During the Great Patriotic War (i.e. the Eastern Front of World War II), Khrushchev served as a political commissar (zampolit) with the equivalent rank of Lieutenant General.
In the months following the German invasion, in 1941, Khrushchev, as a local party leader, was coordinating the defense of Ukraine, but was dismissed and recalled to Moscow after surrendering Kiev. Later, he was a political commissar at the Battle of Stalingrad and was the senior political officer in the south of the Soviet Union throughout the war time period - at Kursk, entering Kiev on liberation, and in the suppression of the Bandera nationalists of the Ukrainian Nationalist Organisation, who had earlier allied with the Nazis before fighting them in Western Ukraine.
In the years leading up to 1953, Khrushchev was an ardent Stalinist, carrying out Stalin's orders with uncritical obedience; he earned the nickname "the Butcher of the Ukraine" in the late 1940s.[3]
Kruschev could fly.....