A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (18 page)

Once, on a reconnaissance flight with bombs under the wings, the
weather was very bad. I couldn't get to the target, so I decided to turn
back. When I landed, the ground personnel were holding the wings of
my aircraft to stop it from swinging because of the strong wind.
Otherwise, it could turn over and blow up. I watched that scene from
the cockpit. When I saw all of them rushing away from the plane, I
cried out to them, "Why are you running away?" I learned later that I
had lost the vane of one of the bombs attached to the wings, which
meant that any second my aircraft could have blown up from the
slightest movement.

Our squadron commander, Olga Sanfirova, was shot down when a
bullet hit the fuel tank and the aircraft caught fire. They landed
between the German and Soviet trenches, and when they got out of
the cockpit, a Soviet officer called to them and said, "You girls, you go
to the right!" because that area was a mine field. But he meant to his
right, and they went to their right, and Olga stepped on a mine. It
exploded and tore off her leg and she was screaming, and the Soviet
officer ran out to help her and stepped on a mine. So it ended that
they and several soldiers nearby perished, and only her navigator,
Rufina Gasheva, survived.

On a bombing mission one night I nearly lost my navigator, Galina
Bespalova. The searchlights caught our plane, but I dove and escaped
from it. Galina was thrown completely out of the cockpit by this
maneuver, but she was caught on the machine gun, and when I leveled off she dropped back down into her cockpit. She was on her first
mission and had forgotten to fasten her safety belt. I called to her
from my cockpit several times, but she wouldn't respond. This was
directly over the target, and she had already dropped the bombs. I
returned to our airdrome and didn't know if she were dead or alive,
because I was busy dodging projectiles and couldn't look back. When
I landed I found Galina alive but so shaken that she couldn't report to
the commander about the mission. I was also shaken when I thought
I could have lost my navigator above the target. We became friends
then and are friends now. We were like sisters in our regiment, and we
took care of every member of our family.

In Poland in 1945 we were bombing Konigsberg as a snowstorm
was approaching, but we persuaded Commander Bershanskaya to let
us make one flight. We bombed successfully and then started to
return home, but the ground was covered with heavy, heavy snow,
and we were flying just above the trees. When we arrived at the area
of the airdrome we couldn't find it, because we were flying in a milk
of heavy snow. The stress was so intense my legs began to shake, and
I knew the plane was turning yet I couldn't do anything to make it fly
straight. Then I tried to land at another airdrome, and when we
crossed the Vistula River approaching the field, the ground personnel
turned on the lights. But I couldn't see the runway; it was impossible-we couldn't land anywhere. Finally I noticed a flat area and I
landed, but when I saw a high-voltage mast in front of us, we both
started nervously shaking.

We didn't know whether we were on our territory or German-held
territory. I stopped the engine so as not to attract attention. In the early morning we looked around and saw a farm, so we took our
pistols out and started approaching. Then we fired our pistols to
attract someone's attention, but no one responded. As we came closer
we heard a cow moo, and we were frightened even more. We returned
to our plane, started the engine, and took off. The weather had improved greatly, and we found our Soviet airdrome. Eight of our planes
didn't return that night to their home field. One crew crashed, and
one lost its landing gear while landing.

We slept in the daytime. When something happened to our aircraft, or we weren't allowed to fly for some reason, we were very
upset, because we wanted to fly as many missions as possible. So for
us it was a terrible thing not to fly. As we became used to the danger,
we didn't think about death or the losses. When we were going to the
airfield to fly we sang, and when we were going to our quarters after
flying we also sang, that is if the night was good and we had no losses.
We had a tradition that when some crew didn't return, their plates
and silverware were put out for them in the mess even when we knew
they had been shot down. Their places were set for some days in hope
that they might return, which in fact sometimes happened.

The men pilots would look for the airdrome of our regiment, and
when they saw the linen outside they started doing acrobatics, and
they didn't let us sleep in the daytime. When we were returning from
a mission, most of our ground troops knew we were women pilots.
When I was flying very low I would close the throttle and say, "Hey,
brothers how are you?" and they would light their torches. I wanted
to encourage them with a voice from the sky.

We used no illumination in our bombing because dropping flares
by parachute lit up everything, and the enemy could see our planes
and shoot us down. So no lights, no navigation lights. When a new
pilot arrived at the regimental airdrome she had orientation flights
with an instructor, and their conversation went like this: "You see
this? I cannot see it! Do you see this? I cannot see it! This is a road. I
cannot see it!" But after three or four flights she would start to see the
small differences in the shadings of the terrain and adjust to seeing at
night. When we went on bombing missions we were told only the
approximate location of the target, and it was our responsibility to
find the target, bomb it, and return to our airdrome. I flew about
eighteen hundred hours during the war from 1943 to 1945.

In December, 1945, I left the army, and in February, I joined the
Ministry of Geology as a pilot. I had a crew, and together we flew
looking for minerals, oil, and uranium. I was working on the aero magnetic picture of the Karelia territory in the northern Karelski
Peninsula near Finland, and the mission was to find iron ore deposits.
That year we found a rich deposit of iron ore, and I received an award
from that republic. On this expedition I married a pilot, and after this
we began flying together. I was commander of that detachment in
civil aviation.

My husband became a navigator of civil aviation, flying with
Aeroflot. I flew under the Ministry of Geology, but we flew from the
same airdrome.

I continued to fly until 1951 when I crashed, and my face was
scarred and my head was broken. I was flying a Yak-Ii, a big plane,
and the propeller broke, the engine stopped, and I could do nothing
about it because our altitude was only seventy meters. I warned the
crew that we were going down. We crash-landed between the trees on
the slope of a hill, and the plane started burning. I had hit my head
and was unconscious. The doors jammed, and the crew, the navigator
and the radio operator, managed to pull me out through a small
window in the door of the cockpit. There were also some secret
devices aboard the aircraft, and they took them out along with some
food and chocolate. Then the fuel tanks exploded. We were one hundred kilometers from the nearest village.

When I regained consciousness, I opened my eyes and asked about
our plane. I didn't remember anything that happened, and they worried about that. My eyes were all right, and they bandaged my face.
We had a map from the plane, and it saved our lives. We walked out of
there, and it was a miracle that the other two weren't hurt at all.
There is a saying that if you are really lucky, you were born in the
placenta. I believed in that saying and asked my mother if I really was
born in the placenta, and she said, "Yes, it is true!" Well, we walked
about one hundred kilometers. All the villages in that area are located
along the rivers and waterways, and we finally came to a village. So
my flying career ended that year.

I have two daughters: one is a doctor, and one is an engineer. My
husband crashed and died in 1956. He was the navigator of a
Tupolev-I14 on an international flight, a technical flight to the Congo,
and while taking off something happened. There was a mist and they
couldn't see anything, but you know there is this Russian tradition to
rely on a miracle, hoping that something will help us survive when
everything is against it. So they would say, 'All right, God will help
us," and take off. There were two crews on that aircraft, because it
took thirteen hours to fly to the Congo nonstop. When the plane took off it crashed. One crew was in the tail part, which broke in half, and
all in the tail lived; all in the front of the plane died. My husband was
in the front crew cabin and he died.

Senior Lieutenant Alexandra Akimova,
navigator of the squadron

I was born in a very common family. My father was a worker, and
there were four children in the family besides myself. My father even
participated in the First World War, and both he and my uncle were in
the Civil War. All my mother's relatives from the old times were
determined Communists, and I was born, educated, and brought up
in that atmosphere, in the ideas that were proclaimed by Marx and
Lenin. My mother was a housewife because there were many children
to be looked after, and my father was a schoolteacher. He went to
college to learn to be a teacher right after the revolution. We lived in
the Moscow region, not far from the city. Later on he graduated from
Moscow University and became principal of the school.

After finishing school I entered the Moscow Pedagogical Lenin
Institute. While I was a first-year student war broke out. Even before
the war started we could feel the strain in the atmosphere, and we
took an active part in defense work. There was an appeal to all the
young students in the colleges to acquire some knowledge or profession that could be of use to the country if war did break out. So I
trained as a military nurse at the same time I was attending college.

After the Germans invaded our country there was an appeal for
young girls to be drafted into the female regiments. I was then eighteen, and I decided to join an air regiment. The number of those who
could join was very limited, but I had the advantage of being a member of the Komsomol Committee of the institute.

The navigators in the female regiments were recruited from the
colleges or higher educational establishments, and I became a navigator. Our education allowed us to more quickly master the aviation
techniques. I had never flown an aircraft, but I had made parachute
jumps.

In May, 1942, our regiment, then designated the 588th Air Regiment, was sent to the front. Ours was the only purely female regiment. I was an officer in the regiment from the very first day to the
day of victory.

In the Kerch area there was a place that was known as Black Death.
Over that area my pilot, Katya Peskaryova, and I were shot down. We
lost control of the aircraft when it was hit by antiaircraft fire. We had already released our bombs and were then caught in the searchlight. I
shot off a flare and the pilot could see the landmarks, but we couldn't
find a landing place. I shot off a second flare and we could see, but the
ground was very uneven with hills and bomb craters. We landed in
that rough area, and the plane veered to one side and nosed into the
ground. I had slight facial injuries, but the pilot's leg was caught by
the fuel tank. Soviet soldiers from a fighter regiment came to rescue
us and took us to a trench where we spent two nights, because it was
right on the front line.

In Poland, in early spring, 1945, the visibility was bad, and most of
our crews were grounded. Several of us, however, were allowed to go
on a mission. After dropping our bombs we couldn't find our airfield
because of the weather, and we landed in a field near a forest. It was
sleeting, and the ground was very muddy. Some young people ran up
to our plane, and we didn't feel very much at ease because they spoke
a foreign language, but fortunately it was Polish. We had to wait till
morning to take off, when the ground would be frozen; it was impossible to taxi or take off in the deep mud. We asked the boys to guard
the plane, and we were taken into the village.

In each settlement there is a head man called staros. We stayed at
his house all night and negotiated our departure the next day, asking
that they help us with the plane. We didn't want to sleep, so we asked
the young men guarding the plane to join us in our pilots' rations of
vodka, biscuits, and milk. The next morning the ground was frozen,
and we took off.

Another time, in 1944, on the Belorussian front along the Neman
River, there was a very brisk advance of our troops. We were stationed
near a small settlement with very wide streets, and we made them
our runways. Suddenly, at night, there was an order for us to get into
our planes and train the machine guns in the direction of the front
lines-some of the Germans had broken through. We were to shoot at
the Germans from the aircraft on the ground. We stayed in our planes
all night and fired at the enemy. The next day at dawn we could
plainly see the Germans who had broken through. They were nearby,
behind the house where our aircraft were stationed. We were to shoot
as much as possible so as not to let the Germans intrude into our
territory. There were many small groups of Germans cut off from
their army by our fast-moving troops. These were a part of them.

Again, in Belorussia, we were stationed in one of the villages, and
after dinner we went into the woods to pick strawberries. The commander of the front called our unit because one small German group had broken out, and we were to look for them. We took off on a
reconnaissance flight and saw smoke coming out of a small woods, and
we also saw some German troops. In another small woods there were
Soviets. At that point I was scared. Now I could see how very close the
fascists were to our regiment. Then we were ordered on a strafing mission. We could see the Germans very clearly, and I fired at them with
my machine gun. They scattered-some of them firing at us, some of
them running. Aircraft from one of our male regiments were circling
with us, and one of their planes was shot down. We did not want to kill,
but we were in the regiment to fight and free our motherland.