The Red Army’s Moscow Airborne Operation Turned Into a Debacle

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By Sebastien Roblin,War Is Boring

This is part two of a two-part series. Readpart one.

On Feb. 22, 1942, Soviet Maj. Gen. A.F. Levashev was sitting inside a TB-3 bomber as it carried the Fourth Airborne Corps’ senior officers to their landing zone — part of a major operation to relieve the Eighth Airborne Brigade, which had been trapped behind German lines at Vyaz’ma, near Moscow, for a month.

Levashev would not reach his destination alive.

During the flight, a German fighter strafed the TB-3, killing Lavashev and wounding several others, according to David Glantz’s The Soviet Airborne Experience. A second source, Aleksander Maslov’s later Fallen Soviet Generals: Soviet General Officers Killed in Battle — which Glantz edited — stated that the TB-3 landed when soldiers noticed the motionless Levashev.

“I saw a bloody patch on his temple and observed that a bullet had exited from the back of his head,” a Soviet major recalled, according to Maslov.