Air Battle for Stalingrad. Luftwaffe operations to support the Paulus army. 1942–1943

Not a single serious work has been written about the role of aviation in the Battle of Stalingrad. One gets the impression that everything was reduced to street battles, tank attacks and artillery duels. In this book, the battle is shown, as it were, from a bird’s height, the eyes of German aces and Soviet pilots flying on the verge of physical and nervous exhaustion. Particular attention is paid to the famous air bridge in Stalingrad, an organized Luftwaffe, which was not in history analogues. Hundreds of overloaded planes through the snow and fog, day and night flew into the “boiler”, despite the anti -aircraft fire and the attacks of the “Stalinist falcons”, which opposed them without sparing strength and regardless of huge losses. The author collected incredible and sometimes shocking details of air battles in the sky of Stalingrad, as well as in a radius of two hundred kilometers around him, systematizing a huge array of information from German and domestic archives. An objective view of events will allow the reader to feel all the cruelty and drama of this unprecedented battle