Sunday, 26 November 2017

Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-3, part three

When Operation Barbarossa began on 21st June 1941, most MiG-3 together with the least advanced version, MiG-1, were assigned to the border military districts of the USSR.
In fact, the Leningrad Military District had 164 assigned, the Baltic Military District had 135, the Western Special Military Distric had 233, 190 assigned to the Kiev Military District and 195 to the Odessa Military District making a total of 917 of them available with just 81 being non-operational. Only 64 of them were assigned to the Naval Aviation with 38 in the Baltic Fleet and 26 in the Black Sea Fleet.
Fourth and 55th Fighter Regiments, the ones equipped with MiG-3 as their main fighter, served in the Odessa Military District, and their experiences during the first day of the war, can be taken as typical. The 4th Fighter Regiment, shot down a Romanian Bristol Blenheim, but also lost one aircraft due to a collision with an obstacle when taking-off. On the other hand, the ones of the 55th Fighter Regiment, with unexperienced pilots, only managed to damage a German Henschel Hs.126 although they claimed to have shot down three German aircrafts with the price of three pilots killed and nine aircraft lost. As an unusual fact, three of them were sent down on a reconnaissance mission to Ploesti, in Romania, but were forced to land because they didn't properly calculate the fuel consumption and, therefore, ran out of it before even reaching their target.










Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-3
2. Salamander Books - The Complete Book of Fighters
3. Signal Squadron - Aircraft In action 204 - Early Mig Fighters in Action

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