The History Buff's Guide to World War II (43 page)

Diligent, inspiring, and practically inexhaustible, for nearly a year she trained what would become three air regiments within the group: the 586th Fighter, 125th Dive Bomber, and 46th Night Bomber. Altogether, the thirty-year-old managed hundreds of officers and enlisted, but she never lived to see combat.

In late 1942 Moscow assigned Raskova’s 125th Dive Bomber Regiment to S
TALINGRAD
at the height of the winter battle. Piloting one of the regiment’s twin-engine Pe-2s, Raskova and three crew members flew to the front when a sudden blizzard engulfed them. Facing thrashing winds and falling darkness, she attempted to land in an open field and crashed, killing everyone on board.
¹¹⁷

Testament to her leverage and inspiration, her body was interned in Red Square. Streets, schools, village centers, and newborns were named after her. Not surprisingly, Raskova’s group went on to fight with distinction. From 1942 to the war’s termination, the group logged thirty thousand sorties, two of her fighter pilots attained the status of ace, and her night-bomber regiment fought in the battle of B
ERLIN
.
¹¹⁸

During the war, thirty-three women flyers received the highest decoration, “Hero of the Soviet Union.” All but three of them were in Raskova’s Aviation Group 122.

3
. YVONNE NÈVEJEAN (BELGIUM, 1900–1987)

Famed Moravian Oskar Schindler rescued more than twelve hundred Jews from the Holocaust. Lesser-known Belgian Yvonne Nèvejean spared more than four thousand, mostly children.

She was head of the Oeuvre Nationale de l’Enfance (National Agency for Children) and directed the state-sponsored children’s homes throughout her country. As the SS began to round up and export Belgium’s sixty-five thousand Jews in 1942, the nation’s underground Jewish Defense Committee turned to Nèvejean for assistance. When asked to help children who had become orphaned or separated from their parents, Nèvejean vowed to save any child and immediately employed her agency to that end.

As the JDC found children for rescue, Nèvejean dispatched social workers and nurses to pick them up. Housing her charges in state facilities, she worked tirelessly to find permanent homes for all, either with foster families or Christian organizations. To pay for the operation, she collected funds from the JDC, banks, private donors, and the exiled Belgian government in London. She and her assistants also gathered food, medicine, clothes, ration books, and forged documents.
¹¹⁹

On one occasion, the Gestapo raided a children’s home in Wezembeek, seized a number of Jewish children and adults, and transported them to Mechelen camp, a train embarkation point for Auschwitz. Nèvejean hurriedly contacted Belgium’s Queen Mother Elisabeth and, with the help of the national department of justice, negotiated the release of all the detainees.
¹²⁰

Over the course of two years, Nèvejean and her associates saved approximately a quarter of Belgium’s Jewish population below the age of ten, known thereafter as “Yvonne’s Children.”

Yvonne Nèvejean’s rescue of the children from Mechelen was a miraculous achievement. Of the 26,500 Jews deported from the camp, only some 500 are known to have lived.

4
. LUDMILA PAVLICHENKO (USSR, 1916–74)

Tiny, bitter, and blunt, Sgt. Mila Pavlichenko was one of the most prolific sharpshooters in the Red Army and a legend on the eastern front. Her fellow Soviets called her the “Death Sniper.” To the Germans she was the “Bolshevik Valkyrie,” killing with impunity in her native Ukraine and Crimea. During the 1941 siege of Odessa alone, she allegedly tallied more than 180 kills.

Wounded four times and losing her husband in combat, she desired to kill as many Germans as possible. But as news of her exploits reached Moscow, Soviet officials decided to use her in a different capacity. They promoted her to lieutenant, made her the subject of a documentary, and in 1942 sent her on a speaking tour. In Canada, England, Wales, and the United States, she regaled audiences with stories of her assassinations and lectured them on the need for a second front in Europe. She met with students, factory workers, Ukrainian-American groups, and was one of the first Soviets ever to be invited to the White House, a personal guest of E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT
.
¹²¹

When telling audiences of her daring occupation, she recalled one incident most often. Near the city of Sevastopol, she became locked in a duel against an opposing sniper that lasted nearly two days. After finally getting in the last and fatal shot, she investigated her prey and found a booklet containing a tally of more than four hundred kills. One version of the story contends the ledger read “Dunkirk.” Whether this was added to stir the emotions of British audiences is unknown.

What could be confirmed was her own incredible total. In her brief but prolific career, Pavlichenko was credited with 309 enemy fatalities.
¹²²

According to Soviet records, female snipers of the Red Army scored more than eleven thousand kills during the Second World War.

5
. GISI FLEISCHMANN (SLOVAKIA, 1897–1944)

A diehard Zionist working for the Jewish Center of Slovakia before the war, Gisi Fleischmann was in charge of arranging emigrations to Palestine. As Hitler’s power grew, she knew enough to send her two children to the British mandate, but she repeatedly refused to go herself. Instead she spent the rest of her short life saving others.

In the spring of 1942, as the SS began wholesale roundups, extraditions, and executions of the Continent’s Jews, Fleischmann and others formed a clandestine rescue operation code-named “Working Group.” Members of the underground society decided to bribe regional Gestapo chief Dieter Wisliceny to stop the deportations. Fleischmann raised the ransom money through Jewish foundations in Geneva and New York and led the negotiations with Wisliceny. The attempt succeeded. From the fall of 1942 to the fall of 1944 extraditions effectively ceased in Slovakia.

Encouraged by their success, Working Group outlined a “Europa Plan,” whereby the Third Reich would spare all Jews in exchange for money and goods shipped in from outside the Continent. While presenting the arrangement to Nazi authorities, Fleischmann was arrested and jailed for four months. After her release, she again refused to leave the country. In October 1944 the SS swept up nearly every member of the outfit, including Fleischmann. Taken on one of the last trains to reach Auschwitz, she was pulled from the boxcars, sent directly to the chambers, and gassed.
¹²³

When she was deported to Auschwitz, Gisi Fleischmann was designated “R.U.” for Rückkehr unerwünscht, meaning “Return undesirable.”

6
. YELENA FEDOROVNA KOLESOVA (USSR, 1917–42)

A Moscow grade school teacher, tall, athletic, Yelena Kolesova volunteered for military service immediately after the German invasion. Hastily trained in demolitions, Kolesova led a small group of female fighters behind enemy lines in November 1941. Over the course of nineteen days they set fire to buildings, conducted reconnaissance, and killed several German soldiers. For her initiative and courage, she received the Order of the Red Banner, the third-highest decoration available to Soviet citizens.
¹²⁴

In May 1942, she survived a behind-the-lines airdrop that killed three of her female compatriots. Undeterred, Kolesova proceeded with her diminished group. With the help of local civilians, she derailed trains, abducted enemy soldiers, and destroyed bridges. Germany offered thirty thousand Reichmarks (about seven thousand dollars in 1942) for her capture and estimated her unit to be six hundred strong, where in fact it only numbered a half dozen. She went on to receive the Order of Lenin, the highest decoration in the Soviet Union.
¹²⁵

On September 11, 1942, while leading an attack on a heavily defended German outpost in the town of Vydritsa, Kolesova charged a machine-gun nest and was torn apart by return fire.

Along with several schools and museums, avenues in four Russian cities bear the name Yelena Kolesova.

7
. MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (U.S., 1904–71)

She was the first woman editor of
Fortune
magazine, one of the first photographers from the West allowed into the Soviet Union, a founding member of
Life
magazine, and the only U.S. photographer in Moscow at the start of the German invasion. Not only did she break new ground and champion higher standards in a male-dominated industry, but she also risked her life to show the war to the United States.

After her return from the eastern front in 1942, she published a book titled
Shooting the Russian War
and sought assignment in the European theater. The first woman correspondent officially accredited by the U.S. armed forces, she was also the first to accompany a B-17 crew on a bombing run. Bourke-White narrowly escaped death when a torpedo sank her ship off the coast of North Africa, only to follow U.S. troops through the mountains astride Naples and C
ASSINO
. She then went with G
EORGE
S. P
ATTON’S
Third Army on its march through northern France.

Arguably her most revolutionary contribution to photojournalism occurred in the last days of the war, when she took part in the liberation of Buchenwald, a forced-labor camp in central Germany. Going against governmental censorship and an unwritten agreement among media members to suppress disturbing images, Bourke-White and
Life
magazine printed her photos of Buchenwald’s emaciated and dying inmates. The images were the first graphic confirmation of Nazi concentration camps ever published for the American public.