Liberators. Airborne troops

The winged infantry, a new branch of the USSR Air Force, was born in 1930. First in the world stories The parachute detachment was created in the Leningrad Military District and consisted of 480 paratroopers with 18 aircraft. Before the war, the country already had 5 airborne corps, in which about 50 thousand paratroopers served.

The paratroopers received their real baptism of fire at the beginning of 1942, participating in the Vyazemskaya operation. On the night of February 23, 7 thousand paratroopers were to seize the Vyazma-Kirov railway and reach Vyazma, Dorogobuzh, Yukhnov. And in the rear, new landing units were already being formed. The soldiers learned to fold a parachute and jump from an airplane, overcoming fear and mastering emergency situations that arose in the air. In parallel, the paratroopers were engaged in physical training, studied hand-to-hand combat, mastered the art of using cold and small arms. weapons... A real paratrooper had to be able to do everything and shoot from any type of weapon - be it a native PPSh or a German MP.

In the autumn of 1943, the Red Army had to force the Dnieper on the move. Floating craft were being prepared, artillery. At the airfields near Sumy and Kharkov, in Lebedin, Smorodina and Bogodukhov, the final preparations for loading onto the planes were underway. 138 planes participated in the first wave of the landing.

A separate chapter of the series tells about the history of the Order of the Red Star.

Comments

[pudelartemon]

In the autumn of 1943, the Red Army faced the prospect of crossing the Dnieper River. The first wave of landings included 138 aircraft.

We look forward to hearing about the Dnieper landing.
And a little almost off-topic.
My father-in-law was drafted in July of '41 and assigned to one of the airborne brigades. Until mid-'43—'43, Karl!—they were constantly being reformed, then expanded, and so on. During the country's most difficult years, they didn't know what to do with them, and able-bodied men languished in the rear. Then they simply reformed him into an infantry regiment, where he fought until '45, ending the war in Budapest. These aren't liberal fairy tales, but the recollections of a veteran.

[AMG]

After the Battle of Stalingrad, the senior Soviet military leadership believed that the Airborne Forces could be used in the upcoming offensive operations. In the spring of 1943, after graduating from military academy, my father was assigned to the 10th Airborne Division. Training took place somewhere near Moscow, including parachute jumps from tethered balloons. However, he was then sent to training courses and assigned to the infantry. By the summer of 1943, the 9th Airborne Division also took part in the Battle of Kursk as infantry. On September 24 of that year, the Dnieper Airborne Force was dropped near the villages of Velykyi and Malyi Bukryny in the Kyiv region, consisting of two incomplete brigades, with the aim of assisting troops crossing the Dnieper. Due to numerous organizational errors and significant losses, the operation was declared a failure. Military historian Alexei Isayev provides a detailed account of this online.