Amet-khan Sultan

Amet-khan Sultan (Crimean Tatar: Amet-Han Sultan, Амет-Хан Султан, احمدخان سلطان; Ukrainian: Амет-Хан Султан; 20 October 1920 – 1 February 1971) was a highly decorated Crimean Tatar flying ace in the Soviet Air Force with 30 personal and 19 shared kills who was twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

Amet-Khan Sultan was born on 20 October 1920 to a Crimean Tatar mother and a Lak father in Alupka, Crimea, then part of the short-lived state of South Russia (now Ukraine) during the Russian Civil War.

In 1937, he graduated from secondary school and later studied at the railworker's school in Simferopol as well as at the aeroclub based at Zavodskoe Airport, where he graduated from flight training in 1938 while he was employed as a fitter at a local railway depot.

In February 1939, he joined the Red Army and was sent for further training at the Kacha Higher Military Aviation School of Pilots, which he graduated from in 1940, and was assigned to the 122nd Fighter Aviation Regiment.

Amet-khan's name would occasionally attract mockery from his peers, but he himself would often poke fun at his name, joking that "I myself am both the Khan and the Sultan."

Most of his friends and family would refer to him as Amet-khan, not Sultan.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Amet-khan was a pilot in the 4th Fighter Aviation Regiment and immediately deployed to the front lines to carry out defensive sorties flying the obsolete Polikarpov I-153 over Rostov-on-Don.

In winter 1942 after suffering high casualties the regiment was retrained and taught to fly the newer Hawker Hurricane.

In March 1942, the regiment was deployed to defend the city of Yaroslavl, during which Amet-khan scored his first aerial victory on 31 May 1942.

He rammed a Junkers-88 bomber with his fighter after running out of ammunition, striking it on the left wing head-on while flying upwards and slicing off the wing.

He managed to jump out of his burning plane and parachute to the ground, with minor injuries to his arm and head, some from having slammed his head into the dashboard of the cockpit.

He landed on a farm where a worker pointed a pitchfork at him because the worker was worried Amet-khan was one of the Luftwaffe pilots, but after folding over his pilot's coat and showing the farmer his Order of the Red Star they showed him respect and inspected the site where the planes fell.

The two pilots of the Ju 88 were identified by villagers while Amet-khan rested.

Amet-khan stayed on that farm for a night to recover and was visited by the regiment commissar, who woke him up and congratulated him on his successful attack.

He soon returned to his regiment to fly again after a brief stay in the hospital, where he came to be teased by several of his fellow pilots for ramming his plane upwards instead of ramming downward and smashing only the landing gear of the plane against the Ju 88, which might have enabled him to make a belly-landing and walk away without a scratch.

The bomber turned out to have been on a reconnaissance mission, making the sacrifice of his plane less of a loss to the Soviet Air Force.

For the victory he was presented with an engraved watch in the Yaroslavl city square and later awarded the Order of Lenin.

In the summer of 1942, Amet-khan scored nine more aerial victories, most of them while flying in groups over Voronezh in a Hawker Hurricane before he was reassigned in August to Stalingrad, where he piloted a Yak-7B and was praised by his commanders for being one of the first in the regiment to engage an enemy fighter at night.

He briefly piloted a Yak-1 over Voronezh that summer and did not score any aerial victories during that time, but later in the war he scored several victories while flying one.

In the Battle of Stalingrad he quickly increased his tally and was reassigned in October to the prestigious 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, which had been reorganized to be composed entirely of flying aces to counter German air offensives in the area.

The regiment included Mikhail Baranov, the most successful Soviet ace at the time, and Lydia "Lily" Litvak, the first female flying ace.

Over Stalingrad in August 1942 Amet-khan had to parachute out of his plane for a second time after his Yak-7B was shot down.

From November 1942 until the end of the war he remained the commander of the third squadron of the 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment.

After retraining to fly a Bell P-39 Airacobra in 1943 he fought over Rostov-on-Don and saw heavy combat over the Kuban area as part of the campaign to retake control of Taganrog, Melitopol, and the Crimean Peninsula.

On 24 August 1943, he was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for his success in contributing to the aerial defense on the Southern, Bryansk, and Stalingrad fronts, as well as over Moldova, southern Ukraine, and Yaroslavl.

Although not recorded in official Soviet documents, British historians Thomas Polak and Christopher Shores attributed a second aerial ramming of a Ju 88 to Amet-khan, taking place over the Battle of Stalingrad in winter of 1943.

Only seventeen Soviet pilots are known to have executed two aerial rammings; two Soviet pilots executed three rammings, and one pilot, Boris Kovzan, who committed four, holds the record for most aerial rammings.

Despite having been able to avoid deportation to Uzbekistan when the entire Crimean Tatar nation was repressed in 1944 due to his father's Lak background, he refused to change his passport nationality listing to Lak or identify as one throughout his entire life despite pressure from government organs.

After the end of the war, he worked as a test pilot at the Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky and mastered piloting 96 different aircraft types before he was killed in a crash while testing a new engine on a modified Tupolev Tu-16 bomber.

He remains memorialized throughout Ukraine and Russia, with streets, schools, and airports named after him as well as a museum dedicated to his memory.

From 18 to 20 May 1944, he was permitted to take a three-day vacation from combat to visit his family in Alupka, not long after the Soviets retook control of Crimea, bringing several of his friends, including fellow Hero of the Soviet Union Pavel Golovachev.

One morning, an NKVD officer barged into the Amet-khan house attempted to force Amet-khan and his parents to leave Crimea, but they initially refused to leave and a struggle ensued until Amet-khan identified himself as a Hero of the Soviet Union to the NKVD officer who had attacked him and his status as a war hero was confirmed by Pavel Golovachev who was present at the scene.

The NKVD officer then began questioning him about his ethnic background, decided that Amet-khan was technically Dagestani, and explained that there was an order to deport the entire Crimean Tatar people and that his brother Imran was wanted for collaborating with the Germans.

Throughout the day the NKVD continued to deport the Crimean Tatar people, and his mother, who was a Crimean Tatar, was sent to a transportation point, but after other members of the Air Force who were friends of Amet-khan made it clear to the NKVD that she and the rest of her immediate family were exempt from deportation because she was married to a Lak and hence no longer considered a Crimean Tatar in the eyes of the law, she and her husband were spared deportation; however, they were advised to temporarily relocate to Dagestan, for the time being.

His thirtieth solo and last aerial victory occurred near Berlin Tempelhof Airport when he took out a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 on 29 April 1945.

Eventually Imran was sentenced in 1946, but Amet-khan's parents still were allowed to live in Crimea.

After witnessing the violent deportation, Amet-khan returned to his regiment and continued to distinguish himself in battle, but suffered from severe depression.

He flew a Lavochkin La-7 in the later parts of the war in campaigns over Königsberg, Berlin, and East Prussia.

In the Battle of Königsberg he and his regiment flew with a group of French pilots from the Normandie-Niemen regiment.

Amet-khan saved the life of one of his comrades over Königsberg; after Chubukov and Khvostov engaged with a group of originally six fighters; two German fighters went down while taking out Khvostov, and Chubukov was surrounded by the remaining four when Amet-khan rushed toward the fighters and saved Chubukov from being shot down.