Arseniy Vorozheykin (1912 – 2001) — pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union
There is a saying that a bird is known by its flight. An aviation expert can always tell who is at the controls by the behavior in the sky that is particular to one pilot or another. Aces are spoken of the way one speaks of literary or musical masters, with the word "signature style." Veterans of combat aviation recall that fighter pilot Arseniy Vorozheykin had his own distinctive manner of fighting. To improve his field of view, he flew with the cockpit canopy open. He was never one for head-on attacks. A master of aerobatics, he relied on sharp maneuvers that would momentarily black out his vision, and he frequently employed various ruses to deceive the enemy. He possessed a rare gift as an aerial marksman: in training he would put ten times as many rounds on target as the minimum required for top marks. He had learned his marksmanship in childhood, when poverty and the absence of a father meant that a simple little rifle in a boy's hands was not a plaything but a means of putting food on the table.
Arseniy Vasilyevich was born in the selo of Prokofyevo in Gorodetskaya Volost, Nizhny Novgorod Governorate. His father was killed in the First World War, leaving him fatherless early in life, and he came to know an orphan's lot — hunger and hardship. After finishing seven years of schooling he worked at a lumber mill, then served as a sailor on the guardship of the first Volga survey expedition. In 1931 he was called up into the Red Army. He served three years in a cavalry unit. After demobilization he was sent to study at the Gorky Agricultural Communist Higher Education Institute, and from there was dispatched by special enrollment to the Kharkov Military Flying School. Vorozheykin received his baptism of fire two years before the start of the Great Patriotic War — on 22 June 1939, in the skies over Khalkhin Gol, in battles against the Japanese. There he won his reputation as a fighter pilot who could down an enemy with a single burst, never missing. Vorozheykin had taken to heart the principles of aerial combat taught to him at that time by twice Hero of the Soviet Union Major Sergey Gritsevets: "A man who cannot see in the air is not a fighter pilot — he is a flying target. Spot the enemy first, and you have already gained the upper hand. And if you have the upper hand, you win." Vorozheykin went up to fight as many as five times in a single long summer day. He carried out many successful attacks. But one day he himself was shot down. Mongolian border guards found Arseniy covered in blood, with a barely detectable pulse. He was flown by aircraft to a hospital in Chita. The doctors' findings: the left arm was wounded, the spine was bruised, the skull had been pierced in three places, and a metal fragment was lodged in the back of the head. With injuries like these, even after recovery, the medical conclusion is always categorical: unfit for flying. After undergoing several surgical operations, Vorozheykin began training relentlessly. Then, having slipped out of the hospital and "lost" his discharge papers, he returned to his unit. As commissar of the 5th Squadron of the 22nd Fighter Aviation Regiment, Arseniy Vorozheykin flew more than one hundred and sixty combat sorties, fought thirty aerial engagements, and shot down six aircraft personally and twelve in group actions. For this campaign he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. "You need to go and study, Arseniy — go to the academy," Sergey Gritsevets told him at parting. But Vorozheykin was not to study then, because in the bitter December of 1939 he was again taking off from field airstrips on operations against the White Finns. Only after the end of hostilities on the Karelian Isthmus did he begin studies at the Air Force Academy, which he completed successfully in the summer of 1942. He did not reach the active army until September, however, joining the 728th Fighter Aviation Regiment as a senior political officer. Vorozheykin fought on the Kalinin, Voronezh, 1st Ukrainian, and other fronts. Until March 1943 the regiment flew the I-16. While escorting a group of ground-attack aircraft in his "Ishak," Vorozheykin found that his undercarriage would not retract. He pressed on with the mission regardless, and when an aerial battle broke out he managed to hold his own alone against six Messerschmitt Bf 109s until help arrived. On 4 February 1944, the commander of a squadron of the 728th Fighter Aviation Regiment, Captain Vorozheykin, was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. He had more than once come to the aid of his comrades, been set on fire himself, gone down with a dead engine, and landed a shot-up aircraft. In March 1944, after shooting down a fascist reconnaissance "cuttlefish," he was himself hit. By some miracle the pilot managed to set the aircraft down on a forest clearing cut through a swamp in enemy-held territory. His comrades rushed to help, managed to land a Po-2 in the clearing, and flew their squadron commander out under the cover of two Yaks. When Vorozheykin's wingman Emelyán Chernyshev was killed, Arseniy Vasilyevich began taking along in his aircraft a mongrel dog named Varvar, who had been left without a master. Chernyshev had trained the dog to keep watch from the aircraft over the rear hemisphere and to bark a warning to the pilot whenever the enemy appeared. Varvar could distinguish enemy aircraft types by the sound of their engines. It also happened that while on the airfield the dog would bark a warning of the enemy's distant approach, long before anyone could hear it. On his signal, the "hawks" would surge into the air. On 19 August 1944 Vorozheykin was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for the second time. By that point he had 46 personal victories to his credit and was flying a new fighter, the Yak-9, bearing the number "44." Vorozheykin flew his last combat in a new Yak-3 just a few days before the end of the war. Over Berlin he attacked a four-engine jet aircraft, the Arado Ar 234. Over the entire course of his combat career, Vorozheykin flew more than 300 combat sorties, fought 90 aerial engagements, and shot down 52 enemy aircraft personally and 13 together with comrades. His combat group's flight over the skies of defeated Berlin on 1 May 1945 entered the history of our aviation. Pilots of the 2nd Air Army made two red banners — on one they wrote in large letters "Victory," on the other "Long Live the 1st of May!" Two aircraft carrying these banners took off, escorted by sixteen fighters. Over the Reichstag the banners were dropped by parachute and, unfurling in the smoky Berlin sky, floated gently down into the positions of our troops.