Gorškov, Ivan Alexandrovič

senior lieutenantIvan Alexandrovich Gorshkov

I.A. Gorshkov was born in 1910 in the village of Usenevo (Усенево) of the Moscow Region in a family of a laborer, his nationality was Russian. No further information is available about his childhood. From archival documents it is clear that he was conscripted into the army by the regional military commissariat of Leningrad in 1932. After graduating from the Ej pilot school, he commanded at the rank of lieutenant (lieutenant) a swarm of the 6th Fighter Squadron, belonging to the 116th Fighter Aviation Brigade of the Belarusian Military District.

As a "Soviet volunteer", he took part on the Republican side of the fighting in the Spanish Civil War. For five months he fought on a I-15 type machine. There is no record in the archives that he achieved the downing of an enemy aircraft. All that is apparent is that he participated in approximately 30 combat sorties and engaged in four aerial dogfights. In one of them, on 20.01.1938 in the Teruel area, his machine was hit by enemy fire and Gorshkov had to bail out of the damaged machine. The wreckage of his machine hit another Republican I-15, at the controls of which sat the commander of 2a Escuadrilla, Grupo No 26, Teniente Leopoldo Morquillas Rubio. Both pilots were rescued by parachutes and landed in Republican-held territory.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, he fought at the rank of lieutenant (senior lieutenant) as squadron commander of the 1st Fighter Aviation Regiment on the Crimean, Western and Northwestern Fronts. Some sources state¹ that he was given command of the 774th Fighter Aviation Regiment for six days, which had been formed shortly before from the 1st Fighter Aviation Regiment. However, from the scan shown below, it is clear that he died as squadron commander of 774. IAP. On 25.04.1942, after taking off in a Yak-1 fighter, he did not return from a combat flight in the Novgorod region.

During the war he participated in 103 combat sorties, 40 of which were attacks on enemy ground troops, 37 of which he accompanied bombers and fighters as fighter cover, and 20 of which were patrol sorties over the battlefield. He fought 30 aerial dogfights in which he single-handedly shot down three German machines - one Junkers Ju-88 and two machines of the type Messerschmitt Bf-109.

Anokhin, V., Bykov, M.: All Stalin's Fighter Air Regiments. The First Complete Encyclopedia, Yauza-press, 2014. ISBN 978-5-9955-0707-9
www.obd-memorial.ru
https://allaces.ru/p/people.php?id=17577¹
https://www.proza.ru/2015/01/08/2173
Logoluso, A., Caruana, R.: Fiat CR.32 Aces of the Spanish Civil War, Osprey Publishing, 2013
CSAMO, f. 20418, op. 1, d. 4, l. 15.
TsAMO, f. 58, op. 818883, d. 1519, l. 3.
TsAMO, f. 56, op. 12220, d. 34, l. 108