A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (35 page)

On September 11, 1941, we came to the Airforce Academy here in
Moscow where the women gathered. They gave us military uniforms
and high boots, and during the night we went to bomb shelters because the Germans were bombing Moscow. We met there with Marina Raskova, and then we were sent to Engels to the flying school.
We all studied everything about the aircraft, and at the end of six
months we were assigned a specialty.

I was appointed parachute packer, and I was very disappointed
because I wanted to work on the aircraft. My commander was a major
of the parachute section, and he tried to calm me, but I started crying.
We had a field tent with a long table of fifty square meters where I
could pack the parachutes. The rule was that before the packers
started their work, they must first make some jumps. Of course there
was no great desire to jump, but we considered it a duty. So I put on
this parachute, and I had another parachute, a reserve one; I got into
the cockpit, and we climbed to goo meters.

The pilot told me to get ready. There is a cord from the pilot to the
parachute so if you are not balanced enough, or freeze up and don't
pull the ring yourself, it will open. I asked permission to get out of the
cockpit and to stand on the wing. I climbed out on the wing, the pilot
decreased the speed of the plane, I held onto the cockpit with my left
hand, got ready, and asked the pilot which leg I should jump from. He
told me either. I took the ring in my hand, and the pilot said jump, so
I jumped and pulled the ring, but it was too difficult to pull. Then I
took both hands and pulled it again, and then came the shock of the parachute opening. I felt something sliding off my leg; it was one high
boot and then my sock, and I landed with one boot and one bare foot.
Then everyone started laughing! I made three jumps in all.

When one of our aircraft was shot down and the pilot jumped with
the parachute I had packed, I felt proud because it was also the result
of my job that the pilot got down safely. For my good work I was given
a medal. Every day I checked the parachutes that were in the cockpits. The minimum altitude for jumping was about two hundred to
three hundred meters; otherwise, the pilot would hit the ground before the parachute completely opened.

I was at the airdrome whenever the planes were flying, and at
times the Germans bombed our field. All of the airdrome personnel
lived in dugouts underground and slept on bunks. In the winter it was
so cold when you awakened in the morning that sometimes your hair
was frozen to the wood of the beds; but you could hardly call them
beds, because they were some thin logs with mattresses on them. We
wore men's uniforms, trousers, and underwear. Our ration was a soldier's, and the pilots had their own rations.

Once at Voronezh city, where the military situation was very grave
and the Germans were massively advancing, the logistics battalion
couldn't bring us our rations for three days. We had no other food; we
lived on herring, so we survived. When we were stationed near the
villages we would exchange tobacco, cigarettes, bread, and sugar for
milk, sour cream, eggs, and butter and sometimes meat. We seldom
had meat, only cooked soup bones.

When we moved to another airdrome, a cargo aircraft with mechanics, ammunition, and some instruments was first to go, and
sometimes our pilots took the mechanic into the cockpit of the
fighter aircraft. There was some space inside the fuselage, and the
mechanics flew with the pilots in that manner. It was forbidden, of
course, but the front is the front. I had duty also at the command post
of the regiment and in the officers' mess. I enjoyed that duty because I
was close to the food. But we adjusted ourselves to the wartime food
and seldom felt hungry.

The mechanics and the sergeants had a salary of seventy rubles a
month, very good money at that time, and parachute packers and
mechanics of armament and avionics got less. To bathe, we were
carried in trucks to a nearby town bathhouse once every two or even
three weeks; it depended on the situation. There were some marriages registered at the front. The regimental commander usually
gave permission, and then the documents were sent to the division commander at the front. They approved of the marriages, but there
were no proper conditions, no place to live together. If the wife was
pregnant she was sent from the regiment to the rear to give birth and
was gone about three or four months.

I married my husband at the end of the war; most of us married
after the war was over.

Lieutenant Raisa Surnachevskaya,
senior pilot

I was born in Moscow on August 8, 1922. I entered a technical school
when I was about fifteen and very romantic. Across the street was a
glider school. I saw boys and girls entering there every day, and I was
carried away by the idea. The next year I was admitted, and I studied
there simultaneously with the technical school and finished both. I
was seventeen. I had to choose then between work or aviation; I chose
aviation and became a flight instructor.

When the war broke out I was brought with other girls in a truck
to a stadium, where Raskova was founding the regiment. I was appointed to the 586th Fighter Regiment. We went through training at
Engels and then to the front in the Yak-i. Our combat began in 1942 at
the town of Voronezh. One of our pilots shot down a German bomber
while we were still studying for combat!

At the front we flew in pairs, and Tamara Pamyatnykh and I flew
together. Our mission was air defense, and we were sent up when
there were German aircraft in our area. On one particular mission we
were told that there were two German planes in our area moving in
the direction of a Soviet railroad station that we were to defend.
When we climbed up we could see that there weren't two bombers,
there were two large groups of enemy bombers! We placed ourselves
above them with the sun behind us as we approached the formations.

At first we thought they must be birds, there were so many of
them. Then we realized they were German dive bombers, they were
approaching the railroad station, and the station was full of trains. We
wagged our wings to indicate to each other that we were ready to
attack. Our first targets were the lead aircraft. On this attack we each
shot down a German bomber, and then we quickly made another
pass, and again each of us shot down another. My plane was not
damaged by their gunfire but Tamara's plane was, and I was filled
with despair when I saw her plane dropping away, spinning and on
fire. I realized that I would have to continue the attack alone, and I
continued making passes at the bombers, shooting, and setting sev- eral more of them on fire, but I didn't shoot them down. Our task was
not to shoot the enemy down so much as to prevent them from
reaching their target; in this instance, the railroad station.

Raisa Surnachevskaya, 586th regiment

Then there was a jolt. My aircraft was hit, there was steam and
smoke in the cockpit, and the oil temperature rose to the red line, but
still I could handle the plane-it was controllable-and I chose a field
to make an emergency landing. But first I also made sure that I was
over our territory and not behind the German lines. I landed on a hill,
with my landing gear up; it was a belly landing to try to prevent my
plane from turning over. In the valley below there was a village, so I
tried to land so as to not further damage the aircraft or the people in
the village. I wanted to transmit over my radio that I was making a
forced landing, but I couldn't transmit.

When the plane stopped I got out of the cockpit and took my
parachute out, and I was thinking all the time about Tamara, because
I saw her plane go down, and I thought she might have been killed.
Then the civilians from the village and collective farm came toward
my plane armed with sticks and spades and rushed to the aircraft,
because they thought it might be a German plane. When they saw a
girl, they stood still, fascinated! The chief of the collective farm came
up to me and asked for documents. That area and farm had recently been occupied by the Germans, and they were very afraid. I said to
the man, "First you show me your documents and then I will!"

I left my aircraft there and told the villagers that it would be taken
away by the mechanics. When they came for my aircraft, they counted forty-three bullet holes in it. Afterward it was completely repaired, and I flew all my missions in that particular aircraft.

When I left my plane after I was shot down, I walked to the
telegraph station to notify my regiment that I had been shot down
and was returning to Voronezh. I was thinking about Tamara, and I
asked the staff there if I could call my regiment to find out if she was
safe. They said that already another young girl with a parachute had
been there to notify Voronezh that she was safe. And then I saw her
and she was safe!

Later, in another battle, I shot down another German plane. It was
a reconnaissance aircraft, and I was flying with the commander of the
regiment, and we shot the German plane down.

Senior Sergeant Galina Drobovich,
regimental mechanic of the aircraft

I was born in the town of Smolensk in 1921, and my mother and
grandmother raised me, because my father started another family.
He was a Russian intelligence officer. When I was three years old we
moved to Moscow. I completed nine grades of a secondary school
and then worked in an aviation plant, but I had never been in an
airplane. I worked as a controller in the instrument laboratory of the
plant.

I went in for mountain climbing, and I was among the mountain
climbers who were to conquer the peaks of the Caucasus Mountains.
When the war actually started I was climbing the highest peak, Elbrus. We got back to Moscow with great difficulty, because trucks,
carts, and trains all were crowded with people being evacuated or
trying to return home. Part of the time we traveled on the roofs of the
train because the cars were overflowing. When at last we arrived in
Moscow we went immediately to the Military Commissariat to enlist in the army. There were huge crowds of people trying to enlist.
They wouldn't enlist me because I was a woman.

I attended courses to train medical personnel and continued working in the plant. Then the Germans started bombing Moscow, and
there were many wounded civilians. We picked them up and took
them to hospitals. Then I worked in a military hospital taking care of
the wounded brought from the front. My working day at the aviation plant was twelve hours, and I worked in the military hospital at night.
We had very little sleep.

I heard about Marina Raskova forming the women's air regiments,
and I went to Komsomol headquarters and asked to be taken in to
this regiment. Before I went to be interviewed by Raskova, I put on
my Alpinist boots and overalls. When Raskova saw me, she smiled
and asked me what I would like to do at the front. I told her I wanted
to be a machine gunner. She then appointed me as a mechanic of the
aircraft. I think she took me right away because I wore the badge of
First Grade Alpinist on my overalls.

I trained in Engels, and then I was assigned to work with the Yak
fighter plane in the 586th Fighter Regiment. I remember when the
Yaks were first brought to Engels, because up until then we had only
worked with models in the classroom, and it was altogether another
thing to work outside when the wind was blowing and the temperature was forty below zero. When we touched the metal of the engine
our skin would stick to it, and some of it came off on the metal. Our
cheeks and foreheads were frozen too. On returning to the barracks
our hands would be a deep blue color.

At the front, when our crews were flying combat missions near our
airdrome, we mechanics could recognize the sound of our guns and
machine guns as a mother can tell the voice of her child. If the sound
stopped, we felt we had failed our pilots because we hadn't properly
prepared the aircraft for the mission, and thus our pilots could become an open target for the enemy. We worried until our planes
returned.

After the war I worked at the Kurtchatov Nuclear Research Institute. Then I married and had two children, and I still work as the
assistant telephone station master in the Olympic Games Center in
Moscow.

Captain Klavdiya Terekhova-Kasatkina,
secretary of the party organization of the regiment

My duty was to bring up the young girls to be real soldiers, real
military people. My parents were peasants who moved from their
village to Moscow to earn some money, and here I was born. I graduated from a technical school, and after that I entered the Moscow
Textile College. I was a very brave girl: I jumped with a parachute,
rode horses, drove a car, I could do everything!

When I was finishing the third course at the college, the Great
Patriotic War broke out. I went to my father and said, "There are three of us in our family, and at least one member of the family must go to
the front and defend our motherland. I can do a lot of things-I will
join the army and fight the hated enemy."