The city of Kazan, capital of the Republic of Tatarstan (Russia), has a medieval historic center where the local cemetery is located. There stands a monument in memory of World War II and, next to it, an artistic tombstone bearing the name of Mikhail Devyatayev, a character with a more than curious story: he starred in one of the most amazing escapes of World War II – and we’ve seen quite a few here – and yet, he was considered suspicious in his country for a long time until the truth came to light and he went from villain to hero.

The cemetery of Kazan is called Arsk Field, derived from Archa Darugha, one of the administrative divisions of what was the ancient Khanate of Kazan, in turn part of the Golden Horde, until the 16th century. It must be a fascinating place because besides graves, it has a turbulent history behind it: it was the site of the Tatar camp that besieged Kazan under the orders of Ivan the Terrible, there government troops faced Pugachev’s rebels in 1774, and there the Bolsheviks gathered in October to initiate the local version of the revolution in 1917.

So, the place seems perfect for a character like Mikhail Devyatayev, although he was not native to the area. He was born in a small village in the Republic of Mordovia called Torbeyevo, precisely in that revolutionary year of 1917. His family was peasant and very large, as he was the thirteenth child, yet he was able to study at the River Navigation School, graduating in 1938 and starting his professional life in that sector as an officer on a ship that made voyages along the Volga.

Mikhail Devyatayev's grave at the Arskoe cemetery in Kazan.
Mikhail Devyatayev’s grave at the Arskoe cemetery in Kazan. Credit: Bodganov-62 / Wikimedia Commons

However, he had to interrupt his work when he was called up and drafted into the Red Army. Interestingly, he was not assigned to the navy but to aviation: he entered the Chkalov Flight School, from which he graduated as a pilot in 1940. Just in time because war winds were blowing: on one hand, the Soviet Union had been in conflict with Finland since September 1939, the so-called Winter War, which it barely won in March; on the other hand, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom had also taken up arms in September, following the invasion of Poland.

In reality, the Second World War was in a strange impasse, a situation of immobility known as the Phoney War, but it ended in May with the invasion of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg by the Wehrmacht, parallel to the occupation of Norway and Denmark.

The conflict was spreading and widening, so it was only a matter of time before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement between Germans and Soviets named after their foreign ministers, was shattered.

Molotov signs non-aggression pact in the presence of Ribbentrop and Stalin
Molotov signs non-aggression pact in the presence of Ribbentrop and Stalin. Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Both countries were aware of this and were preparing, but Hitler began his Operation Barbarossa earlier than Stalin anticipated, hence the first phase of the attack, initiated on June 22, 1941, was so devastating. The Red Army was still in the process of modernization, as the revolution and the subsequent civil war had delayed it, so in those early moments, the Germans rolled over the Soviet defenses like a steamroller.

In that context, aviation played a fundamental role, so Mikhail was one of the first soldiers to engage in combat in what the USSR knows as the Great Patriotic War. He did so immediately at the controls of his plane, and on June 24, that is, two days after the German aggression, he achieved the first shoot-down of a Junkers Ju 87, the famous model known as the Stuka, which the Luftwaffe used in dive-bombing raids to pave the way for ground troops.

Like other comrades, his effort in those early and dramatic moments was crucial, and he was recognized by being awarded the Order of the Red Banner, a military merit decoration that was the most important in the country from its creation in 1918 until 1933 when it was displaced by the Order of Lenin. In fact, Mikhail would also earn the latter, among others. Despite being seriously wounded in a leg on September 23 and spending a long time recovering, he later returned to the front lines.

Polikarpov Po-2 Replica
Polikarpov Po-2 Replica. Credit: Alan Wilson / Wikimedia Commons

He was first assigned to a Polikarpov Po-2, a biplane that was the most produced aircraft model in aviation history. The Po-2, designed in 1927, was completely obsolete by 1941, so it was hardly used in combat, mainly for night attacks, harassment, or propaganda; generally, it was used more for training or for light passenger transport, not to mention extra uses like ambulances or crop dusters (in fact, it was nicknamed Kukuruznik, which means maize).

Mikhail spent almost the entire war flying medical missions, but after a meeting with Aleksandr Ivanovich Pokryshkin, he managed to change things. Pokryshkin was a national aviation ace, a visionary who had invented the ShKAS machine gun (a gas-operated weapon with a high rate of fire that was incorporated into fighters and bombers) and the Polikarpov R-5 reconnaissance aircraft (widely used in the Spanish Civil War as a low-altitude bomber, which earned it that nickname) and who would become a marshal; but he was already a hero then and intervened to have Mikhail reassigned to combat duty.

That’s how in May 1944 he joined the 104th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment on the Ukrainian front, where, with the rank of major, he scored nine victories in two months flying a Bell P-39 Airacobra (an American-made aircraft sent to the USSR under the Lend-Lease Act). However, luck was not on his side this time either, and he was shot down again near Lviv (Lvov), a city in western Ukraine (then part of Poland) occupied by the Germans three years earlier and which the Red Army was trying to reconquer. Since they wouldn’t achieve that until July 27, Mikhail, who survived the crash of his plane but with considerable burns, fell into what was still enemy territory.

A Bell P-39 Airacobra with Soviet insignia
A Bell P-39 Airacobra with Soviet insignia. Credit: Martin Čížek / Wikimedia Commons

Captured, he was interned in the Łódź concentration camp, present-day Poland. It was a city that barely suffered damage during the war and where a Jewish ghetto of twenty thousand people had been erected, of which, when Mikhail arrived, there were fewer than a thousand left, to the point that it was closed to distribute the survivors among the nearby camps. Among them was the infamous Radogoszcz prison, where they proceeded to exterminate them in anticipation of the city’s fall (they ultimately chose to set fire to the building with the prisoners inside).

Therefore, death pervaded the place, and Mikhail did not want to wait his turn. On August 13, he escaped but did not get far and, once again captured, he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This was a problem because it was already in Germany, in Oranienburg (Brandenburg), making any escape attempt difficult. The facility had opened in 1936 to accommodate the excess inmate population from Esterwegen, a secondary camp of Neuengamme where French, Belgian, Dutch, and Czech prisoners of war had been interned.

Esterwegen was initially for political prisoners, but then the roster was expanded to include Jews, Poles, and Soviets (also Spanish Republicans; Largo Caballero was interned there). By August 1944, the tide of war was clearly turning in favor of the Allies, and the Red Army was advancing without anyone being able to stop it, so the SS began to execute prisoners. Mikhail, aware that sooner or later his turn would come as a pilot (who were considered potentially more dangerous), managed to exchange his identity for that of a deceased infant and temporarily eluded death.

Next, he experienced another transfer, this time to Usedom. It was an island off the coast of the Baltic Sea, at the mouth of the Oder, which today is shared by Germany and Poland but at that time was used by the Nazi regime as a camp for forced labor teams serving at a base on the northwest side, that of Peenemünde. This place may sound more familiar to readers, as it was where the V1 and V2 missile programs were developed, the weapons that Hitler desperately promoted to try to turn the tide of the war.

Location of the island of Usedom with Peenemünde highlighted in red
Location of the island of Usedom with Peenemünde highlighted in red. Credit: TUBS / Wikimedia Commons

The prisoners were employed in repairing the runways and manually clearing the terrain of unexploded bombs, as the Allies were aware of the activities taking place on those islands and dropped about sixteen hundred tons of bombs on them. The working conditions were very harsh, not only because of the danger of an explosion or falling into enemy hands but also because of the severity of the winter and the brutal treatment by the guards.

Therefore, Mikhail was determined to escape again, despite being in the heart of a hostile country and not speaking either German or Polish; he preferred to die trying than to wait suffering the same inexorable fate. On February 8, 1945, he convinced three comrades-in-arms named Sokolov, Krivonogov, and Nemchenko – later joined by four more – to collaborate in an escape, putting his plan into practice one night when the guards were usually having dinner and there were fewer personnel watching. They were working on a runway when Krivonogoc killed the guard with his shovel.

Then another prisoner named Peter Kutergin put on the guard’s uniform and led the group of nine prisoners, as if escorting them, to the airfield. There they discreetly boarded the Heinkel He 111 used by the camp commander and took off heading east; Mikhail was the pilot, obviously, having gathered information about the cockpit. It wasn’t easy because first the deceived Germans tried to intercept the plane – a fighter returning from a mission crossed paths with them but had run out of ammunition – and then it was the Soviet anti-aircraft guns that frantically fired at the enemy bomber.

In fact, the Heinkel was hit but still, the pilot’s skill allowed them to land in the village of Gollin, in the USSR. The escapees spent some time in the hospital to recover from malnutrition and fatigue while being subjected to harsh interrogation by the NKVD, which did not believe them. When they were discharged at the end of March, five of them were sent back to the front in a disciplinary battalion and died in combat over the following weeks. The others, as officers, were sidelined from service pending the investigation that was opened, as the secret service found their story implausible.

Devyatayev in front of his memorial monument in Karlshagen in 1972.
Devyatayev in front of his memorial monument in Karlshagen in 1972. Credit: Markscheider / Wikimedia Commons

In November of that year, two months after the war ended, Mikhail was discharged from the army without the investigation being resolved, which was postponed since there was no hurry. That meant he was still officially suspicious and, therefore, he was treated as such, unable to find employment commensurate with his qualifications and having to make a living as a stevedore at the river port of Kazan. This unjust situation lasted until 1957, when Sergei Korolev, head of the Soviet space program and rocket designer, began to analyze the information that those prisoners had provided years earlier about the German V1 and V2.

Korolev discovered that the data provided was so valuable that no enemy agent would provide it, so he dug up the files of the evaders still alive, presented them to the authorities explaining the value of their testimonies, and in August of that year, Mikhail went from being a pariah to becoming a Hero of the Soviet Union, being unanimously applauded, receiving distinctions, starring in books and articles, etc. That’s how he gathered some of the country’s most prominent decorations, such as the aforementioned Order of Lenin, the Order of the Patriotic War (first and second class), honorary citizenship of the Republic of Mordovia, and many more.

Perhaps his greatest personal reward was to resume his job as a riverboat captain on the Volga, where he commanded the first domestic hydrofoil models (a type of vessel that reaches high speeds by riding above the water). In 1972, he wrote a memoir, and in 2002, the time came for him to leave this world to which he had clung so tightly in difficult times. A museum in his hometown commemorates his exploits, and a rocket was named after him, but perhaps it is more curious that there is a monument in his memory on Usedom Island.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on November 27, 2018. Puedes leer la versión en español en Mijail Devyatayev, el prisionero soviético que protagonizó una evasión en la Segunda Guerra Mundial robando un avión alemán

Sources

Merfyn Bourne, The Second World War in the Air: The Story of Air Combat in Every Theatre of World War Two | Dimitri Sudakov, Escaping from death camp on nazi bomber | Mikhail Devyatayev: stealing a german plane. Escape from concentration camp Usedom (Aircrew Remembered) | Wikipedia

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