A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (28 page)

Our friendship has been preserved until the present day. Youth is
youth. We made pillows out of our foot cloths and embroidered the
Pe-2 on them. Everybody embroidered the Pe-2 on their pillows.
When it came time for our last farewell at the end of the war, we
could not imagine how we could go on living without each other. We
made a good family.

Lieutenant Ludmila Popova,
navigator

I was born and raised in Moscow, and my father was a military man
up to the 1930s. Then, in October, 1941, he was called back into the
military and was killed at the front. I was seventeen. From the moment I found out he had been killed, I was determined to go into the
military and avenge his death. When I was old enough to join the
army, I was sent to an aviation school and became a navigator. Later,
in 1943, I joined the regiment to take the place of those who had
perished.

Galina (or Galya) Tenuyeva-Lomanova was my pilot, and she was
wounded in combat. Our mission was to bomb a very well-protected
target, and we were hit by heavy antiaircraft fire; the aircraft was
riddled by bullets. There were holes in the engine and in the nose of
the aircraft, and the engine was steaming. Lomanova was wounded in
her arm. Then there was a great explosion in the nose of the plane-a
shell exploded there. At first there was so much smoke in our cabin I
could hardly see, but I felt the aircraft descending. When the smoke
dispersed I saw Galya lying unconscious against the control stick. We
had already lost 2,000 meters in altitude, and I took her by the shoulders and held her back from the stick. Then she regained consciousness, took the controls, and began flying the plane again. She decided
we could make it back for a landing at our own airfield.

When the shell exploded, the glass in the canopy of our compartment was blown out. The wind blew away everything, and the map
that I had in my hand flew away also, so I had nothing with which to
navigate. Before combat missions, our commander always warned us
that we must know the location of places and the terrain of the flying
area by heart in order to find our way without the map. We didn't
realize what the purpose was for that, and we would talk about those
grumbling commanders who always tried to find some fault with us.
And then, when I found myself in that situation, I realized how important it really was. I had to bring us back to our airdrome by memory. We managed to stay airborne all the way back to our own regimental airfield. Galya asked me to help her land the aircraft, because
she felt she was not capable of doing it alone with only one arm. I
helped her with the controls as best I could. When we landed she was
sent to the hospital, and I was assigned to another pilot.

My new pilot was Irina Asadze, and she was the pilot I finished the
war with. She retired at the end of the war, and in 1946 I also retired
from the air force.

When we were in eastern Prussia our gunner was severely wounded
in the head. We couldn't help him, because he was in a separate
compartment farther hack from us. The only thing he managed to say
on the intercom was that he was wounded; these were his last words.
We had already dropped all our bombs, so we detached from our
formation and at maximum speed returned to the nearest airfield.
When we were approaching the field we shot two rockets in the air to
indicate there was a wounded person on the aircraft. When we landed
we saw that he had lost much blood. He couldn't bandage himself
because he had lost consciousness. He was taken to the hospital and operated on, and he lost part of his eyesight. We went with him and
waited there until after his operation. I was never wounded-God
saved me! I flew forty combat missions in the war.

Life is life. Certainly war is a difficult job to do, but it was not
confined to gravity. We found time to have fun, to dance and sing, on
those nights when we hadn't had any losses. We were young and
romantic and had a lot of dreams; thoughts for the future. We came
from different parts of our country. There were other Muscovites, and
we would get together and imagine the day when we would go home
and stroll along the streets. Everyone would look at us and admire us,
the streets would be lit, and all would be sunny and shiny with war
far behind us. War is not a normal thing for any country, for any state,
for any man, and especially for a woman. And war is not the form for
settling differences between countries.

Lieutenant Yekaterina Musatova-Fedotova,
pilot, commander of the formation

I started flying in a glider school when I was sixteen, and in 1941 I
began working as a pilot-instructor. From the beginning of the war I
wrote letters asking to be sent to the front as a volunteer. When at
last they let Raskova form the regiments, she sent us all a letter
asking how many flying hours we had. Because we all wanted to help
our country and go to the front, we added hours to our totals. If we
had too hours we wrote that we had 700 or Soo hours and were very
experienced pilots. The chief of our training school went on holiday,
and we took advantage of that and escaped to Engels, because he
wouldn't release us from our instructing jobs. Four of us from our
school arrived at the women's flight training base at Engels. The
regiments had already been trained by that time. Very quickly they
also trained us, and we became part of the 587th Bomber Regiment, as
it was called at that time. I was nineteen years old.

The Pe-2, the aircraft flown by the 587th regiment, was a fine
airplane, probably the best in either the German or Soviet air force.
But it was complex and difficult for women to fly, especially small
women who were slim and hungry. The control stick was heavy to
move, and our arms and legs were so short we had three folded pillows behind our backs. The navigators helped us by pushing on our
backs as we pushed on the stick to get the tail up for takeoff.

I was a born pilot. In my flight formation there were three aircraft,
and I piloted the lead plane. The experienced pilots carried 1,200 kilos
of bombs, and the inexperienced carried 6oo kilos. When we were assigned a combat mission that
was urgent and important, the
ground staff carried the regimental banners onto the airfield, and we took off with the
accompaniment and rustle of
the banners.

Klara Dubkova, 125th regiment

Once, when we were preparing for such a mission, I had
climbed up only fifty meters on
takeoff, and one of the engines
quit. We were loaded with 1,200
kilos of bombs; it was a failure
of everything. I couldn't turn
back to the airfield, because all
of the regiment were still taking off. On the right side was a
forest, in front was a small village, and beetroot was planted
horizontal to our heading. I had
but a fraction of a second to decide what to do, so I chose the
only course: to belly-land in the beetroot field. So down we went into
the field. The aircraft came to a stop, and we were all alive and all
right. At that moment the ambulance, fire truck, and people came
running. I felt absolutely empty, drained; all I could think was, This is
the way pilots crash their aircraft. At this moment Tonya (Antonina
Khokhlova), our tail-gunner, got out of the plane, sat on the tail, took a
mirror out of her pocket, and began powdering her face. She said to me,
"Yekaterina, you dusted my face!" The earth was dry and dusty, and
our landing stirred up the dust. Klara Dubkova, my navigator, turned
to Tonya and said, "We could have exploded when we landed, and
now you are making merry!" Tonya replied that with our commander
as pilot that would never have happened. With humor she said to me,
"You could have landed at the village where they would feed us with
fried potatoes, and now we are hungry!"

Many things go together in this life-ridiculous, funny episodes.
Once, because I was on an emergency airfield, I was called to join up
with the squadron in the air. I took off and felt the plane dragging to
the right, so I gave more power to that engine, climbed up, and joined
the formation. Then I saw the rear gunner in the plane ahead of me putting his whole leg out of his window! He was giving me a signal
that something was wrong with our plane. I didn't know what was
wrong, I only felt it. And because there was no transmission between
aircraft, he was trying to show me with gestures and signs. When he
put his leg out, I understood that one landing gear had not retracted.
When we returned to our airfield after completing the mission, all the
other planes were given permission to land except ours. We circled
the field, and then we were given the order to parachute out of the
plane. I didn't understand why we were to do that, and I decided to
land the aircraft on the one gear. I managed to land on the left gear,
and then, very slowly, I moved off the runway to clear it for other
aircraft. At this time there were cameramen at our field shooting a
film about our female regiment, which was to be called The Wings of
the Motherland. When we landed safely, a lot of people rushed toward
the plane, and among them were those cameramen. When I got out of
the cockpit, a cameraman came up to me and asked why I spoiled
such a good shot, because our plane didn't turn over or crash. He
expected us to turn over and to show in the film how we crashed, and
now we emerged safely from the cockpit!

Another time we took off on a combat mission and formed up with
Markov in the lead, and I felt that one of my engines was slowing
down. Markov perceived the situation and slowed down the whole
formation. He helped us to stay with the formation throughout the
mission and made sure we could keep up. If we dropped back, our
fighter escort would go with the formation, and we could be shot
down easily by the German fighters. So it was because Markov always tried to take care and see that we were protected that we made it
back.

We had to land on a fighter airfield because of the bad engine
instead of continue on to our own field. When we made the return
flight to our airdrome, I decided to show off to display my skill and
ability. On our airfield there was a group of male fighter pilots. They
were constantly watching us landing and taking off, so I decided to be
the star of the day. I was coming in for a landing and I bounced, so I
added power and went around. I thought, Now I will show them how
I can land, and I did the same again-I bounced! On the third try I
thought, Now I must show them, and I made a very bad landing. I had
never done that before; I was so very embarrassed.

I got out of our plane and went to report that we had returned to
base, and Markov said, "Girls, have you had a good sleep this night?"
I said yes, even though we hadn't, because we had to change some instruments in the plane and then fly back. He answered that we
hadn't slept that night, or I could have landed the aircraft as I usually did. He didn't consider us to be ready to fly that day, and he said
we could not go on the mission that morning. The three of us stood
in front of him and begged to go, and he said no. We sobbed, and he
put his fist on his desk and said, "No, I order you to bed to sleep,
now go!"

We were shot down again when bullets hit our fuel tank. Our
fighters got in a fight with the fascist fighters, and we were left
without any escort. There were nine bombers left without escort, and
all but one of us was shot down by German fighters. We all made
forced landings, and we all survived.

Sergeant Mariya Kaloshina,
mechanic of armament

I was born in 1922, and I came to Raskova's regiment a little later in
the war. It was in 1943, because I was only finishing a secondary
school in the tenth form when the war started. While finishing
school I had a dream to enter the Airforce Academy, but at the beginning of the war it was evacuated to central Asia, so I entered an
aviation technical college.

In 1943 I was assigned to the 125th Guards Bomber Regiment and
taken to the front. I was then twenty-one years old. I had taken the
six-month training course for the regiment, which was easy for me
because I had some technical knowledge. At the front I was appointed
to be a mechanic for the commander of the formation, Alexandra
Krivanova.

To affix the bombs to the aircraft, we stood on our knees and rolled
them. When we got used to doing it, we rolled the bombs with our
feet, our hands on our hips. There were different types of bombs: the
small bombs made to destroy buildings were calledy Fugaska. There
were other small bombs called Zazhigalka, and they were incendiary
bombs. During the war, the Germans dropped Zazhigalkas on Moscow. I lived in Moscow when the war broke out, and we would stand
on the roof of a building, pick up the bombs, and throw them into
sand. Then they would stop burning. Children stayed on the roofs
during the war to do that.

At Konigsberg I had much work to do, because there were constant
raids over the fascist territory; we didn't have a spare second. In the
daytime we provided the aircraft with bombs, and at night we were on
guard duty. We slept for about three hours.