Soviet Air Forces

Here is the news.

All Moscow is waiting to give a hero's welcome to the world's first spaceman, Major Gagarin of the Soviet Air Force.

And to begin the bulletin, here's a Moscow recording of his voice speaking to Russian scientists as he went through space.

Using one of our microphones.

Mannheim's not there, but Mannheim was obviously the overall military commander there at the time.

So Lundqvist is chief of the Finnish Air Force, not the Soviet Air Force.

Yes,

sorry, my apologies.

He was one of those rare officers who combined genuine tactical genius with the ability to make everyone around him a better pilot.

Zemke had spent time before the war as an exchange officer with both the Soviet Air Force and the Royal Air Force.

He had watched different services develop different approaches to fighter combat.

He had formed strong opinions from actual observation about what worked and what did not.

The 56th Fighter Group arrived in England in the spring of 1943, and they were flying Thunderbolts.

Their commander was Hub Zemke, a Montana ranch kid who had flown with the Soviet Air Force as an instructor before the United States entered the war, and who had a clear-eyed understanding of what aircraft could and couldn't do.

Zemke looked at the Thunderbolt and started thinking tactically rather than complaining about what it wasn't.

What you did not do in a P-47 was mix it up in a turning fight at low altitude with a Focke-Wulf 190.

Hmm.

Major test pilot, uh, retired as a lieutenant general in the Soviet Air Force.

You know, very, very, very, very, um, decorated, well-known pilot.

Well, apparently, [clears throat] in, just before Gagarin went up, uh, they sent up Ilyushin, supposedly.

They called themselves the Wolf Pack.

Their commanding officer was Colonel Hubert Zemke, a Montana-born pilot who had spent time before the war flying with the Soviet Air Force as part of a military exchange program.

He had watched the Luftwaffe from close range.

He came back with a clear-eyed respect for what German pilots could do, and he trained his group accordingly.

The carrier-based variant, the Seafire, served the Royal Navy throughout the war, though the narrow undercarriage made carrier landings genuinely unforgiving, and the Seafire bent a great many propellers over the years.

It flew in the markings of the United States Army Air Forces, the Soviet Air Force, South Africa, Australia, India, and dozens of other nations.

Late Mark Spitfires saw combat in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, flying on both sides.

Today, there are roughly sixty airworthy Spitfires in the world, sixty, out of approximately twenty thousand built.

This theory comes from the thought that a dismantled Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 was included in the cargo on Flight 967.

In 1967, a Soviet Air Force pilot named Viktor Belenko defected in his MiG-25 to Hokkaido, and was offered asylum by Gerald Ford.

The fighter jet, MiG-25, became operational in 1970.

It was the main interceptor and reconnaissance aircraft of the Soviet Union, so they would do anything to keep it out of American hands.