Winged battleship
“Father of Nations” invented a new technical term
Is it possible to “cross” a tank with an airplane? For many years the very idea seemed absurd. However, in the end, we, in the pre-war USSR, still found specialists who were able to solve such a “technical puzzle”. Among them was Nikolai Sklyarov, a veteran of Soviet industry, who worked for almost 70 years at the All-Union Institute aviation materials and has been developing new types of armor protection for several decades.
The correspondent had a chance to meet with Nikolai Mitrofanovich and find out from him unknown details of how he “forged” that “shield of the Motherland”, which helped to defeat the fascists.
The civil war in Spain “unexpectedly” showed the military leadership of the USSR a sad fact: the dashing “Stalin's falcons” on their light machines have little chance of surviving a real battle.
“At the beginning of 1930-s, VIAM, on its own initiative, began developing highly durable alloys,” recalled N.M. Sklyarov. - The leaders of our institute believed that air battles would play an important role in the upcoming wars, and therefore reliable protection of pilots against enemy bullets should be provided for in the design of combat aircraft. However, some of the leading Soviet aircraft designers - including Lavochkin, Petlyakov ... categorically disagreed with such conclusions ... They argued that the "red star" pilots should defeat the enemy due to the high art of maneuvering, personal courage ... And if, they say, to hide the pilot for bullet-proof walls, then he, that look, will turn into a coward and simply unlearn how to fly properly! The dispute could continue for a long time if the Spaniards did not start a civil war in 1936, in which the USSR actively supported the Republicans, supplying them with military equipment and sending their tank crews and pilots to this distant country.
The air battles that unfolded in the southern sky gave no cause for optimism. German fighters participating in the battles on the side of General Franco, armed with more powerful machine gun installations, easily made a sieve of Soviet “hawks”, and no courage could help here. It was then that our “flyers” and guessed to arrange at least handicraft protection from bullets. Savvy aviators built themselves improvised armor backs of pieces, cut off from the body of the padded armored. Even such a primitive homemade more than once saved the life of air fighters.
“Stalin found out about this, and after a few days, on his instructions, our Viamov group involved in the development of armor met Commissar Voroshilov, to whom we talked about the idea of installing protective backs in the cockpits. A few months later, 2 in May 1938, Air Force Commander Yakov Smushkevich arrived at the plant in Podolsk to personally take the first batch of such armor pads ... But there was nothing like this anywhere else in the world. The same Germans, no matter how hard they tried, failed to develop a comparable industrial technology for the production of armor steel for aircraft. In the meantime, a fantastic project was conceived in the USSR: the aircraft designer Ilyushin proposed to make a fully armored attack aircraft ...
Night Fire
So that a journalist who is not privy to the subtleties of armor production could appreciate the uniqueness of this project, Nikolay Mitrofanovich had to arrange a small educational program right there:
- To get a particularly durable steel - armor, you need to quench it: first heat up to almost a thousand degrees, and then quickly cool - for example in oil. The problem is that this causes severe deformation and the armored parts lose their original shape. It is almost impossible to assemble an aircraft body from such “krivulin” aircraft, observing all the highest precision requirements that are imposed on its geometry. Attempts to stamp out fuselage fragments from already hardened sheets were doomed to failure due to the fragility of such steel ...
It would seem, indeed, a hopeless situation. However, the VIAM laboratory staff managed to create a special steel grade, which retained its plastic properties even with fast cooling to 270 degrees. This made it possible to stamp blanks from such a metal in a special press - right in the process of their hardening.
The first attempt to make parts from the new alloy in the factory almost ended in scandal. Experienced workers, accustomed to the old technology, did not want to put the hardened part under the press: “It’s fragile! Instantly smashes to dust! Another good thing, and the machine will fail, but we must answer! .. ”It was necessary for the young specialist Sklyarov to demonstrate to them the amazing properties of the new steel: first, the red-hot billet was dunked for cooling into oil - and then Nikolay Mitrofanovich struck it with a sledgehammer. The part did not crack and did not fall apart into fragments, but only bent, proving its plasticity. After that, the work went ...
- During the experimental work on the preparation for the industrial production of new types of materials, sometimes there were completely unforeseen problems, - my interlocutor shook his head. - Once in the factory workshop, where they prepared an experimental batch of our armor plates, an emergency happened. At about two o'clock in the morning, a bath with five tons of saltpeter suddenly caught fire, which was used to cool metal blanks. Arriving firefighters were going to shoot down the flame with water. However, I categorically forbade them to do this, because I understood: if water gets into the burning saltpeter: a chemical reaction will begin, accompanied by the release of a large amount of hydrogen, and this means that a crushing explosion that will blow the whole building will follow! It remained to wait until all the contents of the bath were burnt out.
- Of course, for the head of the fire brigade, such an order looked like sheer stupidity: here the fire was blazing with might and main - at the military, by the way, factory! - And the head of the armored lab forbids him to extinguish. And this is not stupidity, but obvious sabotage!
“Although there were no serious damages from the fire in the workshop, the next day, the People's Commissar of the NKVD Yezhov himself came to deal with my“ sabotage ”in the night fire. Being summoned to him, I tried to explain the logic of my prohibitions to extinguish nitrate with water as intelligibly as possible. Apparently, my “highly scientific” report did reach an understanding of the formidable security officer: silently, he nodded his head, showing that my “sin” was forgiven and the incident was settled, turned around and walked away from the office ...
“Fiction” from Podolsk
Having mastered the manufacture of new armor blanks, in the summer of 1940, at the Podolsk plant, they assembled two IL attack corps for testing. Just at this very time, the leaders of our leading armor factories, Izhora and Kirov, sent a letter to Stalin in which they argued that Ilyushin’s proposal to create a fully armored plane was absolutely unrealizable fiction! They both received advice from the Kremlin: go to Podolsk and make sure that your “fantasy” is already embodied in reality.
Soon in Voronezh, at one of the best aviation enterprises in the Soviet Union, mass production of “flying tanks"- attack aircraft" IL-2 ". (But “advanced” Americans were able to master the production of armored aircraft only much later - in the 1950s.)
During the Great Patriotic War, the Luftwaffe pilots nevertheless adapted themselves to shoot down attack aircraft, approaching them in the “dead zone” from the side of the tail. Our specialists had to develop a modification of this combat vehicle - “IL-10”. On the “top ten” was provided additional space for the gunner-radio operator. In addition, shielded armor was used as the protective “armor” of the new aircraft.
“They made it double-layered,” Nikolai Mitrofanovich again went into the explanations. - The outer layer is designed to destroy the projectile that hit the plane, and the inner layer takes the blows of the fragments formed during the explosion ... I even had to report on the principle of operation of such material at a special meeting near Stalin himself. Joseph Vissarionovich was pleased with what he heard: “Oh, so you came up with an active armor? Well! .. ”By the way, this term itself -“ active armor ”- has since taken root in the practice of metalworkers, only few people know that Comrade Stalin personally thought it up.
Is it possible to “cross” a tank with an airplane? For many years the very idea seemed absurd. However, in the end, we, in the pre-war USSR, still found specialists who were able to solve such a “technical puzzle”. Among them was Nikolai Sklyarov, a veteran of Soviet industry, who worked for almost 70 years at the All-Union Institute aviation materials and has been developing new types of armor protection for several decades.
The correspondent had a chance to meet with Nikolai Mitrofanovich and find out from him unknown details of how he “forged” that “shield of the Motherland”, which helped to defeat the fascists.
The civil war in Spain “unexpectedly” showed the military leadership of the USSR a sad fact: the dashing “Stalin's falcons” on their light machines have little chance of surviving a real battle.
“At the beginning of 1930-s, VIAM, on its own initiative, began developing highly durable alloys,” recalled N.M. Sklyarov. - The leaders of our institute believed that air battles would play an important role in the upcoming wars, and therefore reliable protection of pilots against enemy bullets should be provided for in the design of combat aircraft. However, some of the leading Soviet aircraft designers - including Lavochkin, Petlyakov ... categorically disagreed with such conclusions ... They argued that the "red star" pilots should defeat the enemy due to the high art of maneuvering, personal courage ... And if, they say, to hide the pilot for bullet-proof walls, then he, that look, will turn into a coward and simply unlearn how to fly properly! The dispute could continue for a long time if the Spaniards did not start a civil war in 1936, in which the USSR actively supported the Republicans, supplying them with military equipment and sending their tank crews and pilots to this distant country.
The air battles that unfolded in the southern sky gave no cause for optimism. German fighters participating in the battles on the side of General Franco, armed with more powerful machine gun installations, easily made a sieve of Soviet “hawks”, and no courage could help here. It was then that our “flyers” and guessed to arrange at least handicraft protection from bullets. Savvy aviators built themselves improvised armor backs of pieces, cut off from the body of the padded armored. Even such a primitive homemade more than once saved the life of air fighters.
“Stalin found out about this, and after a few days, on his instructions, our Viamov group involved in the development of armor met Commissar Voroshilov, to whom we talked about the idea of installing protective backs in the cockpits. A few months later, 2 in May 1938, Air Force Commander Yakov Smushkevich arrived at the plant in Podolsk to personally take the first batch of such armor pads ... But there was nothing like this anywhere else in the world. The same Germans, no matter how hard they tried, failed to develop a comparable industrial technology for the production of armor steel for aircraft. In the meantime, a fantastic project was conceived in the USSR: the aircraft designer Ilyushin proposed to make a fully armored attack aircraft ...
Night Fire
So that a journalist who is not privy to the subtleties of armor production could appreciate the uniqueness of this project, Nikolay Mitrofanovich had to arrange a small educational program right there:
- To get a particularly durable steel - armor, you need to quench it: first heat up to almost a thousand degrees, and then quickly cool - for example in oil. The problem is that this causes severe deformation and the armored parts lose their original shape. It is almost impossible to assemble an aircraft body from such “krivulin” aircraft, observing all the highest precision requirements that are imposed on its geometry. Attempts to stamp out fuselage fragments from already hardened sheets were doomed to failure due to the fragility of such steel ...
It would seem, indeed, a hopeless situation. However, the VIAM laboratory staff managed to create a special steel grade, which retained its plastic properties even with fast cooling to 270 degrees. This made it possible to stamp blanks from such a metal in a special press - right in the process of their hardening.
The first attempt to make parts from the new alloy in the factory almost ended in scandal. Experienced workers, accustomed to the old technology, did not want to put the hardened part under the press: “It’s fragile! Instantly smashes to dust! Another good thing, and the machine will fail, but we must answer! .. ”It was necessary for the young specialist Sklyarov to demonstrate to them the amazing properties of the new steel: first, the red-hot billet was dunked for cooling into oil - and then Nikolay Mitrofanovich struck it with a sledgehammer. The part did not crack and did not fall apart into fragments, but only bent, proving its plasticity. After that, the work went ...
- During the experimental work on the preparation for the industrial production of new types of materials, sometimes there were completely unforeseen problems, - my interlocutor shook his head. - Once in the factory workshop, where they prepared an experimental batch of our armor plates, an emergency happened. At about two o'clock in the morning, a bath with five tons of saltpeter suddenly caught fire, which was used to cool metal blanks. Arriving firefighters were going to shoot down the flame with water. However, I categorically forbade them to do this, because I understood: if water gets into the burning saltpeter: a chemical reaction will begin, accompanied by the release of a large amount of hydrogen, and this means that a crushing explosion that will blow the whole building will follow! It remained to wait until all the contents of the bath were burnt out.
- Of course, for the head of the fire brigade, such an order looked like sheer stupidity: here the fire was blazing with might and main - at the military, by the way, factory! - And the head of the armored lab forbids him to extinguish. And this is not stupidity, but obvious sabotage!
“Although there were no serious damages from the fire in the workshop, the next day, the People's Commissar of the NKVD Yezhov himself came to deal with my“ sabotage ”in the night fire. Being summoned to him, I tried to explain the logic of my prohibitions to extinguish nitrate with water as intelligibly as possible. Apparently, my “highly scientific” report did reach an understanding of the formidable security officer: silently, he nodded his head, showing that my “sin” was forgiven and the incident was settled, turned around and walked away from the office ...
“Fiction” from Podolsk
Having mastered the manufacture of new armor blanks, in the summer of 1940, at the Podolsk plant, they assembled two IL attack corps for testing. Just at this very time, the leaders of our leading armor factories, Izhora and Kirov, sent a letter to Stalin in which they argued that Ilyushin’s proposal to create a fully armored plane was absolutely unrealizable fiction! They both received advice from the Kremlin: go to Podolsk and make sure that your “fantasy” is already embodied in reality.
Soon in Voronezh, at one of the best aviation enterprises in the Soviet Union, mass production of “flying tanks"- attack aircraft" IL-2 ". (But “advanced” Americans were able to master the production of armored aircraft only much later - in the 1950s.)
During the Great Patriotic War, the Luftwaffe pilots nevertheless adapted themselves to shoot down attack aircraft, approaching them in the “dead zone” from the side of the tail. Our specialists had to develop a modification of this combat vehicle - “IL-10”. On the “top ten” was provided additional space for the gunner-radio operator. In addition, shielded armor was used as the protective “armor” of the new aircraft.
“They made it double-layered,” Nikolai Mitrofanovich again went into the explanations. - The outer layer is designed to destroy the projectile that hit the plane, and the inner layer takes the blows of the fragments formed during the explosion ... I even had to report on the principle of operation of such material at a special meeting near Stalin himself. Joseph Vissarionovich was pleased with what he heard: “Oh, so you came up with an active armor? Well! .. ”By the way, this term itself -“ active armor ”- has since taken root in the practice of metalworkers, only few people know that Comrade Stalin personally thought it up.
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