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By Root 963 0

of one of these men, Mikhail Petrovich Devyataev, is among the most extraordinary of the Second World War. Devyataev was the thirteenth child of a Moldovian blacksmith. His family suffered harrowing privations in the Civil War and its aftermath. In his childhood, an aeroplane made a forced landing near his home. From that moment, he was determined to become a fighter pilot, and in 1941 he did so: “I fell in love with flying and everything about it.” He was twenty-seven and had flown some 200 sorties when one day in July 1944 his Yak-7 was jumped by German FW-190s. He lost consciousness as he parachuted from his stricken aircraft and woke to find a German soldier standing over him. His leg was broken, and he had been badly burned. He spent some months in the primitive hospital of his PoW camp, and retained a lasting gratitude to British prisoners in the next compound, who were generous with food and even found a few drugs for him. En route to a new camp near Königsberg at the end of 1944, he exchanged identities with a dead Red Army soldier, because Soviet pilots were subject to exceptionally brutal German treatment. At the beginning of 1945, he was shipped to Peenemünde, the island on the Baltic coast where Hitler’s “wonder weapons” were developed and tested.

His destination was a slave-labour camp. Here, with an icy wind blowing off the sea, some 4,000 Russians were employed repairing runways and clearing unexploded British bombs in conditions of pitiless brutality. All the prisoners were starving by inches. None had ever escaped. They were beaten constantly, often fatally. One man who tried to swim to freedom was brought back and torn to pieces by guard dogs in front of the prisoners. Devyataev saw a bailed-out British bomber crewman killed by the dogs in a lake where his parachute fell. Most of the work gangs were sooner or later blown up by bombs they were moving. The crematorium fires never cooled.

By the beginning of February 1945, the Germans were in a visibly dangerous mood. Devyataev concluded that the prisoners had no hope of surviving the war if they stayed where they were. They would either starve or be shot. He told the nine other men in his gang that they must escape. “How?” they demanded. “I’ll fly you out,” he said. It took some days to convince them that he could do it, for they knew nothing of his credentials as a pilot. At last, in the early-morning darkness of 8 February, as their gang worked on the runway, Ivan Krivonogov struck their guard a savage, fatal blow with his crowbar. Petyor Kutergun hastily stripped off the man’s uniform and himself put it on. The camp dogs, which they feared desperately, had recently been taken away for training to attack tanks with explosive charges. Their absence made escape seem marginally easier. The work gang, apparently escorted by a guard, stumbled a mile down the airstrip to the commandant’s personal Heinkel. They opened the rear door and scrambled into the fuselage. Devyataev found and opened the battery box. It was empty. He slumped in despair.

It took them an agonizing quarter of an hour to find a battery trolley and connect it. More precious minutes slipped away before the pilot was able to start the engines. Daylight had come. The Russian now had to taxi past a line of other aircraft, on which German mechanics were already working. He tore off his striped jacket, thinking that the sight of a pilot half-naked in mid-winter would alert the Germans less readily than a man in the grimly familiar garb of a prisoner. The Luftwaffe men indeed gazed curiously at the Heinkel’s cockpit, but did not intervene. Devyataev was struggling with the unfamiliar controls. He got Krivonogov to sit beside him, pushing buttons and pulling levers at his direction. The other eight men huddled in the fuselage. The plane swung on to the runway. The pilot gunned the engines and released the brakes. As they lifted into the sky, they began to croak the words of the “Internationale.” They lurched rather than flew through the sky. Devyataev, who had never flown a twin-engined aircraft,