Although Alexei was very enthusiastic, he was worried about the new female pilots. He felt it was necessary to ask the mechanics in the regiment to check if there were any safety hazards. He winked at the mechanics beside him and signaled him to go over and check.
The mechanic saw Alexei's wink and nodded, walked to the plane with the tool box, and began to check the damaged oil pipe to see if Laisha had been repaired.
After a careful inspection, the mechanic showed a look of surprise on his face. He turned his head and said to Alexei: "Captain, it's so incredible that they actually repaired the broken oil pipe."
"Really?" Alexei also looked in disbelief when he heard the mechanic say this: "They can actually repair the broken oil pipe. You are not kidding me, are you?"
"How could I be joking about this kind of thing?" Faced with Alexei's doubts, the mechanic said with some dissatisfaction: "If the plane has hidden dangers, once it takes off, it will be life-threatening."
After the mechanic explained this, Alexey believed that the female pilots in front of him who were not favored by everyone could repair the plane themselves. He stared at Laisha wide-eyed and said in surprise: "Comrade Lieutenant, this is really incredible. Can you actually repair the plane yourself?"
"Comrade Captain, this is nothing!" Lai Sha said with a wry smile: "When we are in the 586th Fighter Flight Regiment, we have to refuel and reload the plane by ourselves."
"What?" Alexei was completely shocked when he heard this: "Every time you take off to fight, do you still need to refuel and reload the plane yourself?"
"Yes, what's so strange about this?" Lai Sha and others have been discriminated against by male pilots since joining the Air Force, so they feel that it's natural to do these things by themselves. Seeing Alexe's surprised expression at this moment, they feel very strange: "No one can help us, we can only do it ourselves."
Alexei took Laisha and the others to the prepared pilot dormitory, and then ran to the regiment command post to find the regiment commander Khostnikov. When the regiment commander saw Alexei coming back, he asked curiously: "Captain, is there anything wrong?"
"Comrade Commander," Alexei said to the commander: "Maybe our view of the new female pilot is wrong."
"Why?"
"Their plane landed at the airport and happened to catch the enemy's shelling the airport. One of the planes' oil pipes was blown up. After I learned the news, I took the mechanics to help them repair them. What do you think?" Alexei asked and answered without waiting for Khostnikov to answer: "They repaired the oil pipes themselves."
When Khostnikov heard the news, he asked in surprise: "Before our mechanics arrived, did they repair the oil pipe themselves?"
"That's true, comrade commander." Alexei nodded, expressed his affirmation, and continued: "And according to Lieutenant Laisha himself, they not only repaired the planes themselves, but also in the 586th Regiment, they refueled and loaded the planes themselves before every battle in the 586th Regiment."
"Really?" Khostnikov just asked this and realized that he was wrong. Alexei couldn't deceive him with false things. Everything he said might be true. But the commander was a stubborn person. Not only Alexei said, he still thought that female pilots were unreliable.
After walking back and forth in the house with his hands behind his back, Khostnikov stopped and said to Alexei: "Captain, I am not optimistic about them anyway. Therefore, I do not intend to assign any combat missions to them."
"This is not very good, Comrade Commander." Alexei said a little embarrassedly: "No matter what, they are all reinforcements sent by our superiors. If they are hidden by snow, I am worried that when the superiors find out, they will blame you."
"If you don't assign tasks to them, you will know this." Khostnikov told Alexei: "Outside, we have to say that they are always on standby and can be put into battle at any time as the time is right."
Although he knew that Khostnikov's statement was self-deception, Alexei was not easy to refute. First, his position was too low, and he, a small captain, had no right to command the colonel; second, the female pilots had just arrived and tried their best to say good things for them, which might lead to gossip. Therefore, after careful consideration, he could only nod and agree with Khostnikov's arrangement.
…………
When Heliujin learned that the Red October tractor factory was bombed by the German army, he immediately remembered the women's flight squadron that had been on standby, so he called Khostnikov and ordered him to let the women's flight squadron attack.
After receiving the order from Heliujin, Khostnikov was really a dumbfounded manure - he couldn't say anything about his suffering. Although he was always worried that Lai Sha and the others had no combat power, and he rashly threw themselves into the battlefield and asked them to die, since it was an order issued by his superiors, he could only execute it unconditionally.
Since the female pilots arrived here, they were on duty every day in name, but the regiment did not assign any combat tasks to them at all, so the four of them stayed in the dormitory every day and stared at them.
On that day, Laisha felt that there might be no task today, and was considering whether she should go to Khostnikov and asked him to assign tasks to herself. Unexpectedly, she hadn't gone out yet, suddenly a staff officer on duty came over and called her: "Comrade Lieutenant, you have your phone number."
"My phone number?" Lai Sha was stunned when she heard the staff officer on duty say this: "Who will call me here?"
"It's the team leader's phone number."
"The telephone number of the regiment commander?" When she heard that it was the telephone number of the regiment commander, Lai Sha immediately left the duty officer and rushed to the duty room not far away. After she rushed into the room, she saw the microphone of the telephone set on the table, and quickly picked it up and put it in her ear and said, "Comrade Colonel, I am Lieutenant Lai Sha. Do you have any instructions?"
"Lieutenant, listen." Khostnikov said coldly: "The enemy is bombing the Red October Tractor Factory. The superiors ordered us to send planes to drive away the enemy planes there. At present, you are the only squadron left in the regiment, so I order you to take off the air immediately and rush to the Red October Tractor Factory."
When Laisha learned that Khostnikov had finally assigned him a combat mission, he was so happy that he quickly agreed: "Don't worry, comrade Colonel, we promise to complete the mission."
Khostnikov was always worried that this female flight squadron had no choice but to let them go to fight. He heard Lai Sha agree so readily, he asked nervously: "Comrade Lieutenant, can you deal with these enemies?"
"Don't worry, comrade Colonel." Laisha said confidently: "We will let the Germans taste our power."
When Khostnikov was about to put down the phone, he suddenly thought of a key question. The women's squadron was just coming. Can they find a place? He quickly asked: "Can you find a specific location?"
"No problem. We have been studying maps these two days." Laisha replied: "Even without the guidance of the navigator, we can find combat areas."
Laisha ran back to the dormitory quickly. Before Lilia and the others could ask, she shouted excitedly: "Girls, the mission is here, and she is ready to take off the air combat."
When the three female pilots heard Lai Sha say this, they immediately cheered. When Lilia changed her flight suit, she asked Lai Sha curiously: "Comrade Squadron Captain, where is our combat location?"
"Red October Tractor Factory," Lai Sha took the opportunity to introduce the mission to his subordinates: "The enemy's dive bomber is bombing the factory, and our mission is to drive the enemy's bomber away from the sky above the factory."
"How many planes do the enemy have?" Lilia asked afterwards.
Lilia's question stopped Laisha. When she answered the phone, she was so excited that she forgot to ask Khostnikov about how many planes the enemy had. Seeing that Laisha was reluctant to speak, Kajia said in a flash: "Lilia, don't worry, we are fighters, and the enemy is bombers. Even if they have more than us, we can still drive them away from the factory."
"When fighting, we were divided into two units." Laisha agreed with Kajia's statement and began to formally assign tasks: "Maria and I were in the same group, and Maria was the wingman; Lilia and Kajia were in the same group, and Lilia was the wingman, and Kajia was the wingman." She saw that everyone had changed their clothes, and waved her hand suddenly, "Go!"
The female pilots rushed to the runway and boarded the Jacques-1 fighter that had already been refueled and loaded with ammunition. After launching the fighter, they rose to the sky one by one. After Laisha and the others completed the formation, they did not have to use any instruments or maps to know that the place where the smoke filled the distance was the battlefield they were about to go to, so four planes lined up and flew towards the direction where the smoke covered the sky and the sun.
Khostnikov stood in front of the regiment command post, looking at the four Jacques-1 fighters away, and said with some jealousy: "Hey, my regiment is equipped with the Rag-3 fighters, while these girls are flying the Jacques-1 fighters. If all these planes were handed over to the real pilots under my command, they might be able to catch more German planes."
The Lager-3 fighter is a single-seat single-engine piston fighter. Because the engine's power is too small for the bulky wooden fuselage, the designers have to try to improve the performance of the aircraft by reducing the weight of the fuselage, including reducing the armed forces on the aircraft. But even so, this fighter is always at a disadvantage in the German BF109 fighter.
The Jacques-1 fighter is the most advanced fighter of the Soviet army. Its main weapons are the 20mm cannon in the center of the propeller and two 12.7mm machine guns at the nose, which are completely comparable to the BF109 fighter.
When the women's flight squadron arrived over the Red October Tractor Factory, the entire factory was bombed by fifty or sixty JU87 dive bombers. The enemy not only bombed the factory building of the assembly workshop, but also did not escape the misfortune of being bombed. Peter's factory building was hit by three bombs, and the roof on the fifth floor was blown through. The factory building where Guriyev was also turned into a ruin under the continuous bombing of the German army. If his guard had not been able to respond with agile and drag him away before the factory collapsed, the Guard Division might have been headless at this moment.
Seeing the densely packed enemy planes above the factory, Maria, who participated in the battle for the first time, was frightened and trembled like a sieve. She said tremblingly to Lai Sha through the radio station: "Comrade Squadron Captain, the enemy's planes are too many, and we may not be able to deal with them."
"Mariya, rush up with me," Laisha ordered simply, "Please protect me." After that, she pushed the joystick and rushed towards an enemy plane that had just dropped the bomb. When there were still three or four hundred meters apart, she used a machine gun to strafuse the enemy plane. Unfortunately, the distance was too far, and the bullets she fired were all empty.
However, the pair of Lilia and Kajia have fought with the Luftwaffe many times in the sky and have rich combat experience, but they have cooperated very well with each other. Seeing Lilia speeding up and rushing over, Kajia quickly followed closely behind to cover her behind so as not to be attacked by enemy planes.
Although there were targets everywhere, Lilia locked up an enemy plane hovering at a low altitude and dived towards it. After entering the effective range, she immediately fired with a cannon. After a series of cannons were out of the bore, she accurately hit the tail of the enemy plane and smashed it to pieces.
The enemy plane that lost its tail suddenly lost control, and the head turned down quickly, fell to the ground, making a shocking explosion. Because all this happened too quickly, the German pilots did not even have the chance to jump, and they were smashed to pieces in the explosion of the plane.
When Laisha saw an enemy plane being shot down, she immediately guessed that it was Lilia's masterpiece and quickly congratulated her through the on-board radio station: "Lilia, good! Come on, try to shoot down a few more of them."
Sokov, who was hiding in the basement, received a call from Brisky. Brisky said excitedly on the phone: "Comrade Brigade Commander, our plane has arrived. A minute ago, I saw with my own eyes a German bomber shot down."
"That's great, this is really great." Sokov, who was blown up by the German plane and hid in the basement and did not dare to show up, heard that an enemy plane was shot down, and he suddenly felt proud. He asked in a good mood: "Comrade Captain, how many of our planes have come?"
"Four aircraft, comrade comrade," Brisky replied, "Four fighters are coming."
"What, only four fighter planes came?" Sokov's smile gradually disappeared. There were at least fifty or sixty German planes in the sky, and our air force only dispatched four. It seemed like they were coming to die. But he still asked unwillingly: "Comrade Captain, have you seen it clearly? Is there really only four?"
Chapter completed!