A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (16 page)

My military rank was senior lieutenant. I flew i,oo8 missions with
bombs, but my total during the war was i,ioo flights. I had the most
flying hours of the regiment.

After the war I worked as a test pilot, testing aircraft that had been
worked on and put back together. I was still in the military when I
had an accident flying, and I was on the brink of death. In 1948, while
I was still in the service, my daughter was born in Poland, in Torun
city. This is the city of love. After this we went back to Russia, and it
was the end of my flying career-I quit flying.

Senior Sergeant Matryona Yurodjeva-Samsonova,
mechanic of the aircraft

I was born in 1923. In my family there were six children, and our
father joined the armed forces right away when the war broke out.
When I went to see him off at the train and to say goodbye, I swore to
my father that I would also join the army and go to the front. He said,
"No, that must not happen; you are the eldest sister in the family." I was determined to go, so I enlisted in one of the regiments. My
mother nearly fainted, because she had lost her husband to the army
and now her daughter, too.

When Marina Raskova came to Saratov town where I lived, I applied directly to her for admission. She had founded the regiment at
Engels, and Saratov is just on the opposite bank of the Volga River. I
asked to join the regiment and she took me, but I had to ask several
times before she agreed. By that time I was studying in the aviation
technical college; I was a second-year student. I was eighteen when
the war started.

I studied with the other girls at Engels for six months and was
assigned to the 588th Air Regiment, later to become the 46th Guards
Bomber Regiment. I worked on planes for various aircrews during the
war, but the last two years I maintained the aircraft of Yevgeniya
Popova. When she trusted her life into my hands, I did everything on
this earth for her, to keep her alive, to keep the aircraft in the best
condition. Yevgeniya trusted me so much that she didn't even put her
signature on the release form. This form certified that the aircraft
was in order, the engine was in order, and the mechanic had fixed the
plane for a combat mission quite all right. I asked her why she didn't
sign it, and she replied that she knew her life was in my hands, and
she trusted me completely.

We were new at being mechanics, and the airplanes were also
newly born. Because they didn't have time to completely fix the
planes at the plant and because of our insufficient experience, I had to
work on the new plane for a long time to make it reliable. You knew
your friend was going to fly it in combat, and you did everything,
even beyond your physical might and strength, to have it in perfect
condition and to save the life of your aircrew.

Our regiment changed its location very frequently because the front
was in flux. First it was occupied by the Germans; then we would
occupy where they had been. For our type of aircraft, with its slow
landing speed, we didn't really need an airfield-it could land on any
field. Once, when we settled down on a new field and started operations, I was on duty guarding the regimental banner. Suddenly, we
heard a noise: it was Soviet infantry soldiers running out of the forest.
When they saw us they said, "Oh, girls, what are you doing here? The
Germans are coming, and they will be here any second!" The crewsmechanic, navigator, and pilot-all jumped into the aircraft and flew
away. Some left in trucks. But I had the banner to guard and I couldn't
leave it, so I was left standing there, guarding the banner.

In wartime the banner is a sacred thing for the soldier of any
detachment, any regiment, and you are to safeguard it as your baby. It
should be kept alive all the time. If it disappears, it means the regiment cannot exist anymore. It was a sacred duty for any girl to safeguard the banner. We got on a truck with the banner and drove away,
but the truck broke down. The three of us jumped from it, and we
saw, coming down the slope, tanks and infantry both Soviet and
German. So we decided to separate the banner from the pole, bury it
somewhere, and remember where it was buried. When spring came
we would come back and dig it up, and in this way keep it safe.

The Soviet infantry was retreating, and the Germans were advancing with troops and tanks. Then we saw that the Soviets were coming
up to reinforce with their Katushas, the sacred gun of the Soviet
Army. The Katusha comprises many ballistic rockets. Katusha-a
purely Russian name-is a form of Katherine, like Kateriana, Katusha. Then the Katushas were set up in their stand and fired, and
they crushed all the German tanks and the German infantry. It was a
mass of metal, human beings, and blood. It saved our troops from
retreating, and instead our troops began advancing. Then we carried
the banner and began walking, and it took us almost twenty-four
hours to rejoin our regiment.

When the war ended, I returned and finished aviation technical
college. I was sent to work as an engineer in the capital of one of the
central Asian republics. As for the banner, I was so frightened that
night and day-it was a nightmare to me-that I completely forgot
the names of the girls who were with me, and for twenty years I tried
to remember. Finally, when I came to the twentieth-anniversary reunion in Moscow, one of the girls ran up to me and asked if I remembered that day and how we saved the banner. I started crying, because
I lived so far away from Moscow and couldn't come to a reunion for
those twenty years. Now they both came up to me, those girls I was
with that time, and I cried. The banner is now in the Museum of the
Military Forces of the USSR, The Museum of Defense.

Senior Lieutenant Nadezhda Popova,
pilot, squadron commander

Hero of the Soviet Union

When I saw an aircraft for the very first time, the pilot landed, got out
of the cockpit, came to us children, and asked what village this was.
We told him the name of the village, and he said, "Oh, now I know!"
He climbed back into the cockpit and flew away, leaving us in the dust of the prop wash. I had thought only gods could fly, and it was
amazing to me that a simple man could get in a plane and fly away.

I was born and grew up in the Ukraine, and I loved our music. I was
a very emotional girl; I liked to sing and recite poetry. Before seeing
this pilot I thought I would become a doctor, but after this I thought
maybe I would become a pilot. My parents would say, "You'll become a
doctor, you'll take care of us, you'll cure us," but now I had a desire to
fly. I believed in signs, and I was afraid to say something aloud. When I
would decide to do something I would keep it a secret-only when I
had done the thing would I open my mouth and tell everybody about it.

I was in the tenth grade in school when I entered the air club to
learn flying, but I didn't tell anyone about it. At sixteen I made both
my maiden jump with a parachute and my solo flight. It was fantastic. At that moment I began to believe in myself. This is a very
interesting age-at this age you want to do something unusual. My
photograph, standing by an airplane in my flying suit, was in a local
newspaper. When I came home my parents asked if it was me, and I
said it was. They were angry because they didn't know about my
flying-it was my secret. I told them I didn't want them to worry
about me.

I was sent to the Kherson Flying School and completed that program. The sports club gave me basic knowledge about navigation and
the behavior of the aircraft in the air, but the advanced school for
pilots lasted for two years. I finished flying school before the war
started. I then returned to the sports club and worked as an instructor. I was eighteen.

I was very shocked when in the early days of the war my brother
was killed. We were close, and I cried for days and nights. When my
mother heard that her son had perished-he was only twenty and had
never even kissed a girl-she met me at our house and embraced me
and sobbed, "That damned Hitler!"

I saw the German aircraft flying along our roads filled with people
who were leaving their homes, firing at them with their machine
guns. Seeing this gave me feelings inside that made me want to fight
them. During the war our house, in the German-occupied territory,
became the fascist police office. They destroyed the apricot trees and
the flowers and used our garage to torture our people. They blasted
our school, and it was like a terrible storm had invaded our country.
The war changed our lives forever.

When the war started, I sent a cable to Moscow asking to be sent to
the front. They refused, but then I was drafted into the regiments Marina Raskova was forming. She had become a Hero of the Soviet
Union in 1939. She was a beautiful woman with wide blue eyes and
long hair; she worked at the air academy as a teacher. After our
training she became the commander of the dive bomber regiment.
But before they had made a single combat mission, she perished in
bad weather. In February, 1942, she was buried in Red Square.

Irina Sebrova (seated, center) and Nadezhda Popova (standing,
46th regiment. Photograph by Khaldei

We trained at Engels, on the Volga River. After training, our regiment of night bombers was sent to the Ukraine. I was in that regiment from the very first day until the last. We were innocent of lifeour motherland was endangered, and we would fight the Germans.
My first unhappy day was in training when Raskova told us we must
get out of our skirts, put on trousers, and have our hair cut very short.
Many girls were crying because of their braids, but the order was
fulfilled. We came there to learn bombing and firing tactics, code,
navigation, and how to fire machine guns as well as small arms, and
we flew day and night under different conditions. There was a firing
range, and we dropped bombs there.

One night I was the commander of a flying formation on a training
mission to our bombing range. Each plane had a crew of two, the pilot and a navigator. It began snowing heavily. Two aircraft crashed, and
we lost four people that night; these were the first losses in our
regiment. One was a very close friend of mine; it was a grave moment.
We were very stressed by our flying conditions; we were without
instruments to help us orient ourselves. At that time the equipment
was very primitive, and inexperienced pilots became disoriented.
Some thought it was my fault because I didn't teach well. When I
landed near the bombing range I saw Lilya, my friend, lying on the
ground under the aircraft. Raskova asked me, "Where are your pilotsdead! Why are you here, and where are they? You are flying together,
and why did it happen that you are here and they crashed?" I was
flight commander, and they blamed me for not instructing them
properly. When something like this happens, they always look for a
scapegoat. I was nineteen years old.

Two other pilots came to the commander and explained how this
had happened. The other aircraft had taken off after me, and we
started practice-bombing that night. My aircraft was first to bomb,
and they followed at about one-minute intervals. I dropped my bombs
and made a turn toward the airdrome, and so as each plane approached the bomb area, there were no aircraft ahead of them. On the
bombing range there was a circle and some lights illuminating it. We
each were to bomb the target and then fly on into the darkness, make
a turn, and come back to the airdrome. But the pilots of these two
aircraft became disoriented and flew into the ground from boo meters
up. It was snowing, and there was no horizon, no up or down, no
aircraft leading them. It was a tragic lesson for us.

I made 852 combat missions, and I was a squadron commander. At
the front some of the crews crashed and were killed, and reinforcements came every month as replacements. I was shot down several
times, my aircraft was burning, and I made some forced landings, but
my friends used to say I was born under a lucky star; I was never even
wounded.

During the battle at Novorossijsk, a city on the Black Sea, our
regiment was located about twenty kilometers from the city, in a
resort area behind a low hill. While we were stationed here we fulfilled two combat missions in cooperation with the naval fleet. One
day we were invited to the command post, a dugout where we were
briefed by the chief of staff of the naval fleet. A part of our navy troops
occupied a small territory of the city on the seacoast, and they had
sent a radio message that they had no water, ammunition, medical
supplies, or food and asked for urgent assistance.

Our aircraft were supplied with containers filled with supplies to
drop to our troops. We took off, and my heart was pounding because
this was an unusual mission-not to destroy but to save our sailors. I
was fond of seamen; I liked the uniforms and thought they looked
like knights. The army and air force changed their uniforms with
time but not the navy. So I went on this mission like a child with an
open heart.