Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Il-2 assault ace who rose to command the Soviet Air Force at its zenith
On 31 August 2012, upon hearing that his lifelong friend Marshal Sergei Sokolov had died, Yefimov suffered a fatal heart attack. The two old soldiers departed the same day.
The Soviet Air Force's greatest Il-2 assault ace of the Great Patriotic War, Yefimov flew 222 combat sorties, destroying 85 enemy aircraft on the ground and 7 in the air, and received the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union twice by the age of twenty-one. As First Deputy C-in-C of the Air Force from 1969, he was the driving force behind the Su-25 ground-attack aircraft, and as Commander-in-Chief from 1984 he directed Soviet air operations in Afghanistan, presiding over the force at its quantitative peak of over 13,000 aircraft. In retirement he remained an influential figure as chairman of the Russian Committee of War Veterans.
Career Timeline
- 1942–1945Il-2 pilot → squadron commander, 198th Assault Aviation Regiment; 222 sorties
- 1957–1959Commander, 339th Fighter-Bomber Aviation Division → 6th Guards Bomber Aviation Division
- 1964–1969Commander, 57th (later 14th) Air Army, Carpathian Military District
- 1969–1984First Deputy C-in-C, Soviet Air Force
- 1984–1990C-in-C, Soviet Air Force — Deputy Minister of Defence, USSR
- 1990–1993Chairman, State Commission on Airspace Use and Air Traffic Control
- 2006–2010Member, Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation; Chairman, Russian Committee of War Veterans
Related historical events
The Su-25 and the Revival of Ground-Attack Aviation
After Stalin's death, in April 1956, Defence Minister Zhukov abolished ground-attack aviation within the Soviet Air Force, arguing that assault aircraft had no place in modern warfare. For Yefimov, an Il-2 pilot who had fought the Great Patriotic War from the cockpit of a Sturmovik, this was 'not a step forward, but two steps back.' When appointed First Deputy C-in-C of the Air Force in 1969, he launched a sustained campaign to resurrect the ground-attack arm. Yefimov threw his full backing behind the Sukhoi design bureau's concept for a light attack aircraft, the T-8, and personally chaired both the mock-up commission and the State Testing Commission, driving the Su-25 programme past every obstacle. On 22 February 1975, when the T8-1 prototype made its maiden flight, Yefimov was on hand to raise the toast: 'To the revival of ground-attack aviation!' In April 1981, even before state trials were complete, it was Yefimov who ordered the Su-25 rushed to Afghanistan for combat evaluation under Operation Romb. The 200th Independent Assault Aviation Squadron, deployed to Shindand, proved the Su-25's exceptional survivability and close air support capability over the Panjshir Valley and Farah, and the aircraft went on to become the backbone of Soviet and Russian ground-attack aviation, deployed in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria long after the Cold War ended.