The noise first reached the Bolshevik cavalry as an intense, insectlike droning in the sky while the horsemen were riding across southern Russia’s sunburned steppes, featureless plains that scarcely afford cover for a rabbit. Their objective was the strategically important city of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad) on the Volga River, where they anticipated an easy victory over the White Russian anti-Bolshevik defenders. A brutal orgy of rapine and torture would follow against any enemies of the revolution who survived the first assault—for terror was the signature of Red cavalry leader Boris Dumenko’s 5,000-strong force.

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As the droning grew louder, the cavalrymen exchanged uneasy glances. It sounded like enemy aircraft, but where? The huge vault of the sky above them seemed empty. Then someone yelled out, jabbing his hand urgently into the air. All eyes turned in the direction indicated, squinting at four tiny dots that quickly became airplanes, flying straight toward them. Officers shouted, pointing and gesticulating, but gave no orders. Then the horses, sensing the confusion and spooked by the noise of the approaching engines, began to whinny and rear.

Soon the planes were nearly above them. The cavalry started to break ranks and fired a few aimless shots into the sky. Suddenly, like a gigantic bird of prey, one of the planes detached itself from the others and plunged down at them, engine screaming, in a near vertical dive. Briefly the Reds glimpsed the pilot’s helmeted head. In a terrifying crescendo of sound the other planes followed, aiming at the wheeling mass of horsemen in what seemed like an act of collective suicide. Just before crashing into the unyielding steppe, each plane pulled out of its dive and released four small bombs. Sixteen detonations wreaked bloody carnage, as men and horses were blown apart.

The terrified survivors scattered across the plain, vainly attempting to escape from an attack against which they had no adequate defense. The swooping planes were not done with them yet. Climbing back into the sky, they cartwheeled down again to scythe the panic-stricken men and horses with lethal bursts from their twin machine guns. Time after time, through the stupefying roar of engines, came the vicious stammer of the machine guns until it seemed there could not be a man or beast left alive or unwounded.

The planes left as suddenly as they had appeared, waggling their wings as they growled off in the direction from which they had come. Dumenko’s force was utterly broken, its dazed survivors strewn over the steppe. Even then for many there was no reprieve: They were hunted down and slaughtered by their rivals, the White Cossacks. Tsaritsyn was saved for the moment. On the killing ground, the Cossacks counted 1,600 Bolshevik dead. No wounded survived.

The perpetrators of this devastating piece of aerial warfare were four Sopwith Camels of B Flight, No. 47 Squadron, Royal Air Force, part of the British interventionist force in south Russia during the Russian Civil War. The squadron was acting in support of the anti-Bolshevik White Russian forces, otherwise known as the Volunteer Army, under General Anton Ivanovich Denikin.

Allied intervention in Russia had started in early 1918, after the fall of the Romanovs and the collapse of Aleksandr Kerensky’s provisional government, when the subsequent peace agreement between the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers threatened to release hundreds of thousands of German soldiers to reinforce the Western Front. There were also concerns about the submarine bases at Archangel and Murmansk and access to the vast resources of Siberia. Britain and France hastily pledged assistance to any Russian forces willing to go on fighting the Central Powers, leading directly to Allied support of various anti-Bolshevik groups around the periphery of Russia. Ultimately this brought about well-intentioned but ill-coordinated Allied involvement with the United States and Japan (which pursued its own colonial agenda in the Far East) over four years in several parts of Russia—actions that would result in the utter defeat of anti-Bolshevism and the humiliation of the Allies. Allied intervention in that conflict imbued Soviet leaders with a mistrust of the Western powers that has persisted even past the end of the Cold War.

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