A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (27 page)

After Stalingrad we were sent to central Russia and then to the
Kuban area in the northern Caucasus. Once I flew to the airdrome
with the airforce commander to initialize the liaison between the
many airforce regiments, because there was no ground communica tion between the regimental airdromes. When I was about to land a
German plane passed me, and I could plainly see the black crosses on
the wings and the yellow around the crosses. I also saw the pilot, who
looked gaunt, and I noticed that he had white hair. I decided not to
land, and I pulled up and flew to a nearby small village and began
circling the church at an altitude just above the tops of the trees to
evade the German aircraft. My plane was defenseless, and it was also
difficult to fly because it was extremely sensitive on the controls.
The German was following me, and a burst of machine-gun fire hit
the surfaces of the plane, but he didn't set it on fire. I even bit my lips
until blood came trying to level the aircraft. Then he flew away, and I
landed at the airdrome. When I landed a handsome and tall man came
to me and asked if I was alive. He asked me in the manner you would
ask a man, using a man's vocabulary. I said yes, I was alive, so he
knew then that I was a woman. He said, "Oh, all of us were thinking
that the German pilot would kill you!"

Because I flew over Soviet territory and there was little threat from
ground fire, I flew at as low an altitude as possible; otherwise, I would
have been strafed and shot down by German aircraft. Part of my duty
was to pick up the remains of our crashed pilots in parachute sacks.
Most of the bodies I carried were in pieces. One of our pilots had very
beautiful hands; everyone noticed her hands and commented on
them. When they loaded her remains into my plane a hand was sticking out of the bag, and I recognized it as her hand.

When I was away on such a duty I was walking along by our front
line, and I heard some strange, intermittent, soft whistling sounds. I
didn't recognize the sound immediately and turned my attention to
listening-then I realized those were bullets! Bullets singing. They
were shooting at me.

My flying duties required that I land wherever I was to pick up or
deliver someone or something, and I landed on roads or small fieldsthe nearest place. Once I was told to pick up one of our wounded
pilots, Irina Osadze. Irina's aircraft had been hit by an anti-aircraft
shell, the shell hit the Plexiglas of the bomber, and pieces of the glass
were sticking out of her face and neck. When we arrived at the field
hospital the nurse wanted to pull out the pieces, but Irina did it
herself. She didn't fear pain.

Another time I flew to another of our pilots, Yelena KulkovaMalutina, when she was wounded in her belly, and her bowels were
perforated in twelve places. I flew to the field hospital with our regimental doctor so he could find out where she had been transferred and to check on her wounds. On our way back I couldn't land on our
airdrome because of a heavy fog, and I decided to land elsewhere until
the fog cleared. When I climbed up out of the fog a Soviet fighter was
right there. He pulled alongside, showed me his navigational chart,
and indicated that he did not know where he was. I then showed him
where the airdrome was. When he landed he asked who was the pilot
of this number twenty-eight aircraft, and he was told Galina. He said
that he must find her and kiss her, and when they asked him why, he
told them that I had saved his life!

When I was told to fly somewhere I was only given a general idea
of where it was; I was to fly there and then find a certain place. I
would draw my route on a map and fly there, but it seemed to me that
God saved me many times.

Pilots want to play games with the aircraft-to violate the law.
Katrina Musatova and I decided to fly to another airdrome where
Katrina had a boyfriend, so we carried some turnips and other vegetables, flew over the barracks, and threw the vegetables, bombing them
boom, boom, boom on the roof. I was a pilot, and now here I was
being a navigator-bombardier! We made another pass, and there they
were, out there eating the vegetables as we flew over.

In October, 1944, I was invited to join the Airforce Liaison Squadron. In the 125th regiment I was the lone liaison pilot, but in the
airforce army there was a whole squadron. I was promised that I
would be appointed flight commander in that squadron, but when I
arrived, there were ten to fifteen aircraft and the same number of
male pilots. Some of them were full of indignation, saying, "Why?
Aren't there any good pilots in our squadron so that you decided to
appoint this small girl?" I told the commander that I would like to be
appointed to the position right now, but first let these male pilots see
what kind of a pilot I am. The commander often tested me and sent
me with other crews on a mission.

Once I flew with another aircraft and my plane was faster, so I lost
him in the bad weather, a mist. You can see the terrain only vertically, but in front of you, you can't see anything. I had to maneuver
and make some turns, but finally I came to my destination, and the
other pilots were happy to see that I was still alive. They kissed me
and hugged me with tears in their eyes.

Then, after all, I was appointed flight commander, and all my
subordinates respected me greatly. Finally, I selected the best, the
handsomest of the pilots in the squadron, and I married him. Unfortunately, two years ago on Victory Day, May 9, he died. He was only sixty-seven, and he should have lived longer. He had been flying for
forty years: twenty-five in military aviation and fifteen in civil aviation. I have two daughters; both of them graduated from institutes,
and they have their own families. After my husband's death I moved
to my junior daughter's apartment, and we live together.

Sergeant Yekaterina Chujkova,
mechanic of armament

When we are awarded orders or medals in our army, we have a tradition: to drop our orders and medals into a crystal glass filled with
vodka and to drink that glass of vodka to the bottom. In the wartime
we had to use empty food cans instead of the crystal.

I was born in 1925. When the war broke out I lived in Leningrad and
was finishing secondary school. The pupils from senior classes were
sent to dig trenches at one of our airfields. When winter came and we
were not allowed to dig trenches anymore, we were sent to escort
citizens of Leningrad to shelters when the bombing started. We had a
special pass that allowed us to escort people in the daytime as well as
at night. We also accompanied the militia in searching out traitors
who climbed onto the roofs of our plants and factories and indicated
with flares where the factories were located so the German aircraft
could bomb them.

When the siege of Leningrad began, the ration of bread was 125
grams (about 4.5 ounces) a day. We were starving, and we were physically weak. It was difficult to move. We students were assembled and
given a portion of mash made of soup without any fat, any meat,
anything. Just boiled water and a piece of brown bread. All of the
students were gathered in one place to be given some food in order for
us to survive this siege. And that was the way it was in 1942. My
sister worked at a plant, and when her plant was evacuated to Moscow, she took me with her.

I arrived in Moscow and reported to the Young Communist League
with my documents to be stamped. One woman on that committee
asked me if I wanted to go to the front, and I said yes. Marina
Raskova's emissary had come to Moscow to select girls for the regiments. She saw me and asked why I wanted to join the regiment,
because I was so thin and small that I could hardly move, suffering
from the starvation in Leningrad. I told her that in Leningrad I had to
survive the siege and that I would put on my weight when in the
regiment. The army received much better nutrition than any civilian
at that time. Maybe she felt sorry for me-I was accepted to join. At that time my mother and a sister and brother lived near Moscow in
the German-occupied territory, my grandmother was still in Leningrad, and my father had perished at the front. One of my other sisters
was evacuated to Siberia with the kindergarten where she worked.

When I joined the regiment, it was 1943. At this date the regiment
badly needed reinforcement. I was taken right to the front and trained
there for a month. I was taught how to arm the bomb with the
detonator and to attach it onto the aircraft itself. I trembled when the
instructor tested me, because I was still so weak and the bombs
weighed so much-I was trembling like a mouse while he stood there
watching me affix the bombs to the aircraft. We had all our training
right on the airfield, and our model was a real plane.

At night we had to take our turn on guard duty: to take a gun and
guard the aircraft. In the winter we had to dig the bombs out of the
snow blown by snowstorms, and we found it was much easier to keep
the bombs under the plane. Guarding the planes was not a very pleasant duty, for our eyesight was constantly strained. And we had to
listen, too, very hard. The shift was two hours on, then two hours off
to rest; then another two hours' guard duty. I was frightened to he out
there at night, and when I heard a noise in the forest I would call out,
"Stop, who's coming? Stop, who's there?" If no one answered I said,
"I'm sorry, but I'm going to shoot; excuse me, I'm going to shoot!"

The aircraft were distributed on the sides of the runway at great
distances from each other, and my guard post was near the forest. In
the distance I saw a figure, then no figure, then a figure again, and I
cried, "Stop, who's coming? I'll shoot!" I shot into the air; then I shot
at the figure, and it fell down in the snow. It turned out to be a
Russian guarding the perimeter who had forgotten the password. He
lay in the snow until the information was passed on to the staff, and
they came out and found he was one of our soldiers. He was frozen
but unhurt!

I was a very good singer, and I was keen on singing. I was in the
chorus, and when I was affixing the bombs to the aircraft I would sing
out loud, and everybody could hear me. Once, when I was preparing
the last plane before the night, I knew it was the last assignment for
that day. I was polishing the guns and affixing the bombs, and I took
off my boots because it was easier to climb up on the wing without
them. The technician of armament came up and said that I was again
doing my duties bare-legged. I replied that my boots were so loose it
was hard to work in them. According to the army rules I should have
been punished for being out of uniform, but I was not because there was no one to replace me. We didn't wear socks, only foot clothsbig, bandagelike cloths. We had to resew our uniforms; they were
men's uniforms and didn't fit. In the winter we were cold, and we
used a modified oil drum for heat in our dugout. We would go to the
forest with an axe and chop wood for ourselves. We did everything for
ourselves-washed linens, sewed our clothes, dug our dugouts, chopped
our wood-everything.

Near the town of Smolensk they put another engine in the aircraft
and had to use a special wood ladder to climb up. We decided to steal
the ladder for firewood for our stove. It was very, very cold, and we
were afraid of the forest at night, so we chopped up the ladder and
carried the small pieces into our dugouts. The next morning we lined
up, and the commander of the squadron said that someone had stolen
the ladder. She asked who had stolen it and said that the ones who
had stolen the ladder should take two steps forward. She repeated
that, and the third time, all of the girls in the first squadron took two
steps forward! There was a new girl who had just joined the regiment,
and she also took two steps forward. The commander asked why she
was doing that, and the girl said that she would do what everybody
else did. A few days later the same commander came into our dugout
and saw that it was very warm, and she said, "Good for you, you found
a way to keep warm!" This was the commander of the squadron,
Nadezhda Fedutenko, Hero of the Soviet Union.

For our breakfast we had a dry piece of bread. We worked so hard
and slept so little and had so little proper food that when I was
working the streams of tears ran down my face. The streams ran
down while I was cleaning different small devices in the petrol and
affixing the bombs to the aircraft at dawn. I never said to myself,
What have I come here for? I only thought how difficult it was.

We always saw the planes off on their missions, and we stood on
the airfield and watched them return. If the squadron came back in
tight formation we were happy. But if they came back one at a timeone aircraft landed, and then another, and another, and another-it
meant that they had been attacked by the German fighters. We recognized our own aircraft according to the sound of the engines. We
immediately knew that it was our pilot and plane. In the evening,
when we exchanged information about each of our planes, we would
describe them as we would a close relative. One would say, "My
aircraft was the fourth one to return," and another would say, "Mine
was ninth to land." We experienced it very intimately. It was the
leading topic of our conversation.

Each of our planes had five machine guns. When they got back, if
all the bullets had been fired, we had to reload each gun, and it held
27o bullets. It was impossible to carry the box with the bullets into
the aircraft, and it was very difficult to load the guns, especially in
the pilot's cabin. The cockpit was very small, and the machine gun
was directly in front of the pilot, where all the instruments were
located. I had to crawl on my knees.

All the girls in our squadron lived in our dugout. In other squadrons they did it differently. And in some places we lived differently:
sometimes in houses, sometimes in smaller dugouts.

I was arrested during the war and sent to the guardhouse, and there
was hardly a person who was not arrested at some time. Mostly we
were arrested for exchanging things with the local peasants. We
would exchange our men's underwear for potatoes, pies, milk, and so
on. We exchanged what we didn't wear. Once I went to the nearest
village with a girlfriend to make an exchange, and on our way we met
a commissar from our regiment. She realized what we were doing,
and we were arrested for three days and put in the guardhouse. It was
no worse than the dugout, and it was warm there, with something to
eat and a heap of straw. The other girls would bring us a book and
push it through the window. There was a soldier guarding you when
you were in the guardhouse; for example, my bosom friend Sasha was
standing guard on me with a gun. There wasn't any special detachment to guard us; our girls did it.