A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (33 page)

We each were provided with a rucksack; a piece of soap; men's
underwear and our padded uniforms, jacket and pants; a blanket; a
mattress cover; and a pillow. The pilots were provided for in the same
way. Except for our initial training when we were all together, we
were not billeted with the officers and pilots. One of our pilots kept a
little bit of perfume in the cockpit, and she was punished for that. It
was a violation of rules; not even a lipstick in the cockpit.

The first pilot of my aircraft, Irina Olkova, demanded order in our
work from beginning to end, and before she got into the cockpit, she
personally examined the aircraft. Only after that did she get into the
plane. We clashed because she said something went wrong with the
aircraft during the flight, and it was my fault that it did not work
properly. I invited an engineer to examine the engine and aircraft, and
he did. He then declared that it was in perfect order. We had different
personalities that didn't work well together, and this pilot had a sort
of male character, you know. Then reinforcements came-new pilots-and I was assigned to one of the young pilots, Tamara Voronova,
and after the war she married and had four children. I was her mechanic until the end of the war and we became great friends, and to
this day we visit each other.

For the last seventy years of this socialist existence we have been
used to saying no words about anything at all, to refrain: that is why
now we look upon this chance with you as an opportunity to relate
our stories.

NOTE: Yekaterina Polunina, archivist for the regiment, was present
and asked to add something to Valentina's story, saying that Valentina would not tell it about herself.

"Valentina comes from a very famous and outstanding family, the
Popkov family, that was repressed during the Stalin period. Her father
perished during the Civil War, and the family, the Popkovs, brought
her up. After the war it turned into a very tragic situation. Her girlfriends, with whom she had been serving in the army for all those years, couldn't even phone her. All her telephone conversations were
monitored. She was pursued by the government because her uncle
was repressed during this period and was imprisoned and pronounced
to be 'the people's enemy,' and he was rehabilitated only this year
(1990]. "Valentina was at the front, which is why she was not imprisoned. All of her family and relatives were imprisoned at that time.
She was the only one who survived outside prison. She was dismissed
from the plant where she had worked before the war-just because she
was alive! She was brought up in the 'family of the enemy,' as they
called it, and for that reason she was isolated, totally isolated, from all
of her friends. Each of us was warned by the KGB after the war that we
could never see her or phone her because she came from a family of an
imprisoned enemy of the country, and only one girlfriend called her.
Later on they threatened to imprison her friend's husband just because
she had been phoning Valentina. She suffered very much.

"Now she is responsible for the work of the regimental council.
She writes to everyone in the regiment, she cries for them, she is very
sorry for everybody else-but not herself. Life made her keep silent."

Lieutenant Valentina Petrochenkova-Neminushaya,
pilot

I was born in a small village near Smolensk, and when I was five years
old my family moved to Moscow. While I was in school I heard that
some of our women pilots, Grizodubova, Osipenko, and Raskova,
made a nonstop flight to the Far East. All the country greeted these
brave women in Moscow. After this I decided to become a pilot. I was
then under sixteen, and when I went to the aero club I was not
allowed to join because of my age. I went to the classes anyway, even
though I was not listed as a student. In the spring, when the cadet
pilots started flying, I was not allowed to fly. I went with my father to
the militia station and asked an officer to give me a new birth certificate with my birth listed as eight months earlier, and he did it! That
is the way I started flying.

When I finished the course at the aero club I was not allowed to
study at the flying school because I was under eighteen. So I joined
the glider school. In the summer of 1940 I took part in a glider allunion competition, and I became a Champion of the Soviet Union by
flying seven and one-half hours, maneuvering, looking for the clouds
and updrafts, and finally arriving at the destination. Because of that, I
was sent to the glider school as an instructor.

When war broke out I was appointed as an instructor in the Po-2. In 1942 Stalin signed an order that we must prepare forces who would
be delivered behind the lines by parachute. Many of my girlfriends
from glider school wrote to me from the front that they flew fighter
aircraft, and I envied them. I wrote many letters to my command
asking to he sent to the front, but I was told I was needed there to
train landing-force parachutists. At Kazan city there was a parachute
training center, and I was awarded the title of parachutist in February,
1942. We jumped from an altitude of 80o meters, and it was so freezing cold that we hid our hands in the spare parachute and couldn't
control our landings. The airfield was icy, and it was so windy that
when we landed, the parachute remained full of air. We were sliding
away across the icy field with the wind, and only the instructors or
hushes could stop us! I was told that when I had prepared sixty men
for this airdrop operation they would let me go to the front.

So I was given an airplane, a mechanic, and thirty parachutes. It
was my mission to teach those men. There was one incident when
one of the men was to jump, and he was frightened and refused to
leave the aircraft. Then he caught the rudder cable in his hand, the
plane started descending, and I could not control it. He held on
tightly, and I tried to calm him down, begged him to release the cable,
patted him on the head, even kissed him, and then I beat his hand
with the rope, but he held on. I pulled him hack into the cockpit with
his legs up in the air and finally landed the plane. After this event the
man was released from parachute duty.

I finished the training of parachutists and went to Moscow, where
they wanted me to fly the PO-2 with the 588th regiment, but I refused
and said I only wanted to fly fighters. I was sent to the training center
for air defense pilots, and when I reported to the commander, I said
that I wished to train in fighters. He said, "No! No women!" and I said
to him, "I will go nowhere, I will fly fighters," and I sat in the chair.
'All right, you can sit here!" he said, and turned and left the room. I
spent all the night in his office, and when he returned in early morning I was still there, sitting on the chair. I said that I would sit there
and go nowhere, and he said that there were two hundred men in the
center and they lived in the dugout, and where should he put me?
Finally they took some plywood and made a small cabin for me in the
corner of the dugout.

It was very difficult for me when the flying started. The cadets had
about thirty-five flying hours when they came there, and I had about
four hundred, and my instructor said there was no use training me
like those men because I could fly. Because of my flying hours I was not allowed to fly but sent to duty in the kitchen and other services.
The commander said that when the first man could fly the fighter
aircraft then I would he the second one.

When flights in the fighter started, all the pilots and mechanics
were near the runway. When it was my turn I started taking off, and it
looked like a zigzag because my legs were trembling with nervousness, but when I was up and flying everything went well, and I was
crying, "Hurrah!" in the cockpit. It was a small plywood aircraft, the
main fighter before the war. If a bullet hit the plane it would catch on
fire, and a lot of pilots died in it because of that. I made three flights
that day and three perfect landings. I reported to the commander, and
he told the men they should follow my example and fly as I did. Then
I flew the Yak-7 and -9.

We were trained to dogfight in the air, and I was the last of the
pilots to complete this training for combat. It was the end of November and it was snowing. We had a dogfight, and as we approached the
runway the snow started. The instructor landed and then it was my
turn, and I saw a wall of snow with no ground visible. The commander at the field radioed to me: please land your aircraft. We had a
wind tee pointing down the runway we should use, but I couldn't see
it because both it and the snow were white. So I asked them to please
put a car at the beginning of the runway for me to see, and I made two
approaches and finally got the plane down, and the commander said I
did perfectly. That was my last training flight.

In December, 1943, I arrived at the 586th Fighter Regiment in Kiev.
Kiev had been liberated in November, and there was a lot of combat
in that area. So I made my first combat flight in December, 1943, to
guard the railroad bridge crossing the Dnieper River. Step by step we
approached our own borders, and then in Budapest we celebrated
victory day.

I was flying an older Yak on a training mission near Budapest when
I lost flying speed doing an Immelmann maneuver. It fell into a spin
and the wings began shaking, and finally I pulled it out. I was so low
and the countryside so hilly that the people on the ground saw what
was happening and turned away, because they thought I was going to
crash. During that time my whole life flew before my eyes, and I
pulled out so low that the aircraft radiator touched the ground, and it
bent the blades of the propeller! I landed, taxied, stopped the engine,
took off my parachute and went to my quarters pale as death, opened
the door, and fell down unconscious. The doctor came to see me, and
it was three days before I made my next flight.

I was eager to fly more, but my brother was killed in the war, and
when the war ended my mother asked me to come home and not to
fly any longer.

In 1946 I married a pilot I met during the war, and he said, "You
choose-aviation or me." So I stopped flying. My husband was a test
pilot, and we moved many times; he died in 1981. After the war I was
the senior test technician at the parachute center. I worked at our
space training center, and when there was a program for women to fly
in space, I trained them to use parachutes. During the war I flew 250
combat hours, and I left the army in November, 1945.

(Officer, rank not stated) Nina Slovokhotova,
deputy regimental navigator

I am a professor and doctor of science and chemistry doing research
in radiation physics and polymeric chemistry. I graduated from Moscow University before the war, and I was a postgraduate student in
chemistry when the war started. I was invited by Raskova to be chief
of chemical service, but there was no chemical warfare.

In 1943 1 was trained as navigator for the regiment. I was then
twenty-four. I planned the routes for the pilots, showed them how to
escape the anti-aircraft fire, and trained pilots in navigation, but my
major responsibility was to work with the radar location station. It
was the first model of our radar, and I watched enemy aircraft on the
screen and directed our planes to intercept. The area of regimental
responsibility for air defense was divided into squares, and I was a
guidance officer. I was one of the first radar navigation officers in our
country.

When we moved to a new area I would fly with the regimental
commander and mark the maps of the area with landmarks for the
pilots. I was also responsible for ground information. We had communication with ground forces, a net of air surveillance. As an inspector
I would go to the posts of air surveillance centers, where the girls
working there were supposed to know the difference between Soviet
and German planes.

The first radars were delivered in 1942, but it wasn't until 1943 that
a net was formed and we knew how to maintain it. Because pilots
flew missions for many hours both day and night when the situation
was very intense, we had no time to sleep for four or five days at a
time. The radar was set up far from the runways and airdrome, usually three to five kilometers, and it was camouflaged so we were not
bombed. We lived underground in dugouts, but later we lived in houses. Early in the war the fighter pilots had only radio receivers, no
transmitters, in their aircraft. In 1943, our planes were equipped with
two-way radios. There was one episode when a woman pilot sighted
an enemy aircraft, and then he dove into the clouds, and the girl burst
out crying on the radio, "He escaped, he has escaped!" I would call to
the artillery and ask them the altitude of the enemy aircraft, and
there was close cooperation between us. The pilots usually thanked
me for identifying the fascist planes in the air so they could attack,
but sometimes the pilots reproached me for not finding any. After the
war, when I was defending my doctoral dissertation, one of the women
who had been a famous pilot during the war, Olga Yamshikova, came
to the restaurant where we were celebrating and said, "I don't know
what kind of chemist she is, I don't care, but she was a very perfect
guidance officer during the war!" When the pilots landed after a mission they reported, and I was to write a combat message. They also
related the episodes of dogfights to be forwarded. One day our pilots
Tamara Pamyatnykh and Raisa Surnachevskaya were in the air, and I
informed them that in a certain area there were some German aircraft. They flew there and saw forty-three German bombers flying
toward the railroad station they were guarding near Kursk, and the
girls attacked the leading aircraft, split the formation, and shot down
four planes. The Germans turned back, never bombing the station. It
was an important target for the fascists, because a massive concentration of Soviet troops and ammunition had been drawn to that sector
to prepare for the Kursk Bulge battle. A British war correspondent saw
this dogfight and described it in his press release. The Queen of
England made her husband, the King, give each of these girls a gold
wristwatch. Tamara Pamyatnykh is a remarkable woman.