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Before the siege of Leningrad in August 1941, many factories and institutes were evacuated from the
city. One of them was the Leningrad Institute of Chemical Technology, which was evacuated to Kazan.
The famous Soviet organic chemist Professor Alexander Dmitrievich Petrov remained
to monitor the property that they did not have time to withdraw.
Having surrounded the city from all sides, the enemy regularly bombed it from the air.
Soviet anti-aircraft gunners fought against German planes and often shot them down. So,
in early October 1941, another German ME-109 aircraft was shot down,
and the pilot managed to land it on the outskirts of the city. He was immediately arrested,
and a crowd of local residents gathered around the plane. Professor Alexander Petrov was among them.
Fuel flowed from the demaged fuel tank to the ground, and since the Professor was an
inquisitive person, he became interested in what kind of fuel German planes used and he collected
the necessary amount of it in order to study the chemical composition of the fuel
in the laboratory of the institute.
After studying the German fuel, Petrov found out that it freezes at a temperature
of only minus 14 degrees Celsius, while the Soviet aviation fuel remained liquid
up to minus 60 degrees. That meant the German planes would not be able to take off at minus 15.
Petrov secured a meeting with the deputy commander of the Northwestern Front Air Force
and told about his discovery. They decided to check the information and the professor
got some more fuel samples from other German aircraft. The situation with these
samples was identical, the fuel froze at a temperature of minus 14 degrees.
From that moment on, the Air Force generals admitted to this information began to be
interested in the air temperature in the Leningrad region several times a day. At this time,
the scouts identified the location of two German airfields in Gatchina and Siverskaya.In Siverskaya
only there were 40 Junkers 88 multi-purpose aircraft, 31 fighters and 4 transport aircraft.
On the night of November 6, the air temperature dropped below minus 20 degrees Celsius
and in the morning Soviet P-2 bombers rose into the sky and dropped bombs on German airfields from
a height of 2550 m. Enemy fighters could not start their engines and attack soviet planes,
and the German anti-aircraft artillery failed to shoot them down. After 15 minutes,
Soviet attack aircraft got up into the air and suppressed the artillery fire,
and after 2 hours Soviet bombers struck a second blow at German airfields, finishing off the enemy.
Soon the Germans developed aviation fuel capable of not freezing at -20 degrees
Celsius, but they managed to resume the bombing of Leningrad only 6 months later, in April 1942.
So, thanks to the curiosity of Professor Petrov, soviet aviation was able to inflict
significant damage, not fearing the enemy fighters` attack. Alexander Petrov himself
was soon evacuated to Moscow, where in 1943 he became a professor at the Mendeleev Moscow
Institute of Chemical Technology and headed the Department of Petrochemical Synthesis.
Dear friends, that's all for today. I found interesting material on how Winston Churchill
saved Germany and Soviets from use of chemical weapons during WW2.
If you are interested, I can also make a video. Write please in the
comments. It was Tim and the Eastern Front channel. Wish you peace and health. See you.