Petlyakov Pe-2

In 1937 the Soviet state arrested Vladimir Petlyakov on the sort of charge that required no evidence. He was not a marginal figure: he had worked under Tupolev and led the design of the TB-7 four-engined heavy bomber, the aircraft later named Pe-8 after him, and it was the supposed slowness of that programme that provided the pretext. In 1939 he was moved to an NKVD sharashka near Moscow — a prison design bureau where arrested engineers went on producing aircraft under guard — and found a great many of his former colleagues already there.

What he drew there was the VI-100: a twin-engined, high-altitude fighter with a pressurised cabin, intended to escort bombers at heights where nothing else could operate comfortably. It first flew on 22 December 1939. Within months the requirement was cancelled and Petlyakov was ordered to turn his high-altitude fighter into a dive bomber.

By 1940 Stalin had watched the German campaigns in Poland and France, and drawn the obvious conclusion: what won battles was not high-altitude escort but tactical aircraft that could hit troops and armour directly. The order came down to convert the VI-100 into a dive bomber, and the time allowed was forty-five days.

Almost everything sophisticated was stripped out. The pressurisation went; the nose was reglazed for a bombardier; dive brakes went under the wings; bomb racks and a small bay were fitted; and the crew settled at three — pilot, navigator-bombardier and a radio operator who also manned a gun. The aircraft that resulted entered service in March 1941, three months before the German invasion, and the high-altitude fighter it had been designed as was never built.

The Pe-2’s great virtue was speed. Two Klimov M-105 V12s of about 1,100 hp each gave it roughly 540 km/h — faster than many of the fighters sent to intercept it in 1941, and fast enough that its crews could sometimes decline combat altogether. In a year when the Soviet air force was being destroyed on its airfields, an aeroplane that could outrun the problem was worth a great deal.

It carried a modest load for its size — normally 600 kg of bombs, up to 1,000 kg — and it asked a lot of its pilots. The controls were heavy, the landing speed high, and an engine failure on takeoff was very often fatal. The Pe-2FT series improved the defensive armament with heavier 12.7 mm guns after combat showed the original arrangement to be inadequate.

Petlyakov was released and decorated for the aircraft that bore his name — the state having first imprisoned him, then extracted the design, then rewarded him for it. He did not enjoy the reversal for long.

On 12 January 1942, needing to reach a meeting in Moscow, he chose to fly in one of his own Pe-2s rather than take a transport aircraft. It crashed in poor weather near Gorky, and Petlyakov was killed at the age of 50. The bomber that carried his name would be built for another four years, in numbers he never saw.

The Pe-2 also carried the most famous of the Soviet women’s air units. Marina Raskova — a celebrated pre-war navigator who had used her access to Stalin to get women’s combat regiments authorised at all — formed three of them in 1941: a fighter regiment, a night bomber regiment that the Germans would come to call the Nachthexen, the Night Witches, and the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment, which flew the Pe-2. The 587th later earned the title of 125th Guards, and its crews flew the same demanding aircraft on the same daylight missions as the men’s regiments — which, given how unforgiving the Pe-2 was, was the point.

Raskova did not live to lead it in combat. On 4 January 1943, flying two other Pe-2s to the regiment’s first operational airfield near Stalingrad, she was killed in a crash. She was given a state funeral and her ashes were interred in the Kremlin wall — the first Soviet woman to receive one — and the regiment she had assembled went on to fight through to the end of the war.

For the rest of the war the Pe-2 was simply what the Soviet air force meant by a bomber. It flew tactical strikes ahead of the ground offensives — bridges, railheads, artillery positions, columns caught on the road — and it did so as part of a method rather than as individual raids: Soviet operational practice massed aircraft over the breakthrough sector for the hours that mattered and accepted that little would be available anywhere else. From Stalingrad through Kursk, Bagration in the summer of 1944 and the drive to Berlin, the Peshka was the aeroplane doing that work, in the numbers that decided the Eastern Front: 11,427 built, more than any other Soviet bomber of the war.

The design’s original identity resurfaced once. The Pe-3 was a heavy-fighter conversion — the VI-100 idea revisited, with the bombing equipment removed and the armament increased — used for reconnaissance and long-range escort. It was built in small numbers and remains a curiosity: the aircraft returning briefly to what it had been drawn to be.

The obvious comparison is the Ju 88, and it is a fair one: both were fast twin-engined bombers that could dive, both were stretched into roles their designers had not intended, and both were the tactical backbone of their air forces. The Pe-2 was less versatile and less refined than the German aircraft, and it did not need to be either — it needed to be fast, buildable, and available in the thousands, and it was all three.

What sets it apart is the story attached to it, and the story is not incidental. This was a first-class aeroplane designed by a man the state had imprisoned, redesigned to a political deadline in forty-five days, flown by regiments that included the only one of Marina Raskova’s three women’s regiments to fly a modern twin-engined bomber, and it killed both the designer who drew it and the woman who raised those regiments. Few machines carry so much of a system’s character in their history.

• Yefim Gordon & Dmitri Khazanov, Soviet Combat Aircraft of the Second World War (Midland Publishing).
• Peter C. Smith, Petlyakov Pe-2 Peshka (Crowood Press).
• Reina Pennington, Wings, Women and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (University Press of Kansas).