A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (22 page)

I married after the war, and I have only one child. He hasn't any
children, and I am not a happy grandmother. My husband died seven
years ago.

Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya Zapolnova-Ageyeva,
mechanic of armament

My native city is Moscow; I was born there. When the war started I
was studying at the Moscow Aviation Institute. We were all patriots
and wanted to volunteer. I heard of the three female regiments being
formed by Raskova, and I immediately applied and was admitted to
the regiment. My knowledge of aviation was theoretical because I had
no practical knowledge or flying experience before the war. I became
a mechanic.

Our planes usually flew three raids a day, and the interval between
raids was one hour. Within that time we had to fix the bombs, load
the guns, and prepare for flight. The flight could not be delayed even
for one minute, because it was all coordinated with fighter regiments
that escorted the bombers. It was very intense. In Stalingrad, in very
cold weather with temperatures down to forty-two degrees below
zero centigrade, the skin on our hands froze and stuck to the metal,
and our hands were black from frostbite. In the Kuban region, in the
south of our country, there was unbearable heat, and there we burned
our hands on the metal.

When Raskova, who had become commander of our regiment after
our training at Engels, perished ferrying a plane to the front, we had a
ceremony at the regiment, a deep mourning. In Russia we have a good
tradition to pay tribute to the dead after the body is buried. We all
assemble in a hall somewhere to say the kindest and most honorable
words about the dead person. Then we have a funeral. We were all
filled with grief, and it was the greatest loss for us. Russian people are
superstitious, and we believe in some signs. We have a sign here in
Russia: if a dog is howling for a long time, weeping and sobbing, a
misfortune is sure to happen-something terrible. Before Raskova
perished a dog was howling for several days, and we asked ourselves,
"What is going to happen? What wrong is going to happen?" and she
died. Well, again, signs are signs, and life is life.

On the eve of the New Year we have a tradition foretelling our fortune for the coming year. At the regiment we wrote some small
notes, saying for everybody what kind of a year it was going to be, and
we put them under the pillows. Everyone thrust her hand under the
pillow, took out the message, and read it out loud. Raskova read that
she was going to have a happy year, but it turned out to be quite the
contrary. That year she perished; she was thirty-one years old. She
was born in 1912 and was killed in 1943. She left an orphan daughter,
Tanya, who had to live with her grandmother.

I returned to the institute after the war, but I had missed four years
and had forgotten a lot. My father had perished at the front, and I was
not physically well, so I quit and later married.

Sergeant Antonina Khokhlova Dubkova,
tail-gunner

Members of the z25th regiment

Some Soviet pilots flew over our
regimental airfield at zero altitude. Then we saw that something was dropped from the
plane. Our commander was very
strict and said, "That is forbidden, and the pilot must be punished." Well, of course it might
have created an accident. Then
he sent a technician to find
what was dropped. What he
brought back was a big teddy
bear. I don't know where they
procured it, but there was a notice pinned to the bear that
said: "Dear young girls, we just
learned we are escorting you.
Don't you get frightened; we'll
do everything to defend you,
fight for you with the last drop
of our blood. Thank you!" That
was a gift from the sky. These
were the fighters who escorted
our bombers. Every bomber flight going out on missions is supposed
to have fighter escorts.

I was a sergeant and an aircrew machine gunner. At first I was the
only woman machine gunner in the whole regiment. All the other gunners were men, because physically it was very difficult. I used to
do gymnastics, ride horses, and row a scull, too, so I had a lot of
strength. I asked Marina Raskova to let me fly. At first they wanted to
make me a weapons mechanic. Then I asked her, and she liked me
and I liked her, and she said, "Well, I will take you in my plane once
and see what you look like." She couldn't tell very well without doing
that. We flew, and it was enough for her that I didn't throw up on my
first flight. Then she said I should take up the studies for two or three
months, and that should be enough for me.

The real effort was to recharge the machine gun, to pull the lever
when it took sixty kilograms, and I had to do it with my left arm. I
could never do it on the ground because it was very hard, but in the
air it was one, two, and it was recharged! I squatted with the parachute behind my back, one machine gun behind me, another fixed
machine gun that faced down and back. The latter gun was heavier,
and it required the recharging. The lighter machine gun could be
lifted out from one side and remounted on the other side, depending
where the attack was coming from. I was in a separate compartment
farther back than the pilot and navigator. It had a small canopy, so
that you could see in all directions. I had communication with the
pilot on an intercom. We were shot down two or three times. There
was a narrow escape, and, you know, we might not have had the
pleasure of seeing each other now.

Well, we were shot down in the Kuban region, and there were more
German planes there than we had fighter aircraft to escort us on
missions. It was very hard for Soviet pilots at that time. I don't remember if we had any escort when we saw German Messerschmitts
approaching us. Of course we started firing; we were frightened, and
these were our first missions. We were saved, more thanks to the
weather. We got into a big, stormy cloud, and the Messerschmitt lost
us. But before he lost sight of us he fired a round, and we saw that one
of our engines was burning and the fuel was gushing out. My pilot
was very skilled, and she managed to land the plane in a small
meadow about two kilometers behind our lines. We had an agreement between us that if there were a forced landing, the one who
feels better, who is conscious, not wounded, helps the others. It was
especially necessary to help the pilot and the navigator to get out of
that very small cabin.

After we landed my pilot, Yekaterina Musatova-Fedotova, called,
"Tosha, Tosha!" I had with me an instrument, like a small axe or
crowbar, to pry open their canopy, but I had breathed in so much dispersed fuel that I was like a drunken person. There was a pounding
noise, and four-letter words, and shouting to get out quick and help
us! That sobered me a little. Even now I can't breathe in exhaust
gases, and I can't stand the sight of petrol. Well, I got them out, and
luckily the plane didn't blow up and begin to burn.

The most interesting thing that I remember since then is that I
communicated by radio with somebody in the ground forces and told
them of our despair and our situation. So on the ground we were
waiting for help, and then we saw some soldiers, infantry soldiers,
crawling up to us. But we saw that they were our soldiers, and what
do you think they came with? Big green leaves, and these leaves were
full of strawberries! Probably they heard us talking and knew we were
women, the gift sent to them from the sky. That was the first nice
thing during the war-red strawberries, beautiful strawberries in
green leaves!

We survived the war because of our regimental commander. All
through the flights he was addressing his navigator, asking, "How are
the girls?" He chose the routes so that we evaded the ground attacks
of the anti-aircraft guns and also the German fighters; he knew the
situation very well. He told us always to stick together. Of course the
anti-aircraft fire couldn't be helped, and the first salvo generally got
someone. We began to maneuver all together, the nine of us or the
eighteen of us. Well, they couldn't adjust to our maneuvering and
missed us, but the fighters looked for an opportunity, for a plane to
part from the group so that they could easily shoot it down. When the
group stuck together there were nine planes: nine gunners with machine guns, nine navigators with their machine guns, plus the guns of
the pilots.

The second time we were shot down was on the western front, but
I shot down one plane, too! I didn't know I shot it down, but the
ground forces saw everything, and then we had the photographing
that begins when you fire. They saw it was shot down; the bullets
were tracer bullets, so our soldiers could see where they came from.
One of the planes of a male regiment was burning; our plane was hit,
but we weren't burning. The fuel tubes all shattered, and the fuel
again was streaming out. Then Katyusha, our pilot, saw a little clearing surrounded by the forest on all sides, and she managed to land the
plane safely.

The other plane that was on fire was flown by the men's crew.
Probably they were conceited young boys not very well trainedthey couldn't make it the last one hundred meters to that open space where we landed. They crashed in the forest and burned before our eyes. Because there was no one else around, we had to pick
up their remains: one arm, one leg, all smoked and roasted. I thought
I would never look at any meat after that. Well, life is life. So we
collected the remains of that crew, all three of them, torn apart. No
heads, all apart. We gathered them together. There was a parachute
intact, so we ripped the parachute apart, covered the remains, and
buried them.

The third time we were not shot down, but one of the engines cut
off as we were taking off. The height was only one hundred meters,
and we were loaded with bombs. Luckily for us there was a field in
front of us, so I quickly switched on the radio and said, "Forced
landing, forced landing!" so that the ground personnel knew where
we were. We made a belly landing, and very soon the crew of technicians and engineers arrived. When they looked under the wings and
saw the bombs they nearly fainted-the engineer was a woman, too.
One of the explosive devices that attached to the bomb was pushed
out and got split up, so it was live. It was by a micron or the hundredth part of a millimeter that the yoke did not detach from the
capsule with the explosive. Well, that's probably luck. But when they
arrived they thought that I was crazy from sheer fright, because they
found me sitting on the fuselage, powdering my face. We had landed
on a freshly plowed field and the earth was dry, and there was so
much dust you couldn't see anything. So I sat astride the fuselage, my
legs down in my cabin, and I thought, I must do something with this
dust, so I began brushing it off. They thought, Tosha is gone!

Either you have no time to be frightened or you have to act very
quickly, but somehow it's not a helpless fright. You have to act, you
have to do something, you have to save your life-not only your life
but the lives of your friends. Fright is natural and fear is natural for
everybody, but it wasn't freezing-a fright that makes you helpless.

I am frightened now (i99o). I don't know what will become of my
fair country. I don't know what is going to happen to our country,
with the lack of even the barest necessities.

It's not just the lack of things, it's just the sheer stupidity and
sabotage! The harvest, they plowed it down; probably they have always been doing it. Throughout the years, when the chief of the
Regional Party Department comes to inspect the fields and finds that
by a certain date the crops haven't been harvested, he punishes everybody. So what the kolkhozinks (farmers) do is to plow it under and say
everything is harvested.

Everybody has thought about this, but there is no one to think
what to do. No one can do anything here. We are all helpless for some
reason. These people are no fools, and even I am no fool. I can tell
them what should be, but how to achieve this? It doesn't work because of the resistance, because of the party leaders, and Gorbachev
himself-I think he doesn't know what to do. To take the power away
from the party you have to begin shooting them. I don't know whether
Gorbachev is right or not. I think so far he may be right, because if he
starts shooting them, there will start an overall shooting, a civil war.
A civil war is something-it will be just a massacre of everybody, by
everybody. As I read in a book, everyone is in an excellent state of
preparedness to bite or to kill everybody else. And the people are nice,
the people are nice. I don't know the psychology of it.

I was a student here in Moscow at the language institute before the
war, so I got through two years, four terms; then the war broke out,
and I made a break in studies. After the war, in May, 1945, I came back
and had two more years at the military institute.

I hated Stalin throughout my life, beginning with the murder of
Kirov. I was fifteen then, in sixth grade, and I said, "That's Stalin's
deed!" Then there came Kujbishev and Gorky and all the nice men,
from my point of view, and I hated Stalin when the war started.
Molotov declared, "For our country, for the motherland, for Stalin." I
was a coxswain at the rudder of the men's crew, a sculling crew, when
we heard the declaration of war. So we came back, landed, put the
boat away, and all went to the Military Commissariat to enrolleight boys and myself. I told the boys when I heard this broadcast that
said "for our country, for the motherland, for Stalin" that the motherland is all right, but why should I fight for Stalin? He's a man-let
him fight for himself! There was no traitor among the eight boys, no
traitor. I might have been shot.