Ivan Ilyich Babak

Ivan Ilyich Babak was born on 26 July 1919 in the village of Alekseyevka, now in Nikopol district of Dnipropetrovsk region, into a peasant family. He was Ukrainian. He graduated from the Zaporizhzhia teacher-training institute and from a flying club, and taught chemistry and biology at the Partizanskaya secondary school in Primorsky district of Zaporizhzhia region. He went to the war a schoolteacher and returned to teaching after it. He joined the Red Army in 1940 and graduated from the Stalingrad military aviation school in 1942. He reached the front in May 1942 as a pilot of the 45th Fighter Aviation Regiment, 216th Composite Aviation Division, and opened his account over Mozdok in the summer of 1942. For their part in the fighting over the Kuban the regiment and division were made Guards units, becoming the 100th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment and the 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Division. His Hero of the Soviet Union was conferred on him as a flight commander of the 100th Guards Regiment for the fighting at the breakthrough on the Molochnaya river and the liberation of Mariupol. On 6 September 1943, flying an Airacobra, he shot up the locomotive of a train on which, as the sources record, German forces were making a last attempt to take local young women from Mariupol to Germany. The people of Mariupol raised the money for a fighter named Mariupol, which was given to Babak. By September 1943 he had shot down eighteen enemy aircraft alone and four shared. By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 1 November 1943, Guards Junior Lieutenant Ivan Ilyich Babak was made a Hero of the Soviet Union with the Order of Lenin and Gold Star no. 1132. Over the war he shot down thirty-five aircraft alone and five shared. In February 1945 Senior Lieutenant Babak was appointed to command the 16th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, the regiment previously commanded by Aleksandr Pokryshkin. On 16 March 1945, less than two months before the end of the war, his aircraft was shot down by anti-aircraft fire on a combat mission and he was taken prisoner; he was freed after the victory. While he was believed dead, a pilot of his regiment, Grigory Dolnikov, painted the inscriptions "For Petya Guchok" and "For Vanya Babak" on his own aircraft. On 14 April 1945 his division commander, Pokryshkin, recommended Babak for a second Hero of the Soviet Union, but the recommendation was not acted on because he had been a prisoner, and when he returned to the regiment on 19 May 1945 he received no decoration either. He commanded the 32nd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment until 1947 and completed the senior officers' flying and tactics course that year. From 1949 Captain Babak was in the reserve and later retired. He returned to the work the war had interrupted, teaching chemistry and serving as head of school no. 7 in Poltava. His memoir, Stars on the Wings, appeared in 1981. He died on 24 June 2001 and is buried at the central cemetery in Poltava. Schools in Alekseyevka and in the village of Yuzhny in Kaliningrad region were named after him.