Mikhail Petrovich Devyataev (Russian: Михаил Петрович Девятаев; Moksha: Михаил Петрович Девятаев/Mixail Petrovič Devätaev; 8 July 1917 – 24 November 2002) was a Soviet fighter pilot known for his escape from a Nazi concentration camp on the island of Usedom, in the Baltic Sea.
Early life and military career
Mikhail Devyataev was born in 1917 at Torbeyevo, Mikhail was the thirteenth child born to the family of a Mokshan peasant.
In 1934, he saw an airplane for the first time (it was an air ambulance that had arrived in Torbeyevo to pick up a sick person). After that, he decided to become a pilot.
In 1938 he graduated from a School of River Navigation in Kazan and worked as the captain of a small ship on the Volga. That same year he was conscripted into the Red Army and began education at a Chkalov Flying School, graduating in 1940.
He became a lieutenant and a fighter pilot.
On June 22, 1941, the Axis powers attacked the USSR. Devyatayev fought from the first day of the war in Belorussian Special Military District (which became the Western Front). On June 24, 1941, he shot down his first enemy plane, a Ju 87. Two days later, his I-16 plane was shot down in an air battle near Minsk. A Luftwaffe fighter pilot of enemy "Messerschmitt-109" tried to shoot Devyatayev, who had parachuted out of his burning plane, in mid-air. Devyatayev saved his life because he managed to make a skydive. Soon he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner.
On 23 September he was seriously wounded (he was hit in his left leg). After a long stay in the military hospital he was assigned to Po-2 unit and then to medical aviation. He resumed his duties as a fighter pilot after his meeting with the famous Soviet ace Aleksandr Pokryshkin in May 1944.
Commander of an echelon with the 104th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, Senior Lieutenant Devyatayev destroyed nine enemy planes.
On July 13, 1944, while flying a Bell P-39, Devyataev made three combat sorties, escorting bombers, and then flew for the fourth time to intercept enemy Junkers. He was shot down by a Messerschmitt aircraft near Lvov. He was downed over German-occupied territory and became a prisoner of war, held in the Łódź concentration camp. He made an attempt to escape on 13 August but was caught and transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
He soon realised that his situation was perilous because as a Soviet pilot, he could expect extreme brutality and high risk of execution; therefore, he allegedly managed to exchange identities with a dead Soviet infantryman named Grigoriy Nikitenko.
Devyataev was later transferred to a camp in Usedom to be a part of a forced labor crew working for the German missile program on the island of Peenemünde.
In the preserved camp records, he appears correctly as prisoner 11024 Dewjatajew, Michail, however. Under hellish conditions, the prisoners were forced to repair runways and clear unexploded bombs by hand. Security was rigidly enforced with vicious guards and dogs, and there was little chance of escape. Even so, by February 1945, Devyataev concluded that, however remote, the chance of escape was preferable to certain death as a prisoner.
Devyataev managed to convince three other prisoners (Sokolov, Krivonogov and Nemchenko) that he could fly them to freedom. They decided to run away at dinner time, when most of the guards were in the dining room. Sokolov and Nemchenko were able to create a work gang composed only of Soviet citizens, as they did not know foreign languages with which to communicate freely and coordinate their plans with other inmates.
At noon on 8 February 1945, as the ten Soviet POWs, including Devyataev, were at work on the runway, one of the work gang, Ivan Krivonogov, picked up a crowbar, killed their guard and took his rifle. Another prisoner, Peter Kutergin, quickly stripped off the guard's uniform and slipped it on.
The work gang, led by the "guard", managed to unobtrusively take over the camp commandant's He 111 H22 bomber and fly from the island. Devyataev piloted the aircraft.
The Germans tried to intercept the bomber unsuccessfully.
The aircraft was damaged by Soviet air defences, but managed to land in Soviet territory. Devyatayev and his comrades were met by soldiers of the artillery unit of the 61st Army of the Red Army