A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (25 page)

They were shot down on a mission when both engines and fuel
tanks were hit by enemy fire, and Mariya Dolina managed to bellyland the aircraft. When she did, the cockpit hatch jammed, and the
girls couldn't get out. By this time the cockpit already was full of
smoke. It was the tail gunner who saved their lives. He got out of his
cockpit, crawled along the fuselage, forced the canopy open, dragged
them out of the cockpit, and rushed them away from the aircraft.
They were no more than fifty meters from the plane when it blew up.

Another time they didn't return from a mission that day, but the
next day they were flown back to our airdrome in another aircraft. I
had watched our navigator, Galina, while she was in the presence of
Commander Markov and guessed that they had feelings for each
other. It was just an undercurrent, because they didn't act in any way
but properly, ever. But when the girls were brought back burned and
injured, Valentin Markov himself carried Galina out of the plane and
over to the vehicle to bring them to the regiment. Then we all knew
his feelings for her. They were married after the war.

Lieutenant Yelena Kulkova-Malutina,
senior pilot

I was born in Leningrad in 1917, the year of the revolution. While I was
still in school, I attended glider school. I was seventeen years old.
When I graduated I entered a pilot's school of civil aviation, which I
completed in three years. I was then sent to a Urals unit of aviation,
and I worked as a pilot in medical aviation. The connections between
the Kazan region and the central part of Russia where I worked were
bad. The roads were in poor condition, and the only possible way to
carry mail and things such as food and sick people was by plane. I
flew a U-2 mainly to carry the sick. This unit was called a Unit of
Special Activity.

In 1942 I was transferred to the town of Magnitogorsk, where I was
an instructor-pilot. I was twenty-three or twenty-four when the war
started, and I trained male pilots in a military training school. At that
time, just before the war, Soviet aviation was in its glory. There was
an outburst of aviation development, and aviation was widely talked
about. In our present-day situation, we never talk about cosmic space
and exploration. Aviation flourished then. At the school I was the
only woman out of eighteen instructors. It was in an open airfield,
and there was no place for a ladies' room. Everything was open; to
find a place I had to go behind a bush, where I could he seen by
everyone, and there were only men. I was so shy and embarrassed that I didn't even have a gulp of water in order not to go to the ladies' room
behind a bush. And the cadets insisted on asking our commander
why I didn't ever have breakfast!

Then I was transferred to a group that was preparing to fly in one of
Marina Raskova's regiments. The regiments had suffered losses at the
front, and they needed crews to take their places. By this time I had
1,5oo hours of flying time; that is why, as an experienced pilot, I was
trained in the most complex plane, the Pe-2 dive bomber. In our school
the nutrition had been very poor: it was wartime. When I went to the
regiment the food was so much better that for a period of time I
couldn't eat enough-I just ate much food. It took time before I felt full.
When I joined the regiment everyone was so friendly, so helpful-they
loved each other. Even though I came to the regiment for only the last
year and a half, I cherish the friendships I made for all of my life.

On July 24, 1944, when I was on a combat mission, I received a
heavy wound in my belly from a fascist shell. We were assigned to
bomb a certain target, and the weather was bad, with low clouds.
When we made our first try we did not manage to bomb the target,
because it was completely covered with clouds. We went back to our
airfield and then returned and made a second pass over the target.
The enemy artillery was ready for us: they fired at us so much that
many planes were set on fire, but there were no planes shot down. My
plane was not set on fire, but I was shot and severely wounded. I
realized I was wounded, but I didn't feel extreme pain. I told my
navigator, who was also named Yelena, that I was wounded and asked
what I should do. The navigator said: "We must go on because there is
no place to land. We will all crash if we don't go on to a field where we
can land!"

We lagged behind our unit, because it was difficult for me to continue flying the aircraft. Fortunately we found the airfield of a fighter
regiment, and I managed to land. But very many times while in the
air I fainted, and my navigator gave me liquid ammonia to inhale so I
would regain consciousness. When I finally landed the plane, I lost
consciousness completely. I was carried to the military field hospital
but didn't know anything until I awakened surrounded by three thousand wounded. They operated on me, and it turned out to be very
serious, as are all wounds in the belly. The girls from the regiment
visited me there when they could. I had eleven holes in my rectum. I
was transferred to the Moscow Military Hospital, where I stayed for
two months, and then returned to my regiment.

I returned and flew combat, even though I was not considered fit to fly. I couldn't stand not to fly, so I finished the war with my comradesin-arms. I also participated in the victory parade in Red Square. I
stayed in the army until 1949•

After the war I also flew the Tu-2. I was a lieutenant. We have three
lieutenant ranks: junior lieutenant, lieutenant, and senior lieutenant.
When the war ended and our regiment was released, I joined a male
regiment. While I was in the regiment I married a pilot, got pregnant,
and retired in 1949.

Sergeant Nataliya
mechanic of armament

I was born in 1921 in the town of Penza, 6oo kilometers from Moscow
toward the Volga River. My father was a teacher in a higher school,
always beyond secondary school. My family moved to Moscow when
I was a child. I entered teachers' college there, and I also started in a
parachute school. But the year before the war, the government stopped
women from engaging in any kind of military sport that could endanger their lives, so I wasn't allowed to finish.

When the war started I heard about the women's air regiments, and
my girlfriend and I went where they were interviewing for the three
hundred positions in the regiments. There were thousands of girls in
line waiting to apply. I was accepted into the 125th Guards Bomber
Regiment as a mechanic of armament. We trained from nine in the
morning to three in the afternoon and then from six to nine in the
evening. When we finished our training, we trained the next group of
mechanics.

At the front, one of our difficult jobs was cleaning the machine
guns. The guns became very dirty inside, choked with smoke and
burned particles. We had to lift them; they weighed sixteen kilograms
and were two meters long. We were all so small and thin-what was
Raskova thinking about when she chose small girls for such jobs? In
the winter, especially, we had to carry the machine guns through the
snowdrifts on our shoulders to the dugout to clean them, because it
was too cold to properly clean them outside. Everything to do with
ammunition was bulky and heavy.

We were given only forty-five minutes to rearm the aircraft after a
mission and often worked almost beyond our physical capacity. Soon
we devised methods for rearming that were not in our manuals but
were necessary in order for us to finish on time. When we loaded the
bombs we usually had six girls to carry and attach them to the
aircraft.

My first aircrew perished on a mission. I had a very emotional
feeling about their deaths. I wondered if I had in some way failed
them; perhaps I had not charged the machine guns properly or erred
in some duty I was to perform. I lived with that uneasy feeling until
the tail-gunner, who had survived, wrote to me from the hospital. He
told me that the pilot and navigator had been killed by one shell and
that the aircraft and guns were operating properly. It was chance, not
something I had done improperly, that had caused their deaths.

Lieutenant Galina Brok-Beltsova,
navigator

I was born in 1925 in Moscow,
and I finished secondary school
there. I was very sports-minded.
When the war broke out the
government sent out an appeal
to the strong, mighty people to
join aviation. The boys and girls
were tested in a centrifuge and
drafted into aviation. We were
then trained to be gunners or
navigators. Without any boasting I can say we were all mighty,
healthy, robust, and patriotic
young people. I trained in 1941
and 1942 in a military school.
Then I was drafted into the
Emergency Aviation Regiment,
became a navigator in the Pe-2
dive bomber, and was sent to
the front as a replacement. My
pilot was Antonina BondarevaSpitsina. I flew thirty-six missions during the war.

Galina Brok-Beltsova, 125th regiment

When I was sent to the 125th regiment, I was struck by the skill
and competency of the personnel and inspired by being there with a
group of young girls whose uniforms were covered with medals and
orders. The pilots and navigators were so confident and well-trained,
and it was all because of Marina Raskova: she was their ideal, their
hero. We all need an ideal, an example to follow. It makes you develop
your own energy. The "old ladies," or "aged," as we called the crews
that had been with the regiment since the beginning (even though they were only twenty-three or so), taught us not to be afraid but to
face the reality and the hardships with courage and to overcome. We
learned not to lose our composure but to have the stamina and agility
to survive.

On one mission we took off and were flying toward the target, and
one of our engines quit. We began lagging behind the formation. A
dive bomber never flies to a target alone: it always flies with a squadron, and that squadron is protected by fighter aircraft. If your plane is
falling behind the squadron, you are to return to your airdrome.
Otherwise the enemy fighters will shoot you down. And now we
were alone without fighter cover. The bombs were affixed to the
aircraft, and we had no emergency area to drop the bombs, which
meant we might be dropping them on our own troops. But we
couldn't land with the bombs, either.

We knew they would explode when we landed, because these were
not Soviet bombs but captured German bombs. The peculiarity of the
German bombs was that they had no mechanism on them to prevent
them from exploding if you landed with them still attached to the
aircraft, as ours did. So there was no way out but to continue on to the
target.

The German antiaircraft guns filled the air around the squadron,
which was by then way ahead of us, but our lone aircraft didn't attract
their attention at all. We dropped the bombs and turned to fly home.
Then we were attacked by two German fighters coming in from different directions. We all did our best with our machine guns, but it
was quite useless; the tracer bullets we were firing did not even reach
the fascist aircraft. They attacked us from positions from which we
couldn't return fire. This was a section between the tail and the
wings that could not be covered.

We could see their faces: they were smiling at us and made another
circle with their guns firing and terrible smiles on their faces. Antonina thrust the plane abruptly to the right and to the left, weaving
and jumping in the air. All of a sudden we heard nothing. Then we
saw that the Soviet fighters had come back to help us after they
finished escorting the formation back to our airfield. And so the
German fighters vanished. No one believed that we would ever return
from that mission.

Another time, in east Prussia, they decided that we could carry
more bombs if we carried less fuel. As it turned out, we were completely overloaded. A Pe-2 from a male regiment took off just before
us, crashed into a hangar, and exploded, not being able to clear the hangar. We were next in line to take off. You have to forbid yourself
from thinking that your plane will end up the same way. You concentrate on a successful mission. On takeoff, our pilot held the aircraft
on the ground until it had adequate speed, and when it lifted off, it
was apparent that we were extremely overloaded. We felt it dragging
us back to earth. But we made it; our aircraft cleared the hangar, and
we did have a successful mission. It was a victory-not over the
German troops but over ourselves. You fight your own cowardliness.

While I was awaiting assignment to the front I had met a male pilot,
and we became engaged. After I went to the regiment at the front I
received a letter from him every single day. The whole of my squadron
read them, because very few of the other girls received letters. They
used to say to me, "Galina, it's true love." Later I married him, and the
whole squadron was present at our wedding. He came to our regiment
to marry me, and it was the happiest episode of my life.