36 MTAP’s most experi­ enced airmen, and had seen action since 1943, when 36 MTAP flew torpedo missions in the Black Sea. His A-20 went down following an attack by an Me 109 straight above Kirkenes at 1901 hours. Next, the A-20 flown by Mladshiy Leytenant Vasiliy Yurchenko fell in flames. Shortly afterward, the Airacobra piloted by 2 GIAP’s Leytenant Ivan Yaroslavtsen - also a veteran, with the experience of 234 combat missions - was shot down. Walter Schuck was credited with the destruction of an Airacobra at 1903 hours. Through the fierce counter-attack by III./JG 5’s Messerschmitt pilots, the bombs dropped by the Soviets in the 4 July raid fell scattered - many were jettisoned before the target was even reached. The cost for this suc­ cess was a loss of three 8./JG 5 pilots. It may appear surprising that the Soviet Northern Fleet relied so heavily on Lend Lease fighters which were inferior to the Me 109 G-6 at such a late stage of the war. In fact, only Airacobras were used to escort the A-20s against Kirkenes on 4 July 1944, and afterward Curtiss P-40s performed an unsuccessful fighter-bomber attack against the same target. Quite contradictory, the Soviet air offensive against the convoys provided the German fighter pilots with a renewed qualitative superiority, at least in one sense. Since the summer of 1942, the airmen of Luftflotte 5 had encountered Yak fighters with increasing frequency. As we have seen previously, these were quite a match to the Me 109s. But the weak point of these Soviet-de- signed fighter types was their limited operational range. The Yakovlev fighters had a normal operational range of 560 miles, which made their use of limited value for T