MrP
Banned
The following is part of Hendryk's Superpower Empire: China 1912 TL (or, as it is now officially known, With Iron and Fire). Those who engjoy it will doubtless find Maverick's spin-off "The Sun and the Mirror" interesting as well
Russia’s entry into the age of aviation took place on 25 July 1909, when a Dutchman, Baron Alexis van den Schrooff, flew over Odessa in a Voisin biplane; this was less than two months before China’s own aviation first, since Feng Ru made his historic flight over Oakland on 22 September of the same year. Then on 23 May 1910, a Russian-made airplane took to the air for the first time near Saint Petersburg. Coincidentally, one of the pioneers of Russian aviation was from Irkutsk and would later become a Yakutian citizen: Yakov Gakkel, an electrical engineer, designed some of the first Russian-made aircraft, though his workshop proved a commercial failure and went out of business in 1912 (he would move back to his native Siberia during the civil war and eventually become chief engineer at Bryner, where he was a key contributor to the development of the company's trademark screw trucks). In the years leading up to World War I Russia started catching up, and even became an early leader in multiengine aircraft when Igor Sikorsky designed the Russky Vityaz, the world’s first four-engine passenger plane, later to evolve into the heavy bomber Ilya Muromets; but even with a rapidly expanding domestic aircraft manufacturing sector, it remained dependent on foreign—mostly French—powerplants. By the beginning of the war, the Russian Air Service had the world’s largest air fleet with 244 aircraft (224 of them French-made), but in the course of the war this early advantage was eroded by its aviation industry’s inability to cope with high attrition rates. Engines, in particular, were in chronically short supply. Russia built 400 aircraft a year, compared to Germany’s 1,348, and with the constant losses only fielded 579 by December 1917, with an extra 1,500 in various states of repair, storage, or training use.
Between the Bolshevik takeover in November 1917 and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the following March, the Russian Air Service—along with the rest of Russia’s military—ceased to exist as an organized body. With no orders, no command structure and no pay, most Russian pilots and ground crews simply went home when they were not summarily executed by revolutionary soldiers’ committees, so that when the various factions that would fight in the Russian civil war coalesced by June 1918, the Bolsheviks found that they could barely scrape together some 150 aircraft. The various White armies were even worse off with a few dozen aircraft each: when General Horvath set up the Provisional Siberian Government, he had at his disposal 65 aircraft and slightly more pilots.
The first deployment of aircraft in the Siberian Campaign was on 18 March 1918, when a single Caudron G3 observation plane was sent ahead of the Chinese Seventh Cavalry Regiment, on a reconnaissance mission over Blagoveshchensk (two days later, another observation plane was similarly sent ahead of the Fifth Cavalry Regiment over Khabarovsk; neither was armed). On April 2, when the Chinese Eight Infantry Division entered Vladivostok, it was accompanied with a flight of three G4 aircraft; although these were likewise primarily assigned observation duty, they came with ammunition and ordnance in case they might be called on to actively engage enemy targets.
By June, the Chinese Siberian Expeditionary Corps was assembled, though between the hurdles of deployment and the fact that the front was thousands of kilometers to the West, it only saw small-scale action, mostly of the counterinsurgency kind against bands of Red partisans, until the Battle of Perm in December. Its air component, under the command of newly-promoted Colonel Rong Zhen (one of the so-called “Eight Immortals” of Chinese aviation) was composed of two squadrons, one of Farman F-40 observation planes, the other of Voisin VIII bombers. Chinese airmen first shed blood in Siberia on 23 August 1918 when a F-40 strafed a group of partisans near Kansk, while on patrol along the Transsiberian railway, though they already had received their first non-combat losses weeks earlier, when a Voisin VIII crashed while attempting to land, killing both crew members. At the Battle of Perm, on 15 December, Colonel Rong’s forces took part in the campaign’s first air-to-air battle: a flight of four Voisin VIII bombers on an air support mission were engaged by two Bolshevik Nieuport 17 fighters, which downed two planes and damaged a third before breaking off unharmed. These were the only two airworthy fighters available to the Bolsheviks on that part of the front, yet they had achieved a clear tactical victory over the CAF. Stung by the humiliation, Rong requested from CAF commander General Feng Ru, and swiftly obtained, a large overhaul of Chinese air assets in Russia: in January 1919 the Expeditionary Corps’ air strength was increased from two to eight squadrons (including three of fighters—two of SPAD S-XIII and one of Sopwith Camels) organized in two groups. It was further expanded in March with the addition of another group of four squadrons (one of SPAD S-XIII fighters, three of Breguet 14 bombers), in preparation for the forthcoming Volga Offensive. Its size would be further increased throughout the following three years, so that by the time the Campaign ended in 1922, it comprised no fewer than 13 groups.
The air forces of General Horvath’s Provisional Siberian Government underwent no less impressive an expansion in the course of the conflict, officially known in Yakutia as the War of National Independence. As previously mentioned, at the time of its foundation it only had 65 aircraft in varying states of airworthiness: an assortment of older Nieuport, Farman and Voisin planes, mostly imported from France though a few had been assembled in factories in European Russia. This disparate collection was organized into a coherent fighting force under the energetic leadership of Colonel Igor Shangin. The son of a civil servant in Irkutsk, Shangin had risen to the rank of captain in the Transbaikal Cossack cavalry before the war. In September 1914, he had transferred to the fledgling Russian Air Service; in 1915 he had studied at the Military Aviation Academy in Sebastopol; by June 1917 he was deputy commander of Russia’s First Air Group. After the Bolshevik took over, he sneaked out of revolution-wracked Petrograd, made his way back to his native Siberia and put himself at the service of the PSG. General Horvath put him in charge of “everything that flies under Russian colors east of Sovdepia”. “Sovdepia” was the derogatory term used by Whites to refer to the area under Bolshevik rule (the Bolsheviks, for their part, derisively referred to PSG-controlled Siberia as “Happy Horvathia”, which before 1918 was the nickname of Horvath’s China Eastern Railway satrapy).
It was a thankless task at first. Spare parts, and especially engines, were difficult to obtain, so that at any one time nearly half of the PSG’s small air force was grounded, awaiting maintenance; to deal with logistical issues, Shangin drafted Aleksandr Friedmann, former manager of Aviapribor—a manufacturing plant of aircraft component parts founded in Moscow in Summer 1917—who had escaped revolutionary turmoil by taking up a teaching position at the University of Perm, where PSG forces found him in December 1918 [1]. Training new pilots to increase the roster beyond its initial size of 70 was also a challenge. This pressing problem was solved when Aleksey Abakumenko and Stepan Nozdrovsky reported for duty. Abakumenko, initially an airplane mechanic who had become a pilot, had had the good fortune to be sent to Britain to study at the Royal School of Aviation mere days before the Bolshevik takeover; returning to Russia via Vladivostok in August 1918, he was entrusted with setting up a flight school in Irkutsk. As for Nozdrovsky, a former mathematics lecturer at the University of Saint-Petersburg, he had obtained a pilot’s license in 1913 and become a flight instructor. A fighter pilot on the Eastern Front, he had moved to Kazan after the collapse of the Russian military structure and opened a private flight school; when the Czech Legion took the city in August 1918, he joined the PSG and by September was in charge of the new Chita Flight School, later to become Chita Air Force Academy.
Most importantly, the taking of Kazan also gave the Siberian Whites the fallen Tsarist regime’s gold stockpile, making it overnight flush with hard cash—even after the Chinese had taken their share and various higher-ups had duly lined their pockets, that still left Horvath’s government with over 300 million gold rubles. Then, three months later, Germany surrendered and World War One was over, prompting Entente governments to abruptly cancel wartime orders to their respective defense industries, leaving the latter with huge amounts of unsold inventory and idle production capacity. Urgent demand met eager offer, and by the last days of 1918 freight ships were sailing from Western Europe to Vladivostok, loaded with all manner of military supplies, including aircraft both surplus and fresh off the factories. China, of course, did likewise with its own share of the windfall, and other ships sailed bound for Tianjin and Qingdao. The first deliveries in February 1919 coincided with the graduation of the first batch of Chita and Irkutsk Flight School graduates, and Shangin’s air force swelled from one to three groups, now equipped with the latest types of aircraft: SPAD S-XIII, SEA IV and Sopwith Camel fighters; Breguet 14, Voisin X, Caudron R11, Farman F-60 “Goliath”, Vickers Vimy and Caproni Ca.3 bombers, as well as smaller batches of yet more models. The next month, this newly augmented force received its baptism of fire with the Volga Offensive.
Although other Entente countries also sent forces to the Russian theater—often with vague or even contradictory mission statements—, on the Siberian front the presence of aircraft flying under other colors than those of the PSG or China remained anecdotal. The air assets deployed by the Japanese were mostly kept in or near Vladivostok as a symbolic display of power, with some sent over to Petropavlovsk in the wake of the Tang-Hara Agreement on the delineation of Chinese and Japanese areas of influence in Eastern Siberia. Britain focused its attention on the Southern Whites, whose air force was reinforced with the RAF 47 Squadron from April 1919 to October 1920, and to a lesser extent on the Northern ones at Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. The only other power which intended to deploy aircraft in support of its ground forces on the Siberian front was France, but organizational mishaps caused the pilots, a squadron’s worth, to arrive in Vladivostok in February 1919 without their planes or ground crew. Following a deal with the French Military Mission, they were assigned to the Chita Flight School as instructors. One of them was Joseph Kessel, already a seasoned veteran at not quite 21 years old—born in a Jewish Russian family and having grown up in Orenburg before moving to France, Kessel had volunteered for a Siberian tour of duty out of what he later described as an atavistic call: “To the eyes [of my comrades], Siberia was nothing but a frozen, godforsaken wasteland… Me, in a sort of trance, I journeyed across unknown continents and oceans. The longer the way, the richer its promises. And at its conclusion, at the end of the world, these endless snowbound steppes, these giant rivers, these limitless forests, these stone age tribes, and the Cossacks from the Baikal, the Amur.” (Les Temps Sauvages) With a wink and a nod from the French Military Mission, Kessel and his fellow pilots would also get to fly combat sorties with PSG aircraft, though mostly in mopping-up operations against remaining Red partisans in the Transbaikal.
Two future major figures of Chinese aviation joined the Expeditionary Corps in time for the offensive: Zhu Binhou and Yang Xianyi. Zhu, also known as Etienne Tsu, was the son of Shanghai business tycoon Zhu Zhiyao (Joseph Tsu). He had gone to France in 1913 to get a pilot’s license and fought in the war as a Foreign Legion fighter pilot; he would later found the Huanlong corporation, one of China’s main aircraft manufacturers. Yang, who was born in the Chinese community of Hawaii, had graduated from the Curtiss Aviation School and come to China in order to join the CAF in January 1919. He would replace Rong upon the latter’s premature death in October 1919, and after the end of the Siberian Campaign, succeed Feng as commander of the CAF.
The offensive was intended to encircle Bolshevik positions to the South and allow a link-up between the PSG’s forces and those of General Markov, nominal leader of the White movement, which held the Don and Kuban regions of Southern Russia. It marked the beginning of large-scale aerial contribution to the fighting. Until then, as on other fronts of the Russian civil war, aircraft were being mostly used for observation, tactical bombing, and ad hoc air support; only a handful of air-to-air engagements had yet taken place, because of the small number of fighters available to either side. But in the preceding months, the Chinese Expeditionary Corps and the PSG’s army had beefed up their air components, and had begun empirically developing a doctrine for their use. Due to the huge size of the theater of operations (stretching across thousands of kilometers of endless steppe), the highly mobile nature of the fighting and the thinness of logistical chains, bringing together the sort of concentration of artillery fire that had made and unmade battles during World War One was virtually unfeasible; instead, Sino-White forces were learning to rely on aviation as a form of surrogate artillery, called on to provide air support of an increasingly closer kind (as a joke went among PSG pilots, “How do you know air support is too close? when it’s our own troops that are firing back!”). The initially cumbersome communication system between ground and air forces was streamlined by providing infantry down to the regiment level direct field telephone lines to specific squadrons, allowing for faster feedback—an evolution that was not entirely welcome by the higher echelons of both PSG and Expeditionary Corps aviations, where there was (reasonable) concern that it created a risk of short-circuiting them out of the chain of command; months of trial and error were necessary to work out a satisfactory procedure. However, given that the industrial and demographic heartland of “Sovdepia” was quite out of range, Sino-White air doctrine gave little consideration to strategic bombing; in the following years, the Chinese would along with Western powers be influenced by Giulio Douhet’s theories, but the Yakutians would hold fast to the idea that the main role of aviation is to support, and act in coordination with, ground forces.
Chinese and PSG pilots also discovered the hard way that their most bitter enemy in Siberia wasn’t the Bolsheviks, it was nature itself. The extreme weather caused the fragile structures of the wood and fabric aircraft to wear and tear much faster than in milder climes; the spring and autumn rasputitsa turned airfields into useless muddy quagmires; fog could keep aircraft grounded for weeks at a time (a place like Irkutsk has an average of 103 foggy days a year). But mostly, it was the cold that pilots learned to fear most. Temperatures in the brutal Siberian winter get so low that aircraft in the open had to keep their engines continually running, lest motor oil congeal into molasses-like jelly—and that was at ground level. Up in the air rubber was liable to turn brittle and crack, rivets to fall off their holes, flight instruments to seize, and wings to become coated with a layer of ice that might grow thick enough to send planes spiraling down out of control. Hypothermia and frostbite were frequent occurrences, despite the introduction in 1919 of British- and US-made electrically-heated flight suits (powered by a wind-driven generator), and among both flying personnel and ground crew, many finished the war with missing fingers and toes. For every airman lost to enemy action, three or more died from environment-related causes.
On the Sino-White side, nearly 250 aircraft were assembled for the Volga Offensive, in support of two Armies, four Cossack cavalry divisions, and a Chinese infantry division. The opening shots were fired on 10 March 1919 and, from day one, aircraft were used extensively to harass enemy formations ahead of advancing Sino-White forces and bomb fortified points. The second week of April brought two high feats for the Sino-White aviation. On 8 April, in front of Saratov, Red commander Boris Dumenko’s Combined Cavalry Division was destroyed in a mere few minutes by bombs and machine gun fire from six Sopwith Camels: the 5,000-strong force lost 600 dead (including Dumenko himself) and another 2,000 wounded, the disorganized survivors being later picked off by cavalrymen from the Orenburg Cossack Division. Two days later, as the fighting had moved to Saratov itself, over 60 aircraft conducted a deadly hours-long strafing noria against the Red Volga Flotilla, sinking or damaging nearly half of its 40-odd vessels and preventing it from effectively contributing to the defense of the city.
However, the Volga Offensive also brought a hard lesson about the limits of air power. Despite initial victories, the Sino-White forces were pushed back in a series of vigorous counter-offensives beginning in early May, and by July had been forced to retreat all the way to their starting point. The Chinese Ninth Division, which had found itself cut off, ran out of supplies and, despite desperate attempts by Rong and Shangin’s men to provide air support, was cut to pieces by Bolshevik forces. Improvised attempts to air-drop supplies had also proved almost entirely ineffective. The sobering conclusion was clear: air superiority alone did not guarantee victory; that remained a job for ground troops as it always had. At a strategic level, the failure of the offensive also convinced General Jiang Chaozong, commander of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, that his supply chains had become critically overextended, and the decision was taken to conduct no further offensive operations west of the Urals. General Khanzhin had come to the same bitter conclusion (and so had Horvath, who was beginning to see the silver lining of an eventual stalemate against the Bolsheviks), and both Chinese and PSG troops pulled back to the Tobol, where they took advantage of a lull in the fighting to entrench themselves.
Between August 1919 and November 1921 the Sino-Whites set up five successive defensive lines—across the Tobol, the Ishim, the Irtysh, the Upper Ob, and eventually the Yenisei. In the first four cases the purpose was to wear down the Red Army by forcing it into costly assaults against reinforced positions, only for the defenders to pull back once the line was breached. In this strategy of attrition, aviation had two unglamorous but important assignments: on the one hand, weaken the Red logistical chain through tactical bombing of railroads, rail yards, warehouses and other infrastructure not already destroyed by retreating ground troops; on the other, harass the troops themselves by strafing columns on the march and laying suppressing fire in front of defensive positions. Since, in their retreat, the Sino-Whites were careful to thoroughly destroy the tracks and bridges of the Transsiberian Railway, the one railroad across that part of the country, the airmen’s role in practice was to make it as frustratingly slow as possible for the Bolsheviks to rebuild it.
The Bolshevik military leadership, which still struggled with a chronic shortage of aircraft due to the international embargo and the slow collapse of their industrial base, had opted for a policy of concentrating what planes they could scrounge at the points of greatest need, even if that meant entirely depleting other front of their air assets. This meant that, as long as they were also fighting the Northern, Northwestern and Southern Whites, the Poles and the Ukrainian Anarchists, they seldom had a chance to spare any airplane at all for the Siberian Front, leaving the Chinese and the PSG to enjoy undisputed mastery of the skies for months at a time. Then all of a sudden up to a couple hundred Red aircraft might show up over the front, but they were as often as not fitted with worn-out engines and flown by undertrained pilots—lack of training among Red pilots resulted in one crash for every 10-15 hours of flight time in 1919. Unlike the Sino-Whites, who could purchase new materiel at will, the Reds had to make do with the same aging aircraft types since 1917, some of them imported before the Revolution, some domestically manufactured: in the course of the war, they managed to build some 700 planes in six small preexisting factories, but only some 290 engines, compared with 1,600 planes and 1,800 engines which were jury-rigged back into working condition. Air superiority in both quantitative and qualitative terms allowed the Chinese and the PSG to keep otherwise obsolescent types in operation, using them in patrol or ground attack roles, while the newer ones were held in reserve for those times when the Red air force showed up. In the latter case, technological edge and larger numbers made aerial combat an increasingly one-sided affair.
Various new ground attack tactics were developed during that phase of the war. One that proved particularly effective was devised by Captain Pavel Argeyev, a veteran of both the Western and Eastern Fronts who had arrived from France in June 1919 to join the fight against the Bolsheviks. As a former infantry officer, he had noticed the psychological effect of fléchettes, 15-cm steel darts dropped hundreds at a time from aircraft against massed enemy formations in the early phase of WW1. Invented by the French and quickly picked up by the Germans, the weapon had stopped being used by 1916. Argeyev had the idea of associating the fléchettes with classic antipersonnel bombs, with the delivery system being two aircraft (usually Breguet 14) flying in tandem, one dropping the bombs and the other the fléchettes: to protect themselves against the former, enemy infantrymen had to drop to the ground, which made them more vulnerable to the latter. Late in the war, PSG pilots perfected a night bombing tactic that involved stopping the engine so that their planes would glide silently towards their targets, at which point they would release the equally silent fléchettes. The actual impact was often small, but as psychological warfare this was fairly effective, as Bolshevik soldiers spent their nights fearfully trying to pick up the faint, telltale sounds of a surprise fléchette attack: the whistle of air from the incoming aircraft’s bracing cables, the hiss of the steel projectiles falling to the ground, the sudden cries of comrades pierced through as they lay sleeping. PSG air forces used extensively in a ground attack role the Caudron R11, which had originally been designed as a bomber escort but proved very effective for low-altitude harassment of enemy troops, thanks to its five machine guns. They were also fond of the Voisin X, a largely unsuccessful type on the Western Front, but which proved its worth in the Siberian theater: a very literal form of flying artillery, this pusher single-engine light bomber came equipped with a Hotchkiss 37mm or 47mm cannon, which allowed it to disable armored trains with just a few well-placed shots. Sino-White airmen further learned to concentrate their fire on the rear of Red troop concentrations, were Cheka officers were deployed to keep the regular soldiers moving forward at gunpoint: once the former were down, the latter became much more likely to stall in their advance or even to rout.
In March 1921, Crimea, the last White bastion in European Russia, fell to the Bolsheviks. Some 150,000 Southern White soldiers, officers, officials, supporters and their relatives were evacuated to safety aboard the remnants of the Black Sea Fleet. With the collapse of Markov’s government, Entente powers agreed that the fleet was now the responsibility of the PSG—mostly to save themselves the headache of taking in more White refugees. Nearly half nonetheless vanished when the ships arrived in Alexandria, taking their chances with colonial British authorities to attempt and make their way to Europe, but the rest decided to stay on and see what fate had in store for them in Siberia. Among the influx of Southern White talent that reached “Happy Horvathia” in the aftermath of Crimea’s fall, whether sailing with the fleet or arriving individually, were a number of men who would later play a part in the history of aviation in Yakutia: pilots and officers Boris Sergievsky, Aleksandr Kovanko, Mikhail Safonov and Timofei Borovoy, as well as air transport pioneer Vasily Yanchenko, but one may also include aircraft manufacturers Artur Anatra, Dmitry Tomashevich and Fyodor Tereshenko among them.
Artur Antonovich Anatra, the grandson of an Italian engineer who had emigrated to Russia in the early 19th century, was already a wealthy banking tycoon when he also became an aviation enthusiast in his late 30s. The founder of the Odessa Aero-Club and publisher of an aviation-oriented illustrated magazine, he offered in October 1912 to set up aircraft manufacturing facilities for the Russian military on club grounds. The first Army orders came in June 1913, for five license-made Farman IV airplanes. In the following four years, Anatra produced more French aircraft under license (Farman, Morane-Saulnier, Nieuport and Voisin) but also, from 1915, locally designed models by French engineer Elysée-Alfred Descamps and Vassily Khiony. By early 1917 most of the output consisted of local designs, namely the Anatra D and DS, and a second factory had been set up in Simferopol, for a total production of some 100 aircraft a month.
One promising prototype that was developed in 1916 by Descamps and Khiony was the Anadva, an innovative design which consisted of two Anatra D fuselages joined by a common wing, with a nacelle attached to the upper wing between the two. The pilot sat in the left fuselage, the observer in the right one, and the gunner in the nacelle. A later version had a crew of six. Flight tests started in July 1916 with pair of 100 HP Gnome-Monosoupape engines, but those were replaced on the second prototype by 140 HP Salmson's. Trials took place throughout 1917. The Russian army saw the aircraft's potential as a light bomber, and 50 were ordered to compensate supply shortages of the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets. However, by then the October revolution had taken place.
After the Bolshevik coup, the company refused to submit to demands of the Council of People's Commissars that its management be turned over to its workers, and was nationalized by decree in December. The following June, the factories were destroyed in order to deny their use by White forces which were advancing on Odessa. Distraught, Anatra left with Descamps on a French ship shortly before the recapture of Odessa by the Bolsheviks in 1919 (Khiony opted to stay behind and later joined the Soviet aircraft industry). Having been informed by representatives of Horvath's government that some of his assets—invested in the Commercial Bank of Siberia—had been salvaged, he accepted their invitation to relocate in Eastern Siberia.
In 1920 he settled in Irkutsk, joined by Descamps, and started an aeronautical workshop that soon began churning out Breguet 14 light bombers, SPAD S-XIII fighters and DS observation planes in modest but steadily increasing numbers. One of his test pilots was none other than his sister-in-law Yevdokia, one of the first women to obtain a pilot's license in prewar Russia. Due to the unreliabilty of local supply chains, Anatra Aircraft Company went for vertical integration, producing itself most component parts, though he remained temporarily dependent on imported French powerplants. By mid-1921 it produced some 20 aircraft a month, a far cry from its heyday in Odessa but a respectable output given the prevailing conditions. Under Descamps' direction, the company resumed the development of its own designs, above all the Anadva. A third prototype was built, this time using 160 HP Salmson engines and with a crew once again reduced to three, and with Horvath's government expressing interest, 13 production models followed, seven of which were deployed in time to take part in the Battle of Krasnoyarsk. However, further orders were cancelled in early 1922, when the armistice with the USSR resulted in cutbacks in military spending.
The engineer in charge of organizing Anatra's powerplant assembly facility was Aleksandr Kvasnikov. Born in Baku in 1892, he studied at the Superior Technical School in Moscow, and was a student of Russian flight pioneer Nikolay Zhukovsky. From 1914 to 1917 he was a military pilot. After the February Revolution, having been demobilized, he enlisted at the Tomsk Technological Institute and graduated in 1918. He joined the White retreat to eastern Siberia; ending up in Irkutsk, he applied for a job with Anatra. Thanks to his qualifications he was swiftly hired.
The last major battle of the war was also its largest air battle: on 9 November 1921, began the engagement variously known as the Battle of Krasnoyarsk or the Battle of the Yenisei, during which three Bolshevik Armies tried to breach the Shoshin Line, an elaborate defensive work on the eastern shore of the Yenisei. Since September, with victory achieved or in sight in Ukraine and Central Asia, the two other still active theaters with the Siberian Front, the Reds had deployed nearly every fighter and bomber in their inventory against the Sino-Whites; even then they were still outnumbered more than three to one by the PSG and the Expeditionary Corps’ combined 550 combat aircraft. Throughout September and October, Red pilots had had to fight tooth and nail to dispute air superiority to the Sino-White ones who maintained constant pressure on advancing Bolshevik forces, seeking to maximize attrition before they reached the Shoshin Line. They and their machines were given no respite, having to fend off hit-and-run tactical bombing raids or engage in dogfights on a daily basis, so that their combat effectiveness had seriously decreased by the time the actual battle began. For the next two weeks, as ground forces vainly attempted to breach or turn the artillery-laden fortifications that cut them up to pieces, air forces waged an equally hopeless fight against an enemy that was more numerous, better equipped, in better shape, and with a shorter and intact supply chain. With the Red air forces soon overwhelmed, PSG and Chinese ones could focus on ground targets, strafing and bombing with abandon, defying scattered AA fire. These attacks were all the more devastating as, with the ground frozen, troops were virtually unable to dig in for protection; and the Yenisei, its surface ice broken up by explosions, formed a kilometer-wide moat on which rafts and other small vessels could be easily picked off. With the airfields a short distance behind the Line, the airmen could conduct several sorties a day, reloading and filling up before taking off again. While these tactical ground attacks were going on, the heavier bombers (Farman F-60, Vickers Vimy, Caproni Ca.3 and a few locally-made Anatra Anadva) conducted raids along the Red rear echelons, in some cases all the way to Novonikolayevsk 650 km to the West. In this regard aviation was instrumental in slowing, and then stopping, the Red Army’s eastward momentum.
[1] After the war, Friedmann joined the Department of Physics at Irkutsk University, where he set to work on refining Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, and elaborated a set of equations that provided a mathematical model for the expansion of the universe. By the end of the 1920s he had revolutionized modern cosmology, whose standard model is named the Friedmann Model after him.
Reaching for the Eternal Blue Sky :
A History of Aviation in Yakutia, 1917-1945
Insignia of the Yakutian Air Force.
1917-1922
A History of Aviation in Yakutia, 1917-1945
Insignia of the Yakutian Air Force.
1917-1922
Russia’s entry into the age of aviation took place on 25 July 1909, when a Dutchman, Baron Alexis van den Schrooff, flew over Odessa in a Voisin biplane; this was less than two months before China’s own aviation first, since Feng Ru made his historic flight over Oakland on 22 September of the same year. Then on 23 May 1910, a Russian-made airplane took to the air for the first time near Saint Petersburg. Coincidentally, one of the pioneers of Russian aviation was from Irkutsk and would later become a Yakutian citizen: Yakov Gakkel, an electrical engineer, designed some of the first Russian-made aircraft, though his workshop proved a commercial failure and went out of business in 1912 (he would move back to his native Siberia during the civil war and eventually become chief engineer at Bryner, where he was a key contributor to the development of the company's trademark screw trucks). In the years leading up to World War I Russia started catching up, and even became an early leader in multiengine aircraft when Igor Sikorsky designed the Russky Vityaz, the world’s first four-engine passenger plane, later to evolve into the heavy bomber Ilya Muromets; but even with a rapidly expanding domestic aircraft manufacturing sector, it remained dependent on foreign—mostly French—powerplants. By the beginning of the war, the Russian Air Service had the world’s largest air fleet with 244 aircraft (224 of them French-made), but in the course of the war this early advantage was eroded by its aviation industry’s inability to cope with high attrition rates. Engines, in particular, were in chronically short supply. Russia built 400 aircraft a year, compared to Germany’s 1,348, and with the constant losses only fielded 579 by December 1917, with an extra 1,500 in various states of repair, storage, or training use.
Between the Bolshevik takeover in November 1917 and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the following March, the Russian Air Service—along with the rest of Russia’s military—ceased to exist as an organized body. With no orders, no command structure and no pay, most Russian pilots and ground crews simply went home when they were not summarily executed by revolutionary soldiers’ committees, so that when the various factions that would fight in the Russian civil war coalesced by June 1918, the Bolsheviks found that they could barely scrape together some 150 aircraft. The various White armies were even worse off with a few dozen aircraft each: when General Horvath set up the Provisional Siberian Government, he had at his disposal 65 aircraft and slightly more pilots.
The first deployment of aircraft in the Siberian Campaign was on 18 March 1918, when a single Caudron G3 observation plane was sent ahead of the Chinese Seventh Cavalry Regiment, on a reconnaissance mission over Blagoveshchensk (two days later, another observation plane was similarly sent ahead of the Fifth Cavalry Regiment over Khabarovsk; neither was armed). On April 2, when the Chinese Eight Infantry Division entered Vladivostok, it was accompanied with a flight of three G4 aircraft; although these were likewise primarily assigned observation duty, they came with ammunition and ordnance in case they might be called on to actively engage enemy targets.
By June, the Chinese Siberian Expeditionary Corps was assembled, though between the hurdles of deployment and the fact that the front was thousands of kilometers to the West, it only saw small-scale action, mostly of the counterinsurgency kind against bands of Red partisans, until the Battle of Perm in December. Its air component, under the command of newly-promoted Colonel Rong Zhen (one of the so-called “Eight Immortals” of Chinese aviation) was composed of two squadrons, one of Farman F-40 observation planes, the other of Voisin VIII bombers. Chinese airmen first shed blood in Siberia on 23 August 1918 when a F-40 strafed a group of partisans near Kansk, while on patrol along the Transsiberian railway, though they already had received their first non-combat losses weeks earlier, when a Voisin VIII crashed while attempting to land, killing both crew members. At the Battle of Perm, on 15 December, Colonel Rong’s forces took part in the campaign’s first air-to-air battle: a flight of four Voisin VIII bombers on an air support mission were engaged by two Bolshevik Nieuport 17 fighters, which downed two planes and damaged a third before breaking off unharmed. These were the only two airworthy fighters available to the Bolsheviks on that part of the front, yet they had achieved a clear tactical victory over the CAF. Stung by the humiliation, Rong requested from CAF commander General Feng Ru, and swiftly obtained, a large overhaul of Chinese air assets in Russia: in January 1919 the Expeditionary Corps’ air strength was increased from two to eight squadrons (including three of fighters—two of SPAD S-XIII and one of Sopwith Camels) organized in two groups. It was further expanded in March with the addition of another group of four squadrons (one of SPAD S-XIII fighters, three of Breguet 14 bombers), in preparation for the forthcoming Volga Offensive. Its size would be further increased throughout the following three years, so that by the time the Campaign ended in 1922, it comprised no fewer than 13 groups.
The air forces of General Horvath’s Provisional Siberian Government underwent no less impressive an expansion in the course of the conflict, officially known in Yakutia as the War of National Independence. As previously mentioned, at the time of its foundation it only had 65 aircraft in varying states of airworthiness: an assortment of older Nieuport, Farman and Voisin planes, mostly imported from France though a few had been assembled in factories in European Russia. This disparate collection was organized into a coherent fighting force under the energetic leadership of Colonel Igor Shangin. The son of a civil servant in Irkutsk, Shangin had risen to the rank of captain in the Transbaikal Cossack cavalry before the war. In September 1914, he had transferred to the fledgling Russian Air Service; in 1915 he had studied at the Military Aviation Academy in Sebastopol; by June 1917 he was deputy commander of Russia’s First Air Group. After the Bolshevik took over, he sneaked out of revolution-wracked Petrograd, made his way back to his native Siberia and put himself at the service of the PSG. General Horvath put him in charge of “everything that flies under Russian colors east of Sovdepia”. “Sovdepia” was the derogatory term used by Whites to refer to the area under Bolshevik rule (the Bolsheviks, for their part, derisively referred to PSG-controlled Siberia as “Happy Horvathia”, which before 1918 was the nickname of Horvath’s China Eastern Railway satrapy).
It was a thankless task at first. Spare parts, and especially engines, were difficult to obtain, so that at any one time nearly half of the PSG’s small air force was grounded, awaiting maintenance; to deal with logistical issues, Shangin drafted Aleksandr Friedmann, former manager of Aviapribor—a manufacturing plant of aircraft component parts founded in Moscow in Summer 1917—who had escaped revolutionary turmoil by taking up a teaching position at the University of Perm, where PSG forces found him in December 1918 [1]. Training new pilots to increase the roster beyond its initial size of 70 was also a challenge. This pressing problem was solved when Aleksey Abakumenko and Stepan Nozdrovsky reported for duty. Abakumenko, initially an airplane mechanic who had become a pilot, had had the good fortune to be sent to Britain to study at the Royal School of Aviation mere days before the Bolshevik takeover; returning to Russia via Vladivostok in August 1918, he was entrusted with setting up a flight school in Irkutsk. As for Nozdrovsky, a former mathematics lecturer at the University of Saint-Petersburg, he had obtained a pilot’s license in 1913 and become a flight instructor. A fighter pilot on the Eastern Front, he had moved to Kazan after the collapse of the Russian military structure and opened a private flight school; when the Czech Legion took the city in August 1918, he joined the PSG and by September was in charge of the new Chita Flight School, later to become Chita Air Force Academy.
Most importantly, the taking of Kazan also gave the Siberian Whites the fallen Tsarist regime’s gold stockpile, making it overnight flush with hard cash—even after the Chinese had taken their share and various higher-ups had duly lined their pockets, that still left Horvath’s government with over 300 million gold rubles. Then, three months later, Germany surrendered and World War One was over, prompting Entente governments to abruptly cancel wartime orders to their respective defense industries, leaving the latter with huge amounts of unsold inventory and idle production capacity. Urgent demand met eager offer, and by the last days of 1918 freight ships were sailing from Western Europe to Vladivostok, loaded with all manner of military supplies, including aircraft both surplus and fresh off the factories. China, of course, did likewise with its own share of the windfall, and other ships sailed bound for Tianjin and Qingdao. The first deliveries in February 1919 coincided with the graduation of the first batch of Chita and Irkutsk Flight School graduates, and Shangin’s air force swelled from one to three groups, now equipped with the latest types of aircraft: SPAD S-XIII, SEA IV and Sopwith Camel fighters; Breguet 14, Voisin X, Caudron R11, Farman F-60 “Goliath”, Vickers Vimy and Caproni Ca.3 bombers, as well as smaller batches of yet more models. The next month, this newly augmented force received its baptism of fire with the Volga Offensive.
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Although other Entente countries also sent forces to the Russian theater—often with vague or even contradictory mission statements—, on the Siberian front the presence of aircraft flying under other colors than those of the PSG or China remained anecdotal. The air assets deployed by the Japanese were mostly kept in or near Vladivostok as a symbolic display of power, with some sent over to Petropavlovsk in the wake of the Tang-Hara Agreement on the delineation of Chinese and Japanese areas of influence in Eastern Siberia. Britain focused its attention on the Southern Whites, whose air force was reinforced with the RAF 47 Squadron from April 1919 to October 1920, and to a lesser extent on the Northern ones at Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. The only other power which intended to deploy aircraft in support of its ground forces on the Siberian front was France, but organizational mishaps caused the pilots, a squadron’s worth, to arrive in Vladivostok in February 1919 without their planes or ground crew. Following a deal with the French Military Mission, they were assigned to the Chita Flight School as instructors. One of them was Joseph Kessel, already a seasoned veteran at not quite 21 years old—born in a Jewish Russian family and having grown up in Orenburg before moving to France, Kessel had volunteered for a Siberian tour of duty out of what he later described as an atavistic call: “To the eyes [of my comrades], Siberia was nothing but a frozen, godforsaken wasteland… Me, in a sort of trance, I journeyed across unknown continents and oceans. The longer the way, the richer its promises. And at its conclusion, at the end of the world, these endless snowbound steppes, these giant rivers, these limitless forests, these stone age tribes, and the Cossacks from the Baikal, the Amur.” (Les Temps Sauvages) With a wink and a nod from the French Military Mission, Kessel and his fellow pilots would also get to fly combat sorties with PSG aircraft, though mostly in mopping-up operations against remaining Red partisans in the Transbaikal.
Two future major figures of Chinese aviation joined the Expeditionary Corps in time for the offensive: Zhu Binhou and Yang Xianyi. Zhu, also known as Etienne Tsu, was the son of Shanghai business tycoon Zhu Zhiyao (Joseph Tsu). He had gone to France in 1913 to get a pilot’s license and fought in the war as a Foreign Legion fighter pilot; he would later found the Huanlong corporation, one of China’s main aircraft manufacturers. Yang, who was born in the Chinese community of Hawaii, had graduated from the Curtiss Aviation School and come to China in order to join the CAF in January 1919. He would replace Rong upon the latter’s premature death in October 1919, and after the end of the Siberian Campaign, succeed Feng as commander of the CAF.
The offensive was intended to encircle Bolshevik positions to the South and allow a link-up between the PSG’s forces and those of General Markov, nominal leader of the White movement, which held the Don and Kuban regions of Southern Russia. It marked the beginning of large-scale aerial contribution to the fighting. Until then, as on other fronts of the Russian civil war, aircraft were being mostly used for observation, tactical bombing, and ad hoc air support; only a handful of air-to-air engagements had yet taken place, because of the small number of fighters available to either side. But in the preceding months, the Chinese Expeditionary Corps and the PSG’s army had beefed up their air components, and had begun empirically developing a doctrine for their use. Due to the huge size of the theater of operations (stretching across thousands of kilometers of endless steppe), the highly mobile nature of the fighting and the thinness of logistical chains, bringing together the sort of concentration of artillery fire that had made and unmade battles during World War One was virtually unfeasible; instead, Sino-White forces were learning to rely on aviation as a form of surrogate artillery, called on to provide air support of an increasingly closer kind (as a joke went among PSG pilots, “How do you know air support is too close? when it’s our own troops that are firing back!”). The initially cumbersome communication system between ground and air forces was streamlined by providing infantry down to the regiment level direct field telephone lines to specific squadrons, allowing for faster feedback—an evolution that was not entirely welcome by the higher echelons of both PSG and Expeditionary Corps aviations, where there was (reasonable) concern that it created a risk of short-circuiting them out of the chain of command; months of trial and error were necessary to work out a satisfactory procedure. However, given that the industrial and demographic heartland of “Sovdepia” was quite out of range, Sino-White air doctrine gave little consideration to strategic bombing; in the following years, the Chinese would along with Western powers be influenced by Giulio Douhet’s theories, but the Yakutians would hold fast to the idea that the main role of aviation is to support, and act in coordination with, ground forces.
Chinese and PSG pilots also discovered the hard way that their most bitter enemy in Siberia wasn’t the Bolsheviks, it was nature itself. The extreme weather caused the fragile structures of the wood and fabric aircraft to wear and tear much faster than in milder climes; the spring and autumn rasputitsa turned airfields into useless muddy quagmires; fog could keep aircraft grounded for weeks at a time (a place like Irkutsk has an average of 103 foggy days a year). But mostly, it was the cold that pilots learned to fear most. Temperatures in the brutal Siberian winter get so low that aircraft in the open had to keep their engines continually running, lest motor oil congeal into molasses-like jelly—and that was at ground level. Up in the air rubber was liable to turn brittle and crack, rivets to fall off their holes, flight instruments to seize, and wings to become coated with a layer of ice that might grow thick enough to send planes spiraling down out of control. Hypothermia and frostbite were frequent occurrences, despite the introduction in 1919 of British- and US-made electrically-heated flight suits (powered by a wind-driven generator), and among both flying personnel and ground crew, many finished the war with missing fingers and toes. For every airman lost to enemy action, three or more died from environment-related causes.
On the Sino-White side, nearly 250 aircraft were assembled for the Volga Offensive, in support of two Armies, four Cossack cavalry divisions, and a Chinese infantry division. The opening shots were fired on 10 March 1919 and, from day one, aircraft were used extensively to harass enemy formations ahead of advancing Sino-White forces and bomb fortified points. The second week of April brought two high feats for the Sino-White aviation. On 8 April, in front of Saratov, Red commander Boris Dumenko’s Combined Cavalry Division was destroyed in a mere few minutes by bombs and machine gun fire from six Sopwith Camels: the 5,000-strong force lost 600 dead (including Dumenko himself) and another 2,000 wounded, the disorganized survivors being later picked off by cavalrymen from the Orenburg Cossack Division. Two days later, as the fighting had moved to Saratov itself, over 60 aircraft conducted a deadly hours-long strafing noria against the Red Volga Flotilla, sinking or damaging nearly half of its 40-odd vessels and preventing it from effectively contributing to the defense of the city.
However, the Volga Offensive also brought a hard lesson about the limits of air power. Despite initial victories, the Sino-White forces were pushed back in a series of vigorous counter-offensives beginning in early May, and by July had been forced to retreat all the way to their starting point. The Chinese Ninth Division, which had found itself cut off, ran out of supplies and, despite desperate attempts by Rong and Shangin’s men to provide air support, was cut to pieces by Bolshevik forces. Improvised attempts to air-drop supplies had also proved almost entirely ineffective. The sobering conclusion was clear: air superiority alone did not guarantee victory; that remained a job for ground troops as it always had. At a strategic level, the failure of the offensive also convinced General Jiang Chaozong, commander of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, that his supply chains had become critically overextended, and the decision was taken to conduct no further offensive operations west of the Urals. General Khanzhin had come to the same bitter conclusion (and so had Horvath, who was beginning to see the silver lining of an eventual stalemate against the Bolsheviks), and both Chinese and PSG troops pulled back to the Tobol, where they took advantage of a lull in the fighting to entrench themselves.
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Between August 1919 and November 1921 the Sino-Whites set up five successive defensive lines—across the Tobol, the Ishim, the Irtysh, the Upper Ob, and eventually the Yenisei. In the first four cases the purpose was to wear down the Red Army by forcing it into costly assaults against reinforced positions, only for the defenders to pull back once the line was breached. In this strategy of attrition, aviation had two unglamorous but important assignments: on the one hand, weaken the Red logistical chain through tactical bombing of railroads, rail yards, warehouses and other infrastructure not already destroyed by retreating ground troops; on the other, harass the troops themselves by strafing columns on the march and laying suppressing fire in front of defensive positions. Since, in their retreat, the Sino-Whites were careful to thoroughly destroy the tracks and bridges of the Transsiberian Railway, the one railroad across that part of the country, the airmen’s role in practice was to make it as frustratingly slow as possible for the Bolsheviks to rebuild it.
The Bolshevik military leadership, which still struggled with a chronic shortage of aircraft due to the international embargo and the slow collapse of their industrial base, had opted for a policy of concentrating what planes they could scrounge at the points of greatest need, even if that meant entirely depleting other front of their air assets. This meant that, as long as they were also fighting the Northern, Northwestern and Southern Whites, the Poles and the Ukrainian Anarchists, they seldom had a chance to spare any airplane at all for the Siberian Front, leaving the Chinese and the PSG to enjoy undisputed mastery of the skies for months at a time. Then all of a sudden up to a couple hundred Red aircraft might show up over the front, but they were as often as not fitted with worn-out engines and flown by undertrained pilots—lack of training among Red pilots resulted in one crash for every 10-15 hours of flight time in 1919. Unlike the Sino-Whites, who could purchase new materiel at will, the Reds had to make do with the same aging aircraft types since 1917, some of them imported before the Revolution, some domestically manufactured: in the course of the war, they managed to build some 700 planes in six small preexisting factories, but only some 290 engines, compared with 1,600 planes and 1,800 engines which were jury-rigged back into working condition. Air superiority in both quantitative and qualitative terms allowed the Chinese and the PSG to keep otherwise obsolescent types in operation, using them in patrol or ground attack roles, while the newer ones were held in reserve for those times when the Red air force showed up. In the latter case, technological edge and larger numbers made aerial combat an increasingly one-sided affair.
Various new ground attack tactics were developed during that phase of the war. One that proved particularly effective was devised by Captain Pavel Argeyev, a veteran of both the Western and Eastern Fronts who had arrived from France in June 1919 to join the fight against the Bolsheviks. As a former infantry officer, he had noticed the psychological effect of fléchettes, 15-cm steel darts dropped hundreds at a time from aircraft against massed enemy formations in the early phase of WW1. Invented by the French and quickly picked up by the Germans, the weapon had stopped being used by 1916. Argeyev had the idea of associating the fléchettes with classic antipersonnel bombs, with the delivery system being two aircraft (usually Breguet 14) flying in tandem, one dropping the bombs and the other the fléchettes: to protect themselves against the former, enemy infantrymen had to drop to the ground, which made them more vulnerable to the latter. Late in the war, PSG pilots perfected a night bombing tactic that involved stopping the engine so that their planes would glide silently towards their targets, at which point they would release the equally silent fléchettes. The actual impact was often small, but as psychological warfare this was fairly effective, as Bolshevik soldiers spent their nights fearfully trying to pick up the faint, telltale sounds of a surprise fléchette attack: the whistle of air from the incoming aircraft’s bracing cables, the hiss of the steel projectiles falling to the ground, the sudden cries of comrades pierced through as they lay sleeping. PSG air forces used extensively in a ground attack role the Caudron R11, which had originally been designed as a bomber escort but proved very effective for low-altitude harassment of enemy troops, thanks to its five machine guns. They were also fond of the Voisin X, a largely unsuccessful type on the Western Front, but which proved its worth in the Siberian theater: a very literal form of flying artillery, this pusher single-engine light bomber came equipped with a Hotchkiss 37mm or 47mm cannon, which allowed it to disable armored trains with just a few well-placed shots. Sino-White airmen further learned to concentrate their fire on the rear of Red troop concentrations, were Cheka officers were deployed to keep the regular soldiers moving forward at gunpoint: once the former were down, the latter became much more likely to stall in their advance or even to rout.
In March 1921, Crimea, the last White bastion in European Russia, fell to the Bolsheviks. Some 150,000 Southern White soldiers, officers, officials, supporters and their relatives were evacuated to safety aboard the remnants of the Black Sea Fleet. With the collapse of Markov’s government, Entente powers agreed that the fleet was now the responsibility of the PSG—mostly to save themselves the headache of taking in more White refugees. Nearly half nonetheless vanished when the ships arrived in Alexandria, taking their chances with colonial British authorities to attempt and make their way to Europe, but the rest decided to stay on and see what fate had in store for them in Siberia. Among the influx of Southern White talent that reached “Happy Horvathia” in the aftermath of Crimea’s fall, whether sailing with the fleet or arriving individually, were a number of men who would later play a part in the history of aviation in Yakutia: pilots and officers Boris Sergievsky, Aleksandr Kovanko, Mikhail Safonov and Timofei Borovoy, as well as air transport pioneer Vasily Yanchenko, but one may also include aircraft manufacturers Artur Anatra, Dmitry Tomashevich and Fyodor Tereshenko among them.
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Artur Antonovich Anatra, the grandson of an Italian engineer who had emigrated to Russia in the early 19th century, was already a wealthy banking tycoon when he also became an aviation enthusiast in his late 30s. The founder of the Odessa Aero-Club and publisher of an aviation-oriented illustrated magazine, he offered in October 1912 to set up aircraft manufacturing facilities for the Russian military on club grounds. The first Army orders came in June 1913, for five license-made Farman IV airplanes. In the following four years, Anatra produced more French aircraft under license (Farman, Morane-Saulnier, Nieuport and Voisin) but also, from 1915, locally designed models by French engineer Elysée-Alfred Descamps and Vassily Khiony. By early 1917 most of the output consisted of local designs, namely the Anatra D and DS, and a second factory had been set up in Simferopol, for a total production of some 100 aircraft a month.
One promising prototype that was developed in 1916 by Descamps and Khiony was the Anadva, an innovative design which consisted of two Anatra D fuselages joined by a common wing, with a nacelle attached to the upper wing between the two. The pilot sat in the left fuselage, the observer in the right one, and the gunner in the nacelle. A later version had a crew of six. Flight tests started in July 1916 with pair of 100 HP Gnome-Monosoupape engines, but those were replaced on the second prototype by 140 HP Salmson's. Trials took place throughout 1917. The Russian army saw the aircraft's potential as a light bomber, and 50 were ordered to compensate supply shortages of the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets. However, by then the October revolution had taken place.
After the Bolshevik coup, the company refused to submit to demands of the Council of People's Commissars that its management be turned over to its workers, and was nationalized by decree in December. The following June, the factories were destroyed in order to deny their use by White forces which were advancing on Odessa. Distraught, Anatra left with Descamps on a French ship shortly before the recapture of Odessa by the Bolsheviks in 1919 (Khiony opted to stay behind and later joined the Soviet aircraft industry). Having been informed by representatives of Horvath's government that some of his assets—invested in the Commercial Bank of Siberia—had been salvaged, he accepted their invitation to relocate in Eastern Siberia.
In 1920 he settled in Irkutsk, joined by Descamps, and started an aeronautical workshop that soon began churning out Breguet 14 light bombers, SPAD S-XIII fighters and DS observation planes in modest but steadily increasing numbers. One of his test pilots was none other than his sister-in-law Yevdokia, one of the first women to obtain a pilot's license in prewar Russia. Due to the unreliabilty of local supply chains, Anatra Aircraft Company went for vertical integration, producing itself most component parts, though he remained temporarily dependent on imported French powerplants. By mid-1921 it produced some 20 aircraft a month, a far cry from its heyday in Odessa but a respectable output given the prevailing conditions. Under Descamps' direction, the company resumed the development of its own designs, above all the Anadva. A third prototype was built, this time using 160 HP Salmson engines and with a crew once again reduced to three, and with Horvath's government expressing interest, 13 production models followed, seven of which were deployed in time to take part in the Battle of Krasnoyarsk. However, further orders were cancelled in early 1922, when the armistice with the USSR resulted in cutbacks in military spending.
The engineer in charge of organizing Anatra's powerplant assembly facility was Aleksandr Kvasnikov. Born in Baku in 1892, he studied at the Superior Technical School in Moscow, and was a student of Russian flight pioneer Nikolay Zhukovsky. From 1914 to 1917 he was a military pilot. After the February Revolution, having been demobilized, he enlisted at the Tomsk Technological Institute and graduated in 1918. He joined the White retreat to eastern Siberia; ending up in Irkutsk, he applied for a job with Anatra. Thanks to his qualifications he was swiftly hired.
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The last major battle of the war was also its largest air battle: on 9 November 1921, began the engagement variously known as the Battle of Krasnoyarsk or the Battle of the Yenisei, during which three Bolshevik Armies tried to breach the Shoshin Line, an elaborate defensive work on the eastern shore of the Yenisei. Since September, with victory achieved or in sight in Ukraine and Central Asia, the two other still active theaters with the Siberian Front, the Reds had deployed nearly every fighter and bomber in their inventory against the Sino-Whites; even then they were still outnumbered more than three to one by the PSG and the Expeditionary Corps’ combined 550 combat aircraft. Throughout September and October, Red pilots had had to fight tooth and nail to dispute air superiority to the Sino-White ones who maintained constant pressure on advancing Bolshevik forces, seeking to maximize attrition before they reached the Shoshin Line. They and their machines were given no respite, having to fend off hit-and-run tactical bombing raids or engage in dogfights on a daily basis, so that their combat effectiveness had seriously decreased by the time the actual battle began. For the next two weeks, as ground forces vainly attempted to breach or turn the artillery-laden fortifications that cut them up to pieces, air forces waged an equally hopeless fight against an enemy that was more numerous, better equipped, in better shape, and with a shorter and intact supply chain. With the Red air forces soon overwhelmed, PSG and Chinese ones could focus on ground targets, strafing and bombing with abandon, defying scattered AA fire. These attacks were all the more devastating as, with the ground frozen, troops were virtually unable to dig in for protection; and the Yenisei, its surface ice broken up by explosions, formed a kilometer-wide moat on which rafts and other small vessels could be easily picked off. With the airfields a short distance behind the Line, the airmen could conduct several sorties a day, reloading and filling up before taking off again. While these tactical ground attacks were going on, the heavier bombers (Farman F-60, Vickers Vimy, Caproni Ca.3 and a few locally-made Anatra Anadva) conducted raids along the Red rear echelons, in some cases all the way to Novonikolayevsk 650 km to the West. In this regard aviation was instrumental in slowing, and then stopping, the Red Army’s eastward momentum.
[1] After the war, Friedmann joined the Department of Physics at Irkutsk University, where he set to work on refining Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, and elaborated a set of equations that provided a mathematical model for the expansion of the universe. By the end of the 1920s he had revolutionized modern cosmology, whose standard model is named the Friedmann Model after him.