Nikolai Gastello - Controversy

Controversy

The details of Gastello's final mission are hard to substantiate due to lack of reliable data or witnesses. The only people alive to see Gastello's final plunge, the crew of Lt. Vorobiev, were killed in action just a few days after Gastello.

After the fall of communism in the late 1990s several reporters began disputing the official accounts. Some of the claims made were:

• Gastello did not perform the attack deliberately.
• The target of the fire-taran was not a column of tanks, but a stationary flak gun, apparently the one that dealt the burning aircraft the fatal blow.
• The suicide attack was performed by another pilot from the same squadron, Captain Maslov.
• Gastello's flight included not two, but three aircraft, with Maslov flying the third bomber.
• Gastello's plane was hit, but it flew away from the battle, with one crew member being seen to bail out.
• A man who was 15 years old in 1941 claimed he saw a jump off the left wing of the aircraft, which is only possible for the pilot to do; and the bailed out airman, who he believes to be Gastello, was captured by the Germans.
• A burned out body was discovered in the woods in July 1941 by a group of peasants, far away from the location of the fire taran, with an undelivered letter and a cigarette case identifying it as a member of Gastello's crew.
• A 1951 Soviet reburial effort exhumed the graves of Gastello's crew, who were wrapped in parachutes and hastily buried by peasants the night after their death. A map case and a medallion belonged to Captain Maslov and his gunner were found on the bodies. The entire affair was subsequently swept under the rug.
• Neither Gastello nor Maslov managed to hit anything of value, and the actual fire-taran was performed a day later, by Presaizen Isaac Zilovich, reported by Squadron Commander Captain Beletsky and verified from the air the next day by 128 Air Regiment Second in Command V.Sandalov. Isaac Presaizen was recommended for Hero of the Soviet Union award, the recommendation still stands in the archives, having never been answered. The actual air photos taken by V.Sandalov were used to award Gastello his fame for non-existent attack.

These claims, made in 1994 and then in 2001 in Russia's leading newspapers, Izvestia and then Moskovskiy Komsomoletz, caused a firestorm in the former Soviet Union. They have been aggressively debunked by journalists and official historians ever since. The regiment's official logs, locked away in Soviet archives, indeed record Gastello's flight as only including two aircraft, his and Lt Vorobiev's. Few reasons exist to doubt Lt Vorobiev's actual report: he could gain nothing from it personally, and indeed perished in battle just a few days later. The official log, however, does list a single unidentified crew member as bailing out from Gastello's plane.

Supporters of the official version of events also doubt the accuracy of the 1951 reburial story, as an aircraft that dives into the ground and explodes in a fireball is unlikely to include entire bodies with intact parachutes they can be wrapped in. If such bodies were indeed located and buried, it is not surprising they would be from a crew other than Gastello's.

Both sides however agree that, whoever it was that exploded amidst German tanks on June 26, 1941, the pilot's motivation will never be truly known. No radio transmissions were received from the aircraft, as it was most unlikely that it had a radio, and it is impossible to know if the ramming of the German column was deliberate or accidental.

The publicity led to President Boris Yeltsin awarding Captain Maslov the Hero of Russia in 1996. On the other hand, First Lieutenant Isaac Presaizen was never awarded a Hero for a confirmed hit to this day.