re: #107 Shiplord Kirel

Beautiful!

It’s not the car’s fault of course, but Pontiacs were a firm favorite of Joseph Stalin and his henchmen.
When aircraft designer Alexander Yakovlev was awarded the Stalin prize in 1940, it came with 100K Rubles, a gold medal, a nice dacha near Moscow, and a Pontiac Silver Chief. Later, Yakovlev used the Pontiac to flee to the Urals ahead of the advancing German army in 1941, though in fact the Germans never quite reached Moscow.

Well, one of the reasons the Germans did not actually reach Moscow was because the Luftwaffe was unable to provide air superiority over Moscow that November and December. And part of the reason for that was Yak fighters flying CAP over Moscow.

(It was not until 1943 that the Red air force prevailed generally on the eastern front. Weaknesses in pilot training and doctrine held back the Red air force for the first few years of the war. Special circumstances unique to the battle of Moscow allowed the fundamentally weaker Red air force to contest the skies over Moscow: the Germans were operating from open air grass strips while the Russians had the civilian and military infrastructure of Moscow’s airports. Heated hangars, for instance.