‘Learning is Winning'

We are used to thinking that when Operation Barbarossa opened, the combat-experienced Luftwaffe met a combat-inexperienced VVS (Voenno-vozdushniye sily, the Soviet Air Force). Like most popular myths about the Soviet military, this is both true and false. While the VVS was woefully ill-prepared for combat, its pilots had seen combat in numerous locales in the previous five years.