A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (21 page)

There were no radio transmitters on the Pe-2 until later in the war.
In the fall of 1943 our unit was honored by being named a "Guards"
regiment, and our regimental name and number was changed from
the 587th Bomber Regiment to the 125th Guards Bomber Regiment.
The regiment was also named after Marina Raskova, at our request.

When we were flying, my duty was to navigate the aircraft to the
target and to find our route. He, as commander and pilot, could not
see other aircraft flying behind us. He would ask me, "Where is this
pilot, and where is that one?" and I would say, "Everything is all right,
they're following us." He was thinking more about the crews than
about the target! After we had been flying with him for some time we
called him not "bayonet" but "Daddy." I was twenty-five at that time
and he was thirty-three, and now we still call him Daddy.

vM: Now we live in a little-improved world. You (in the United
States) know more about us, and let God help us add to our mutual
knowledge, to become more easy and less tense.

Senior Lieutenant Antonina Bondareva-Spitsina,
pilot

I come from the Ural region, from a working family; my father
worked at a metallurgical plant in the Urals. Our family consisted of
six children. When I was little everyone started talking about aviation, an outburst of aviation, and it became more and more popular.
We lived in a small village, and a plane, at that time even a glider, was
a small miracle.

I was in sixth grade when a biplane landed. Everybody rushed to see what it was like, what it looked like, what it really was in real life.
When I saw that plane my heart began beating fast, and I fell in love
with the aircraft at first sight. Later on the pilot who brought the
aircraft to the village founded a glider club nearby, and when I was
sixteen, I enrolled in the club. In our region they admitted eighteen
students, and only two were girls. I was the only daughter in my family,
with five brothers, and my mother didn't even let me go to the club
until I completed all household tasks and duties. My father was very
much against my flying, but I did it anyway. Each time I left to go to
the glider school my father would say, "Don't come back, you may not
come back, I won't let you in!" Strange as it seems, my mother was not
against it-she let me go. I was healthy, robust, and active, and my
mother said I was meant to be a boy but turned out to be a girl.

I graduated from the glider school at sixteen. We had to make five
parachute jumps before we were allowed to go to flying school. This
was not a physical test but one to show whether you were brave
enough to fly a plane. I quickly went on to powered aircraft, flying the
U-2. When I became an instructor, I was nearly eighteen. Then I
taught cadets. I was just under eighteen, and they were seventeen.
And I didn't even have a passport of the country yet! You had to be at
least eighteen to have a passport. I even had to add a year to my age in
order to be assigned the rank of instructor-pilot.

When the war broke out I wanted to volunteer to be in Raskova's
regiment, but I wasn't allowed to leave the school. The male instructors had left for the front, and I had to instruct the cadets. Only in
1943, when the women's regiments suffered losses, did I go to the
front as a reinforcement.

I joined the 587th, later to be the 125th Guards Bomber Regiment. 1,
by this time, had 2,000 flying hours. Then I was trained to fly the Pe-2
dive bomber. My middle brother was also a pilot in the war, and my
elder brother perished during the war. He was a paratrooper, a member of a sea landing force, and was killed. We received only a notice
that he was killed in battle; we do not know the place of his grave.
During the war we were each provided with a cylinder that we spun
open, and we inserted into it a piece of paper with our identification
on it. The official name for our air arm, which was a part of the Soviet
army, was the USSR Army Air Force.

On one mission, just as we dropped the bombs, I felt something go
wrong with our aircraft. The dive brakes had fallen, and I did not
know that. The aircraft began chattering, and it started going down.
The sea was below us and we remained alone, because the accom panying fighters went on with the squadron. I was searching for a
place to land, and then I was caught by two fascist fighters who began
shooting at us from different angles. I tried to maneuver, but I
couldn't; the plane wouldn't respond. It was like a cat-and-mouse
game; they didn't hit any of us, but the shells came very close. Suddenly they disappeared, and I learned later that two of our fighters
came to rescue us and shot down the Germans. I finally landed on the
airfield, but it took all my muscles, strength, and might-everything
that I had-to make it, because it was pulling the nose down toward
the earth. God saved us, and no one was hurt. The aircraft was so shot
up that it took a month to repair.

125th regiment in front of their re-a aircraft. Standing, sixth from left:
Antonina Bondareva-Spitsina; seventh from left:
Yevgcniya Gurulyeva-Smirnova; far right: Galina Brok-Beltsova

One of the most horrible episodes came on a mission when I
sensed that there was petrol in the cabin. I bent my head down to see
what was happening and saw a hole in the fuel tank, and just then a
great shell flew through the cabin over my head. Only because my
head was bent down did I survive. My navigator (Brok-Beltsova) was
nearly hit also, and she was so frightened that even after the mission
her mouth was screwed up in a funny way. It was her nerves; she had seen the shell go over, and her face remained distorted for some time.
War is war, and life is life.

While we were waiting for our combat mission to be assigned we
would sit on our parachutes, and between the parachutes and our
back we had a tiny cloth that we were knitting between flights. When
we were assigned a mission, we put it back between our body and the
parachute and went off to combat.

At the end of the war, when the women were released, I continued
serving in the air force. There were only three women pilots in my
unit who wished to remain in the active air force; we were retrained
to fly the Tu-2 aircraft and were assigned to a male regiment. I flew
until 1950, when I quit flying. I often have dreams about aircraft-of
flying. It is my favorite dream.

War friendship is stronger than that between relatives, and we still
know about everybody. We take care of each other and help in any
way we can, and on great holidays I have received at least seventy
letters from my friends!

Lieutenant Yevgeniya Gurulyeva-Smirnova,
navigator

I was born on December 24, 1922. Aviation is my fate. I came to it
because it was predestined. I loved the sky since early childhood.

I came from Siberia, very far away behind the Urals, to apply to the
army headquarters to be drafted into the army. We were all united by
the sentiment of defending our beloved motherland from the enemy. I
know how the Americans love their land, and we Russians love our
land, too. You can understand our patriotic feelings. I know that in
America you are heterogeneous just as we are, but you are friendly
with each other, you support each other, you are one whole nation. I
like your president; I like your people.

I started flying in a glider school and made my first flight when I
was sixteen years old. I continued on to pilot-instructor school; then I
flew in an auxiliary medical regiment until I came to the 125th regiment as a reinforcement. My assignment was to he a navigator. I did
not have a lot of flying hours, but I was a very good pilot.

I was wounded-very few from our regiment were wounded. We
were bombing tanks in Lithuania, and there was heavy antiaircraft
fire. A shell exploded directly under our aircraft when we were over
the target. I had a burning pain in my body, as if a fire were burning
inside. I hit against the metal navigator's seat and fell to the floor. I
was semiconscious, and my blood covered the floor of the cockpit with a shell splinter of about
twenty-five centimeters stuck
into my thigh. The pilot's seat
was protected with armor plate,
but the navigator's seat was not.

Yevgeniya Gurulyeva-Smirnova,
125th regiment

I knew I had to drop the
bombs, so I reached up and
found the liquid ammonia, put
it to my face, and became fully
conscious. Then I dropped the
bombs and photographed the
target as was required to indicate we had fulfilled the mission. We returned to our airfield and landed safely. By then
I was motionless, and they had
to throw me out of the cockpit
as though I were a sack of coal.
I was carried to a military hospital where I was operated on,
and I was in the hospital for
three months. I came back to
the regiment and made a few
training flights before returning to active service in the summer of
1944.

We moved from one airfield to another. When it was warm enough,
we covered the wing of our plane with a tarpaulin and slept under it,
especially in the spring and fall when it was too wet to sleep in a
dugout. It was very cold and wet in the Smolensk region where we
slept in dugouts. When we returned from our missions we couldn't
rest or even dry our things because the floor was covered with water
and mud. Our linens, pillows, mattresses, blankets-everything was
wet through. Sometimes we left our boots in front of the open fire to
dry overnight, and when we awakened, instead of dry we found them
burned. Those mornings we had nothing to put on our feet when we
heard the alert signal.

By the time I arrived at the regiment the whole squadron to which
I was assigned had been killed, and we were all replacements. Only in
1944 did we make our first combat missions. There were eight of us
from our squadron who became very good friends and swore that our
friendship would endure to the last day of our lives. We are still friends and call each other and see each other, but unfortunately
many of us have already died.

No other country in the world let women fly combat, but Stalin
proclaimed that our women could do everything, could withstand
anything! It was a kind of propaganda to show that Soviet women
were equal to men and could fulfill any task, to show how mighty
and strong we were. Women could not only bring babies into being
but could build hydroelectric plants, fly aircraft, and destroy the enemy. Even if Stalin hadn't let the girls fly we would have volunteered
by the thousands for the army.

Our regiment had two squadrons of nine aircraft each. We had very
good air cover; not only Russian but also French fighters provided us
with protection when on bombing missions. When the German fighter
planes came up to try to stop the bombers, our fighter aircraft would
engage them.

I only saw one of our aircraft shot down. It started to fall, and only
the tail-gunner managed to parachute out. We were instructed on
how to jump from our plane if necessary: by jumping vertically to our
flight path, with our feet pointed to the ground and our back against
the wind. We were to jump through the lower hatch, feet first. The
tail-gunner left her position, dropping through the lower hatch also.

The Pe-2 had one bad feature: its landing speed was quite fast, and
that contributed to a number of crashes. We had fewer casualties in
our regiment than the men did flying the same type of aircraft; I think
we were more exact in our flying.

What I feared most on flying missions was being captured by the
fascists. We also were afraid of being punished for not fulfilling a
combat mission. We couldn't turn around and go hack without completing the mission. If we didn't complete our assignment, we could
be imprisoned. We didn't think we would be imprisoned but only
punished within the regiment. Nowadays people don't pay much
attention to trifles, but in our time, in Stalinist days, we were
punished.

Today we speak about repression and about labor camps in our
country. We say it was a great injustice for the people to be imprisoned by their own government if they spoke out against the system, but at that time we didn't think so. My grandfather was imprisoned after the revolution and sent to a labor camp in Siberia for
protesting against Soviet rule. He cursed all the Soviets in his village.
Before the revolution he was a rich peasant in spite of the fact that he
had a large family. He worked hard, but the Soviets dispossessed him of everything. They tried to force him to join the collective farm and
he wouldn't. So he was punished. At that time, when I was young and
in school, I thought it was just punishment because he didn't support
the system.