A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (31 page)

Senior Sergeant Yekaterina Polunina,
senior mechanic of the aircraft

First I was a mechanic of the aircraft for Olga Studenetskaia, the pilot
who shot down a Junkers Ju-88 bomber, and who was a deputy squadron commander. I was very surprised when she chose me to be her
mechanic; probably it was because she knew I had worked at an
aviation test factory. I remember when she was coming in to land and
the elevator cable on her Yak broke and she couldn't land, so she
opened the throttle, gained altitude, and jumped. When she jumped,
the stabilizer hit her in the back as the plane was spinning, and she
spent seven months in the hospital. She came hack to our unit but
she was not allowed to fly anymore, so she went to light aircraft
aviation.

Once I was arrested. I had to do some technical work on the aircraft that took some fifty hours, and when I went to the mess to have
a bowl of soup, the commander announced a lineup. I was arrested
because I wasn't on duty, and I was given ten days in the guardhouse.
It was a cabin in which I could only stand still. I couldn't bend, I
couldn't lie down, only stand still. The most difficult thing about it
was keeping up morale. The most outrageous thing was to go outside
the door of the room with a man standing behind me with a gun
sticking in my back saying, "Go and have your-whatever you have to do." And I had to do it in his presence. I was doomed to stay there ten
days, but I only stayed two, because no aircraft could do without the
mechanic. Afterwards I read in the documents of the political staff of
the regiment that I was punished because I had not prepared the
aircraft for flying. But that was not true-I didn't have to prepare it for
flying; I had fifty hours to do some provisional work with the plane.

After the war, all of the women who were mechanics before the
war or who were attending school in mechanics or who were faculty
members teaching mechanics-all changed careers. None went back
to it. They found it was too heavy a work for women.

One night we were having a little rest on the heaps of straw outside
on the airfield. The field was not lighted, and we suddenly heard the
roaring of an engine in the air and thought it was a German plane. At
that moment it turned on its identification lights-forbidden in wartime-and it became clear that the pilot was asking for lights on the
runway for landing. And when it landed and we came up to the
aircraft, we didn't know who was in the cockpit, a German or a Soviet
pilot. If a German pilot, what to do with him: to imprison him or to
fire at him? Just then the canopy opened, and a robust young man
speaking Russian called us bad names, and said, "Why didn't you give
me identification lights on the wind tee for the runway to land on?"
He was short of fuel and was on the verge of crashing. We were so
happy that he turned out to be a Soviet pilot and not a German one.

One day, at the end of the war on an airfield in Hungary, a sporttype plane came in and landed. As he taxied toward us, I realized he
was not a Russian but a foreigner, and he said in German "Kaput" as
he got out of the cockpit. I looked then at the wings and at the tail,
and I saw the German fascist crosses. I knew I had allowed the landing of a fascist aircraft! In our regiment there was only one person
who could speak a foreign language, Nina Slovokhotova, our deputy
regimental navigator. She asked him in English who he was, what
nationality he was, and he explained he was Hungarian and had arrived by himself to see what had happened to his native town, Budapest. And I, Yekaterina, had allowed him to land.

In 1943, after ten of our pilots died during the war, nine more came
to the 586th regiment as replacements. Nine of our pilots are still
alive in 199o. The Yak fighter was a sophisticated and difficult plane
to maintain, so the senior engineer and squadron engineers were men.
But the engineer in avionics and the engineer in armament were
women. Not only women served as mechanics but men also. Most of
the mechanics have suffered from ill health after the war.

The fighter pilots had to act as their own navigators and gunners,
and so they had to have experience and many flying hours. Each
regiment had a rear service battalion for fuel, cooks, ammunition
service, chemical service, and guard company, and the airforce regiments only had the responsibility for flying missions.

There was no water, so we boiled snow; there was no antifreeze for
the planes, so we drained them in winter after each mission and
drained the oil and heated it in barrels with a stove underneath. The
barrels were on skis like a sleigh, to take to the planes. If a plane made
a forced landing, we often towed the sleigh to the aircraft for many,
many kilometers. All the mechanics, twenty-two of us, were students
of the Moscow Aviation Institute.

Early in the war our regiment had the Yak-1 fighter with two machine guns of 7.62 mm caliber, the same as rifle bullets-very small
caliber-so it was necessary to attack about three times to shoot
down a plane. In 1942 they replaced them with 12.7 mm machine
guns and a 20 mm cannon that fired through the gearbox shaft. The
Yak engine, as well as the machine guns, started with compressed air,
with a very long tube to the compressor; and if the tubes broke in the
air, the pilots couldn't fire their guns. It was difficult to adjust these
machine guns so they wouldn't hit the propeller. The guns were
called "klicks" because they made that kind of noise. Each gun
weighed 20 kilos, and it was heavy to clean and oil in the winter.

The main mission of our air defense regiment was not to shoot
down but to chase away enemy aircraft. We started in combat from
the banks of the Volga River on to Vienna, Austria, where we were
then equipped with Yak-9 fighters. Our aircraft guarded bridges;
many river crossings including the Don, the Voronezh, the Dnieper,
and the Dniester; industrial centers; railroad centers; and our troops
at the front.

The pilots flew 4,419 combat missions and 125 dogfights and shot
down thirty-eight enemy aircraft. Few of the places the regiment
guarded were destroyed by enemy aviation. Some eight crews from
our regiment were assigned to two male fighter squadrons on the
Stalingrad front, and they flew in pairs with male pilots as their
wingmen because they did not have as much experience.

The wingman's duty was to protect the tail of the lead fighter pilot.
When one of the girls, Nechayeva, was protecting the squadron commander who was about to land, three German Me-ro9s attacked
them. She had no fuel, no ammunition, but she covered his aircraft
with hers, and everyone there saw her killed. Budanova, another of our pilots sent to the male squadron, perished in July, 1943, but not
before she shot down over twenty German aircraft; and Lilya Litvyak,
also an ace, died in August, 1943. Five of the eight pilots came back to
our regiment. Our pilots would dive as much as seven kilometers in a
dogfight, and their blood vessels were damaged.

There are monuments to both Budanova and Litvyak. The mechanics knew their pilots very well. I am the regimental archivist.

Captain Alexandra Makunina,
chief of staff

We moved to Moscow when I was four years old. I was twenty-four
when the war started, and we were on an expedition to find mineral
deposits in the Ural Mountains. It was not until the fourth day of the
war that we found out about it. On August 3 I got to Moscow. On
October io I joined the army, went to train at Engels, and then on to
the front with the 586th Fighter Regiment. It was a difficult time for
Moscow itself, as the German troops were very near the capital, and
it was being bombed from the air by the fascists.

Most all the women in the regiment had gone to glider school. I,
too, had gone to glider school. I was in my first year of postgraduate
studies after finishing in the Department of Physical Geography at
the university. I flew the gliders and jumped with a parachute. I was
looking for adventure, and when the war started my first impulse was
to join the partisans on the ground. Being a geographer, I had been on
some expeditions looking for deposits, and I also was a mountain
climber. I trained with the regiment at Engels where I had navigation
courses. My teacher was Marina Raskova, and Raskova herself appointed me to be chief of staff. I was striving to fly, but Marina said to
me, "In the regiments I've enough girls who can fly the planes, but to
be chief of staff I must be sure you are a person of brains." She would
say that the staff was the brain of the regiment. As chief of staff I was
the second in command on the ground after the commander of the
regiment. The position carried a wide range of responsibilities. I had
the responsibility of planning the work of the regiment on the ground,
air training, and combat missions. My rank was lieutenant, and I
finished the war as a captain.

Besides the staff itself there was a control post responsible for the
combat missions, and it was part of my duty to organize its work.
Also the women could come to me if they needed something-they
could and they did! They could go to town when they were not on
duty, get their hair done, meet the fellows, fall in love. When bad news came from home I authorized short-term leaves for them. They
used to say, "Who sleeps less than anyone in the regiment-the chief
of staff!" It was a strain for me to be of this rank and to serve as a
commander, and as a consequence I began fainting. I never slept more
than three hours a night, sometimes not at all. When I began fainting
I asked to be appointed deputy commander because I couldn't physically stand the overstrain any longer.

When I became the deputy commander my duties were to plan
combat missions and training flights-schedule everything. My profession and training as a physical geographer helped me a lot. For
example, when the regiment started for another airfield I had all the
maps, and I explained to the girls the terrain and topography of the
new area.

The women were all volunteers, and it was a fever of patriotism, a
necessity for them to do something. I myself could not have acted in
any other way; it was proper to be at the front and to do this work.
The very notion, the very sense of defending the motherland, was the
duty of all the men and the women too. But I don't think women
should make combat flights at all; I think a woman should remain a
woman. Combat is not for a woman.

I remember when we received military clothing for the girls: jackets, overalls, boots, pants, all male clothing, everything very large. We
didn't receive any underwear for women; it was not a normal situation. One of the girls received very, very large boots, and while she
was checking the aircraft and getting it ready for a mission, she took
off her boots and performed her job bare-legged. At this moment the
staff of the regiment was approaching. She realized that it was going
to be a uniform violation and she would be punished, so she had to
leave her job, jump into the hoots, and stand straight in order to report
to the staff.

In our regiment the girls were attractive. They were very young
and fresh, and nearby was a male regiment. Well, they got acquainted
and they loved each other. Once the commander of that male regiment came to our commander and said, "I can give you as many
aircraft as you want if you give me five girls [at this point he gave their
names]; let's make an exchange!"

It is a fact that girls were arrested for some violations. Sonya Tishurova was keen on dancing, and she even formed a special group of
girls who performed national dances in the regiment. She tried to
teach the Belorussian national dance to everybody. Once she was
arrested for three days for absence without leave, and when a person is arrested they are to take off their belt. She was put in a guardhouse,
a room where she could do nothing, just stay there with her meals
brought to her, but she still could see through the window that life
was going on. Sonya stayed there without a belt on her uniform, and a
brass band arrived at the regiment. It grieved her not to attend, because bands almost never came to the front. Besides, there were a lot
of male regiments, and she was so popular among all the dancing fans
who knew Tishurova was the best at performing the dances. So they
came to her rescue and brought her a belt so she could be in uniform.
She escaped from that room and came to the dance and then returned
to the guardhouse!

High-ranking officials decided who was to be punished and what
the punishment would be, but lower ranks could prescribe shorter
punishments.

Senior Lieutenant Mariya Kuznetsova,
pilot

I began flying in 1936, when I was eighteen. I was born in a city near
Moscow, and my parents were peasants. My father was arrested in
1937. When I started at the aeroclub I had to write in the documents
that my father was arrested and imprisoned, and for this reason, because he was considered an enemy of the people, I was expelled several times from this flying course. My friends, however, persuaded
the principal of the school to let me finish the courses. My father died
during the war.

I became a flight instructor in the Po-2 in a military pilot school
and taught there for five years, graduating about sixty pilots. In 1941 I
joined the army and was assigned to the 586th Fighter Regiment as a
pilot guarding targets like bridges and such.

I took part in the actions at the Stalingrad front, and I was there
when the German troops in Stalingrad were surrounded and surrendered. I remained there up to the summer of 1943. They had sent four
of us to the Stalingrad front to join a male fighter regiment, and there
we met the enemy's every mission. I shot down three enemy aircraft.
We suffered great losses of planes and pilots at that time, and because
of a shortage of aircraft I didn't fly on every combat mission. Men
mostly flew the Yaks. Of four aircraft flying in a formation, one was
piloted by a woman-me. I shot down a Ju-87 and a Ju-88, German
bombers. At that time German planes were superior in number, and
in each battle we either lost an aircraft or a crew. Our fighters attacked the bombers, and the German fighters fought our fighters, and one of our pilots said, "We have to fight the enemy on our own
fair land, and in an alien sky which at present doesn't belong to us."