a third gold star, but awarded the Order of Lenin instead. In June 1944 Molodchy became a flight inspector for the 1st Guards Long-Range Aviation Division, so he did not fly any combat sorties from then until April 1945. While assigned as an inspector to the division he trained over 40 pilots. Once he was able to return to combat in April 1945, he flew four missions before the end of the war. Throughout the war he flew 311 sorties, consisting of 24 daylight and 287 night missions on the Yer-2, Il-4, and B-25 over strategically-important cities in Europe including Berlin, Stalingrad, Kursk, Königsberg, Budapest, Vitebsk, Minsk, Vilnius, Riga, Smolensk, Oryol, and Polotsk. Despite being shot down twice, he survived the war, and his flight crew shot down five Axis fighters. Postwar Molodchy remained as a flight inspector until September 1946 when he became the deputy commander of the 37th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment. He went on to attend to Higher Officer Flight and Tactical School of Long-Range Aviation in Ivanovo, which he graduated from in 1948 before returning to his post at the 37th Bomber Regiment. In March 1949 he was promoted to commander of the 121st Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment, where he remained until December 1950. He was then made the deputy commander of the 22nd Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Division, which he became commander of in December 1951, but was demoted to deputy commander in August 1953. In 1955 he was promoted to the rank major-general of aviation and made commander of the 106th Heavy Bomber Aviation Division. After graduating from the Military Academy of General Staff in November 1959 he was assigned to the 5th Long-Range Air Army, and in 1961 he took command of the 8th Separate Bomber Aviation Corps. In 1963 he made a flight to a polar icefield with a full load of bombs in a Myasishchev ZM. His military career began to decline after he sent a letter to Marshal Rodion Malinovsky expressing concern about the structure and organization of military long-range aviation. The letter was seen by Marshal Filipp Agaltsov, who already had a personal grudge against Molodchy; Agaltsov had become a marshal of aviation despite being a commissar and political worker, rather than a pilot. Shortly after storming out of a meeting with military officials in outrage, he was discharged into the reserve - supposedly for health reasons, even though