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Without conscious thought, Blackhawk's experienced eye calculated the differences in the two aicrafts' velocities and aimed the machine gun at the spot in the sky the enemy ship would occupy when the bullets arrived. But Major Litvyak had her eyes on the FW 190, too, and again jerked her plane away an instant before the other ship lined up for its shot.
Blackhawk realized that the Russian women pilots had developed tactics against their Nazi foes. They turned their biplanes' slow speed into an advantage. The Po-2's top speed was lower than the enemy plane's stall speed. The German fighter couldn't match speed for a carefully aimed shot. The best it could do was try to hit the slow moving biplane as it flashed past. If the Russian pilot timed it just right and jinked out of the fighter's path before it fired, the faster enemy ship could not possibly make the same tight turn. The now frustrated pilot had to swing around to try it again. Repeated enough times, the Nazi pilot would give up and leave the slow flying biplane alone. But this Nazi wasn't ready to give up, yet, and this time Blackhawk was ready for the Major's evasive maneuver.
He swung the long barrel of the machine gun, tracking the FW 190 as it swept in for another pass and he squeezed the trigger even as the Po-2 made another hard turn. Two streams of tracer bullets crossed in the night sky. The 20 mm shells from the fighter missed, but Blackhawk's machine gun rounds found their target and stitched a line of holes across the fighter's cowling. Smoke and then flame streamed from the wounded ship and then it exploded in a massive fireball, filling the darkness with blinding light for an instant before fading to eternity. Blackhawk felt a flash of heat on his face and a moment later the concussion wave shook the tough little biplane, and finally it was over.
Major Litvyak leveled her ship and headed again for home. Neither of the experienced combat pilots said anything, and it wasn't because of the difficulty of speaking over the sounds of the engine and wind in the rigging. It simply wasn't needed.
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