A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (13 page)

I went to Moscow to military headquarters. They wanted me to
join the 125th Dive Bomber Regiment flying the Pe-2, because I had by
then over goo flying hours. Before then I never even knew that there
were women's regiments! Then I heard that Bershanskaya commanded the 46th Guards Bomber Regiment, and because I knew her, I
asked to be assigned to her regiment as a reinforcement pilot.

While I was being interviewed at headquarters, a personnel officer
saw my last name and asked if I was related to the political officer of
the same name, who was assigned to the same training school where
I had been a pilot. I knew that the political officer had been taken and
imprisoned as an enemy of the republic in 1937. I thought quickly how
I would best answer, because I was not related to him. But in those
times you had to answer in such a way as to completely deny any
knowledge of him, or the consequences could be quite unpredictable
and could include prison. So I answered that I kept my distance from
the command and staff of the school and didn't know him. The
personnel officer understood my evasive response and replied, "Oh,
since he was my best friend, and you are a Tepikina too, I'll let you
join the 46th regiment."

I joined the regiment in August, 1943, and I flew my first combat
mission a week later. I learned to see in the dark and to determine our
target visually. It took practice to recognize objects in the darkness.
On summer nights we flew five or so combat missions, and in winter
we flew ten and up to fifteen missions. When we returned to reload
the plane with bombs and fuel, the navigator would go in and report
on the mission just completed. The pilot would stay in the cockpit,
and I often dozed while this was going on.

Once when we had been heavily shelled by antiaircraft fire and
were walking together toward the command headquarters to report
that fact, we turned to look at each other. We burst out laughing,
because we were covered with black soot from the explosion of the
shells so close to us in the air! And so we remained alive.

I had three forced landings during the war. Once we were assigned
a mission in the Crimean area of the Black Sea where our troops were
making a landing on the seacoast. There was a very powerful searchlight used by the Germans to spotlight our troops, and then they
would shoot at them. I asked our commander if I could blow up the
searchlight and got her permission. We succeeded in gliding in quietly with our engine throttled back and then blew it up. But when I opened the throttle to regain our altitude, the engine would not increase power but continued to idle. I didn't want to land in the sea, so
I decided to glide to the coast. Then I quite clearly saw the road that
led from the coast to our auxiliary airfield, and although I had only
16o meters of altitude, I did manage to glide over the low hills and
make it back to the field.

Another time I was on a mission in the Kerch region, and before I
crossed the front lines I noticed that the oil pressure had dropped to
zero. I knew that in a few minutes the engine would burn up, so I
turned back. Below me I saw the signaling lights of an auxiliary
airfield and the responding lights of a partisan aircraft, and I descended to land. When we had to make an emergency landing, it was
best and safest to drop the bombs before landing. But if we could not
see an open area when we were on our side of the front lines, we did
not drop them for fear of killing our own troops. In this case I could
not drop the bombs, and so I landed ahead of the partisan aircraft,
leaving him to circle the field again, because I had a load of bombs.
The officer in charge of the airfield started cursing me as I taxied in,
calling me every dirty name he knew, because I had cut off the other
plane in the landing pattern. Also, he didn't want a loaded bomber
landing there. Then, as I drew near him, he recognized me as a fellow
pilot from our civil flying days.

What I feared most was flying toward the searchlights and the antiaircraft guns and worrying about the disposition of the guns relative
to the target. After dropping the bombs the emotional strain receded,
and when we hit the target we cheered. Even my navigator was clapping her hands and beating her feet on the floor, and we forgot about
our fear.

Once I was flying a mission, and with forty-five seconds remaining
before dropping our bombs, we were caught first by one searchlight
and then by some twenty more searchlights. We dropped the bombs,
and then I managed to escape by opening the throttle and diving at a
speed of up to 17o kilometers per hour. Our maximum diving speed
was supposed to be iso. We flew out over the Black Sea at a very low
altitude, and then we flew back to our field. When we arrived, nobody
expected to ever see us again, because they saw us in all those searchlights and did not think we could escape them. The most amazing
thing was that our plane was not even hit on that mission. We were
met at the airdrome with hurrahs from the other crews.

I remember when we had our airdrome on the banks of the Neman
River, and the Germans, on the other bank, were firing every morn ing at the girls going to the toilets. To avoid needless losses, our
commander asked the ground forces if they could stop that firing.
About thirty troops crossed the river and were then subjected to
heavy fire from the Germans. A soldier swam back across the river
and asked our commander to help save them because they were suffering losses! Our commander sent one aircraft to bomb that area
from a height of goo meters, and they missed. So then I was sent on
the same mission with Rufina, my navigator. We flew in at Soo meters and hit the target. Upon our return to the airdrome, there were
shouts of hurrah by the whole regiment. We had saved the girls.

On the way back from that mission, we saw a group of fascist
soldiers lying in the wheat two kilometers from our field. When we
reported it, we were asked to fly over that place and drop a flare to
indicate where the Germans were. The navigator said we could not
drop a flare because it would burn the wheat field. I circled and dove
at the German position three times, down to five meters so our troops
could find them. Our soldiers encircled them, and they were
captured.

I made 640 combat missions, and I was awarded four orders. I
married again in 1945-I married a pilot, and we had a wedding party
there in the regiment. Our regiment was released in October, 1945. In
1947 I managed to get a position as a copilot in civil aviation, flying
cargo aircraft. I flew only one year, and then the doctors refused to let
me fly anymore.

Senior Sergeant Nina Yegorova-Arefjeva,
mechanic of armament

I come from Yaroslavl, a town on the Volga River. I only managed to
finish secondary school, and the very next day the war broke out.
When I first heard that Marina Raskova was forming the regiment,
my first impulse was not to try to join the regiment but to go to the
front.

When I joined the army, I was first sent to a military school to take
a ground course in aircraft armament. That was in the Caucasus,
seventy kilometers from Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. The class
ahead of me had been studying armament for three years before the
war, and we were to study for only three months! Ours was a female
class: only women. We studied twelve hours a day. Only the command and staff and instructors were men. We hardly slept.

We didn't have any textbooks, and we had to listen and take notes.
There was a great shortage of paper in the country, as there is now, and we had to take newspapers and write between the lines for our
notes. Further, we not only had to study twelve hours a day but also
perform our duties: get up for alarms at night, and at times go to
collective farms to help pick and collect the crops. We lived in wooden
houses with twenty-four of us in one very small house. We slept in
tiers with upper and lower berths.

Our military school was a secret because of the war, and at night
we were not allowed to switch on a light. When we had an alarm at
night, we had to search in the dark for our clothes. Then we were
lined up and marched around, for discipline.

I was assigned to a male fighter regiment after training. We were all
distributed to different regiments. Some of the women were sent to the
female regiments, but I was not. Later on Bershanskaya, the commander of the 46th Guards Bomber Regiment, chose me as a replacement in her regiment. I found the conditions there much more favorable. Everyone was so nice and open. The Germans called the crews
night witches. They liked to sleep at night, and our aircraft made the
Germans' life not so easy; they disturbed their sleep. Sometimes, when
our planes were throttled back gliding in over the target, the Germans
would cry out, "Night witches!", and our crews could hear them.

Captain Larisa Litvinova-Rozanova,
pilot, commander of the formation

Hero of the Soviet Union

I was born in Kiev in 1918. I started flying when I was twenty, and in
1939 I finished glider school; then on to the pilots' school at Kherson,
where I became a pilot instructor.

I joined the women's regiment when it was formed in October,
1941. When I was training at Kherson I had an additional number of
hours in ground school and became a navigator as well as a pilot. So
six of us who had that additional training as navigators became the
navigators of the three regiments. I also trained women to become
navigators for our regiment. I did not want to be a navigator, I wanted
to continue as a pilot, but I had to do it.

In 1942, when we were at the front and had fought for about a year,
they decided to form a third squadron of the regiment. I went to the
regimental commander and asked to be a pilot. And so I became a
pilot again and was named commander of the formation. I was a pilot
for a year and seven months.

When Yevgeniya Rudneva, the navigator of the squadron, was
killed, I was again ordered to be a navigator. And to the very last day of the war, I lingered as a navigator. All in all I made 816 combat
missions; as a pilot, more than Soo. No pilot wants to be a navigator!
We all wanted to help the motherland; we were all afraid and knew it
was dangerous, but still we did not want to show our weakness. We
were mere girls; there were no men at all in our regiment, and we got
along very well without them. Each combat mission we were face to
face with death.

We flew our missions with the pilot in the front cockpit and the
navigator in the rear one. We never flew in formation; we took off at
intervals to specific targets such as railroad stations or German field
headquarters-places the Germans were trying to protect. They placed
antiaircraft guns and powerful searchlights around these places to
safeguard them. We always flew at night because our small biplanes
were very slow and vulnerable. They were made of wood and fabric,
and if they were hit by tracer bullets or antiaircraft guns, it would set
them on fire. We had no parachutes, and if your plane caught on fire
you usually couldn't survive.

On one mission I was the fourth to take off. By that time I was
thought to be an experienced pilot, and I flew with a young, new
navigator that night. She was formerly a gunner but retrained to be a
navigator, and this was one of her first missions. Our target was a
fifteen-minute flight from the airdrome.

Halfway to the target I could see four searchlights turn on. It didn't
impress me greatly because I was used to them turning on every
night. I explained to the navigator what it could mean. I could also see
a white spot caught by the searchlights, but in a few seconds that
white spot turned into red. I knew quite well what that meant: an
aircraft was burning. I calculated it was the first plane that took off
from our airdrome. The strangest thing was that no antiaircraft shells
were exploding in the air; the antiaircraft guns were silent, but still it
was set on fire. I felt so miserable seeing our aircraft falling down,
uncontrollable and in flames. The burning plane had hardly touched
the ground when the four searchlights were switched on again and
caught the second of our aircraft. Usually as we approached the target
there was a sea of fire from the antiaircraft guns, and now for the
second time the guns were silent. Do you know how I felt at that
moment? A bitter tickling in my throat, incapable of breathing.
Goosebumps were jumping along my back, and I could hardly feel my
feet-they were as if made of cotton-wool. We saw the second plane
set on fire too, and I saw in the sky the smoke trail of a fighter. I
realized that a German fighter had shot down our two aircraft.

We were approaching the front line, and I realized that in a few
minutes I too would he a target for the fighter. I also knew our plane
was vulnerable to fighters and that we could hardly escape death. My
legs wooden, my teeth clenched. Our velocity was ioo kilometers per
hour and his was Soo. I was so frightened I couldn't even think of
escape. We were across the front line when we saw the third of our
aircraft shot down, and I was the fourth. I was to be over the target in
two minutes.

Then, as you know, in most tragic and desperate situations your
brain begins calculating, and I found my way out quickly. I decided to
approach the target from a very low altitude. I throttled hack so the
engine was idling and we were gliding. We dove down, and I flew over
the target at an altitude of Soo meters. While we were gliding over the
target I could see the third plane on fire, turning over and over in
the air, somersaulting down, the flares exploding one after another in
the cockpits. We realized that our friends were dying.

My navigator whispered to me, as though the Germans could hear
us, that we were now over the target and were ready to drop our
bombs. Normally we would drop the bombs, make a turn while we
were still over the target, and pick up a heading to fly home. I decided
we should fly on in order to shorten our exposure over the searchlights and to the German fighter. We should then turn back and fly
straight over the target, drop our bombs, and be gone. So I told my
navigator not to drop the bombs until we were back over the target.