By George Mellinger

Via the top of 1941 the Soviet Union was once close to cave in and its air strength virtually annihilated, leaving huge numbers of surviving pilots without airplane to fly. At this juncture the uk set aside its prewar animosities towards the Communists and dispatched a number of hundred typhoon warring parties although at the moment the British have been nonetheless suffering to provide the RAF with glossy warring parties in North Africa and the some distance East. a complete of 4300 Hurricanes and Spitfires, in addition to a number of hundred Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and Airacobras, bought from the united states below Lend-lease, have been finally provided to the USSR in an try to hinder a Russian defeat. After the U.S. had entered the struggle, the american citizens prolonged Lend-lease to incorporate direct offer to the Soviets in addition to the British, and one of the plane despatched have been nearly 10,000 warring parties - regularly P-39s, P-40s and P-63s. even if a lot of those plane have been outmoded after they arrived, and a few weren't rather fitted to Russian working stipulations, they served after they have been wanted. a couple of Russian pilots turned Heroes of the Soviet Union flying Lend-lease airplane, and plenty of extra received their early adventure prior to changing to their very own Yaks and Lavochkins. All of those forms, together with the typhoon, remained in lively devices until eventually the tip of the conflict, or even into the post-war interval. The Soviet executive attempted to minimize or hide the significance of Lend-lease warring parties till good into the Eighties, and the pilots who flew them have been discriminated opposed to as 'foreigners'. merely lately have those pilots felt unfastened to confess what they flew, and now the attention-grabbing tale of those males and their heroic achievements can emerge.