Chapter 930: Sacrifice and Contribution

On the chaotic battlefield, a Soviet partisan spotted the helicopter in the distant sky. He and his fellow partisans, who had been fighting a guerrilla war in the area for over a month, were seeing a craft that could hover in the air for the first time. Whatever it was, an enemy weapon that could continuously strafe from high altitude was an incredibly difficult thing to deal with.

“Menshak! Menshak! Think of something, quick! Our men are being wiped out by that bizarre aircraft!” a Soviet partisan in a jacket yelled back to his subordinate. His unit had been pinning down a German patrol just moments before, but in the blink of an eye, the tables had turned.

Yes, completely turned. Rockets, from who knows where, had rained down, tearing his position to shreds. The hundred or so partisans he had painstakingly gathered were now likely less than fifty, and it was hard to say how much courage those who had survived still had left to fight.

After the rockets had blanketed their position, everyone realized there was a new weapon above them. This strange aircraft hovered over their heads, strafing the crowd with its machine guns from on high. Tracer rounds fell like rain around them, kicking up dirt and gravel. Many cried out as they were hit and died.

In truth, this German helicopter wasn’t actually hovering. Due to its design, it could only achieve a state of near-hover. It was actually circling the battlefield at a slow speed, but compared to a fixed-wing aircraft, it might as well have been parked in the sky.

“I can’t find the machine gun team! That area is a sea of fire. I don’t know if I can still find Ivan and the others…” the partisan named Menshak, with a grenade hanging from his belt and a Mosin-Nagant rifle in his hand, shouted to his commander, looking at the German aircraft firing with impunity in the sky. “I think the only thing that can reach that far is… that thing.”

They had found a German Panzerfaust on a battlefield near a patch of woods. What made them even happier was that on the body of a German soldier lying next to the rocket launcher, they had found a rocket. This weapon was immediately treasured by the partisan group, to be used against German tanks when necessary.

But now, it seemed that only that thing could possibly deal with the German armed helicopter that was hovering in the sky. And so, the partisan leader did not hesitate. He immediately nodded and had Menshak go and find their “anti-tank team.”

This partisan leader’s thinking was quite straightforward. He knew that if his unit were to be wiped out, their weapons would be useless. So he had no intention of holding anything back and was determined to use the weapons at his disposal to cause the greatest possible trouble for the Germans.

And so, by a large tree, a kneeling Soviet partisan shouldered the anti-tank rocket launcher. Behind him, a scrawny partisan, who had been studying this weapon for many days, slid the intact anti-tank rocket into the tube.

“It should be ready!” the scrawny partisan said, nodding to Menshak who was standing to one side. “As long as you pull the trigger, you should be able to shoot down that German plane.”

As he spoke, the scrawny partisan pointed his finger at the German helicopter that was constantly strafing with its machine gun in the distance. In front of him, the Soviet partisan who was kneeling on the ground, preparing to fire, pressed the weapon’s sight against the distant helicopter’s fuselage. He then discovered a rather fatal problem.

“Hey! I say, that helicopter is moving! It’s not just sitting still up there, it’s still moving!” the rocket launcher operator reported to Menshak beside him. “If I fire and miss, what will happen to us then?”

Menshak frowned and then shouted at him, “Fire, quick! If you wait any longer, our men will all be dead!” His tone was harsh, and he even pressed his hand on the Mosin-Nagant slung over his back as he spoke.

The rocket launcher operator, terrified, quickly aimed the rocket launcher at the helicopter in the sky and then pulled the trigger with a jerk. A thick cloud of white smoke spewed from the back of the rocket launcher, and the scrawny Soviet partisan who had been standing behind it was thrown back by the immense force, crying out as he collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

The rocket, spewing flames, rushed towards the distant German helicopter. It looked to be on a very close course. With such a commotion on the ground, it was, of course, clearly visible from the helicopter. The German gunner who had been strafing immediately shouted, “Rocket! Climb! Climb, quick!”

The pilot on the other side was trying his best to keep the helicopter steady, to give the machine gunner a stable firing platform. But suddenly, a heart-rending scream came through the headset, and a word in that scream made his blood run cold. He really wanted to know why a group of partisans, who shouldn’t have any heavy weapons, would have such a damn killer weapon as a rocket launcher.

And so, he quickly controlled the plane to climb as fast as possible, and to turn his aircraft as much as possible to present a smaller frontal profile to the incoming rocket. The violent shaking almost threw the two “passengers” in the back of the helicopter out of the aircraft. It was only thanks to their safety ropes that they had saved their own miserable lives.

The ground support fire also temporarily stopped completely, because the fuselage had begun to sway, and the machine gun had also lost its firing angle. In any case, the entire “Argus 3” helicopter was in a state of chaos. The co-pilot was even shouting that he was about to be shot down.

Unfortunately, a soul-crushing scene appeared. The rocket, far, far away, had already deviated from the helicopter’s direction. Looking at its trajectory, it was already impossible to hit the climbing helicopter. Just as the pilot saw the white smoke trail of the incoming rocket from his own cockpit, the rocket finally lost its upward momentum halfway and plunged from the sky.

It was a great pity that the design range of this rocket was 200 meters. The German infantry who were familiar with this thing would generally use it at a distance of 150 meters, because any further, and the accuracy was not guaranteed.

The Soviet partisans had no idea how far this thing could shoot, and they had also misjudged the sturdiness of the helicopter, which looked so close, and its actual distance. To judge the size and distance of an unfamiliar aircraft in the sky is very difficult, especially for a group of amateurs with no relevant experience.

In fact, if these partisans had just fired their rifles at the helicopter, the effect would have been better. Of course, they didn’t know this, so in the end, to pin their hopes on the more powerful rocket launcher was also an understandable matter.

But now their hopes were dashed. The facts proved that the German rocket launcher, in its function of dealing with a helicopter, was not as reliable as a Mosin-Nagant. And this fired rocket, besides not shooting down the German plane, had also exposed its firing position…

Menshak watched in terror as the rocket fizzled out halfway and fell from a height of a hundred or so meters. He didn’t know why this had happened, and his mind was filled with the doubtful theory that the German weapons were defective. But he had not lost the alertness of an old partisan. While his mind was filled with unclear questions, his peripheral vision still spotted the helicopter in the distant sky, which had already aimed its nose in his direction.

And so, this poor Menshak quickly scrambled for cover, just as they had when they had last attempted to attack a German railway and had run into a German armored train on patrol. At that time, they had been swept by the 30mm anti-aircraft cannons on the armored train, and dozens of partisans had been turned into mincemeat. To this day, that scene was his nightmare, impossible to shake.

The rocket launcher operator, looking back at his scrawny comrade who had been knocked half-dead by the backblast, had not noticed that the helicopter had not been shot down by him. By the time he realized with terror that there was a powerful enemy behind him, the two 20mm cannons under the helicopter’s nose were already sweeping over like a storm.

Menshak did not escape the range of the cannon’s strafing. Because the helicopter could almost stop in the air, it had an advantage in dealing with such erratically running targets. These men were soon covered in a blaze of fire from the dense cannon fire. Two huge holes were blown in Menshak’s body, and the fragments of his internal organs were even splattered several meters away.

The German infantry detachment quickly transformed into the role of cleaning up the battlefield. Apart from a few unlucky souls who had surrendered and were to be executed on the spot, most of the people, including the partisan leader, had been killed on the road of their escape. Hunting down a routed enemy was another advantage of the helicopter. It was much faster than most of the enemies running on the ground, and the fleeing people often did not even return fire—wasn’t it a paradise for helicopter combat?

However, for the German helicopter pilots, combat was not always so wonderful. Even when dealing with opponents without heavy weapons, like partisans, the Odin helicopter was still very fragile. Among the recorded losses, there were even cases of being shot down by enemy rifles.

In the whole of April 1939, among the helicopters of the German Army Aviation units fighting on the Eastern Front, 38 had crashed for various reasons. But because of the existence of these helicopters, the pass-through rate of the ever-extending German supply lines had doubled, and the rampant Soviet partisans had been effectively contained.

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