Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3

The Soviet Union entered its rearmament with a shortage that shaped everything it built: it had very little aluminium and a very great deal of timber. The fighter that Semyon Lavochkin designed with Vladimir Gorbunov and Mikhail Gudkov answered that constraint directly, and carried all three of their names.

Its structure was delta-drevesina — birch plywood impregnated with phenolic resin and compressed until it was dense, hard and, importantly, fire-resistant. It was not the flimsy expedient the word “wooden” suggests: the material was tough, it could be worked by a furniture factory, and it needed no light alloy at all.

Everything wrong with the LaGG-3 followed from the arithmetic of mass and power. The airframe was heavy and the engine was a Klimov M-105P V-12 of about 1,050 hp — the same unit that drove the far lighter Yaks. The aeroplane that resulted reached about 575 km/h, which was respectable, and climbed and turned like something considerably less.

A skilled pilot could fight in it by keeping the speed up and refusing to turn with a Messerschmitt. The VVS of 1941 and 1942 did not have skilled pilots in quantity; it had men rushed through training and sent to regiments that were losing aircraft faster than they could absorb replacements. In their hands the LaGG-3 was unforgiving in exactly the situations where forgiveness mattered most.

The verdict of the men who flew it survives as a joke about its own name. LaGG, they said, stood for Lakirovanny Garantirovanny Grob — the “varnished guaranteed coffin”. It is one of the harshest nicknames any air force gave its own equipment, and it stuck hard enough that it is still the first thing said about the aircraft.

The joke was not the whole truth. The same delta wood that made the aeroplane heavy also made it hard to set alight and hard to break: LaGG-3s came home with damage that would have finished a light-alloy fighter, and pilots who understood the machine wrote about its strength as often as others wrote about its sluggishness. Both things were true of the same aeroplane, and which one a pilot met depended largely on how much training he had been given.

It fought everywhere the Red Air Force fought in the hardest years. LaGG-3s flew with the fighter regiments defending Leningrad, on the Kalinin front through the winter of 1941–42, with the Baltic Fleet air force, and over Stalingrad and the Caucasus. In winter the undercarriage came off and skis went on, and the aircraft operated from packed snow.

The role widened as the type was outclassed as a pure fighter. LaGG-3s carried RS-82 rockets under the wings for ground attack from the spring of 1942, and the aircraft spent much of its later career doing the work that fell to fighters no longer able to win an air fight: escort, ground attack, and the interception of aircraft slower than itself.

Some of them changed sides. The Finnish Air Force, which fought most of its war with whatever it could buy or capture, recovered LaGG-3s of the 35th series in usable condition — one of them taken from the Soviet 524th Fighter Aviation Regiment on 14 September 1942 — repaired them and put them into service.

They flew with LeLv 32 from Nurmoila through the winter of 1943–44, in Finnish markings, against the air force that had built them.

The design was improved continuously, and mostly by subtraction. Later series were lightened — equipment deleted, armament reduced from the heavy early fit to a single 20 mm ShVAK firing through the propeller hub with a 12.7 mm UBS above the engine — and from 1942 the boosted M-105PF raised power to roughly 1,210 hp. The final series were genuinely better aircraft than the ones that had earned the nickname.

They were also, by then, competing with the Yak-1 and Yak-7 for the same engine and the same airframe factories, and losing the argument. Production nonetheless ran to 6,528 aircraft before it ended in 1944 — a large number for a fighter remembered chiefly as a failure.

The LaGG-3 was the right answer to the wrong question. Asked to build a modern fighter without aluminium, Lavochkin and his colleagues produced one, and it worked: it flew, it was armed, it absorbed punishment, and it was in the line in the summer of 1941 when the alternative was nothing. Judged against the Bf 109F it met there, it was slow to climb, heavy in the turn and dangerous to a pilot with sixty hours in his logbook.

Its importance lies in what happened next. The same airframe, fitted with a Shvetsov radial in 1942, became the La-5 — the fighter that could beat a Messerschmitt at low level, and the line that ended with the La-7. The coffin and the aeroplane that redeemed it were, in some cases, literally the same machine taken unfinished off the production line.

• Yefim Gordon & Dmitri Khazanov, Soviet Combat Aircraft of the Second World War, Vol. 1: Single-Engined Fighters (Midland Publishing).
• Yefim Gordon, Lavochkin’s Piston-Engined Fighters (Red Star, Midland).
• Kalevi Keskinen & Kari Stenman, Suomen Ilmavoimien Historia — for the captured aircraft in Finnish service.