Modern katyusha machine. Weapon of victory - Katyusha (10 photos)

It is well known that on September 18, 1941, by order of the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR No. 308, four rifle divisions of the Western Front (100th, 127th, 153rd and 161st) for the battles near Yelnya - “for military exploits, for organization, discipline and an approximate order "- the honorary titles" guards "were awarded. They were renamed the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Guards, respectively. In the future, many units and formations of the Red Army that distinguished themselves and hardened during the war were transformed into guards.

But Moscow researchers Alexander Osokin and Alexander Kornyakov discovered documents from which it follows that the issue of creating guards units was discussed in the circles of the USSR leadership back in August. And the first guards regiment was to be a heavy mortar regiment armed with rocket artillery combat vehicles.

When did the guard appear?

In the course of getting acquainted with the documents about the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, we found a letter from the People's Commissar of General Engineering of the USSR P.I. Parshina No. 7529ss dated August 4, 1941 addressed to the Chairman of the State Defense Committee I.V. Stalin with a request to allow the production of 72 M-13 vehicles (later called “Katyushas” by us) with ammunition to form one heavy guards mortar regiment in excess of the plan.
We decided that a typo was made, since it is known that the guards rank was first awarded by order of the People's Commissar of Defense No. 308 of September 18, 1941 to four rifle divisions.

The main points of the GKO resolution, unknown to historians, read:

"one. Agree with the proposal of Comrade Parshin, People's Commissar for General Engineering of the USSR, to form one guards mortar regiment armed with M-13 installations.
2. Assign the name of the People's Commissariat of General Engineering to the newly formed Guards Regiment.
3. To take into account that NCOM manufactures equipment for the regiment with systems and ammunition in excess of the established task for M-13 for August.
It follows from the text of the resolution that not only was consent given to manufacture the over-plan M-13 installations, but it was also decided to form a guards regiment on their basis.

The study of other documents confirmed our guess: on August 4, 1941, the concept of "guards" was first applied (and without any decision on this matter by the Politburo of the Central Committee, the Presidium of the Supreme Council or the Council of People's Commissars) in relation to one specific regiment with a new type of weapon - rocket launchers M-13, encrypting them with the word "mortar" (inscribed personally by Stalin).

It is amazing that the word "guard" for the first time during the years of Soviet power (except for the detachments of the Red Guard in 1917) was put into circulation by People's Commissar Parshin - a man who was not very close to Stalin and had never even visited his Kremlin office during the war years.

Most likely, his letter, printed on August 2, was handed over to Stalin on the same day by military engineer 1st rank V.V. Aborenkov, deputy head of the GAU for rocket launchers, who was in the leader’s office together with the head of the GAU, Colonel-General of Artillery N.D. Yakovlev for 1 hour 15 minutes. Created according to the decision taken that day, the regiment became the first regiment of M-13 mobile rocket launchers (from RS-132) in the Red Army - before that, only batteries of these launchers were formed (from 3 to 9 vehicles).

It is noteworthy that on the same day, on the memorandum of the chief of artillery of the Red Army, Colonel-General of Artillery N.N. Voronov about the work of 5 rocket artillery installations, Stalin wrote: “Beria, Malenkov, Voznesensky. Turn this thing around. Raise the production of shells fourfold, fivefold, sixfold.

What gave impetus to the decision to create the M-13 Guards Regiment? Let's express our hypothesis. In June-July 1941, by decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the system of strategic leadership of the armed forces was restructured. On June 30, 1941, the State Defense Committee (GKO) was created under the chairmanship of Stalin, to whom all power in the country was transferred for the duration of the war. On July 10, the GKO transformed the Headquarters of the High Command into the Headquarters of the High Command. The Headquarters included I.V. Stalin (chairman), V.M. Molotov, marshals S.K. Timoshenko, S.M. Budyonny, K.E. Voroshilov, B.M. Shaposhnikov, Army General G.K. Zhukov.

On July 19, Stalin becomes People's Commissar of Defense, and on August 8, 1941, by decision of the Politburo No. P. 34/319 - "Supreme Commander of all troops of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army and the Naval Forces". On the same day, August 8, the states of "one guards mortar regiment" were approved.

We take the liberty of suggesting that initially it was, perhaps, about the formation of a unit intended to ensure the protection of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command. Indeed, in the staff of the field Headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Army during the First World War, which was quite likely taken by Stalin and Shaposhnikov as a prototype, there were heavy weapons, in particular, the Headquarters' aviation defense division.

But in 1941, things did not come to the creation of such a field Headquarters - the Germans were approaching Moscow too quickly, and Stalin preferred to control the army from Moscow. Therefore, the regiment of M-13 guards mortars never received the task of interceding to guard the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command.

On July 19, 1941, Stalin, setting the task for Timoshenko to create shock groups for offensive operations in the battle of Smolensk and the participation of rocket artillery in them, said: "I think it's time to move from petty to actions in large groups - regiments ...".

On August 8, 1941, the states of the regiments of the M-8 and M-13 installations were approved. They were supposed to consist of three or four divisions, three batteries in each division and four installations in each battery (since September 11, all regiments were transferred to a three-division composition). The formation of the first eight regiments immediately began. They were equipped with combat vehicles manufactured using the pre-war backlog of components and parts created by the People's Commissariat of General Engineering (since November 26, 1941, it was transformed into the People's Commissariat of Mortar Weapons).

In full force - with regiments of "Katyushas" - the Red Army first hit the enemy in late August - early September 1941.

As for the M-13 Guards Regiment, conceived for use in the defense of the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, its formation was completed only in September. Launchers for it were produced in excess of the established task. It is known as the 9th Guards Regiment, which operated near Mtsensk.
It was disbanded on December 12, 1941. There is evidence that all of its installations had to be blown up under the threat of encirclement by the Germans. The second formation of the regiment was completed on September 4, 1943, after which the 9th Guards Regiment fought successfully until the end of the war.

The feat of Captain Flerov

The first volley of a rocket launcher in the Patriotic War was fired on July 14, 1941 at 15.15 by a battery of seven (according to other sources, four) M-13 launchers at the accumulation of echelons of military equipment at the railway junction of the city of Orsha. The commander of this battery (called differently in different sources and reports: experimental, experimental, first, or even all these names at the same time) is indicated by artillery captain I.A. Flerov, who died in 1941 (according to TsAMO documents, he was missing). For courage and heroism, he was posthumously awarded only in 1963 with the Order of the Patriotic War of the 1st degree, and in 1995 he was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Russia.

According to the directive of the Moscow Military District of June 28, 1941, No. 10864, ​​the first six batteries were formed. In our opinion, the most reliable source is the military memoirs of Lieutenant General A.I. Nesterenko (“Katyushas are firing.” - Moscow: Voenizdat, 1975) it is written: “On June 28, 1941, the formation of the first battery of field rocket artillery began. It was created in four days at the 1st Moscow Red Banner Artillery School named after L.B. Krasin. It was now the world famous battery of Captain I.A. Flerov, who fired the first salvo at the concentration of fascist troops at the Orsha station ... Stalin personally approved the distribution of guards mortar units along the fronts, plans for the production of military vehicles and ammunition ... ".

The names of the commanders of all six first batteries and the places where their first salvos were fired are known.

Battery No. 1: 7 installations M-13. Battery commander captain I.A. Flerov. The first salvo on July 14, 1941 at the freight railway station of the city of Orsha.
Battery No. 2: 9 installations M-13. Battery commander Lieutenant A.M. Kuhn. The first salvo on July 25, 1941 at the crossing near the village of Kapyrevshchina (north of Yartsevo).
Battery No. 3: 3 installations M-13. Battery commander Lieutenant N.I. Denisenko. The first salvo was fired on July 25, 1941, 4 km north of Yartsevo.
Battery No. 4: 6 installations M-13. Battery commander Senior Lieutenant P. Degtyarev. First salvo on August 3, 1941 near Leningrad.
Battery No. 5: 4 M-13 installations. Battery commander senior lieutenant A. Denisov. The place and date of the first salvo are unknown.
Battery No. 6: 4 M-13 installations. Battery commander senior lieutenant N.F. Diatchenko. The first salvo was on August 3, 1941 in the lane 12sp 53sd 43A.

Five of the first six batteries were sent to the troops of the Western Direction, where the main blow of the German troops was inflicted on Smolensk. It is also known that, in addition to the M-13, other types of rocket launchers were sent to the Western direction.

In the book of A.I. Yeremenko “At the beginning of the war” it says: “... A telephone message was received from the Stavka with the following content: “It is supposed to widely use “eres” in the fight against the Nazis and, in connection with this, try them in battle. You are allocated one M-8 division. Test it and report your conclusion...

We tested a new weapon near Rudnya... On July 15, 1941, in the afternoon, an unusual roar of rocket-propelled mines shook the air. Like red-tailed comets, mines rushed up. Frequent and powerful bursts struck hearing and sight with a strong roar and dazzling brilliance... The effect of a simultaneous burst of 320 minutes for 10 seconds exceeded all expectations... This was one of the first combat tests of the "eres".

In the report of Marshals Timoshenko and Shaposhnikov for July 24, 1941, Stalin is informed about the defeat of the German 5th Infantry Division near Rudnya on July 15, 1941, in which three volleys of the M-8 division played a special role.

It is quite obvious that a sudden volley of one M-13 battery (16 RS-132 launches in 5-8 seconds) with a maximum range of 8.5 km was capable of causing serious damage to the enemy. But the battery was not intended to hit a single target. This weapon is effective when working across areas with dispersed enemy manpower and equipment while firing several batteries at the same time. A separate battery could fire a barrage, stun the enemy, cause panic in his ranks and stop his advance for some time.

In our opinion, the purpose of sending the first multiple rocket launchers to the front by battery was, most likely, the desire to cover the headquarters of the front and armies in the direction threatening Moscow.

This is not just a guess. A study of the routes of the first Katyusha batteries shows that, first of all, they ended up in the areas where the headquarters of the Western Front and the headquarters of its armies were based: the 20th, 16th, 19th and 22nd. It is no coincidence that in their memoirs Marshals Eremenko, Rokossovsky, Kazakov, General Plaskov describe exactly the battery-by-battery combat work of the first rocket launchers, which they observed from their command posts.

They point to the increased secrecy of the use of new weapons. IN AND. Kazakov said: “Only army commanders and members of military councils were allowed access to these “hard-to-reach” people. Even the chief of artillery of the army was not allowed to see them.”

However, the very first salvo of the M-13 rocket launchers, fired on July 14, 1941 at 15:15 at the Orsha railway commodity hub, was carried out while performing a completely different combat mission - the destruction of several echelons with secret weapons, which under no circumstances should was to fall into the hands of the Germans.

A study of the route of the first separate experimental battery M-13 ("Flerov's battery") shows that at first it, apparently, was intended to guard the headquarters of the 20th Army.

Then she was given a new task. On the night of July 6, in the Orsha region, a battery with guards moved west across the territory that had actually been abandoned by the Soviet troops. She moved along the railway line Orsha - Borisov - Minsk, loaded with trains going east. On July 9, the battery and its guards were already in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe city of Borisov (135 km from Orsha).

On that day, GKO order No. 67ss “On the redirection of vehicles with weapons and ammunition at the disposal of the newly formed divisions of the NKVD and reserve armies” was issued. It demanded, in particular, to urgently search for some very important cargo among the trains departing to the east, which in no case should fall into the hands of the Germans.

On the night of July 13-14, Flerov's battery received an order to urgently move to Orsha and launch a missile attack on the station. On July 14, at 15:15, Flerov's battery fired a salvo at the trains with military equipment located at the Orsha railway junction.
What was in these trains is not known for certain. But there is information that after the volley, no one approached the affected area for some time, and the Germans allegedly even left the station for seven days, which suggests that some poisonous substances got into the air as a result of a missile strike.

On July 22, in an evening radio broadcast, the Soviet announcer Levitan announced the defeat of the German 52nd chemical mortar regiment on July 15. And on July 27, Pravda published information about German secret documents allegedly seized during the defeat of this regiment, from which it followed that the Germans were preparing a chemical attack on Turkey.

Raid of battalion commander Kaduchenko

In the book of A.V. Glushko “Pioneers of Rocket Engineering” there is a photograph of NII-3 employees headed by Deputy Director A.G. Kostikov after receiving awards in the Kremlin in August 1941. It is indicated that together with them in the photo is Lieutenant General of the Tank Forces V.A. Mishulin, who was awarded the Golden Star of the Hero that day.

We decided to find out why he was awarded the highest award of the country and what relation his award may have to the creation of M-13 rocket launchers at NII-3. It turned out that the commander of the 57th Panzer Division, Colonel V.A. Mishulin was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union on July 24, 1941 "for the exemplary performance of the combat missions of the command ... and the courage and heroism shown at the same time." The most striking thing is that at the same time he was also awarded the rank of general - and not major general, but immediately lieutenant general.

He became the third lieutenant general of tank troops in the Red Army. General Eremenko, in his memoirs, explains this by the mistake of the cryptographer, who attributed the title of the signer of the ciphertext to Eremenko's Headquarters with the idea of ​​conferring the title of Hero and General on Mishulin.

It is quite possible that this was the case: Stalin did not cancel the erroneously signed decree on the award. But just why did he also appoint Mishulin as deputy head of the Main Armored Directorate. Aren't there too many rewards for one officer at once? It is known that after some time, General Mishulin, as a representative of the Stavka, was sent to the Southern Front. Usually marshals and members of the Central Committee acted in this capacity.

Did the courage and heroism shown by Mishulin have anything to do with the first salvo of the Katyusha on July 14, 1941, for which Kostikov and the workers of NII-3 were awarded on July 28?

The study of materials about Mishulin and his 57th Panzer Division showed that this division was transferred to the Western Front from the South-Western. Unloaded at the Orsha station on June 28 and became part of the 19th Army. The command of the division with one motorized rifle security regiment was concentrated in the area of ​​Gusino station, 50 kilometers from Orsha, where the headquarters of the 20th Army was located at that moment.

In early July, a tank battalion consisting of 15, including 7 T-34 tanks, and armored vehicles arrived from the Oryol Tank School to replenish Mishulin's division.

After the death in battle on July 13, the commander, Major S.I. Razdobudko battalion was headed by his deputy captain I.A. Kaduchenko. And it was Captain Kaduchenko who became the first Soviet tanker, who was awarded the title of Hero during the Patriotic War on July 22, 1941. He received this high rank even two days earlier than his divisional commander Mishulin for "heading 2 tank companies that defeated the enemy tank column." In addition, immediately after the award, he became a major.

It seems that the awarding of divisional commander Mishulin and battalion commander Kaduchenko could take place if they completed some very important task for Stalin. And most likely, it was the provision of the first volley of "Katyushas" on the echelons with weapons that should not have fallen into the hands of the Germans.

Mishulin skillfully organized the escort of the most secret Katyusha battery behind enemy lines, including the group attached to it with T-34 tanks and armored vehicles under the command of Kaduchenko, and then its breakthrough from the encirclement.

On July 26, 1941, the Pravda newspaper published an article entitled Lieutenant General Mishulin, which described Mishulin's exploits. About how he, wounded and shell-shocked, made his way in an armored car through the rear of the enemy to his division, which at that time was fighting fierce battles in the Krasnoye area and the Gusino railway station. It follows from this that commander Mishulin for some reason left his division for a short time (most likely, together with the tank group Kaduchenko) and returned wounded to the division only on July 17, 1941.

It is likely that they carried out Stalin's instructions to organize the provision of the "first salvo of the Flerov battery" on July 14, 1941 at the Orsha station along echelons with military equipment.

On the day of the salvo of Flerov's battery, July 14, GKO decree No. 140ss was issued on the appointment of L.M. Gaidukov, an ordinary employee of the Central Committee, who oversaw the manufacture of multiple launch rocket launchers, authorized by the State Defense Committee for the production of RS-132 rocket shells.

On July 28, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued two decrees on rewarding the creators of the Katyusha. The first - "for outstanding services in the invention and design of one of the types of weapons that raise the power of the Red Army" A.G. Kostikov was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor.

The second - 12 engineers, designers and technicians were awarded orders and medals. The Order of Lenin was awarded to V. Aborenkov, a former military representative who became deputy head of the Main Artillery Directorate for rocket technology, designers I. Gvai and V. Galkovsky. The Order of the Red Banner of Labor was received by N. Davydov, A. Pavlenko and L. Schwartz. The Order of the Red Star was awarded to the designers of NII-3 D. Shitov, A. Popov and the workers of Plant No. 70 M. Malova and G. Glazko. Both of these decrees were published in Pravda on July 29, and on July 30, 1941, in an article published in Pravda, the new weapon was called formidable without specification.

Yes, it was cheap and easy to manufacture and easy to use firearms. It could be quickly produced in many factories and quickly installed on everything that moves - on cars, tanks, tractors, even on sleds (as it was used in the Dovator cavalry corps). And also "eres" were installed on airplanes, boats and railway platforms.

Launchers began to be called "guards mortars", and their combat crews - the first guardsmen.

Pictured: Guards rocket mortar M-31-12 in Berlin in May 1945.
This is a modification of "Katyusha" (by analogy it was called "Andryusha").
Fired unguided rockets of 310 mm caliber
(unlike 132-mm Katyusha shells),
launched from 12 guides (2 tiers with 6 cells each).
The installation is placed on the chassis of the American Studebaker truck,
which was supplied to the USSR under Lend-Lease.

ctrl Enter

Noticed osh s bku Highlight text and click Ctrl+Enter

Having become symbols of the victory of our country in the Great Patriotic War, a special place is occupied by the Guards rocket launchers, popularly nicknamed "Katyusha". The characteristic silhouette of a truck of the 40s with an inclined structure instead of a body is the same symbol of resilience, heroism and courage of Soviet soldiers, like, say, the T-34 tank, the Il-2 attack aircraft or the ZiS-3 gun.

And here is what is especially remarkable: all these legendary, glory-covered models of weapons were designed quite shortly or literally on the eve of the war! The T-34 was put into service at the end of December 1939, the first production Il-2s left the assembly line in February 1941, and the ZiS-3 gun was first presented to the leadership of the USSR and the army a month after the outbreak of hostilities, on July 22, 1941. But the most amazing coincidence happened in the fate of "Katyusha". Its demonstration to the party and military authorities took place half a day before the German attack - June 21, 1941 ...

From heaven to earth

In fact, work on the creation of the world's first multiple launch rocket system on a self-propelled chassis began in the USSR in the mid-1930s. An employee of the Tula NPO Splav, which produces modern Russian MLRS, Sergey Gurov, managed to find in the archives agreement No. 251618s dated January 26, 1935 between the Leningrad Reactive Research Institute and the Armored Directorate of the Red Army, which includes a prototype rocket launcher on the BT-5 with ten missiles .

There is nothing to be surprised here, because Soviet rocket scientists created the first combat rockets even earlier: official tests took place in the late 20s and early 30s. In 1937, the RS-82 82 mm caliber rocket was adopted, and a year later, the RS-132 132 mm caliber, both of which were in the variant for underwing installation on aircraft. A year later, at the end of the summer of 1939, the RS-82s were first used in combat. During the fighting at Khalkhin Gol, five I-16s used their "eres" in combat with Japanese fighters, surprising the enemy with new weapons. And a little later, already during the Soviet-Finnish war, six twin-engine SB bombers, already armed with the RS-132, attacked the ground positions of the Finns.

Naturally, the impressive - and they really were impressive, although to a large extent due to the unexpectedness of the use of a new weapon system, and not its ultra-high efficiency - the results of using "eres" in forced the Soviet party and military leadership to rush the defense industry with the creation of a ground version. Actually, the future Katyusha had every chance to be in time for the Winter War: the main design work and tests were carried out back in 1938-1939, but the results of the military were not satisfied - they needed a more reliable, mobile and easy-to-handle weapon.

In general terms, what a year and a half later will enter the soldiers' folklore on both sides of the front as "Katyusha" was ready by the beginning of 1940. In any case, copyright certificate No. 3338 for a “rocket auto-installation for a sudden, powerful artillery and chemical attack on the enemy using rocket shells” was issued on February 19, 1940, and among the authors were employees of the RNII (since 1938, bearing the “numbered” name NII-3) Andrey Kostikov, Ivan Gvai and Vasily Aborenkov.

This installation was already seriously different from the first samples that entered the field tests at the end of 1938. The rocket launcher was located along the longitudinal axis of the car, had 16 guides, each of which was equipped with two shells. And the shells themselves for this machine were different: the aviation RS-132s turned into longer and more powerful ground-based M-13s.

Actually, in this form, a combat vehicle with rockets entered the review of new types of weapons of the Red Army, which took place on June 15–17, 1941 at a training ground in Sofrino near Moscow. Rocket artillery was left "for a snack": two combat vehicles demonstrated firing on the last day, June 17, using high-explosive fragmentation rockets. The shooting was observed by People's Commissar of Defense Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, Chief of the General Staff General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, Chief of the Main Artillery Directorate Marshal Grigory Kulik and his deputy General Nikolai Voronov, as well as People's Commissar of Armaments Dmitry Ustinov, People's Commissar of Ammunition Pyotr Goremykin and many other military men. One can only guess what emotions overwhelmed them when they looked at the wall of fire and the fountains of earth that rose on the target field. But it is clear that the demonstration made a strong impression. Four days later, on June 21, 1941, just a few hours before the start of the war, documents were signed on the adoption and urgent deployment of mass production of M-13 rockets and a launcher, which received the official name BM-13 - “combat vehicle - 13 ”(according to the rocket index), although sometimes they appeared in documents with the M-13 index. This day should be considered the birthday of Katyusha, which, it turns out, was born only half a day before the start of the Great Patriotic War that glorified her.

First strike

The production of new weapons was unfolding at two enterprises at once: the Voronezh plant named after the Comintern and the Moscow plant Kompressor, and the Moscow plant named after Vladimir Ilyich became the main enterprise for the production of M-13 shells. The first combat-ready unit - a special jet battery under the command of Captain Ivan Flerov - went to the front on the night of July 1-2, 1941.

The commander of the first Katyusha rocket artillery battery, Captain Ivan Andreevich Flerov. Photo: RIA Novosti

According to the preliminary staffing table, which was determined even before the Sofri firing, the rocket artillery battery was supposed to have nine rocket launchers. But the manufacturing plants could not cope with the plan, and Flerov did not have time to receive two of the nine machines - he went to the front on the night of July 2 with a battery of seven rocket-propelled mortars. But do not think that just seven ZIS-6s with guides for launching the M-13 went towards the front. According to the list - there was not and could not be an approved staffing table for a special, that is, in fact, an experimental battery - there were 198 people in the battery, 1 passenger car, 44 trucks and 7 special vehicles, 7 BM-13 (for some reason they appeared in the column "210 mm guns") and one 152 mm howitzer, which served as a sighting gun.

It was in this composition that the Flerov battery went down in history as the first in the Great Patriotic War and the first in the world combat unit of rocket artillery that took part in hostilities. Flerov and his gunners fought their first battle, which later became legendary, on July 14, 1941. At 15:15, as follows from archival documents, seven BM-13s from the battery opened fire on the Orsha railway station: it was necessary to destroy the trains with Soviet military equipment and ammunition that had accumulated there, which did not have time to reach the front and got stuck, falling into the hands of enemy. In addition, reinforcements for the advancing units of the Wehrmacht also accumulated in Orsha, so that an extremely attractive opportunity for the command to solve several strategic tasks at once arose.

And so it happened. By personal order of the Deputy Chief of Artillery of the Western Front, General Georgy Cariofilli, the battery struck the first blow. In just a few seconds, a full battery of ammunition was fired at the target - 112 rockets, each of which carried a warhead weighing almost 5 kg - and all hell broke loose on the station. With the second blow, Flerov's battery destroyed the pontoon crossing of the Nazis across the Orshitsa River - with the same success.

A few days later, two more batteries arrived at the front - Lieutenant Alexander Kun and Lieutenant Nikolai Denisenko. Both batteries delivered their first blows to the enemy in the last days of July, the difficult 1941 of the year. And since the beginning of August, the formation of not individual batteries, but entire regiments of rocket artillery began in the Red Army.

Guard of the first months of the war

The first document on the formation of such a regiment was issued on August 4: a resolution of the USSR State Committee for Defense ordered the formation of one guards mortar regiment armed with M-13 installations. This regiment was named after the People's Commissar for General Engineering Petr Parshin - the man who, in fact, turned to the GKO with the idea of ​​​​forming such a regiment. And from the very beginning he offered to give him the rank of guards - a month and a half before the first guards rifle units appeared in the Red Army, and then all the rest.

"Katyusha" on the march. 2nd Baltic Front, January 1945. Photo: Vasily Savransky / RIA Novosti

Another evidence of this special attitude was the resolution of the State Committee for Defense, which was issued a month later - on September 8, 1941. This document actually turned rocket mortar artillery into a special, privileged type of armed forces. Guards mortar units were withdrawn from the Main Artillery Directorate of the Red Army and turned into guards mortar units and formations with their own command. It reported directly to the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command, and it included the headquarters, the weapons department of the M-8 and M-13 mortar units and operational groups in the main directions.

The first commander of the guards mortar units and formations was military engineer 1st rank Vasily Aborenkov - a man whose name appeared in the author's certificate for "a missile auto-installation for a sudden, powerful artillery and chemical attack on the enemy using rocket shells." It was Aborenkov who, first as head of the department and then as deputy head of the Main Artillery Directorate, did everything to ensure that the Red Army received new, unprecedented weapons.

After that, the process of forming new artillery units went in full swing. The main tactical unit was the regiment of guards mortar units. It consisted of three divisions of rocket launchers M-8 or M-13, an anti-aircraft division, as well as service units. In total, the regiment had 1414 people, 36 BM-13 or BM-8 combat vehicles, and from other weapons - 12 anti-aircraft guns of 37 mm caliber, 9 DShK anti-aircraft machine guns and 18 light machine guns, not counting small arms personnel. A volley of one regiment of M-13 rocket launchers consisted of 576 rockets - 16 “eres” in a salvo of each vehicle, and a regiment of M-8 rocket launchers consisted of 1296 rockets, since one machine fired 36 shells at once.

"Katyusha", "Andryusha" and other members of the jet family

By the end of the Great Patriotic War, the guards mortar units and formations of the Red Army became a formidable strike force that had a significant impact on the course of hostilities. In total, by May 1945, Soviet rocket artillery consisted of 40 separate divisions, 115 regiments, 40 separate brigades and 7 divisions - a total of 519 divisions.

These units were armed with three types of combat vehicles. First of all, it was, of course, the Katyushas themselves - BM-13 combat vehicles with 132-mm rockets. It was they who became the most massive in the Soviet rocket artillery during the Great Patriotic War: from July 1941 to December 1944, 6844 such vehicles were produced. Until Lend-Lease Studebaker trucks began to arrive in the USSR, launchers were mounted on the ZIS-6 chassis, and then American six-axle heavy trucks became the main carriers. In addition, there were modifications of launchers to accommodate the M-13 on other Lend-Lease trucks.

The 82 mm Katyusha BM-8 had much more modifications. Firstly, only these installations, due to their small dimensions and weight, could be mounted on the chassis of light tanks T-40 and T-60. Such self-propelled rocket artillery units were named BM-8-24. Secondly, installations of the same caliber were mounted on railway platforms, armored boats and torpedo boats, and even on railcars. And on the Caucasian front, they were converted for firing from the ground, without a self-propelled chassis, which would not have been able to turn around in the mountains. But the main modification was the launcher for M-8 rockets on a car chassis: by the end of 1944, 2086 of them were produced. These were mainly BM-8-48s, put into production in 1942: these machines had 24 beams, on which 48 M-8 rockets were installed, they were produced on the chassis of the Form Marmont-Herrington truck. In the meantime, a foreign chassis did not appear, BM-8-36 installations were produced on the basis of the GAZ-AAA truck.

Harbin. Parade of Red Army troops in honor of the victory over Japan. Photo: TASS newsreel

According to the divisions of the guards mortar units and formations, these combat vehicles were distributed as follows. Of the 40 separate rocket artillery battalions, 38 were armed with BM-13 installations, and only two were armed with BM-8. The same ratio was in 115 regiments of guards mortars: 96 of them were armed with Katyushas in the BM-13 variant, and the remaining 19 - 82-mm BM-8. Guards mortar brigades were not armed with rocket-propelled mortars of caliber less than 310 mm at all. 27 brigades were armed with frame launchers M-30, and then M-31, and 13 - self-propelled M-31-12 on a car chassis.

The one with whom rocket artillery began

During the Great Patriotic War, Soviet rocket artillery had no equal on the other side of the front. Despite the fact that the infamous German Nebelwerfer rocket launcher, nicknamed “Ishak” and “Vanyusha” by Soviet soldiers, had an efficiency comparable to the Katyusha, it was much less mobile and had a one and a half times shorter firing range. The achievements of the allies of the USSR in the anti-Hitler coalition in the field of rocket artillery were even more modest.

It was only in 1943 that the American army adopted 114-mm M8 rockets, for which three types of launchers were developed. Installations of the T27 type most of all resembled the Soviet Katyushas: they were mounted on off-road trucks and consisted of two packages of eight guides each, installed across the longitudinal axis of the vehicle. It is noteworthy that in the United States they repeated the original Katyusha scheme, which Soviet engineers abandoned: the transverse arrangement of launchers led to a strong buildup of the vehicle at the time of the volley, which catastrophically reduced the accuracy of fire. There was another version of the T23: the same package of eight guides was installed on the Willis chassis. And the most powerful volley was the option of installing the T34: 60 (!) Guides that were installed on the hull of the Sherman tank, right above the turret, because of which guidance in the horizontal plane was carried out by turning the entire tank.

In addition to them, during the Second World War, the US Army also used an improved M16 rocket with a T66 launcher and a T40 launcher on the chassis of medium tanks of the M4 type for 182-mm rockets. And in the UK, since 1941, a five-inch 5” UP rocket has been in service; But all these systems were, in fact, only a semblance of Soviet rocket artillery: they failed to catch up with or surpass the Katyusha either in terms of prevalence, or in terms of combat effectiveness, or in terms of production scale, or in terms of fame. It is no coincidence that the word "Katyusha" to this day serves as a synonym for the word "reactive artillery", and the BM-13 itself became the ancestor of all modern multiple launch rocket systems.

ctrl Enter

Noticed osh s bku Highlight text and click Ctrl+Enter

"Katyusha" on the streets of Berlin.
Photo from the book "The Great Patriotic War"

The female name Katyusha entered the history of Russia and world history as the name of one of the most terrible types of weapons of the Second World War. At the same time, none of the weapons was surrounded by such a veil of secrecy and disinformation.

PAGES OF HISTORY

No matter how much our fathers-commanders kept the Katyusha materiel secret, just a few weeks after the first combat use, it fell into the hands of the Germans and ceased to be a secret. But the history of the creation of "Katyusha" for many years was kept "with seven seals" both because of the ideological attitudes and because of the ambitions of the designers.

The first question is why rocket artillery was used only in 1941? After all, powder rockets were used by the Chinese a thousand years ago. In the first half of the 19th century, rockets were widely used in European armies (rockets by V. Kongrev, A. Zasyadko, K. Konstantinov and others). Alas, the combat use of missiles was limited by their huge dispersion. At first, long poles made of wood or iron - “tails” were used to stabilize them. But such missiles were effective only for hitting area targets. So, for example, in 1854, the Anglo-French from rowing barges fired rockets at Odessa, and the Russians in the 50-70s of the XIX century - the Central Asian cities.

But with the introduction of rifled guns, powder rockets become an anachronism, and between 1860-1880 they are removed from service with all European armies (in Austria - in 1866, in England - in 1885, in Russia - in 1879). In 1914, only signal rockets remained in the armies and navies of all countries. Nevertheless, Russian inventors constantly turned to the Main Artillery Directorate (GAU) with projects for combat missiles. So, in September 1905, the Artillery Committee rejected the high-explosive rocket project. The warhead of this rocket was stuffed with pyroxylin, and not black, but smokeless powder was used as fuel. Moreover, the good fellows from the State Agrarian University did not even try to work out an interesting project, but swept it away from the threshold. It is curious that the designer was Hieromonk Kirik.

It was not until World War I that interest in rockets revived. There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, slow-burning gunpowder was created, which made it possible to dramatically increase the flight speed and firing range. Accordingly, with an increase in flight speed, it became possible to effectively use wing stabilizers and improve the accuracy of fire.

The second reason: the need to create powerful weapons for airplanes of the First World War - "flying whatnots".

And, finally, the most important reason - the rocket was best suited as a means of delivering chemical weapons.

CHEMICAL PROJECT

As early as June 15, 1936, the head of the chemical department of the Red Army, corps engineer Y. Fishman, was presented with a report from the director of the RNII, military engineer 1st rank I. Kleimenov and the head of the 1st department, military engineer 2nd rank K. Glukharev on preliminary tests of 132 / 82-mm short-range rocket-chemical mines . This munition supplemented the 250/132 mm short-range chemical mine, the tests of which were completed by May 1936. Thus, “RNII has completed all the preliminary development of the issue of creating a powerful short-range chemical attack weapon, and is awaiting from you a general conclusion on testing and an indication of the need for further work in this direction. For its part, the RNII considers it necessary now to issue an experimental-gross order for the manufacture of RHM-250 (300 pieces) and RHM-132 (300 pieces) in order to conduct field and military tests. The five pieces of RHM-250 remaining from the preliminary tests, of which three at the Central Chemical Test Site (Prichernavskaya station) and three RHM-132 can be used for additional tests according to your instructions.

According to the RNII report on the main activity for 1936 on topic No. 1, samples of 132-mm and 250-mm chemical rockets with a warhead capacity of 6 and 30 liters of OM were manufactured and tested. Tests carried out in the presence of the head of the VOKHIMU of the Red Army gave satisfactory results and received a positive assessment. But VOKHIMA did nothing to introduce these shells into the Red Army and gave the RNII new tasks for shells with a longer range.

For the first time, the Katyusha prototype (BM-13) was mentioned on January 3, 1939, in a letter from People's Commissar of the Defense Industry Mikhail Kaganovich to his brother, Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Lazar Kaganovich: basically passed factory tests by shooting at the Sofrinsky control and test artillery range and is currently undergoing field tests at the Central Military Chemical Range in Prichernavskaya.

Note that the customers of the future Katyusha are military chemists. The work was also financed through the Chemical Department and, finally, the warheads of the missiles are exclusively chemical.

132-mm RHS-132 chemical projectiles were fire tested at the Pavlograd artillery range on August 1, 1938. The fire was fired by single shells and series of 6 and 12 shells. The duration of firing a series of full ammunition did not exceed 4 seconds. During this time, the target area reached 156 liters of RH, which, in terms of an artillery caliber of 152 mm, was equivalent to 63 artillery shells when firing in a salvo of 21 three-gun batteries or 1.3 artillery regiments, provided that the fire was fired with unstable RH. The tests focused on the fact that the metal consumption per 156 liters of RH when firing rocket projectiles was 550 kg, while when firing chemical 152-mm projectiles, the weight of the metal was 2370 kg, that is, 4.3 times more.

The test report stated: “The automotive mechanized rocket launcher for chemical attack during the test showed significant advantages over artillery systems. A system capable of firing both single fire and a series of 24 shots within 3 seconds is installed on a three-ton machine. The speed of movement is normal for a truck. Transfer from marching to combat position takes 3-4 minutes. Firing - from the driver's cab or from cover.

The warhead of one RHS (reactive-chemical projectile. - “NVO”) holds 8 liters of OM, and in artillery shells of a similar caliber - only 2 liters. To create a dead zone on an area of ​​12 hectares, one volley from three trucks is enough, which replaces 150 howitzers or 3 artillery regiments. At a distance of 6 km, the area of ​​​​contamination of OM with one volley is 6-8 hectares.

I note that the Germans also prepared their multiple rocket launchers exclusively for chemical warfare. So, in the late 1930s, the German engineer Nebel designed a 15-cm rocket projectile and a six-barreled tubular installation, which the Germans called a six-barreled mortar. Mortar tests began in 1937. The system received the name "15-cm smoke mortar type" D ". In 1941, it was renamed 15 cm Nb.W 41 (Nebelwerfer), i.e. 15 cm smoke mortar mod. 41. Naturally, their main purpose was not to set up smoke screens, but to fire rockets filled with poisonous substances. Interestingly, the Soviet soldiers called 15 cm Nb.W 41 "Vanyusha", by analogy with the M-13, called "Katyusha".

The first launch of the Katyusha prototype (designed by Tikhomirov and Artemyev) took place in the USSR on March 3, 1928. The range of the 22.7-kg rocket was 1300 m, and the Van Deren mortar was used as a launcher.

The caliber of our rockets of the period of the Great Patriotic War - 82 mm and 132 mm - was determined by nothing more than the diameter of the powder cartridges of the engine. Seven 24-mm powder cartridges, tightly packed into the combustion chamber, give a diameter of 72 mm, the thickness of the chamber walls is 5 mm, hence the diameter (caliber) of the rocket is 82 mm. Seven thicker (40 mm) checkers in the same way give a caliber of 132 mm.

The most important issue in the design of rockets was the method of stabilization. Soviet designers preferred feathered rockets and adhered to this principle until the end of the war.

In the 1930s, rockets with an annular stabilizer that did not exceed the dimensions of the projectile were tested. Such shells could be fired from tubular guides. But tests have shown that it is impossible to achieve stable flight with the help of an annular stabilizer. Then they fired 82-mm rockets with a four-bladed tail span of 200, 180, 160, 140 and 120 mm. The results were quite definite - with a decrease in the scope of the plumage, flight stability and accuracy decreased. The plumage with a span of more than 200 mm shifted the center of gravity of the projectile back, which also worsened the stability of the flight. Lightening the plumage by reducing the thickness of the stabilizer blades caused strong vibrations of the blades until they were destroyed.

Grooved guides were adopted as launchers for feathered missiles. Experiments have shown that the longer they are, the higher the accuracy of the shells. The length of 5 m for the RS-132 became the maximum due to restrictions on railway dimensions.

I note that the Germans stabilized their rockets until 1942 exclusively by rotation. Turbojet rockets were also tested in the USSR, but they did not go into mass production. As it often happens with us, the reason for the failures during the tests was explained not by the wretchedness of the execution, but by the irrationality of the concept.

FIRST volleys

Whether we like it or not, for the first time in the Great Patriotic War, the Germans used multiple launch rocket systems on June 22, 1941 near Brest. “And then the arrows showed 03.15, the command “Fire!” sounded, and the devilish dance began. The earth shook. The nine batteries of the 4th Special Purpose Mortar Regiment also contributed to the infernal symphony. In half an hour, 2880 shells whistled over the Bug and hit the city and fortress on the eastern bank of the river. Heavy 600-mm mortars and 210-mm guns of the 98th Artillery Regiment rained down their volleys on the fortifications of the citadel and hit point targets - the positions of Soviet artillery. It seemed that there would be no stone left unturned from the fortress.”

This is how the historian Paul Karel described the first use of 15 cm rocket-propelled mortars. In addition, the Germans in 1941 used heavy 28 cm high-explosive and 32 cm incendiary turbojet shells. The shells were over-caliber and had one powder engine (the diameter of the engine part was 140 mm).

A 28-cm high-explosive mine, with a direct hit on a stone house, completely destroyed it. The mine successfully destroyed field-type shelters. Living targets within a radius of several tens of meters were hit by a blast wave. Fragments of the mine flew at a distance of up to 800 m. The head part contained 50 kg of liquid TNT or ammatol brand 40/60. It is curious that both 28-cm and 32-cm German mines (rockets) were transported and launched from the simplest wooden closure such as a box.

The first use of Katyushas took place on July 14, 1941. The battery of Captain Ivan Andreevich Flerov fired two salvos from seven launchers at the Orsha railway station. The appearance of "Katyusha" was a complete surprise for the leadership of the Abwehr and the Wehrmacht. On August 14, the High Command of the German Ground Forces notified its troops: “The Russians have an automatic multi-barreled flamethrower gun ... The shot is fired by electricity. During the shot, smoke is generated ... If such cannons are captured, report immediately. Two weeks later, a directive appeared entitled "Russian gun throwing rocket-like projectiles." It said: “...Troops report on the use by the Russians of a new type of weapon that fires rockets. A large number of shots can be fired from one installation within 3-5 seconds ... Every appearance of these guns must be reported to the general, commander of the chemical troops at the high command, on the same day.

Where the name "Katyusha" came from is not known for certain. The version of Pyotr Hook is curious: “Both at the front, and then, after the war, when I got acquainted with the archives, talked with veterans, read their speeches in the press, I met a variety of explanations of how a formidable weapon received a girl's name. Some believed that the beginning was laid by the letter "K", which was put by the Voronezh Comintern on their products. There was a legend among the troops that the guards mortars were named after a dashing partisan girl who destroyed many Nazis.

When soldiers and commanders asked the representative of the GAU to name the “genuine” name of the combat installation at the firing range, he advised: “Call the installation as an ordinary artillery piece. It's important to maintain secrecy."

Soon, a younger brother named Luka showed up at Katyusha. In May 1942, a group of officers of the Main Armaments Directorate developed the M-30 projectile, in which a powerful over-caliber warhead made in the shape of an ellipsoid with a maximum diameter of 300 mm was attached to the rocket engine from the M-13.

After successful ground tests, on June 8, 1942, the State Defense Committee (GKO) issued a decree on the adoption of the M-30 and the start of its mass production. In Stalin's times, all important problems were solved quickly, and by July 10, 1942, the first 20 M-30 Guards mortar divisions were created. Each of them had a three-battery composition, the battery consisted of 32 four-charged single-tier launchers. The divisional salvo, respectively, was 384 shells.

The first combat use of the M-30 took place in the 61st Army of the Western Front near the city of Belev. On the afternoon of June 5, two regimental volleys hit the German positions in Annino and Upper Doltsy with a thunderous roar. Both villages were wiped off the face of the earth, after which the infantry occupied them without loss.

The power of the Luka shells (M-30 and its modifications M-31) made a great impression both on the enemy and on our soldiers. There were many different assumptions and inventions about the Luka at the front. One of the legends was that it was as if the warhead of the rocket was stuffed with some kind of special, especially powerful, explosive, capable of burning everything in the area of ​​​​the gap. In fact, conventional explosives were used in the warheads. The exceptional effect of the Luka shells was achieved through volley fire. With the simultaneous or almost simultaneous explosion of a whole group of projectiles, the law of addition of impulses from shock waves came into force.

M-30 shells had high-explosive, chemical and incendiary warheads. However, a high-explosive warhead was mainly used. For the characteristic shape of the head of the M-30, the front-line soldiers called it "Luka Mudischev" (the hero of Barkov's poem of the same name). Naturally, this nickname, in contrast to the replicated "Katyusha", the official press preferred not to mention. The Luka, like the German 28 cm and 30 cm shells, was launched from a wooden corking box in which it was delivered from the factory. Four, and later eight of these boxes were placed on a special frame, resulting in a simple launcher.

Needless to say, after the war, the journalistic and writer fraternity commemorated Katyusha out of place and out of place, but chose to forget her much more formidable brother Luka. In the 1970s and 1980s, at the first mention of Luka, veterans asked me with surprise: “How do you know? You didn't fight."

ANTI-TANK MYTH

"Katyusha" was a first-class weapon. As often happens, the father commanders wished it to become a universal weapon, including an anti-tank weapon.

An order is an order, and victorious reports rushed to the headquarters. If you believe the secret publication "Field Rocket Artillery in the Great Patriotic War" (Moscow, 1955), then on the Kursk Bulge in two days in three episodes "Katyushas" destroyed 95 enemy tanks! If this were true, then the anti-tank artillery should have been disbanded and replaced by multiple rocket launchers.

In some ways, the huge numbers of wrecked tanks were influenced by the fact that for each wrecked tank, the crew of the combat vehicle received 2,000 rubles, of which 500 rubles. - commander, 500 rubles. - to the gunner, the rest - to the rest.

Alas, due to the huge dispersion, shooting at tanks is ineffective. Here I am picking up the most boring brochure "Tables of firing rockets M-13" of the 1942 edition. It follows from it that at a firing range of 3000 m, the range deviation was 257 m, and the side deviation was 51 m. For shorter distances, the range deviation was not given at all, since the dispersion of shells could not be calculated. It is not difficult to imagine the probability of a rocket hitting a tank at such a distance. If, theoretically, we imagine that the combat vehicle somehow managed to shoot at the tank at close range, then even here the muzzle velocity of the 132-mm projectile was only 70 m / s, which is clearly not enough to penetrate the armor of the Tiger or Panther.

It is not without reason that the year of publication of the shooting tables is specified here. According to the TS-13 firing tables of the same M-13 rocket projectile, the average range deviation in 1944 is 105 m, and in 1957 - 135 m, and the side deviation is 200 and 300 m, respectively. Obviously, the 1957 table is more accurate, in which the dispersion increased by almost 1.5 times, so that in the tables of 1944 there are errors in the calculations or, most likely, deliberate falsification to raise the morale of the personnel.

There is no doubt that if an M-13 projectile hits a medium or light tank, it will be disabled. The frontal armor of the "Tiger" is not able to penetrate the M-13 projectile. But in order to be guaranteed to hit a single tank from a distance of the same 3 thousand meters, it is necessary to fire from 300 to 900 M-13 shells due to their huge dispersion, while at shorter distances an even larger number of missiles will be required.

And here is another example, told by veteran Dmitry Loza. During the Uman-Botoshansk offensive on March 15, 1944, two Shermans from the 45th mechanized brigade of the 5th mechanized corps got stuck in the mud. The troops jumped off the tanks and retreated. German soldiers surrounded the stuck tanks, “smeared the viewing slots with mud, covered the aiming holes in the turret with black earth, completely blinding the crew. They knocked on hatches, tried to open them with rifle bayonets. And everyone bawled: “Rus, kaput! Give up! But then two combat vehicles BM-13 left. "Katyusha" front wheels quickly descended into the ditch and fired a volley of direct fire. Bright fiery arrows hissed and whistled into the hollow. A moment later, blinding flames danced around. When the smoke from the rocket explosions dissipated, the tanks stood unharmed at first glance, only the hulls and turrets were covered with thick soot...

Having corrected the damage to the tracks, having thrown out the burnt tarpaulins, the Emcha went to Mogilev-Podolsky. So, thirty-two 132-mm M-13 shells were fired at two Shermans point-blank, and their tarpaulin was only burned.

WAR STATISTICS

The first M-13 firing mounts had the BM-13-16 index and were mounted on the chassis of a ZIS-6 vehicle. The 82 mm BM-8-36 launcher was also mounted on the same chassis. There were only a few hundred ZIS-6 vehicles, and at the beginning of 1942 their production was stopped.

The launchers of the M-8 and M-13 missiles in 1941-1942 were mounted on anything. So, six M-8 guide shells were installed on machines from the Maxim machine gun, 12 M-8 guides - on a motorcycle, sled and snowmobile (M-8 and M-13), T-40 and T-60 tanks, armored railway platforms (BM-8-48, BM-8-72, BM-13-16), river and sea boats, etc. But basically, launchers in 1942-1944 were mounted on cars received under Lend-Lease: Austin, Dodge, Ford Marmont, Bedford, etc. During the 5 years of the war, out of 3374 chassis used for combat vehicles, the ZIS-6 accounted for 372 (11%), the Studebaker - 1845 (54.7%), the remaining 17 types of chassis (except for the Willis with mountain launchers) - 1157 (34.3%). Finally, it was decided to standardize combat vehicles based on the Studebaker car. In April 1943, such a system was put into service under the symbol BM-13N (normalized). In March 1944, a self-propelled launcher for the M-13 was adopted on the BM-31-12 Studebaker chassis.

But in the post-war years, the Studebakers were ordered to be forgotten, although combat vehicles on its chassis were in service until the early 1960s. In secret instructions, the Studebaker was referred to as a "cross-country vehicle." On numerous pedestals, "Katyusha" mutants ascended on the ZIS-5 chassis or post-war types of vehicles, which stubbornly pass off as genuine military relics, but the genuine BM-13-16 on the ZIS-6 chassis was preserved only in the Artillery Museum in St. Petersburg.

As already mentioned, back in 1941 the Germans captured several launchers and hundreds of 132-mm M-13 and 82-mm M-8 shells. The Wehrmacht command believed that their turbojet shells and tubular launchers with revolver-type guides were better than Soviet wing-stabilized shells. But the SS took up the M-8 and M-13 and ordered the Skoda company to copy them.

In 1942, on the basis of the 82-mm Soviet M-8 projectile, 8 cm R.Sprgr rockets were created in Zbroevka. In fact, it was a new projectile, and not a copy of the M-8, although outwardly the German projectile was very similar to the M-8.

Unlike the Soviet projectile, the stabilizer feathers were placed obliquely at an angle of 1.5 degrees to the longitudinal axis. Due to this, the projectile rotated in flight. The rotation speed was many times less than that of a turbojet projectile, and did not play any role in projectile stabilization, but it eliminated the thrust eccentricity of a single-nozzle rocket engine. But the eccentricity, that is, the displacement of the engine thrust vector due to the uneven burning of gunpowder in checkers, was the main reason for the low accuracy of Soviet missiles of the M-8 and M-13 types.

On the basis of the Soviet M-13, the Skoda company created a whole range of 15-cm missiles with oblique wings for the SS and Luftwaffe, but they were produced in small batches. Our troops captured several samples of German 8-cm shells, and our designers made their own samples based on them. Missiles M-13 and M-31 with oblique plumage were adopted by the Red Army in 1944, they were assigned special ballistic indices - TS-46 and TS-47.

The apotheosis of the combat use of the Katyusha and Luka was the assault on Berlin. In total, more than 44 thousand guns and mortars, as well as 1,785 M-30 and M-31 launchers, 1,620 rocket artillery combat vehicles (219 divisions) were involved in the Berlin operation. In the battles for Berlin, rocket artillery units used the rich experience they had gained in the battles for Poznan, which consisted in direct fire with single projectiles M-31, M-20 and even M-13.

At first glance, this method of firing may seem primitive, but its results turned out to be very significant. Shooting single rockets during the fighting in such a huge city as Berlin has found the widest application.

To conduct such fire in the guards mortar units, assault groups of approximately the following composition were created: an officer - group commander, an electrical engineer, 25 sergeants and soldiers for the M-31 assault group and 8–10 for the M-13 assault group.

The intensity of the battles and the fire missions performed by rocket artillery in the battles for Berlin can be judged by the number of rockets used up in these battles. In the offensive zone of the 3rd shock army, the following were used up: M-13 shells - 6270; shells M-31 - 3674; shells M-20 - 600; shells M-8 - 1878.

Of this amount, rocket artillery assault groups used up: M-8 shells - 1638; shells M-13 - 3353; shells M-20 - 191; shells M-31 - 479.

These groups in Berlin destroyed 120 buildings that were strong centers of enemy resistance, destroyed three 75-mm guns, suppressed dozens of firing points, and killed over 1,000 enemy soldiers and officers.

So, our glorious "Katyusha" and her unfairly offended brother "Luka" became a weapon of victory in the full sense of the word!

Despite the fact that 67 years have passed since the victorious end of the Great Patriotic War, many historical facts need to be clarified and more carefully considered. This also applies to the episode of the initial period of the war, when the Katyushas fired their first salvo at the concentration of German troops at the Orsha railway station. Well-known historians-researchers Alexander Osokin and Alexander Kornyakov, based on archival data, suggest that the first Katyusha volley was fired at other Katyusha installations in order to prevent their capture by the enemy.

Three sources of information about the first salvo "Katyusha"

71 years ago, on July 14, 1941, at 15:15, the first volley of an unprecedented new type of weapon, rocket artillery, thundered against the enemy. Seven Soviet BM-13-16 multiple rocket launchers (combat vehicles with 16 132 mm rockets each), mounted on a ZIL-6 automobile chassis (soon to be called "Katyusha"), simultaneously hit the railway station of the city of Orsha, clogged with German trains with heavy military equipment, ammunition and fuel.

The effect of the simultaneous (7-8 sec.) impact of 112 132 mm caliber rockets was amazing in the literal and figurative sense - at first the earth shuddered and rumbled, and then everything blazed. Thus, the First Separate Experimental Rocket Artillery Battery under the command of Captain Ivan Andreevich Flerov entered the Great Patriotic War... Such is the interpretation of the Katyusha's first salvo known today.

Photo.1 Captain Ivan Andreevich Flerov

Until now, the main source of information about this event remains the combat log (ZhBD) of the Flerov battery, where there are two entries: “July 14, 1941, 3:15 p.m. They struck at the fascist trains at the Orsha railway junction. The results are excellent. A continuous sea of ​​\u200b\u200bfire"

and “14.7. 1941 16 hours 45 minutes. Volley at the crossing of the Nazi troops through Orshitsa. Large losses of the enemy in manpower and military equipment, panic. All the Nazis who survived on the east coast were taken prisoner by our units ... ".

Let's call it Source #1 . We are inclined to believe, however, that these are not texts from the ZhBD of Flerov’s battery, but from two combat reports sent by him to the Center by radio, because then no one in the battery had the right to have any documents or any papers with him.

Photo.2 Volley "Katyusha"

The story of the designer Popov. This is mentioned in the second main source of information about the fate and feat of the Flerov battery - the story of one of the participants in the development of "Katyusha" design engineer NII-3 Alexei Popov, which was recorded by the famous Soviet journalist Yaroslav Golovanov in 1983. Here is its content:

Photo.3 Constructor Alexey Popov

« On June 22, the war began. By June 24, we received an order to prepare three installations for shipment to the front. At that time, we had 7 RUs and about 4.5 thousand PCs for them. On June 28, I was called to the research institute. - “You and Dmitry Aleksandrovich Shitov will go with a battery to the front, to teach new technology ...”

So I found myself at the disposal of Captain Ivan Andreevich Flerov. He managed to finish only the first year of the Academy. Dzerzhinsky, but was already a shelled commander: he participated in the Finnish campaign. Zhuravlyov, the political officer of the battery, selected reliable people from military registration and enlistment offices.

Muscovites, Gorky, Chuvashs served with us. Secrecy hindered us in many ways. For example, we could not use the combined arms services, we had our own medical unit, our own technical unit. All this made us clumsy: 7 rocket launchers accounted for 150 vehicles with attendants. On the night of July 1-2, we left Moscow.

Photo.4 Preparing "Katyusha" for combat work

On the Borodino field they swore: under no circumstances should they give the installation to the enemy. When there were especially curious people who tried to find out what we were carrying, we said that under the covers there were sections of pontoon bridges.

They tried to bomb us, after which we received an order: to move only at night. On July 9, we arrived in the Borisov district, deployed a position: 4 installations to the left of the highway, 3 launchers and 1 aiming gun to the right. They stayed there until July 13th. We were forbidden to fire from any type of personal weapon: pistols, 10-shot semi-automatic rifles, Degtyarev machine gun.

Each of them also had two grenades. They sat idle. Time spent studying. It was forbidden to take notes. Shitov and I conducted endless "practical exercises". Once the Messerschmidt-109 passed low over our battery, the soldiers could not stand it and fired at it from rifles. He turned around and, in turn, fired at us with a machine gun. After that we moved a little...

On the night of July 12-13, we were alerted. Our gunners pushed the cannon forward. An armored car drives up: “What part ?!” It turned out that we were so classified that the detachments that were supposed to hold the defense left. "The bridge will be blown up in 20 minutes, leave immediately!"

We left for Orsha. On July 14, we reached the area of ​​the railway junction, where many echelons were concentrated: ammunition, fuel, manpower and equipment. We stopped 5-6 km from the hub: 7 cars with RC and 3 cars with shells for a second salvo. They did not take the gun: direct visibility.

At 15:15 Flerov gave the order to open fire. A volley (7 vehicles with 16 rounds each, total 112 rounds) lasted 7-8 seconds. The railway junction was destroyed. There were no Germans in Orsha itself for 7 days. We got away right away. The commander was already in the cockpit, raised the jacks and go! They went into the woods and sat there.

The place where we shot from, the Germans then bombed. We got a taste of it and an hour and a half later we destroyed the German crossing. After the second salvo, they left along the Minsk highway towards Smolensk. We already knew that they would be looking for us…”.

Let's call it Source #2.

Report of two marshals about "Katyusha"

99% of all publications about the first volleys of the Katyusha and the fate of the Flerov battery are based only on these two sources. However, there is another very authoritative source of information about the first salvos of the Flerov battery - a daily report of the High Command of the Western Direction (Marshals of the Soviet Union S.K. Timoshenko and B.M. Shaposhnikov) to the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command (I.V. Stalin) dated July 24, 1941 of the year. It says:

“The 20th Army of Comrade Kurochkin, holding back attacks from up to 7 enemy divisions, defeated two German divisions, especially the 5th Infantry Division, which had newly arrived at the front, advancing on Rudnya and to the east. Especially effective and successful in defeating the 5th Infantry Division was the RS battery, which with three volleys at the enemy concentrated in Rudnya inflicted such losses on him that he took out the wounded all day and picked up the dead, stopping the offensive for the whole day. There are 3 volleys left in the battery. Please send two or three more batteries with charges ”(TsAMO, f. 246, op. 12928 ss, d. 2, ll. 38-41). Let's call it Source #3.

For some reason, it does not mention the volleys of the Flerov battery on July 14 across the Orsha and across the Orshitsa crossing, and does not indicate the date of its three volleys in Rudna.

Colonel Andrei Petrov's version

Having carefully studied all the circumstances of the first volley of Katyushas, ​​Andrey Petrov (engineer, retired colonel) in his article “The Mystery of the First Katyusha Volley” (NVO for June 20, 2008) made an unexpected conclusion: On July 14, 1941, the BM-13 battery of Captain Ivan Flerov fired at the accumulation of not enemy, but Soviet echelons with strategic cargo at the Orsha railway station!

This paradox is A. Petrov's brilliant guess. He gives several convincing arguments in her favor (we will not repeat) and leads to a number of questions related to the mysteries of the first salvo of the Katyusha and the fate of Captain Flerov and his battery, including:

1) Why was the commander of the heroic battery not immediately awarded? (After all, A.G. Kostikov, the chief engineer of NII-3, who appropriated the authorship of Katyusha alone, was already accepted by Stalin on July 28, 1941, and on the same day he was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. And the heroically deceased I.A. Flerov only in 1963 was he posthumously awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, I degree, and only in 1995 was he awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation).

2) Why did the Marshals of the Soviet Union S.K. Timoshenko and B.M. Shaposhnikov, fully informed about the battery of I.A. Flerov (for example, they even knew that they had only three volleys of shells left), reported to the Headquarters as the first use "Katyusha" about their volleys in Rudna, and not in Orsha?

3) Where did the Soviet command have very accurate information about the intended movements of the echelon, which had to be destroyed?

4) Why did Flerov's battery fire on Orsha on July 14 at 15.15, when the Germans had not yet occupied Orsha? (A. Petrov claims that Orsha was occupied on July 14, a number of publications indicate the date July 16, and Source No. 2 says that after the volley the Germans were not in Orsha for 7 days).

Additional questions and our version

When studying the available materials about the first salvo of the Katyusha, we had several additional questions and considerations that we want to state, considering all three of the above sources to be absolutely reliable (although for some reason Source No. 1 still lacks archival references).

1) Source #2 states that “On July 9, the battery arrived in the Borisov region, deployed its position and stood there until July 13 ... We sat idle. Time spent studying. But Borisov is located 644 km from Moscow, 84 km west of Orsha. Taking into account the return to it, this is an extra 168 km of night roads for a battery of 157 cars! Plus 4 extra days of incomprehensible duty, each of which could be the last for the Flerovites.

What could have been the reason for this additional "forced march" of such an unbearable caravan of battery vehicles, and then its long sitting idle? In our opinion, there is only one thing - the expectation of the arrival of the echelon, which was most likely indicated to Flerov by the High Command as the primary target to be destroyed.

This means that the battery was sent not just to conduct military combat tests (with a simultaneous demonstration of the power of the new weapon), but to destroy a very specific target, which after July 9 was supposed to be in the area between Borisov and Orsha. (By the way, let's not forget that on July 10 the German offensive began, which became the beginning of the fiercest defensive battle of Smolensk, and the second part of the battery raid took place in its conditions).

2). Why did the High Command indicate to Flerov as a target a specific train that ended up on July 14, 1941 at 15.15 on the tracks of the Orsha freight station? How was it better or, rather, worse than hundreds of other trains on the clogged highways of the Moscow direction? Why were installations with the most secret weapons sent from Moscow to meet the advancing German troops and the column accompanying them literally hunting for this train?

There is only one answer to the above questions - most likely, Flerov was really looking for a train with Soviet military equipment, which in no case should have fallen into the hands of the Germans. Having gone through its best types of that period, we came to the conclusion that these were not tanks (they then fell to the Germans in huge numbers, so there was no point in eliminating one or more trains with them).

And not airplanes (which at that time were often transported with dismantled wings in trains), because in 1939-1941, not even delegations, but commissions, German aviation was shown everything.

Oddly enough, it turned out that, most likely, the first volley of Flerov's Katyushas was made according to the composition (or compositions) of other Katyushas that moved to the western border even before the start of the war, so that, according to a secret agreement between Stalin and Hitler on the Great transport anti-British operation through Germany to transfer to the shores of the English Channel (one of the authors of this publication first published such a hypothesis of the beginning of the war in 2004.) But where could the Katyushas come from before the war?

Photo.5 One of the first versions of the Katyusha MU-1, also known as the 24-round M-13-24 (1938)

"Katyusha" appeared before the war

Almost every publication about the birth of the Katyusha claims that the Soviet high military command saw it for the first time in a few days, and the government decided to put it into service a few hours before the start of the war.

In fact, two and a half years before the start of the war - from December 8, 1938 to February 4, 1939 - at the GAU training ground in Kazakhstan, field and state tests of mechanized multiple rocket launchers on a ZIS-5 vehicle were successfully carried out: MU-1 and 16-round MU-2 for firing RS-132 rockets.

The MU-1 had a number of shortcomings, and the MU-2 (drawing No. 199910) on a three-axle ZIS-6 vehicle was planned to be put into service in 1939. The State Commission was headed by the deputy head of the GAU and the head of the Artkom Koromkor (since May 1940, Colonel General of Artillery) V.D. Grendal.

Just before the start of the Finnish War, from October 26 to November 9, 1940, demonstrative firing tests of rocketry were carried out at the Rzhevsky training ground near Leningrad, including the BM-13-16 mechanized launcher on the ZIS-6 chassis.

The commission was headed by the chief of artillery of the Red Army commander (since May 1940, Colonel-General of Artillery) N.N. Voronov. Based on the positive test results, NII-3 was obliged to introduce in 1940 in industry the mass production of mechanized installations BM-13-16, called "object 233" (it is interesting that the production of RS-132 was not assigned to NII-3, so all this year it was carried out serial factories of the People's Commissariat of Ammunition).

It is known that several types of rocket launchers on tanks were used to break through the Mannerheim Line. A number of other facts testify to the fact that it was Katyushas that were mass-produced even before the start of the war:

• of the 7 launchers of the Flerov battery, only 3 were manufactured by NII-3, and the remaining 4 are somewhere else
• already on July 3, the first Katyusha division was formed (43 installations, including 7 Flerov's)
• by mid-August 1941, 9 four-divisional Katyusha regiments were formed (12 installations each), 45 divisions, and in September another 6 three-divisional regiments

Total 1228 installations for July - September. Later they were called "guards mortar units". Such a pace would be unrealistic if the drawings for installations were transferred to mass-produced plants from June 22, 1941.

So a train with Katyushas and several trains with RSs could well have been taken to the border in the last days before the war. After June 22, 1941, moving only at night, these secret trains were especially secretly taken to the rear, so that in no case would they get to the Germans. But why?

The clue was announced by Levitan in the evening summary of the Sovinformburo

It can hardly be considered a mere coincidence that on July 22, 1941, in the evening summary of the Sovinformburo, the announcer Levitan said: “On July 15, in the battles west of Sitnya, east of Pskov, during the retreat of German units, our troops captured secret documents and chemical property of the 2nd battalion of the 52nd mortar chemical regiment of the enemy. One of the captured packages contained: secret instruction ND No. 199 “Shooting with chemical projectiles and mines”, published in 1940, and secret additions to the instructions sent to the troops on June 11 of this year ... German fascism is secretly preparing a new monstrous atrocity - the widespread use of poisonous substances..."

Photo 6. Six-barreled mortar "Nebelverfer" - "Vanyusha" (1940)

This is an amazing coincidence - the very next day after the first salvo of the Soviet Katyushas, ​​samples of German jet technology, possibly the six-barreled Vanyushas (they are also Nebelverfers, they are also Donkeys), fell into the hands of the Soviet troops.

The fact is that the Katyushas, ​​or rather, their prototypes - a number of rocket launchers, starting with the MU-1 and ending with the BM-13-16, were developed in the USSR in the mid-1930s by order of the Chemistry Department of the Red Army, first of all, to carry out a surprise chemical attack.

And only later, high-explosive fragmentation and high-explosive incendiary charges were developed for their rocket projectiles, after which the development went along the line of the Main Artillery Directorate (GAU).

It is also possible that the financing of the first developments was carried out by the chemical department on orders from the German Reichswehr. Therefore, the Germans could well know many of their aspects. (In 1945, the commission of the Central Committee discovered that one of the Skoda factories produced shells for the SS troops - analogues of the Soviet M-8 rocket shells and launchers for them).

Photo 7. Alexander Nikolayevich Osokin, writer-historian

Therefore, Stalin decided to play it safe. After all, he understood that the Germans would definitely film the trains destroyed by the first salvo of Flerov's Katyushas, ​​be able to determine that they depicted fragments of Soviet rocket launchers, which means they would be able to use their film and photo frames for propaganda purposes: here, they say, the Soviet Union is preparing to use in chemical attacks against the German (and therefore it can also be against the British!) Troops poisonous substances thrown with the help of the latest rocket technology.

This could not be allowed. And where did our intelligence manage to find similar German equipment so quickly - rocket launchers, and even documentation for them? Judging by the dates indicated in the Information Bureau report, their development was completed before the start of the war (and practice confirms this - already on June 22, six-barreled Nebelwerfers fired at the Brest Fortress). It may not be accidental that later the German rocket launcher "Vanyusha" was nicknamed?

Maybe this is a hint at his Russian roots and kinship with the Katyusha? Or maybe there was no defeat of the 52nd German chemical regiment, and the Vanyusha-Nebelwerfers, along with instructions, were transferred to the USSR during the years of friendly cooperation, say, in order to maintain allied parity?

There was another, also not very pleasant option - if the rocket launchers and shells for them destroyed in Orsha were of German or joint Soviet-German production (for example, the same Shkodov ones) and had both Soviet and German markings. This threatened serious showdowns with both their own and allies in both warring countries.

Photo 8. Alexander Fedorovich Kornyakov designer of small arms and artillery weapons

So the next day after the defeat of the trains in Orsha, they gave a summary of the Information Bureau about the defeat of the 52nd German chemical regiment. And the Germans had to silently agree with the Soviet version of the defeat of the mortar chemical regiment, and what could they do? So this is what happened:

• the Soviet High Command was constantly informed where the echelon with the Katyushas was located, which was supposed to secretly destroy the Flerov battery
• the battery actually fired on the accumulation of trains in Orsha even before the Germans entered it
• Timoshenko and Shaposhnikov did not know about the Katyusha strike on Orsha
• Flerov was not awarded in any way (how is it to reward for hitting his own echelon ?!), and there were no reports of the first Katyusha strike in 1941 (for the same reason).

We hope that the train with Katyushas was driven onto a separate track, an air raid was announced and people were removed for the duration of its shelling, which, of course, was attributed to the Germans. We also assume that the second volley of the Flerov battery on the same day against the advancing German divisions in the area of ​​​​the crossing on the Orshitsa River was fired, first of all, in order to dispel a possible suspicion that the main task of the battery was to eliminate a specific Soviet echelon.

We believe that after the second salvo, the Germans spotted and surrounded the combat installations of the Flerov battery, and not three months later in early October 1941, but immediately after their salvo across the crossing. Probably, after air raids and an unequal battle, which ended with Flerov’s command “Blow up the installations!”, He himself blew up one of them along with himself.

The rest were also blown up, while part of the battery personnel died, part hid in the forest and got out to their own, including A. Popov. Several people, incl. the wounded crew commander, sergeant from Alma-Ata Khudaibergen Khasenov, were taken prisoner. He was released only in 1945, never talked about anything at home, only after Flerov was awarded the Order in 1963, he dropped: "I fought in his battery."

None of those who went out to their people ever told when Flerov died, for a long time he was considered missing (as he is still listed in the Podolsk archive today, however, for some reason since December 1941), despite the fact that he was allegedly the date of his death was established - October 7, 1941 and the place of burial - near the village of Bogatyr near Pskov.

Then, perhaps, at his command, only the very first volleys of Katyushas were fired, and all the rest - near Rudnya, near Yelnya, near Pskov - at the command of his comrades: Degtyarev, Cherkasov and Dyatchenko - commanders of the 2nd, 3rd , the 4th battery of a separate special-purpose artillery battalion created on July 3, 1941 ... And then another 10 thousand Katyusha combat vehicles that fired 12 million rockets smashed the enemy!

After the 82-mm air-to-air missiles RS-82 (1937) and 132-mm air-to-ground missiles RS-132 (1938) were adopted by aviation, the Main Artillery Directorate set before the projectile developer - Reactive Research Institute - the task of creating a reactive field multiple launch rocket system based on RS-132 shells. An updated tactical and technical assignment was issued to the institute in June 1938.

In accordance with this task, by the summer of 1939, the institute developed a new 132-mm high-explosive fragmentation projectile, which later received the official name M-13. Compared to the aviation RS-132, this projectile had a longer flight range and a much more powerful warhead. The increase in flight range was achieved by increasing the amount of propellant, for this it was necessary to lengthen the rocket and head parts of the rocket projectile by 48 cm. The M-13 projectile had slightly better aerodynamic characteristics than the RS-132, which made it possible to obtain higher accuracy.

A self-propelled multiply charged launcher was also developed for the projectile. Its first version was created on the basis of the ZIS-5 truck and was designated MU-1 (mechanized installation, first sample). Conducted in the period from December 1938 to February 1939, field tests of the installation showed that it did not fully meet the requirements. Taking into account the test results, the Reactive Research Institute developed a new MU-2 launcher, which in September 1939 was accepted by the Main Artillery Directorate for field tests. Based on the results of field tests that ended in November 1939, the Institute was ordered five launchers for military testing. Another installation was ordered by the Artillery Directorate of the Navy for use in the coastal defense system.

On June 21, 1941, the installation was demonstrated to the leaders of the CPSU (6) and the Soviet government, and on the same day, just a few hours before the start of World War II, it was decided to urgently deploy the mass production of M-13 rockets and the launcher, which received the official name BM-13 (combat vehicle 13).

The production of BM-13 installations was organized at the Voronezh plant. Comintern and at the Moscow plant "Compressor". One of the main enterprises for the production of rockets was the Moscow plant. Vladimir Ilyich.

During the war, the production of launchers was urgently deployed at several enterprises with different production capabilities, in connection with this, more or less significant changes were made to the design of the installation. Thus, up to ten varieties of the BM-13 launcher were used in the troops, which made it difficult to train personnel and adversely affected the operation of military equipment. For these reasons, a unified (normalized) BM-13N launcher was developed and put into service in April 1943, during the creation of which the designers critically analyzed all the parts and assemblies in order to increase the manufacturability of their production and reduce the cost, as a result of which all the nodes received independent indexes and became universal. Compound

The composition of the BM-13 "Katyusha" includes the following weapons:

Combat vehicle (BM) MU-2 (MU-1);
Rockets.
Rocket M-13:

The M-13 projectile consists of a warhead and a powder jet engine. The head part in its design resembles a high-explosive fragmentation projectile and is equipped with an explosive charge, which is detonated by a contact fuse and an additional detonator. The jet engine has a combustion chamber in which a powder propellant charge is placed in the form of cylindrical pieces with an axial channel. Pirozapals are used to ignite the powder charge. The gases formed during the combustion of powder pellets flow through a nozzle, in front of which there is a diaphragm that prevents the pellets from being ejected through the nozzle. Stabilization of the projectile in flight is provided by a tail stabilizer with four feathers welded from stamped steel halves. (This method of stabilization provides lower accuracy compared to stabilization by rotation around the longitudinal axis, however, it allows you to get a longer range of the projectile. In addition, the use of a feathered stabilizer greatly simplifies the technology for the production of rockets).

The flight range of the M-13 projectile reached 8470 m, but at the same time there was a very significant dispersion. According to the firing tables of 1942, with a firing range of 3000 m, the lateral deviation was 51 m, and in range - 257 m.

In 1943, a modernized version of the rocket was developed, which received the designation M-13-UK (improved accuracy). To increase the accuracy of fire of the M-13-UK projectile, 12 tangentially located holes are made in the front centering thickening of the rocket part, through which, during the operation of the rocket engine, part of the powder gases escapes, causing the projectile to rotate. Although the range of the projectile was somewhat reduced (to 7.9 km), the improvement in accuracy led to a decrease in the dispersion area and to an increase in the density of fire by 3 times compared to the M-13 projectiles. The adoption of the M-13-UK projectile into service in April 1944 contributed to a sharp increase in the firing capabilities of rocket artillery.

Launcher MLRS "Katyusha":

A self-propelled multiply charged launcher was developed for the projectile. Its first version - MU-1 based on the ZIS-5 truck had 24 guides mounted on a special frame in a transverse position with respect to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle. Its design made it possible to launch rockets only perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle, and jets of hot gases damaged the elements of the installation and the body of the ZIS-5. Security was also not ensured when controlling fire from the driver's cab. The launcher swayed strongly, which worsened the accuracy of firing rockets. Loading the launcher from the front of the rails was inconvenient and time consuming. The ZIS-5 car had limited cross-country ability.

A more advanced MU-2 launcher based on a ZIS-6 off-road truck had 16 guides located along the axis of the vehicle. Each two guides were connected, forming a single structure, called "spark". A new unit was introduced into the design of the installation - a subframe. The subframe made it possible to assemble the entire artillery part of the launcher (as a single unit) on it, and not on the chassis, as it was before. Once assembled, the artillery unit was relatively easy to mount on the chassis of any brand of car with minimal modification of the latter. The created design made it possible to reduce the complexity, manufacturing time and cost of launchers. The weight of the artillery unit was reduced by 250 kg, the cost - by more than 20 percent. Both the combat and operational qualities of the installation were significantly increased. Due to the introduction of reservations for the gas tank, gas pipeline, side and rear walls of the driver's cab, the survivability of launchers in battle was increased. The firing sector was increased, the stability of the launcher in the stowed position was increased, improved lifting and turning mechanisms made it possible to increase the speed of aiming the installation at the target. Before launch, the MU-2 combat vehicle was jacked up similarly to the MU-1. The forces that rock the launcher, due to the location of the guides along the chassis of the car, were applied along its axis to two jacks located near the center of gravity, so the rocking became minimal. Loading in the installation was carried out from the breech, that is, from the rear end of the guides. It was more convenient and allowed to significantly speed up the operation. The MU-2 installation had swivel and lifting mechanisms of the simplest design, a bracket for mounting a sight with a conventional artillery panorama and a large metal fuel tank mounted behind the cab. The cockpit windows were covered with armored folding shields. Opposite the seat of the commander of the combat vehicle on the front panel was mounted a small rectangular box with a turntable, reminiscent of a telephone dial, and a handle for turning the dial. This device was called the "fire control panel" (PUO). From it came a harness to a special battery and to each guide.

With one turn of the PUO handle, the electrical circuit was closed, the squib placed in front of the rocket chamber of the projectile was fired, the reactive charge was ignited and a shot was fired. The rate of fire was determined by the rate of rotation of the PUO handle. All 16 shells could be fired in 7-10 seconds. The time for transferring the MU-2 launcher from traveling to combat position was 2-3 minutes, the angle of vertical fire was in the range from 4 ° to 45 °, the angle of horizontal fire was 20 °.

The design of the launcher allowed it to move in a charged state at a fairly high speed (up to 40 km / h) and quickly deploy to a firing position, which contributed to sudden strikes against the enemy.

A significant factor that increased the tactical mobility of rocket artillery units armed with BM-13N launchers was the fact that a powerful American Studebaker US 6x6 truck, supplied to the USSR under Lend-Lease, was used as a base for the launcher. This car had an increased cross-country ability, provided by a powerful engine, three driven axles (6x6 wheel formula), a demultiplier, a winch for self-pulling, a high location of all parts and mechanisms that are sensitive to water. With the creation of this launcher, the development of the BM-13 serial combat vehicle was finally completed. In this form, she fought until the end of the war.

Tactical and technical characteristics of the MLRS BM-13 "Katyusha"
Rocket M-13
Caliber, mm 132
Projectile weight, kg 42.3
Warhead mass, kg 21.3
Mass of explosive, kg 4.9
Firing range - maximum, km 8.47
Volley production time, sec 7-10
Fighting vehicle MU-2
Base ZiS-6 (8x8)
Mass of BM, t 43.7
Maximum speed, km/h 40
Number of guides 16
Angle of vertical fire, degrees from +4 to +45
Angle of horizontal fire, degrees 20
Calculation, pers. 10-12
Year of adoption 1941

Testing and operation

The first battery of field rocket artillery, sent to the front on the night of July 1-2, 1941, under the command of Captain I.A. Flerov, was armed with seven installations manufactured by the Reactive Research Institute. With its first salvo at 15:15 on July 14, 1941, the battery wiped out the Orsha railway junction, along with the German trains with troops and military equipment on it.

The exceptional effectiveness of the actions of the battery of Captain I. A. Flerov and the seven more such batteries formed after it contributed to the rapid increase in the pace of production of jet weapons. Already in the autumn of 1941, 45 divisions of three-battery composition with four launchers in the battery operated on the fronts. For their armament in 1941, 593 BM-13 installations were manufactured. As military equipment arrived from industry, the formation of rocket artillery regiments began, consisting of three divisions armed with BM-13 launchers and an anti-aircraft division. The regiment had 1414 personnel, 36 BM-13 launchers and 12 anti-aircraft 37-mm guns. The volley of the regiment was 576 shells of 132mm caliber. At the same time, the manpower and military equipment of the enemy were destroyed on an area of ​​over 100 hectares. Officially, the regiments were called Guards Mortar Artillery Regiments of the Reserve of the Supreme High Command.

"Katyusha"
Guards jet mortar became one of the most terrible weapons of the Great Patriotic War
Now no one can say for sure under what circumstances the multiple launch rocket launcher received a female name, and even in a diminutive form - "Katyusha". One thing is known - at the front, far from all types of weapons received nicknames. Yes, and these names were often not at all flattering. For example, the Il-2 attack aircraft of early modifications, which saved the lives of more than one infantryman and was the most welcome "guest" in any battle, received the nickname "humpback" among the soldiers for the cockpit protruding above the fuselage. And the small I-16 fighter, which bore the brunt of the first air battles on its wings, was called the "donkey". True, there were formidable nicknames - the heavy Su-152 self-propelled artillery mount, which was capable of knocking down a turret from the Tiger with one shot, was respectfully called the "St. one-story house, - "sledgehammer". In any case, the names were most often given harsh and strict. And then such unexpected tenderness, if not love ...

However, if you read the memoirs of veterans, especially those who, in their military profession, depended on the actions of mortars - infantrymen, tankers, signalmen, it becomes clear why the fighters fell in love with these combat vehicles so much. In terms of its combat power, the Katyusha had no equal.

Behind us suddenly there was a rattle, a rumble, and fiery arrows flew through us to the height ... At the height everything was covered with fire, smoke and dust. In the midst of this chaos, fiery candles flared from individual explosions. We heard a terrible roar. When all this subsided and the command "Forward" was heard, we took the height, almost without meeting resistance, so cleanly "played the Katyushas" ... At the height, when we went up there, we saw that everything was plowed up. There were almost no traces of the trenches in which the Germans were located. There were many corpses of enemy soldiers. The wounded fascists were bandaged by our nurses and, together with a small number of survivors, were sent to the rear. The faces of the Germans were frightened. They still did not understand what happened to them, and did not recover from the Katyusha volley.

From the memoirs of a war veteran Vladimir Yakovlevich Ilyashenko (published on the site Iremember.ru)

Each projectile was approximately equal in power to a howitzer, but at the same time, the installation itself could almost simultaneously release, depending on the model and size of the ammunition, from eight to 32 missiles. Katyushas operated in divisions, regiments or brigades. At the same time, in each division, equipped, for example, with BM-13 installations, there were five such vehicles, each of which had 16 guides for launching 132-mm M-13 projectiles, each weighing 42 kilograms with a flight range of 8470 meters. Accordingly, only one division could fire 80 shells at the enemy. If the division was equipped with BM-8 installations with 32 82-mm shells, then one volley was already 160 missiles. What are 160 rockets that fall on a small village or a fortified height in a few seconds - imagine for yourself. But in many operations during the war, artillery preparation was carried out by regiments, and even brigades of "Katyusha", and this is more than a hundred vehicles, or more than three thousand shells in one volley. What is three thousand shells that plow trenches and fortifications in half a minute, probably no one can imagine ...

During offensives, the Soviet command tried to concentrate as much artillery as possible on the spearhead of the main attack. Super-massive artillery preparation, which preceded the breakthrough of the enemy front, was the trump card of the Red Army. Not a single army in that war could provide such fire. In 1945, during the offensive, the Soviet command pulled up to 230-260 cannon artillery guns per kilometer of the front. In addition to them, for every kilometer there were, on average, 15-20 rocket artillery combat vehicles, not counting stationary launchers - M-30 frames. Traditionally, Katyushas completed the artillery attack: rocket launchers fired a volley when the infantry was already on the attack. Often, after several volleys of Katyushas, ​​infantrymen entered a deserted settlement or enemy positions without encountering any resistance.

Of course, such a raid could not destroy all enemy soldiers - Katyusha rockets could operate in fragmentation or high-explosive mode, depending on how the fuse was set up. When set to fragmentation, the rocket exploded immediately after it reached the ground, in the case of a "high-explosive" installation, the fuse worked with a slight delay, allowing the projectile to go deep into the ground or other obstacle. However, in both cases, if the enemy soldiers were in well-fortified trenches, then the losses from shelling were small. Therefore, Katyushas were also often used at the beginning of an artillery raid in order to prevent enemy soldiers from hiding in the trenches. It was thanks to the suddenness and power of one volley that the use of rocket launchers brought success.

Already on the slope of the height, quite a bit before reaching the battalion, we unexpectedly came under a volley of our own "Katyusha" - a multi-barreled rocket mortar. It was terrible: large-caliber mines exploded around us for a minute, one after another. It didn’t take long for them to catch their breath and come to their senses. Now it seemed quite plausible newspaper reports about cases when German soldiers who had been under fire from Katyushas went crazy.

“If you involve an artillery barrel regiment, then the regiment commander will definitely say:“ I don’t have these data, I have to zero in the guns. "The shelter is usually given 15-20 seconds. During this time, the artillery barrel will fire one or two shells. And in 15-20 seconds, I will fire 120 missiles in 15-20 seconds, which go all at once," says Alexander Filippovich Panuev, commander of the regiment of rocket launchers.

It is difficult to imagine what it means to be hit by Katyushas. According to those who survived such attacks (both Germans and Soviet soldiers), it was one of the most terrible impressions of the entire war. The sound that the rockets made during the flight is described differently by everyone - grinding, howling, roaring. Be that as it may, in combination with subsequent explosions, during which for a few seconds on an area of ​​​​several hectares the earth mixed with pieces of buildings, equipment, people, flew into the air, this gave a strong psychological effect. When the soldiers took up enemy positions, they were not met with fire, not because everyone was killed - just the rocket fire drove the survivors crazy.

The psychological component of any weapon cannot be underestimated. The German Ju-87 bomber was equipped with a siren that howled during a dive, also suppressing the psyche of those who were on the ground at that moment. And during the attacks of the German tanks "Tiger", the calculations of anti-tank guns sometimes left their positions in fear of the steel monsters. The Katyushas also had the same psychological effect. For this terrible howl, by the way, they received the nickname "Stalin's organs" from the Germans.

The only ones who did not like the Katyusha in the Red Army were the gunners. The fact is that mobile installations of rocket launchers usually advanced to positions immediately before the salvo and just as quickly tried to leave. At the same time, for obvious reasons, the Germans tried to destroy the Katyushas in the first place. Therefore, immediately after a salvo of rocket-propelled mortars, their positions, as a rule, began to be intensively processed by German artillery and aviation. And given that the positions of cannon artillery and rocket launchers were often located not far from each other, the raid covered the artillerymen who remained where the rocketmen fired from.

SOVIET ROCKET MANAGERS LOAD THE KATYUSHA. Photo from the archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation

"We are choosing firing positions. We are told: "There is a firing position in such and such a place, you will be waiting for soldiers or beacons." We take a firing position at night. At this time, the Katyusha division approaches. If I had time, I would immediately remove from there their position. "Katyushas" fired a volley, at the cars and left. And the Germans raised nine "Junkers" to bomb the division, and the division hit the road. They were on the battery. There was a commotion! An open place, they hid under gun carriages. who didn’t fit and left,” says former artilleryman Ivan Trofimovich Salnitsky.

According to the former Soviet missilemen who fought on the Katyushas, ​​most often the divisions operated within a few tens of kilometers of the front, appearing where their support was needed. First, officers entered the positions, who made the corresponding calculations. These calculations, by the way, were quite complex - they took into account not only the distance to the target, the speed and direction of the wind, but even the air temperature, which influenced the trajectory of the missiles. After all the calculations were made, the machines advanced to the position, fired several volleys (most often no more than five) and urgently left for the rear. The delay in this case was indeed like death - the Germans immediately covered the place from which they fired rocket-propelled mortars with artillery fire.

During the offensive, the tactics of using Katyushas, ​​finally worked out by 1943 and used everywhere until the end of the war, were different. At the very beginning of the offensive, when it was necessary to break open the enemy's defense in depth, artillery (cannon and rocket) formed the so-called "barrage". At the beginning of the shelling, all howitzers (often even heavy self-propelled guns) and rocket launchers "processed" the first line of defense. Then the fire was transferred to the fortifications of the second line, and the infantry occupied the trenches and dugouts of the first. After that, the fire was transferred inland - to the third line, while the infantrymen, meanwhile, occupied the second. At the same time, the farther the infantry went, the less cannon artillery could support it - towed guns could not accompany it throughout the offensive. This task was assigned to self-propelled guns and Katyushas. It was they who, along with the tanks, followed the infantry, supporting it with fire. According to those who participated in such offensives, after the "barrage" of the Katyushas, ​​the infantry walked along a scorched strip of land several kilometers wide, on which there were no traces of a carefully prepared defense.

BM-13 "KATYUSHA" ON THE BASE OF THE TRUCK "STUDEBAKER". Photo from Easyget.narod.ru

After the war, "Katyushas" began to be installed on pedestals - combat vehicles turned into monuments. Surely many have seen such monuments throughout the country. All of them are more or less similar to each other and almost do not correspond to those machines that fought in the Great Patriotic War. The fact is that these monuments almost always feature a rocket launcher based on the ZiS-6 car. Indeed, at the very beginning of the war, rocket launchers were installed on ZiSs, but as soon as American Studebaker trucks began to arrive in the USSR under Lend-Lease, they were turned into the most common base for Katyushas. ZiS, as well as Lend-Lease Chevrolets, were too weak to carry a heavy installation with missile guides off-road. It's not just a relatively low-power engine - the frames of these trucks could not withstand the weight of the installation. Actually, the Studebakers also tried not to overload with missiles - if it was necessary to go to a position from afar, then the missiles were loaded immediately before the salvo.

In addition to ZiSs, Chevrolets and Studebakers, the most common among Katyushas, ​​the Red Army used T-70 tanks as a chassis for rocket launchers, but they were quickly abandoned - the tank engine and its transmission turned out to be too weak to so that the installation could continuously run along the front line. At first, the missilemen did without a chassis at all - the M-30 launch frames were transported in the back of trucks, unloading them directly to the positions.

From the history of Russian (Soviet) rocket science
KATYUSH RETAINTS:

M-8 - caliber 82 mm, weight eight kilograms, radius of destruction 10-12 meters, firing range 5500 meters

M-13 - caliber 132 mm, weight 42.5 kilograms, firing range 8470 meters, radius of destruction 25-30 meters

M-30 - caliber 300 millimeters, weight 95 kilograms, firing range 2800 meters (after completion - 4325 meters). These shells were launched from stationary M-30 machines. They were delivered in special boxes-frames, which were launchers. Sometimes the rocket did not come out of it and flew along with the frame

M-31-UK - shells similar to the M-30, but with improved accuracy. The nozzles, set slightly at an angle, forced the rocket to rotate along the longitudinal axis in flight, stabilizing it.

Russian and Soviet rocket science has a long and glorious history. For the first time, Peter I took missiles seriously as a weapon. At the beginning of the 18th century, as noted on the Pobeda.ru website, signal rockets, which were used during the Great Northern War, entered service with the Russian army with his light hand. At the same time, rocket "departments" appeared in various artillery schools. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Military Scientific Committee began to create combat missiles. For a long time, various military departments conducted tests and developments in the field of rocket science. In this case, the Russian designers Kartmazov and Zasyadko showed themselves brightly, who independently developed their missile systems.

This weapon was appreciated by the Russian military leaders. The Russian army adopted incendiary and high-explosive rockets of domestic production, as well as gantry, frame, tripod and carriage-type launchers.

In the 19th century, rockets were used in many military conflicts. In August 1827, the soldiers of the Caucasian Corps fired several thousand rockets at the enemy in the battle of Ushagan, near Alagez and during the assault on the Ardavil fortress. In the future, it was in the Caucasus that this weapon was used most of all. Thousands of rockets were brought to the Caucasus, and thousands were used during the assaults on fortresses and other operations. In addition, rocket men participated in the Russian-Turkish war as part of the artillery of the guards corps, actively supporting the infantry and cavalry in the battles near Shumla and during the siege of the Turkish fortresses of Varna and Silistra.

In the second half of the 19th century, rockets began to be used en masse. By this time, the number of combat missiles produced by the Petersburg Missile Institute numbered in the thousands. They were equipped with artillery units, the fleet, even supplied to the cavalry - a rocket machine was developed for the Cossack and cavalry units weighing only a few pounds, which were armed with individual cavalrymen instead of hand weapons or peaks. From 1851 to 1854 alone, 12,550 two-inch rockets were sent to the active army.

At the same time, their design, application tactics, the chemical composition of the filler, and launchers were improved. It was at that time that the shortcomings of the missiles were identified - insufficient accuracy and power - and tactics were developed that made it possible to neutralize the shortcomings. “Successful operation of a missile from a machine depends largely on completely calm and attentive observation of its entire flight; but as it is currently impossible to fulfill such a condition, when missiles are used against the enemy, it should predominantly operate with several missiles suddenly, in quick fire or in a volley. Thus, if not by the accuracy of the strike of each individual missile, then by the combined action of a larger number of them, it is possible to achieve the desired goal, ”wrote the Artillery Journal in 1863. Note that the tactics described in the military publication became the basis for the creation of Katyushas. Their shells at first also did not differ in particular accuracy, but this shortcoming was compensated by the number of missiles fired.

The development of rocket weapons received a new impetus in the 20th century. Russian scientists Tsiolkovsky, Kibalchich, Meshchersky, Zhukovsky, Nezhdanovsky, Zander and others developed the theoretical foundations of rocket technology and astronautics, created the scientific prerequisites for the theory of rocket engine design, predetermining the appearance of the Katyusha.

The development of rocket artillery began in the Soviet Union before the war, in the thirties. A whole group of design scientists under the leadership of Vladimir Andreevich Artemyev worked on them. The first experimental rocket launchers began to be tested from the end of 1938, and immediately in a mobile version - on the ZiS-6 chassis (stationary launchers appeared already during the war due to the lack of a sufficient number of vehicles). Before the war, in the summer of 1941, the first unit was formed - a division of rocket launchers.

VALLEY "KATYUSH". Photo from the archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation

The first battle with the participation of these installations took place on July 14, 1941. This is one of the most famous episodes of the Great Patriotic War. On that day, several German trains with fuel, soldiers and ammunition arrived at the Belarusian station Orsha - a more than tempting target. Captain Flerov's battery approached the station, and at 15:15 made only one salvo. Within seconds, the station was literally mixed into the ground. In the report, the captain then wrote: "The results are excellent. A continuous sea of ​​\u200b\u200bfire."

The fate of Captain Ivan Andreevich Flerov, like the fate of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers in 1941, turned out to be tragic. For several months, he managed to act quite successfully, leaving from under enemy fire. Several times the battery found itself surrounded, but always went out to its own, retaining military equipment. She took her last fight on October 30 near Smolensk. Once surrounded, the fighters were forced to blow up the launchers (each car had a box of explosives and fickford cord - under no circumstances should the launchers get to the enemy). Then, breaking out of the "cauldron", most of them, including Captain Flerov, died. Only 46 gunners of the battery reached the front line.

SEE ALSO
SPECIAL PROJECT DEDICATED
60th ANNIVERSARY OF VICTORY

However, by that time, new batteries of guards mortars were already operating at the front, throwing down on the heads of the enemy that very "sea of ​​fire" that Flerov wrote about in the first report from near Orsha. Then this sea will accompany the Germans on their entire sad journey - from Moscow through Stalingrad, Kursk, Orel, Belgorod and so on, all the way to Berlin. Already in 1941, those who survived that terrible shelling at the Belarusian junction station probably thought hard about whether it was worth starting a war with a country that could turn several trains into ashes in a few seconds. However, they had no choice - they were ordinary soldiers and officers, and those who ordered them to go to Orsha learned about how Stalin's organs sing less than four years later - in May 1945, when this music sounded in sky