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In the west, most of the movies about the European theater of the Second World War involve Americans fighting Germans, but that was a relative walk in the park compared to Russians fighting Germans. Those two hated each other so much that if you became a prisoner of war, it was the definition of suck. That’s why some Russian POWs said fuck this place and stole a German airplane to escape.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 8, 1945--
Mikhail Devyatayev was a Soviet fighter pilot who got his first kill on a German dive bomber only two days after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. He shot down many more German planes and got fancy medals and shit. But on July 13, 1944, his luck took a temporary dip when he was shot down and became a prisoner of war.
He knew pilots were treated harshly, because people didn’t like having bombs dropped on them, although he wasn’t a bomber. He took the identity of a dead Soviet infantryman and eventually ended up in a Nazi concentration camp on an island in the Baltic sea called Usedom. While there, he was forced to labor on the German missile program making V1 and V2 rockets.
Conditions in the camp were brutal and Devyatayev figured he’d never make it out alive. Despite security being tight, he decided to attempt an escape and convinced several of his fellow prisoners he could fly them out of that frozen hellscape back to their homeland frozen hellscape. On February 8, 1945, Mikhail and nine other Soviet prisoners were hard at work repairing the island’s runway. Then prisoner Ivan Krivonogov bashed their Nazi guard’s brains out with a crowbar, stole his clothes, and led the work gang as their “guard” to the camp commandant’s He 111 bomber. Then Devyatayev flew them out of that shithole.
Seeing a German bomber coming at them, the Soviets of course tried to shoot it down and damaged the plane. But Devyatayev managed to land in Soviet territory. Seven of the 10 escapees were assigned to a rifle unit and sent back into the fight, and five of them died gloriously for the motherland. The three officers were held for investigation for having worked on behalf of the German war effort, albeit forced.
Devyatayev was branded a criminal and struggled to find work after the war. But in 1957 the head of the Soviet space program said Mikhail and the others had provided valuable information about the German rocket program and they should cut the guy some fucking slack. His name was cleared, and he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union.
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