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Special Units · Battle of Kursk, 1943
Groupe de Chasse Normandie (Normandie-Niemen)
Free French fighter pilots in Soviet Yaks, Groupe de Chasse 3 “Normandie” flew over the Orel bulge from 12 July 1943 and lost six men in four days, among them its commander. It was the only Western Allied combat unit to fight on the Eastern Front to the end of the war.
- Free French Air Force · Soviet 1st Air Army
- Orel bulge
- 12–17 July 1943
A French group for the Eastern Front
General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement wanted a French presence on the Eastern Front, where most of the war was being fought, and it wanted Soviet recognition. In 1942 it offered the Soviet government a fighting unit and, on the advice of Gen. Martial Valin, chose an air group over a mechanized division (Wikipedia, “Normandie-Niemen”). Groupe de Chasse 3 “Normandie” was created by de Gaulle’s order of 1 September 1942 at Rayak in Lebanon. The pilots took the name of the French province, and the arms of Normandy, two gold leopards on red, as their emblem.
The first contingent, 14 French pilots and 58 French mechanics, left Rayak on 12 November 1942 and reached the Soviet air base at Ivanovo, northeast of Moscow, at the end of the month: on 28 November in the unit’s records as summarized on Wikipedia, on 1 December in the Ordre de la Libération’s biography of its commander. Seventeen Soviet mechanics joined them. They trained through the winter, first on Yak-7 trainers and from January 1943 on the Yak-1b, the fighter they would take into combat. Commandant Joseph Pouliquen led the group until 22 February 1943, when Commandant Jean Tulasne took command.
To the front, spring 1943
On 22 March 1943 the French were judged ready and moved to the front, attached at first as a fourth squadron to the Soviet 18th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment of the 303rd Fighter Aviation Division, in the 1st Air Army supporting the Western Front (Russian Wikipedia, citing Kozlov). Their first combat came in early April over the country between Polotnyany Zavod and Monastyrshchina. On 5 April Albert Preziosi and Albert Durand shot down two Fw 190s near Roslavl while escorting a Pe-2, the group’s first victories. Eight days later three of its pilots were shot down and three Fw 190s were claimed. Tulasne himself, who flew two or three sorties a day once the group reached the front, shot down an Fw 190 on 23 June.
Over the Orel bulge, July 1943
The German offensive against the Kursk salient opened on 5 July, and Model’s Ninth Army attacked south out of the Orel bulge against the northern face. On 12 July the Soviet Western and Bryansk Fronts struck back at the bulge itself from the north and east, in Operation Kutuzov, threatening to cut off the Ninth Army and the Second Panzer Army. The 1st Air Army flew over the northern side of the bulge with the Western Front, and the French were in the thick of it, flying Yak-1s from fields in the Kozelsk area, among them Khatenki, northeast of Orel (Chapter 5; Chapter 7).
Their work was escort: covering Pe-2 dive bombers and Il-2 assault aircraft against German fighters, above all Fw 190s, while the Luftwaffe pulled units north from the southern face to save the armies in the bulge. The next six days were the worst of the group’s war. Tulasne shot down German aircraft on 15 and 16 July. On 16 July Capt. Albert Littolff, a veteran of the Battle of France and the desert war with fourteen confirmed victories, led a patrol of eight Yaks to protect fifteen Soviet bombers that were attacked by a large number of German fighters near Orel. He and his wingman, Noël Castelain, an ace with six victories in three months with Normandie, disappeared in the fight near Krasnikovo (Ordre de la Libération). Adrien Bernavon was also killed over Orel in these days.
On 17 July Tulasne flew twice. At 05:10 he led ten Yaks escorting Pe-2s against the station at Bely Berega and attacked a Bf 110 without result. At 17:10 he led nine Yaks escorting Il-2s in the Znamenskoye sector, where they met about thirty Fw 190s. In the dogfight that followed, Lt. Didier Béguin was wounded, Aspirant Firmin Vermeil was shot down, and Tulasne disappeared from the view of his deputy, Pierre Pouyade (Donjon, Musée Normandie-Niemen). He was 30. Pouyade took command the same day. In the count of the group’s historian, Yves Courrière, the French lost six men in four days while claiming seventeen confirmed victories.
The losses fell on the group’s most experienced men. Littolff and Castelain were aces, and Tulasne had led French fighter units since 1941; for a group whose first contingent had numbered 14 pilots, six men in four days was a heavy blow. The French kept flying. Under Pouyade, the commander of the group for the rest of 1943, they flew through the remainder of the Orel offensive, which ended with the liberation of Orel on 5 August 1943 and the Soviet advance west beyond the bulge (Chapter 7).
The commander who did not return
Jean Tulasne was born in Nancy on 27 November 1912, the son of a cavalry officer turned aviator. He trained at the Prytanée militaire, Saint-Cyr and the Air School at Versailles and moved from bombers to fighters in 1937. In December 1940, stationed in the Levant under the Vichy government, he faked an engine failure, flew to Palestine and joined the Free French. He served with the Royal Air Force’s No. 274 Squadron near Tobruk, became chief of staff of the Free French air forces in the Middle East and in September 1941 formed the Groupe de Chasse “Alsace,” which fought at Gazala in 1942 (Ordre de la Libération).
A body found about twenty years after the war is buried in the foreign section of Moscow’s Vvedenskoye cemetery under a slab marked “French pilot, unknown”; the Normandie-Niemen memorial association identifies it as Tulasne’s. He had already received the Soviet Order of the Patriotic War, first class, by a decree of 2 July 1943, and he was made a Compagnon de la Libération posthumously on 11 October 1943.
Normandie-Niemen
The group mattered to both governments for political reasons as much as military ones. For de Gaulle, French pilots in Soviet flying clothing over Orel were proof that Fighting France was a combatant ally; for Stalin, they showed that the Soviet alliance reached beyond Britain and the United States. When the French mechanics left for the Middle East in August 1943, Soviet mechanics replaced them for the rest of the war. Russian sources date the group’s expansion into a regiment of four squadrons, named Rouen, Caen, Le Havre and Cherbourg, to 5 July 1943. It received the Yak-9 from August 1943 and later the Yak-3. Preziosi, who had scored its first victory, was also killed over Orel in 1943, and when the group moved to Tula on 6 November only six of its original pilots remained.
In its first year at the front the group was credited with 77 confirmed and 9 probable victories for 25 Yaks lost. In 1944 Stalin gave it the honorific “Niemen” for its part in the battles on the Neman River, and by 1945 Normandie-Niemen was credited with 273 enemy aircraft. Four of its pilots received the gold star of a Hero of the Soviet Union. The regiment is still part of the French Air and Space Force.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem. The group took as its emblem the arms of the province of Normandy, two gold leopards on red; its Yaks flew in Soviet markings with the red star.
Timeline
- De Gaulle orders the creation of Groupe de Chasse 3 “Normandie” at Rayak, Lebanon.
- The first contingent, 14 pilots and 58 mechanics, reaches Ivanovo.
- Commandant Jean Tulasne takes command.
- Judged ready, the group moves to the front with the 1st Air Army.
- Preziosi and Durand score the group’s first victories, two Fw 190s near Roslavl.
- Operation Kutuzov opens against the Orel bulge; the French fly escort from fields near Kozelsk.
- Littolff and Castelain are lost near Krasnikovo.
- Tulasne and Vermeil are lost in the Znamenskoye sector; Pouyade takes command.
- Tulasne is made a Compagnon de la Libération posthumously.
- The group moves to Tula; only six of its original pilots remain.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- Chapter 5: The Air War over Kursk
- Chapter 7: Citadel Called Off: Kutuzov, Rumyantsev and the Liberation of Orel, Belgorod and Kharkov
- The Battle of Kursk collection and atlas
By the numbers
Normandie-Niemen by the numbers
The first year at the front
Credited victories and aircraft lost, from March 1943. Victory figures are the unit’s credits, not checked against German loss records
Source: Yves Courrière, Normandie-Niémen (1979), and Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération, as cited on this page; Wikipedia, “Normandie-Niemen”
What July 1943 cost the original group
Pilots of the first contingent, and the toll of the Orel fighting
Source: Yves Courrière, Normandie-Niémen (1979), and Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération, as cited on this page; Wikipedia, “Normandie-Niemen”
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
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Sources
- Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération, biographies of Jean Tulasne, Albert Littolff and Noël Castelain.
- Yves Courrière, Normandie-Niémen: Un temps pour la guerre (1979), and Yves Donjon, Musée Normandie-Niemen, as cited in French Wikipedia, “Normandie-Niemen,” “Jean Tulasne,” “Albert Littolff” and “Noël Castelain.”
- M. M. Kozlov, ed., Velikaya Otechestvennaya voyna 1941–1945: Entsiklopediya (1985), as cited in Russian Wikipedia, “Нормандия — Неман”; Wikipedia, “Normandie-Niemen.”
- Christer Bergström, Kursk: The Air Battle, July 1943 (2007); Dan Zamansky, Military History (2022), on the Luftwaffe’s shift to the Orel bulge; David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, The Battle of Kursk (1999).