Very often, compatriots have to hear war stories that during the Second World War, the Red Army managed to shoot down German planes with the help of ordinary three-line aircraft. Considering how much the theme of war is becoming more and more mythologized every year, it would be reasonable to ask whether it is possible, in principle, to do something like that?
The brightest artistic illustrations of the fact that small arms can shoot down a motor plane can be seen in the wonderful film by Sergei Bondarchuk "They fought for the Motherland" in 1976 and the poem by Alexander Tvardovsky "Vasily Terkin", which should be known to everyone from school times. However, all this is artistic culture, fiction, albeit reflecting real events. What about shooting down planes with rifles in practice?
To begin with, it is extremely difficult to shoot down a motor plane with hand-held small arms. Even if this is the legendary Mosin three-line, which, as you know, stops a light armored vehicles, when it gets into the water turns into an oar, and is also one of the reasons for the creation of the Geneva convention. Jokes aside, a single bullet can do little to most powered planes. Bombers and reconnaissance aircraft fly too high, and fighters and attack aircraft in the vast majority of cases had armored cockpits pilot and power unit of the machine, designed to hit far from rifle, but machine-gun bullets with a much more representative caliber.
Difficult - this does not mean that such a thing is impossible at all. Moreover, it was not a single soldier who fired at the plane, but a whole unit. As you might guess, massive fire significantly increases the chances of not only hitting, but also damage. You can shoot down a car, but even damaging the plane is already expensive, because in this case it will have to be repaired. In addition, any hit on the vehicle has a corresponding psychological effect on the pilot and can make him, for example, abandon the task, taking the infantry fire for the work of some small-caliber air defense, for example, from paired machine guns.
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Suffice it to say that exercises and techniques for rifle units in manual fire firearms on aircraft were practiced not only in the Red Army, but also in any other army in Europe on This moment. It's fair to say that for the most part, this part of the preparation was a vestige of infantry units since the First World War, when planes flew lower, slower and were much worse protected.
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Interestingly, in 1945, the Wehrmacht even instituted a special award for shooting down an aircraft with hand-held small arms. It was officially issued to 16 fighters. Whether the Germans really managed to shoot down 16 planes with rifles and machine guns, or all this was just a propaganda step, today it is already difficult to say. It is important to understand that even small-caliber artisanal air defense systems (represented, as a rule, by paired machine guns) did not differ in representative effectiveness against modern aircraft at that time. world war. What to say about rifles... However, someone wins the lottery.
If you want to know even more interesting things, then you should read about "Sniper machine gun": what the Wehrmacht paratroopers were armed with during the Second World War.
A source: https://novate.ru/blogs/011020/56225/