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Music Hello everyone and welcome to history of the Second World War, episode 141, the Soviet Union Part 11, by air and by sea.

While the Soviet Red Army was hoping to use the new industrial capabilities

created by the five-year plans to enable a new form of more mobile warfare to be fought,

the Soviet Navy and Air Force were largely dependent on the actions of the five-year plans

to allow them any real expansion of their capabilities. This expansion would happen, and for the

Soviet Air Force, they would be able to test their new aircraft and the Soviet theories of airpower

multiple times before the invasion of Poland. The two most important areas, where this occurred,

were in actions that the podcast has already covered, the Spanish Civil War, and then the fighting against

the Japanese in Mongolia. In both cases, the Soviet Air Force would encounter serious challenges,

just like every other Air Force of the 1930s, as it engaged in air battles. From these challenging

beginnings, the Soviet Air Force would go on to be an important part of the fighting on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, although its contribution would be

largely overshadowed by that of the Red Army.

The Soviet Navy would only really begin to be built up later in the 1930s.

After the Russian Civil War, the naval power of the Soviet Union had largely decayed down to a large number of very small ships,

but very few larger vessels capable of projecting any kind of real naval power,

...