When human beings wage war, they argue that as in love, everything is fair. To paraphrase Winston Churchill during the last world war ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’. In many ways people who consider themselves patriots (or for that matter the lambda citizen) can clearly understand the idea behind this formidable assertion. If we stick to that reasoning, stories of the Ghost of Kiev and the one of a Barbie girl destroying 52 tanks and armored vehicles of the Russian Forces make a lot of sense. The main aim is to boost the morale of a population stunned by a new horrific reality as well as to allow fear to crawl in the ranks of the adversary or in time of war, the enemy. Some will however debate this point of view arguing about the morality of the matter and the dangers and disadvantages in the long run of exposing your own population to such disinformation. But in the territories where hostilities are being actively undertaken, it is only a question of opinion, not a matter of morale. Should we remind the reader once again that the aim of the belligerents is victory at any cost? And incidentally, that is why it is so dangerous to have nuclear weapons in the hands of an angry or desperate nation.
Propaganda stories such as the one of the Ghost of Kiev count among the most effective tools in the arsenal of the information war. As effective as it could be when used outside the warzone by one of the belligerents against an ally or a friendly nation, it raises questions about how much this nation has kept its moral sanity. There is worse, when a non-belligerent country decides knowingly to uphold such fake information and sell it as the word of gospel to its own population, it is a crime and one of the vilest! It reveals that your own government wants the victory so much of its ally that it is ready to sacrifice its own population as collateral damage in the information war.
The ‘Ghost’ haunting the skies of Ukraine was an allegedly legendary ace fighter pilot having reportedly destroyed 50 aircraft of the Russian forces before being shot down while defending Ukraine in an epic Hollywood style duel in the heavens against overwhelming odds. It is the most vivid example of a modern times fairy tale involving the latest technology, which since the very beginning, was clearly possible to debunk.
It is an important tale as it exemplifies all the insanity of the information wars. Soon after the Russian Forces started to press their advance towards Kiev, the regime in place in Ukraine mobilized all its forces to repel the advancing armies. If today it is indisputable that the Russian Air Force has the total supremacy in the skies over Eastern Ukraine (A fact that is not challenged by MSM though they downplay its importance in this theatre and overplay the partial success in other parts of the country of the Ukrainian Air Force to contest the air superiority of the Russian Air Force). It is important to keep in mind the word partial success as we will explain later why we dispute Ukraine’s so called success in the air over its western territories). It was not the same during the early days of the engagement when the Kiev regime succeeded in operating some successful sorties by fighter jets and drone attacks as well as operating some anti-missile units capable of denying to the advancing Russian Army, total air supremacy.
Some stories should not be believed simply because their occurrence is more than improbable not to say impossible .The martial feat attributed to the Ghost of Kiev belongs to this very same category. What is an aviation ace? Simply put, an air ace, flying ace or fighter ace is a combat aviator who scores five or more in the credited shooting down of enemy aircraft during air combat. The very first and arguably most famous warriors of this kind appeared over the skies of Europe during the first world conflict which lasted four years and was fought from 1914 to 1918. They were the first and the most romanticised warriors of this tiny group of elite pilots which now stretch over a century. During those early days of military aviation, air pioneers invented all the rules of the dogfight which is the art of close combat between two enemy aircraft.
At the peak of the admiration hysteria about the Ghost, the Ukrainian hero had accumulated a whopping 42 kills! For those who after hearing these superhuman achievements then made the minimum effort of typing aviation ace in their search engine, the story may have made sense because in the early days of combat aviation, victories were counted by the dozens. What follows could be a useful reminder.
Joining the Royal Flying Corps only in 1917, South African Ace of WW1 Andrew Beauchamp-Proctor is credited with an extraordinary 54 victories which he won in 1918, the last year of the conflict. One could easily think that he could have most probably equated if not surpassed the results of the most famous flying Ace of all time, the Red Baron.
Inventor of the Immelmann Turn (a roll and loop manoeuvre allowing a pilot to dive behind a pursuing fighter)which was to become a standard technique all during the conflict the first German Ace, Max Immelmann is credited with‘only’15 victories and in his case, if he had not been killed early in the war in 1916, he would have also arguably been a contender for the Red Baron.One of the most successful British Aces of WW1was James McCudden who was credited with 57 victories.The French pilots counted among the most successful fighter aces of the Great War with Georges Guynemer certainly the most famous among them with more than 50 victories. Colonel René Paul Fonck was the top Entente Fighter ending the war with an outstanding credited 75 victories. The claims of Fonck were even more extraordinary as they exceeded 140. Taking that into consideration, it is possible that Fonck could have shot down 100 planes by himself or with a crew.
The greatest Italian Ace of the first world global conflict was Count Francesco Baracca, a top flying ace with 34 aerial victories.On the Eastern front, Imperial Russia was an ally of France and Britain until 1917 (The Russian Revolution ended the participation and support of Russia in the war effort alongside the allies) and there were men in this theatre of armed conflict that earned their title of Ace in ferocious air battles. Men like Pavel Vladimirovich Argeyev who originated from Yalta in Crimea is credited with 15 victories, his story is peculiar as he was also known as Paul d'Argueev and The Eagle of Crimea since he flew and fought for both France and Imperial Russia. The most successful Ace for Imperial Russian Air Force was born to a Ukrainian noble family in Kherson Governorate, and was Kazakov with a total certified enemy aircraft shot down tally of 20. Take into consideration that the Russians had different traditions and credited only the plane which fell down in Russian territory and placed more value on the common action rather than the individual one.
Buoyed by these very partial results, our partisan of the minimum effort will still have a last M.S.M.F.C (Main Stream Media Fact Check) and the first gate of general information for the common internet user is as you would have guessed, the guru Wikipedia. Our weekend researcher will check Wiki mainly in an effort to reassure himself as our man has prerogatives to do such research. We have kept an eye on Wikipedia concerning the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ as we have warned many times that any internet user must be careful about Wikipedia because it is often not only biased but sometimes frankly dishonest. We knew that the Ghost of Kiev was too big a lie to hold very long in the test of time and that many would be caught napping on the subject which was exactly what happened to Wikipedia. At The International Outsider someone took a screenshot of the page Wikipedia dated 5/2/2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying _ace where the free encyclopedia wrote, Maj. Stepan Tarabalka (Popularly known as the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’) was credited as an ace fighter pilot during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tarabalka is reported to have downed as many as forty Russian aircraft before he himself was shot down and killed during what the Ukraine Defence Minister called “an air battle with overwhelming forces”. On March 2, President Volodymyr Zelensky posthumously awarded him the country’s top medal for bravery in combat, the Order of the Golden Star, and the Hero of Ukraine title. While he was referred to as an ace, it is not known how many Russian aircraft the pilot actually shot down.
We could not find more flagrant evidence of double standards in main stream media. One of our journalists posted the ’mistake’ on Twitter and a few hours later, the information was deleted and replaced by more sober ones still chanting the glory of the Ukrainian Air Force. The extract is most crucial in understanding the impact that this kind of article makes on an easily impressionable mind. Despite its apparent benign nature, this extract is an extremely powerful instrument of propaganda. First it has been offered by many as a final stop to the BS argument by thousands if not more. (If we took all precautions to record by all electronic means this small cog of the gargantuan western machine of propaganda, one thing we will never know is the statistics of Wikipedia unless one bright day, civic movement decided to place all the deliberate carriers of misinformation in front of an impartial Court of Justice).
Wikipedia adds insult to injury quoting the Minister of Defense of Ukraine himself saying that the poetic air knight was killed like in a Hollywood movie against overwhelming odds, since surely the vile Russians would have cornered the Ghost in a trap inconsistent with the now centennial gentleman’s code of military aviators and murdered the saviour in the pure tradition of Greek tragedy dramaturge. And how many tears about the hero have flown on social media? We have even been for a moment flooded by (mawkish!!) comments from high officials from different countries but the seal of authenticity came from the one that banana historians have deemed to be the new Churchill. Now you can like or dislike Winston Churchill but he counts among the giants of our history and comparing the Ukrainian Comedian who became President to such a figure, is an insult to all those who have studied the history of the human race for the past century and to the memory of the man himself. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if tomorrow Kim Kardashian is elected to an official post, she will be compared to the Iron Ladies of the past century like Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, or Indira Gandhi. I am not arguing that a comedian cannot pretend to the ultimate office to serve her or his country, our democracy is built to allow that to happen. Others like Ronald Reagan are now less famous as an actor or as a President of the United States than Zelensky, the climbing meteor of the ‘free world’. Once again you can like or dislike Ronald Reagan but to give credit to the man, he managed to put an end to the cold war without dragging all humanity into a nuclear holocaust. Obviously the feeling for Ronald Reagan differs grandly inside the borders of Russia. When it comes to judge a man by his acts, what has Zelensky done since he has been elected?
The President of Ukraine was elected on the sole promise that he will achieve a peace deal of some sort with Donbass and on the contrary, every single thing that he has done since he arrived in office has exacerbated the situation to such a point that it resulted in the drama we now see unfolding. In these very strange days where Ukrainian Presidents are considered to have the highest form of morality and are living reservoirs of empirical truth, one of them was called from retirement to give official support, evidence and substance to the grotesque fabrication of the ‘Ghost’. Petro Poroshenko was one of the Presidents of Ukraine as a result of the pro-western coup of 2014 and as a matter of a fact; Zelensky is also one of those heirs of this US publicly supported coup.
Eight years ago on June 21 2014, The International Outsider published an article titled ‘Quo Vadis, Poroshenko Peace Plan Ultimatum to Surrender’. We will not discuss the political career of the Chocolate King who was worth 1.3 billion dollars on the very day of his election according to Forbes. It’s worth remembering though that he is the man who said, I quote, “We will have jobs, they will not (referring to the people of the Donbass). We will have pensions, they will not, we will support our children and pensioners, they will not. Our children will go to kindergartens and schools; theirs will be sitting in cellars. (It is important to note that Poroshenko refers to the cellars of the Donbass in which he forced the children to sit during his whole presidency while his artillery poured tons of projectiles onto the cities of Lugansk and Donetsk in a massive, so-called anti-terrorist operation, which claimed thousands of lives. Remember toot hat Poroshenko launched his operation after having signed the Minsk agreements which guaranteed autonomy to the people of the Donbass). Such a man with the seal of presidency of a failed state would also add oil to the fire by making a statement identifying the Ghost of Kiev. Shortly afterwards, the Times in the UK and the New York Post confirmed that the hero was 29 years old Stepan Tarabalka. Poroshenko circulated a picture and videos on Social Media. Suddenly on March 13, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine itself announced the tragic death of the Hero. How in the world did the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine confirm the death of a fighter pilot who later would be recognized as a fake one by the Air Force? So far, no one in MSM has been interested in asking the question. If Poroshenko was honest (that would be a first in his political career) it would be at least to raise questions about the value of the information that we receive if an ex-President of Ukraine is not immune to fake information himself. But there are more reasons to think that most of the people, who circulated the story at least those at the head of governmental organizations, did it deliberately while knowing that it was one of the numerous fairy tales that this war has produced.
By now we have showed you who were the imbeciles who believed in the story and propagated it but we have not told you yet why these people were stupid. Less than one generation after the Europeans fought the last war, Europe was again set ablaze by a ‘Mad man’ in Berlin and a new race of Aces were born. “The devil” died at the age of 24, he had an outstanding control of his aircraft and was known to have extremely unpredictable, brilliant and breathtaking aerobatics. The “Devil” told his last commanding officer that he had shot down 87 aircraft. The Devil was Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, possibly the most successful Japanese fighter ace of World War two. The future student of the history of air combat will note that some post war Japanese sources link the young man with between a 103 to 147 victories though most historians consider these scores inaccurate.
If the scores in World War 1 seemed high, the next world conflict would see pilots credited with even higher scores. A scrupulous observer consulting a list of air Aces in this conflict could quite easily draw an approximate map of the war and its intensity on different fronts. Approximately 60 percent of all air combat kills were accomplished by aces and which were counted in the hundreds during the most bloodthirsty war of human history. Germany and the Luftwaffe occupy the first hundred places with pilots each accumulating over 100 victories. The most successful of them and to be blunt, the most successful fighter Ace of the whole history of aerial warfare was named Erich Hartmann who was taught to fly by his mother who was among one of the first female glider pilots of Germany. Hartmann ended the conflict on the very last day with the incredible credited score of 352. Erich Hartmann was according to all accounts, what one could qualify as a survivor. The reader can judge by himself. To accomplish these stunning results, Hartmann flew 1404 combat missions and engaged in 825 aerial combats, among the 352 allied aircraft that he shot down, 345 were Soviet and 7 were from the US. He was never shot down by enemy action; he however survived 16 forced crash landings due to damage. He became a prisoner of the US and after surrendering, he was handed to the Soviets who sent him to the Gulag when he was sentenced to 25 years of which he spent 10 years inside. He returned to Germany where he died at the age of 71 in 1993. The ‘Black Devil’ as he was called posthumously, was relieved of the charges laid against him by the Russian Federation in 1997.As we noted previously, WW2 produced hundreds of Aces mainly dominated by Luftwaffe pilots. If it is impossible to name all of them, some however deserve a special mention. Gerhard Barkhorn and Günther Rall occupy respectively, the second and third places with 301 and 275 aircraft shot down.
If you have a minimum grasp of the second world conflict without being an air warfare expert, you would have probably have bet that the second country to produce an ace with numerous kills would be, Russia, Britain, Japan, Italy, China or even France. It would have been an educated guess as these countries produced the bulk of the armed forces engaged in the conflict but you would have lost and dishonorably with that. Almost unbelievably, EinoIl Mari Juutilainen’s airplane never got a hit from an enemy aircraft when he claimed 94 aircraft of the Soviet Union for his country Finland. Juutilainen was like the Japanese ace Saburō Sakai and Juutilainen never lost a wingman in combat. The very first top allied fighter Ace was the Soviet Pilot Ivan Kozhedub who claimed 60 victories at the end of the war. Before arriving to the name of Richard Bong, the top US ace during this war with a credited shooting down of 40 Japanese aircraft, we have to remember Constantin Cantacuzino from the Royal Romanian Air Force who appears before the US pilot in the list with 43 credited victories.
Mato Dukovac was a Croatian top flying ace of the war with between 40 and 44 aircraft shot down toppling the first pilot of the Royal Air Force who was the South African born Marmaduke Thomas St John Pattle. Originally rejected by the South African Air Force, he flew for the Royal Air Force and scored at least 40 victories, making him the highest scoring of British Commonwealth pilots, he is also the flying ace per se on both Gladiators and Hurricane fighters with a total of 35 planes shot down. The Canadian George Frederick Beurling shot down 31 adversary aircraft. There were also insane feats, unbeaten to this day, accomplished by many pilots like Hans-Joachim Marseille, Emil Lang, August Lambert, Hubert Strassi and Wilhelm Batz who became triple aces in a single day with Emil Lang shooting down 18 Soviet planes, establishing the record for the most kills performed by a pilot in history on a single day. A dozen more pilots became double Ace in the same day. What better defines the second world conflict was the planetary scope of the war. Dezso Szentgyorgyi flew for the Royal Hungarian Air Force and had 30 credited victories while Izidor Kovárik scored 28 possibly 29 aircraft, for the Slovak Air Force and the top Australian Ace was Clive Caldwell with a total of 28 victories. New Zealand is close geographically speaking to Australia and so was the top flying New Zealander, Colin Falkland Gray in terms of victories as he scored 27 aircraft shot down. Egon Albrecht-Lemke a German-Brazilian was an Ace with 25 victories; Henryk Pietrzak was Polish and shot down 10 aircraft. There were Aces from Czechoslovakia, Croatia, France, Iceland, and Greece. The top Chinese Ace was Liu Chi-Sheng flying for the Chinese Nationalist Air Force. As we stated earlier, there were hundreds of Aces and one should not judge the accomplishment of these pilots only from the number of ‘kills’, We already explained that during the WW1, the credited kills of an aviator were attributed differently so was the attribution different during the second world conflict? The US, Finnish and British rules credited fractional shares of a kill, Germans and French differed in the way they credited a shared victory and some US commands also credited aircraft destroyed on the ground.
The generals of the information war of today have done their homework as they also consider the gender equality imperatives of a modern society so not long ago Ukrainians, circulated another fake concerning a ‘Ukrainian Beauty’ allegedly having blown up 52 Russian tanks solo. Later on, Barbie girl was identified as Major Victoria Palamarchuck, a trauma doctor and the story was found to be another fake, of course. However,history did not have to invent true female heroes because female aviation aces truly existed. Holder of the title of the female Ace fighter with the most kills nicknamed LiLya, The White Lily of Stalingrad was Lydia Vladimirovna Litvyak, first female pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft when she served in the Soviet Air Force and with Yekaterina Vasilyevna Budanova, were the world’s only two female Ace fighters showing yet again that war does not need invented heroes like the Ukrainian crisis actors, war will produce characters greater than life.
World War 2 announced the appearance of what ultimately would make the story of the Ghost Ace unbelievable, a newcomer on the scene who would forever change the art of air combat, it was the fighter jet. The Twitter warrior, the hasty researcher and the one determined to make his opinion prevail against truth or logic, will not like this article and the way research should be done by one before engaging in a discussion or an argument online, mainly for the amount of time spent that the research implies. In fact there is no choice in the matter, what we are speaking about is a war where real people are dying. Opinions can change the balance of things and consequently save lives. To be sure about your point and to have the moral right to discuss publicly about a matter which involves the very existence of fellow human beings, you must passionately research the subject matter of contention. One thing is sure, in so doing one inevitably acquires knowledge even if one’s illusion is crushed.
The Germans had been working on the design of the first jet fighters before the start of the hostilities, but did not manage to put out an operational fighter until mid-1944 which was the last year of the war. When the Messerschmitt Me 262 finally took to the air, it was too late for this revolutionary weapon to change the fate of Germany but it marked the beginning of the end of an era and the rise and domination of jet fighters in the art of aerial warfare. The Me 262 was plagued with all kind of technical failures and adjustments that a new technology rushed to satisfy urgent imperatives habitually suffers from. But suffice it to say that they were superior aircraft as Heinz Bär, the Luftwaffe Ace occupying the eighth position in the list of History top Aces with 220 victories became a triple Ace in the Me262. The top Allied Ace during this war, Ivan Nikitovich Kozhedub and Chuck Yeager (the man who would break the speed of sound) count among the few men having shot down the Me262. Despite arriving late on the scene, the pilots of the Me262 claimed 542 aircraft shot down. The Messerschmitt was faster and more heavily armed that anything comparable the Allies could put in the sky. The famous Ace, Adolf Galland(104 Kills)and involved in the German High command since his early forties and who was often in disagreement with Goering, tried desperately to convince Hitler to make the Me262, a fighter jet interceptor rather than the roleof bomber that it was assigned to. In the 1980’s in an interview for TV in the USA , Galland remarked that he was present when Hitler asked Messerschmitt during a presentation of the aircraft if the plane was able to carry bombs and in what load. The Fuhrer was opposed to using the Me262 as an interceptor. Galland, however, succeeded in having command of a handful of those jets and commanded a squadron of them strictly as interceptors. From the 1250 (according to some sources 1408) Me262 built, only 50 were allowed to be used as fighters among which only 25 were at each time operational. Despite its revolutionary characteristics, the Me262 was not invincible and the allies took drastic measures to destroy depots and factories involved in the fabrication of the particular chemicals it used as fuel. The first operational jet was also vulnerable at landing and takeoff and the allies ambushed the powerless aircraft during these moments. But there was one additional innovation that the Me262 introduced. To counter Allied bombers, the Germans equipped the fighter with the R4m Rocket pack and though this method was not widely used, it prefigures the future of air combat and the predominance of the Jet Engine.
Moving on to the Korean War, the US and its allies, the UK & Australia faced North Korea, China and pilots of the Soviet Union (the USSR was not an official participant in the conflict though it sent fighter jets and their pilots as instructors and were active participants in air combat). Both sides fielded fighter jets and Aces fought across the famous Mig Alley for air supremacy. Many factors during the conflict like poor records, difficulty to identify crashed planes or overestimation makes the attribution of Credited kills controversial, the top Aces of this war though in most cases dog fighting with jets still retained cannon fire as their main weapon. Soviet fighter pilot, Major Nikolai Sutyagin is the Ace of the Aces in the Korean War with 22 credited victories. The case of Yevgeny Pepelyaev second on this list shows how it was difficult years after the conflict and even today to credit some victories. Officially Pepelyaev, a Hero of The Soviet Union is credited with 19 victories according to Russian sources; meanwhile Western sources attribute the Russian pilot 23 victories, as for the Ace himself he said he was only sure about 6 of his kills while being only able to verify two of the aircraft crashing on land. Several Soviet and US air Force pilots became Aces of two wars and among them were veterans of the Second World War. The top US Ace was Joseph C. McConnell of the 39th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron flying an F-86 Sabre, who shot down 16 aircraft. The Chinese took part in the conflict and the pilot scoring the most ‘kills’ was Zhao Baotong with 9 victories while Li Han, another Ace was credited with 8 victories and became the first Chinese pilot to have shot down an American aircraft. No Aces are confirmed from North Korea with two potential candidates according to other sources, Kim Den Dek and Kim Di San with eight and six victories respectively. They would have attained Ace status flying the Mig 15.
The declining number of Aces and aircraft shot down continued throughout the Vietnam War. The transition from cannon fire to missiles as the main weapons changed radically how fighter pilots engaged with each other in aerial combat. Nguyen Van Coc from the VN Peoples Air Force is the top Ace of this war and he is at the top of a list of 15 Vietnamese Aces and before the first US Ace, Captain B ‘Chuck” DeBellevue with six victories. The jets the Aces flew were the Mig, 17, MIG 19, MIG 21 for the North Vietnamese and the F-14 Phantom II for the US Navy. The strangest Dog Fight in history maybe happened during this war when tail Gunner Airman Albert Moore onboard a bomber B-52 B took out a MIG 21 with 800 rounds in three bursts making Moore one of the rare man to have engaged a fighter jet from a bomber.
Following the Vietnam War, fighter pilots would be engaged in numerous conflicts and incidents with the number of new Aces in continuous decline. In Vietnam the MIG 17 was not equipped with missiles and the MIG pilots did the maximum to attract the more powerful F-86 in close combat due to its superior maneuverability. If true, an incident certainly marks the ultimate achievement by a jet pilot as it would be certainly the only time such a thing would happen. In 1965 during the Indo Pakistani War, Squadron leader Huhammad Mahmood Alam, Commander of number 11 Squadron shot down five Indian jets in one minute. The fight has been contested by the Indian Air Force but most sources still credit this minute, the Ace making moment of the jet era. If this feat is almost unbelievable for the ones who understand its implication, now the reader can appreciate what is really meant by the pseudo achievements of the fake ‘Ghost’ invented by Ukraine. The opening of the pop culture movie ‘Top Gun’ allows a better appreciation of the problems faced by various air forces vis-à-vis aerial close combat. The movie premises stated that its Flyers Weapons School was created in 1969 by the Navy as an elite institution for the top one percent of its pilots and that its purpose was to teach the lost art of aerial combat. The USA apparently came to this conclusion with the drop of the kill ratio in the skies of Korea. But air to air missiles were not the only problem.
The series of wars that the state of Israel fought since its creation against some Arab countries would also produce some astonishing Flying Aces. Nicknamed ‘Hawkeye’ with unique eyesight which allowed Giora Epstein to spot an aircraft at a distance of 24 miles, the Israeli fighter ace scored 17 victories which made him the most successful pilot in the jet era. Most of the kills of the Ace were done with cannon fire, though he downed five aircraft with air to air missiles. On the other side of the conflict Syrian Ace, General Fayaez Mansour scored 15 victories while flying MIG 17 and 21, while Ahmed Al Mansoori shot down 6 enemy planes and seemed to be the top Egyptian Flying ace. As we said earlier in this article, missiles were not the only problem, let us appreciate what Tom Clancy, known for his extreme accuracy on depicting warfare technology wrote about the October War (Ramadan War or the Yom Kippur War).
*Quotes from the book Sum of All Fears:- “Each war knows many ironies, however, and the October War was no exception. As is true of most glorious defensive stands, this one was largely unnecessary. The Israelis had misread intelligence reports. This failure of intelligence has never been adequately explained. Did the fabled Mossad fail so utterly to discern the Arabs' plans? Or did Israeli political leaders fail to recognize the warnings they received? These questions received immediate attention in the world press, of course, most particularly in regard to Egypt's assault-crossing of the Suez, which breached the vaunted Bar-Lev Line. Equally serious but less well appreciated was a more fundamental error made years earlier by the usually prescient Israeli general staff. For all its firepower, the Israeli Army was not heavily outfitted with tube artillery, particularly by Soviet standards. Instead of heavy concentrations of mobile field guns, the Israelis chose to depend heavily on large numbers of short-range mortars, and attack aircraft. This left Israeli gunners on the Heights outnumbered twelve to one, subject to crushing counter-battery fire, and unable to provide adequate support to the beleaguered defenders. That error cost many lives. As is the case with most grave mistakes, this one was made by intelligent men, for the very best of reasons. The same attack-fighter that struck the Golan could rain steel and death on the Suez as little as an hour later.
The IAF was the first modern air force to pay systematic attention to 'turn -around time.' Its ground crewmen were trained to act much like a racing car's pit crew, and their speed and skill effectively doubled each plane's striking power, making the IAF a profoundly flexible and weighted instrument, and making a Phantom or a Sky -hawk appear to be more valuable than a dozen mobile field guns. What the Israeli planning officers had failed to take fully into account was the fact that the Soviets were the ones arming the Arabs, and, in doing so, would inculcate their clients with their own tactical philosophies. Intended to deal with NATO air power always deemed better than their own, Soviet surface -to-air missile (SAM) designers had always been among the world's best. Russian planners saw the coming October War as a splendid chance to test their newest tactical weapons and doctrine. They did not spurn it. The Soviets gave their Arab clients a SAM network such as the North Vietnamese or Warsaw Pact forces of the time dared not dream about, a nearly solid phalanx of interlocking missile batteries and radar systems deployed in depth, along with new mobile SAMs that could advance with the armored spearheads, extending the 'bubble' of counter-air protection under which ground action could continue without interference. The officers and men who were to operate those systems had been painstakingly trained, many within the Soviet Union with the full benefit of everything the Soviets and Vietnamese had learned of American tactics and technology, which the Israelis were correctly expected to imitate. Of all the Arab soldiers in the October War, only these men would achieve their pre -war objectives. For two days they effectively neutralized the IAF. Had ground operations gone according to plan that would have been enough.”
It is rather clear here that fighter jets can be seriously impeded in the actions as interceptors which bring us to the heart of the matter, the tactical environment in which the ghost of Kiev is supposed to have won his victory. Much has been said in the main stream media about the fact that the Ukrainian had been able to interdict total air superiority to the Russian Air Force. It must be said that in the very early hours of the war, the Russians has pounded command centers and all the facilities of the Ukrainian Air Force, which then lost its ability to effectively target its interceptors. The limited success of the Air force had been won by ground troops manning Anti missile batteries like the S 300. If one hears that the Ukrainian air force is still apt to take off and contest the air space over Western Ukraine, we are mainly speaking about drone activities. The jets of the Ukrainian Air Force are only able to perform hit and run activities with very limited support from the ground. It is no secret that the Ukrainians receive live intelligence from Poland and the US and other NATO countries but in no way has this intelligence been able to plug the gap created by the constant attacks of the Russian Air Force or their constant jamming of Ukrainian communications. Nowadays it would be difficult for any fighter pilot to emulate the deeds and exploits of their illustrious predecessors but there will always be room for characters bigger than life. Kurt Welter was a night fighter and possibly the all-time jet Ace with 20 kills on Me262 or Alexei Petrovich Maresiev, another Ace winning 3 victories after losing his legs. We have not been completely honest with you as we deliberately presented Hiroyoshi Nishizawa as possibly the most successful Japanese fighter ace of World War Two. In fact, he is credited with only 36 victories but we thought that his story was relevant to show how it is difficult to rate the Aces and it is still possible that Nishizawa deserve this title after all. However officially, Lieutenant Junior Grade Tetsuzō Iwamoto was the top flying Ace of WW2 with 80 to 87 victories credited. If you are a purist you can find few inaccuracies in this article but mainly concerning the way these extraordinary pilots were rated, the aim of the article was to show to the reader how easy it is to get information necessary to help anyone understand a subject. The research time allocated for such an article was of about an hour and it was purposely done by someone who has almost no knowledge of military aviation. The laziness of many is what makes them victims of fake information on the internet and via MSM. We have stopped our tour of the wars that has befallen us with the Yom Kippur War but if the subject fascinates you, then know that helicopters’ dogfighting is not only a fantasy of action movie directors but something very real. It happened during the Iran Iraq War using, guns, rockets and missiles. Iraqi Mi-24 Hind and Iranian Ah-1 Sea Cobra ambushed and engaged each other. If you think that the greatest Ace in the F-14 Grumman Tomcat is a US pilot, the F 14 is famous for…well, being the plane piloted by Tom Cruise in Top Gun. You would be wrong. The Ace of the Aces flying this extremely powerful carrier capable, twin engine, two seat, twin tail, variable-sweep wing fighter aircraft is Col. Fereydoun A. Mazandarani who scored 16 kills in the Tomcat and the most successful F-14 Tomcat pilot ever. As for how such a powerful American interceptor is manned by their arch-adversary in the Middle East is in itself yet another fascinating story.
The impact on each of us and globally makes this the turning point of the 21st Century
© The International OutsiderC0.Reg.No SC715702 . All Rights Reserved. Design by HTML Codex
by 
