A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (7 page)

Our regiment made 300 combat missions from that field in those
conditions. The total combat missions flown by our regiment during
the war was 23,000. I personally made 23 combat missions as a navigator, and Bershanskaya made 35. We lost about thirty members of our
regimental air crews. For us, those were great losses; for the army, it
was not considered heavy losses.

Our whole regiment took to embroidering. We had no threads, no
real cloth, but we had underwear, usually of a blue material, and we
had cloth-not socks-that you put your foot into and then pulled on
the boots. You see, the boots were very large for us, and these cloths
made them fit comfortably. We embroidered flowers on those cloths
with thread made out of the blue underwear.

When we moved forward into Poland and Germany, we found
many pictures of beautiful flowers to use in our embroidery. My
mother would send colored threads to me at the front. Once I came on
inspection to one of the dugouts because there had been much rain,
the dugouts were flooded, and we wanted to repair the trench to make
it more livable. I saw that the floor was covered with water and that
water was streaming down the walls. There was a table near the light,
and I saw one of the girls standing on the table embroidering, oblivious of the conditions in the room.

The squabbles that went on between the flight squadrons were
almost always about who was to take off first. The first to take off
usually flew the most missions, and they were competitive. The
spirit in the female regiments differed greatly from that in the male regiments. But we were quite ordinary people, and we sometimes
violated the strict code of army discipline. It was required that we
always fly with flares, which came with a parachute attached to slow
their descent so we could see where to land. Once two of our navigators, who did not use the flares while on a mission, separated the
parachutes from the unused flares. They used the material to sew
underwear and pants, because we were supplied with only male underwear. These crew members were brought to trial in the regiment
for destroying military ammunition and were each sentenced to ten
years' imprisonment. They were allowed, however, to stay with the
regiment to show their ability to settle down and he adequate military officers through their work. One of them was killed in action,
and the other survived the war with her chest covered with decorations and orders. At that time the girls agreed with their sentence and
thought it to be quite just!

There were a few cases when the aircraft would he over the target,
and a bomb would stick and not drop. The navigator would get out of
the cockpit, stand on the wing, and reach down with her hands to try
to push it loose. The women were as brave as the male crews.

We had parties and danced and sang, and we had amateur contests
and wrote poetry. The first slogan of the regiment was: You are a
woman, and you should be proud of that. When weather caused the
cancellation of a mission, everyone stayed at the airfield and danced.
It would never come into any man's head to do that, while waiting for
permission to fly.

When I was appointed deputy commander of the regiment, it was a
part of my duties to give orders to the girls that I had trained with and
to know that they had to stand up when I entered the room. We were
friends, and this was a shock to me and was the hardest thing I had to
endure during my first year of army service. Later on the regiment
was reinforced by girls I didn't know personally, and it was easier.

Once I lost the seal of the regiment. I thought life would end-life
was over for me. The only thing left to do was shoot myself in the
head. Just as I knew I had to tell that I had lost it, I found it! But I
remember feeling as though I were standing on the edge.

As the deputy commander, I stayed at an advanced temporary airfield
all night while the combat missions were being fulfilled. I had a special
map that showed what time each crew was to fly over the target and
return, and we were so near the front lines that each aircraft over its
target was visible from the airfield. There were occasions when I saw our
planes shot down and on fire, and I could look at that map and calculate who it was burning in the air. It was the most grievous torture I endured
in the army during the war-to calculate who was dying.

My good friend Yevgeniya Rudneva, who was awarded the Gold Star
(Hero of the Soviet Union) posthumously, was an astronomer and a
poet and was fond of fairy tales. When we were not on missions, she
would gather us all together at the airfield and recite fairy tales by
Zhukovsky. When she was burning in the air over Kerch, I was standing at the airdrome watching it. I was losing my friend, she was burning away above my head, and I could do nothing to save her. Grief
paralyzed me-I was blind and deaf. I could hardly pull myself together
to keep on handling the combat of the regiment on the ground.

There were 200 women in the regiment. We were the only regiment in the whole of the Red Army without any men serving in it.
Once a male was assigned to us for one month to install air-to-ground
communications. He was very shy and quiet and even ate by himself.
At one time he was supplied with female underwear, because his
surname was one whose ending could be either male or female. On
that day he said that not one single day would he remain after he
finished with the installation!

Our aircraft flew i,ioo nights of combat. We started the war with
two squadrons and finished the war with four. We trained our personnel at the front and had one auxiliary squadron used only for training.
Usually we were assigned the combat mission for that night during
the day, and I was responsible for receiving those missions from the
army. Normally both the target and the number of combat missions
directed at that target were indicated. The peculiarity of our missions
was that we always bombed the front line of the enemy. The planes
flew to the target at one altitude and back at another. One night an
aircraft returning from a mission was approaching for a landing, and
it let down on top of another aircraft, also landing. Three of the crew
members were killed, and one survived with a broken leg.

Sometimes we used flares to see our target, and sometimes a Soviet
searchlight directed our aircraft to the target. These two methods were
used when our troops were moving and their location constantly
changing. Otherwise we bombed in the dark. It is complicated, this
lesson in tactics. It was impossible for our planes to bomb from a low
altitude, because the explosion would damage our own aircraft.

We bombed from at least boo meters up to 1,200 meters and never
used delayed fuses, because the enemy could pick them up and take
them away. We usually started from an altitude of 1,300 meters, then
throttled hack and glided silently down to about 6oo meters so the enemy couldn't hear us approaching the target. We suffered losses not
so much because of the antiaircraft guns as because of the German
night fighters. Six crews were shot down by German night fighters. In
one episode over Poland, Polina Makogon was killed when her aircraft collided with a German night fighter.

NOTE: Irina Rakobolskaya is chair of the Physics Department at Moscow University. Her son teaches physics at Stanford University.

Major Mariya Smirnova,
commander of the squadron

Hero of the Soviet Union

I was born in 1920 in a peasant family. Until I was thirteen years old I
went to a village school. Then my family moved to Tver, on the Volga
River. At the age of sixteen I completed the three-year course at a
teachers' college and taught at a primary school. In the neighborhood
there was an airdrome, and every day I saw the planes flying. Thus
was born my decision to train as a pilot.

In 1937 I began my flying and continued on to become an instructor. Among one hundred cadets I was the only girl. In 1939 1 began
training cadets. After the Great Patriotic War started, on November 1,
1941, I joined the regiments formed by Marina Raskova.

I was appointed deputy squadron commander of the 46th Guards
Bomber Regiment. We flew to the front on May 2, 1942, and we didn't
know our exact destination because the front was very unstableliquid, so to speak. The situation might change several times a day. We
were assigned to an airforce division, and the pilots were not enthusiastic when they heard that a female flying regiment was to link up with
them. They accepted us with great mistrust, and each of us was flighttested by a male pilot. My record in the logbook was "excellent!"

On the first combat mission we lost our commander of the squadron, and I was appointed to take her place. There were ten pilots and
ten navigators in my squadron; eight pilots became Heroes of the
Soviet Union. Two crews were shot down, and they perished. All of
the pilots made more than Boo combat flights-I made 935. We carried out very risky assignments. We flew through the front lines,
breaking through three defense lines fortified with German artillery
to bomb targets such as fascist airdromes, railway stations and tracks,
field headquarters, and bridges. We flew in a line three minutes apart,
and the enemy was well aware of our timing. They had to be on the
alert all night long-they didn't have a wink of sleep. This strategy
was deliberate to tire the enemy around the clock.

46th regiment. Front row, left: Mariya Smirnova;
third from left: Yevgeniya Zhigulenko

We faced risks every night. You shouldn't misinterpret my words
and think we faced death openly and bravely-it is not true. We never
became accustomed to fear. Before each mission and as we approached the target, I became a concentration of nerves and tension.
My whole body was swept by fear of being killed. We had to break
through the fire of antiaircraft guns and also escape the searchlights.
We had to dive and sideslip the plane in order not to be shot down. All
this affected my sleep enormously. When we returned from our missions at dawn, I couldn't fall asleep; I tossed in bed and had anxiety
attacks. We slept two to four hours each day throughout the four
years of the war. Once my regiment sent me to a recreation center for
medical treatment to restore my health. But I ran away after three
days because I couldn't stay when the others were risking their lives,
so I returned to my regiment. Fear was always an inseparable part of
our flights, but we knew we had to go through it for we were liberating our motherland. I feared for my squadron; each night when I
climbed into the air, I thought not so much about the assignment as
of the possibility of crashes and death.

On a mission near Novorossijsk, I had just dropped my bombs on the railway tracks and was turning away when I saw a German
fighter, a Focke Wolf, flying toward me. I managed to dive and make a
sideslip. Only pure chance saved me, and I escaped the enemy's fire.
But the aircraft behind me, piloted by Dusya Nosal, was caught by the
enemy fire. She was killed in her cockpit. Her navigator, Irina Kashirina, in the back cockpit knew how to fly and took over the controls, but the dead pilot had slumped forward over the control stick,
and she was not able to use the controls. So she had to reach forward
and hold the dead body by the collar with her left hand and control
the aircraft with her right hand. The rough air over the Crimean hills
almost caused her to crash, but she brought the plane with the body
of the dead pilot back to the regimental airfield. She was in a state of
shock.

On the Taman Peninsula the Germans had a strongly fortified line
known as the Blue Line, stretching from Novorossijsk to Timruk.
This line was firmly backed by strong antiaircraft defenses, and the
whole territory was networked by searchlights, antiaircraft batteries,
and machine guns. Here and there were spread the enemy airdromes
with fighter aircraft on alert. The Blue Line was stuffed with German
staff, and our regimental task was to bomb this concentration of
enemy troops and weapons. My crew was the first to map the route
for the regiment and simultaneously reconnoiter the disposition of
the enemy troops.

Usually, on my way to a target when the searchlights were off, I
tried to approach and hit the target before they knew my aircraft was
there. I would idle the engine and glide over the target noiselessly. But
when a searchlight lit up and caught me in its web other searchlights
also lit up, and I would find myself in their cross of lights. To escape
the searchlights, I idled the engine and sideslipped down into the
darkness. Even though it was a slip into pitch darkness, I could always determine the angle in relation to the ground. I never used flares
to clarify where I was; I was never disoriented because the searchlight
mirrors and the ground itself were my orientation. No matter how
blinded I was by the lights, I had to think and act quickly to level out
the aircraft. The next moment the enemy was fiercely trying to locate
my plane again, combing through space.