A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (17 page)

When we approached that area we saw mountains on the right side
covered with forest and the sea under us. Of course we had no parachutes or rubber safety boats, only a small safety jacket. We always
joked about these jackets, that they would drag you down into the
water instead of keep you out of it. We flew at about one thousand
meters, and I knew there were antiaircraft guns and spotlights in that
area. We had become clever enough to evade them, so I throttled back
and dropped the flare to find the target. While I was looking for the
place to drop my cargo I came down a little too low, and my navigator
called out, "What are you doing-you could hit one of the city towers!"
lust then I saw a torch blinking from the roof of a building, and my
knees started shaking. I cried to Katya that we would drop the supplies together because if we missed, the cargo could drop into German positions. So then we dropped the cargo. I increased my speed
and glided to the edge of the Black Sea.

About that time the antiaircraft guns started, and all the guns were
firing. I felt a shell explode near my aircraft; it hit the wing and made
a large hole. My controls were sticking, and I was afraid to be shot
down over the German positions, so I started maneuvering at an
altitude of about one hundred meters over the sea. I managed to fly
back to my airdrome and land. Then the colonel who gave us the
order to drop supplies climbed up on the wing and thanked us. The
sailors had sent a radio message that they got everything. There were
bullet holes in the wings, map holder, and even my helmet. But we
were not hit. I said, "Thanks to God, everything is all right."

When the war was over, I came to my native town and was met by
a brass band. Lots of people threw flowers, and the flowers were put
in the car and they filled it. Then we came to the theater, and there
were more than two thousand people there. I was a Hero of the Soviet
Union, and the town made this a festivity-I was made an honorable
citizen of the city. I was asked to tell an episode of the war, and I told
them that particular story. Then a man came up and embraced me
and said now he knew who saved them, and he thanked me. He was
one of the sailors in that unit on the Black Sea that our regiment had saved. He told me that all the sailors had then prayed to God for our
lives, to save us from the enemy's wild bullets.

My friend Yevgeniya Rudneva was killed during a mission. When
she came to the regiment she became the regimental navigator. She
made many flights with me, and one night, when we were in the
Crimea, we were given the assignment to bomb Kerch city. That
night she was to fly with me, but she said that it was the first night
flight of a new pilot, and she would like to bomb with her. The
assignment was very dangerous, and there were lots of fascist troops
concentrated near the target. When I was approaching my aircraft that
night before takeoff I tripped, and I thought it was bad that Yevgeniya
was flying with the new pilot-something would happen. I felt this in
my heart, and when I looked into the face of that young pilot I saw
something unusual, a disturbance.

We took off, and they were flying in front of me. I watched them
approach the target and drop their bombs, and then the searchlights
were switched on and caught the plane in their web. A burst of fire
shelled their aircraft, and it was immediately set on fire. I changed
my direction and started dropping my bombs on those gun positions,
and the lights started searching for me, but they didn't find me. I saw
their aircraft burning, and the flares they carried began exploding.
The burning plane crashed while the searchlights continued to hold
it in their lights. It was the 645th combat mission of Yevgeniya Rudneva. After her death, she was decorated with the Gold Star of Hero of
the Soviet Union. She was the only daughter of her family, and she
had never been kissed. She wrote letters to her professor at the university saying she couldn't be a scientist until her fair motherland
was liberated from the fascists. She wrote, "There can be no real
science in an occupied country." Later, the astronomers named an
asteroid after her. She was a senior lieutenant when she perished at
twenty-three.

Early in the war, after a bombing by the Germans, you would look
down and see horses, people, vehicles, everything mixed. We are very
impressionable people, and when you see all these things your brain
becomes overloaded with this terror. I remember some nights I would
fly eight or ten missions, and when we were fighting in Poland, I
made eighteen combat missions in one long winter night. I stayed in
the cockpit almost all the time, and I would have some tea while the
aircraft was being reloaded. I remember once we received a message
from Warsaw saying that the Polish people had started a rebellion and
asking for our assistance. We flew many missions over Warsaw, and it was burning and covered with smoke. It was difficult to breathe the
air. After those missions I couldn't get out of the cockpit from exhaustion.

I took part in the battles in Belorussia, Poland, and Germany. We
finished the war near Berlin, and we bombed the Swinamunde area in
the northern and eastern part of Germany. By the time we reached
Germany, there were fewer German planes in the air. In 1943, the
forces of our aircraft and the German aircraft became equal, and then
we gained air superiority. When the war ended, we were in Brandenburg. Our regiment was released, and the flag of our regiment was
passed to the air museum in Moscow. In hall thirteen of the museum
you can find our flag today.

When we were released there was a meeting of our regiment. The
commander read the order, and lots of us began to cry because of
what we had been through together. This was October, 1945. We
decided to meet after the war on the second of May in a small park
across from the Bolshoi Theater. In 1946, we had our first meeting.
During the years the veterans began to show up with their husbands
and children, but many of them never married. At these meetings we
were crying and laughing. And now every year fewer and fewer of our
people come. We were very young and our friendship very warm, as it
is now.

Senior Sergeant Nina Karasyova-Buzina,
senior mechanic of armament of the squadron

I was born in 1923 in the Tula region in the village of Kluchyovo, and
in 1930 the family moved to Moscow. I finished nine grades of secondary school and went to work. There were four children in our family,
and we were not well-to-do. Together with my father I was a breadwinner, and I worked two and one-half years in a plant before the war
broke out. When the war started, the Komsomol organization of our
plant appealed to the young people to voluntarily join the army. I
volunteered and was assigned to Marina Raskova's regiment.

In Moscow at the Komsomol headquarters I was interviewed by an
army officer and Marina Raskova herself. I was warned that the service I was volunteering for would be very difficult, because I would
have to carry heavy bombs to the aircraft, work in freezing conditions, and probably stand in cold water day and night with little rest. I
was told I should think it over, and I replied that I had and wanted to
join. We were taken to the town of Engels, where we trained. I completed the eight months' course in armament and was sent to the front with the 588th Air Regiment. Initially I had thought I would be a
gunner in an aircrew, and I was disappointed to know I would only
load the bombs, not drop them.

This work we did was not really women's work, because of the
weight of the bombs that we manually attached to the aircraft. At
first I was just an armorer, then a mechanic of armament; then I
became a senior technician in armament. A technician not only arms
the aircraft but has the added responsibility of overseeing the other
armament personnel and their work. We attached the fuses to the
bombs, which armed them, and only then attached the bombs to the
aircraft.

The bombs weighed 25, 32, or ioo kilos each, and we lifted them
into place manually. Some nights we lifted 3,000 kilos of bombs.
Three of us lifted the bombs, working together. We did our work at
night and were not allowed to have any light to work by. So we
worked blind, fumbling in darkness for the proper place to attach the
bombs. But the missions never had to be delayed because the bombs
were not loaded in time. We worked in mud, frost, sleet, and water,
and we were always precise in fixing the bombs. We had to work
barehanded so that we could feel what we were doing. They issued us
gloves, but working in the dark with a locking mechanism forced us
to work without them.

We worked all night, then had a two- to three-hour rest and returned to the planes in the morning to examine the bomb racks under
the aircraft. The racks were so low to the ground that we had to kneel
to examine and attach the bombs. Each aircraft made about ten missions a night. Early in the war each plane carried a maximum of 250
kilos of bombs, but later they could carry 30o kilos.

We slept in dugouts. A dugout is a large underground trench covered with logs and soil. Inside we had plank beds and a fireplace made
of an oil drum. At times we even had a window in the dugout. When
we had to move often and quickly, we didn't have time to dig but slept
outside under the wings of the aircraft.

After the war I married a military pilot. We moved from one place
to another so I didn't work, but I raised two sons. There was some
question as to whether we mechanics could bear children after the
heavy work and the overstraining of our strength during the war, but
it didn't affect us. We were very small and slim during the war, and
we had bad nutrition, never enough sleep, and very hard work, but no
one complained. I never even felt tired.

junior Lieutenant Raisa Zhitova-Yushina,
pilot, flight commander

I was born in 1921. When I was four or five years old I would ask my
mother if I would ever fly, and she would reply, "Yes, from the stove to
the floor!" Of course no one believed that I would fly. At seventeen I
started flying gliders, and after a year I entered a flying school. When I
went to Minsk, in Belorussia, I was nineteen, and I became a pilot at
the sports club. Then the war broke out, and I became a flight instructor preparing male pilots. I was only twenty years old.

In the first days of the war, the Germans started bombing all Belorussian cities, including Minsk. At that time I was in the hospital
with pleurisy, and I think about five hundred aircraft were in the air
bombing our city. In late June I was told that I should leave Minsk,
because the Germans were advancing and were about to capture the
city. I began walking to the east, and along the way I lost consciousness because of my illness. I was wearing my flying suit and had a
map holder and my belt across my chest. I decided if I found an
aircraft without a pilot I would fly somewhere. That was my dream.

I was lying in a field, and some people found me and put me in a
car. They were driving east on a highway along with military vehicles, and on the sides of the road there were civilians who were
fleeing the area. Suddenly I saw three German aircraft approaching
the highway, and I cried, 'Aircraft!" and jumped off the car and stayed
behind. The fascist aircraft were firing their machine guns, and most
of the people in the car were killed or wounded. When I jumped off
the car I broke my leg. A military vehicle picked me up and delivered
me to the hospital in a nearby city.

While I was in the hospital two pilots that I didn't know came to
me and asked if I was a pilot, and I replied that I was. They said,
"Tonight a train will go to some other area, and if you want you can
come with us." It took us about a month to get to Tambov city, in the
center of Russia. There I stayed in the hospital because of my broken
leg, and when it had healed I was assigned to the flying club. I worked
there until 1943 teaching flying to three or four groups.

Then I went to air-force headquarters in Moscow, and they asked
how many flying hours I had. I told them more than a thousand. They
assigned me to the 46th Guards Bomber Regiment on July 13, 1943. I
started in the regiment as a pilot, then a senior pilot, and later as a
flight commander.

My first mission was in August, 1943, in the northern Caucasus.

Left to right: Raisa Zhitova-Yushina, pilot; Polina Petkelyova, navigator;
Mariya Pinchuk, navigator-46th regiment

The aircraft flew on their missions at three-minute intervals between
planes. It was like a conveyor belt: every three minutes an aircraft took
off. When we were approaching the field and runway we would cry out,
"Refuel, bombs, get ready!" because we were eager to bomb the positions of the Germans. I still had some problems with my leg, and
sometimes, because of nerves, I couldn't move one leg. On my last
combat mission, on March 30, 1945, when I landed I couldn't move
either of my legs. It was a nerve problem, and the central nervous
system was paralyzed. I made 53S combat missions during the war.