A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (19 page)

When we saw the captured Germans, in spite of the fact that they
were the enemy and had committed such atrocities in our country, we
couldn't look at them without a throbbing of the heart. They were
miserable figures in shabby clothes, absolutely starving, thin and
weak, and we experienced a kind of pity even for the enemy. If I had
been given a pistol at that moment and a command to fire at them, I
could not have done so.

The very nature of a woman rejects the idea of fighting. A woman
is born to give birth to children, to nurture. Flying combat missions is
against our nature; only the tragedy of our country made us join the
army, to help our country, to help our people.

Russia, for the whole period of its existence, has been an object of
assault. At the cornerstones of our history, women were together
with men-they stood beside the men. To be in the army in crucial
periods is one thing, but to want to be in the military is not quite
natural for a woman.

I think American women have the idea of romanticism connected
with being in the military, and it leads them to want to be a part of it.
That is probably because they have not fought a battle in their own
country for a hundred years and don't know the nature of war. If the
women of the world united, war would never happen!

Senior Lieutenant Mariya Akilina,
pilot

I was born in 1919 in the town of Ryazan. There were seven children
in the family. I don't remember my father; he was drafted into the Red
Army right after the revolution and was killed in the Civil War when
I was two months old. It was very difficult for my mother to raise us
all. She was a cashier at one of the plants and didn't have the means to
give us everything we needed, but my aunt was married and childless,
so they adopted me.

When I was in secondary school, three of us were selected to
attend a parachute training school to learn to jump. While I was in
the parachute school I learned to fly gliders. I was sent on to the
parachute center to continue my training, and when I finished I became an instructor. I was in lots of aviation parades where we jumped
in groups to show our skill. These parades were held at the Tushino
Airdrome near Moscow, and government officials, including Stalin,
were usually present. At that time the government was appealing to
the younger generation with slogans urging, "To the tractors! To the
aircraft! To the collective farms! To the plants!" in order that they
master the new fields of industry.

In the 193os aviation was in its glory; young people wanted to
become aviators. They were all striving to fly. While I was a parachute
instructor, I attended an air club. It was an obligation of a parachute
instructor to be able to fly an aircraft. Then I became a flight instructor. I taught one class of cadets; then I married and had two children.

My husband was a military pilot flying bombers. When the war
broke out, he flew away to the front that same night. The three of us
who had gone to parachute jump school together went to the Military
Commissariat and asked to join the army. I was accepted because I
had by then made 109 air jumps. I was assigned to a special male
airforce regiment training landing forces. I joined the flying squadron
making reconnaissance flights. These flights were to be made both
day and night, but I flew in the day because I had so few night flying
hours. I was assigned to fly the Po-2. It was easy to fly, but it was also
defenseless.

On my first actual combat reconnaissance, I was sent to the front
at Vitebsk and could clearly see the German advancement. I counted
the number of enemy tanks at seventy-nine. They were so occupied
with moving on toward Moscow that they did not even fire a shot at
my plane.

Later I began flying night missions. On these missions I flew parachutists into areas of German occupation for the purpose of intelligence gathering. I also brought supplies in to the partisans. We flew
deep into the German rear areas, and at night it was difficult to
maintain our orientation. There were no landmarks to help me in the
winter, when everything was covered with snow. When I came to the
partisans' area they would signal where to drop the supplies or where
to land, whichever was required on that mission. Landing was a special problem because the partisans were in the forests, the space was
so short to land in, and there was always a threat that the Germans would appear. The partisans would burn two or three fires to show us
the landing place. The German antireconnaissance personnel built
fires of their own to trick us into landing there, instead of the partisan
landing site. It was difficult for us to know if the lighted fires were
ours or theirs, and there were cases where our planes landed where
the Germans had built fires.

Such an incident happened to me on the Volkhov front. I was flying
behind two aircraft that landed on the false German landing strip and
were captured. I landed and was taxiing toward those two planes
when I heard a Russian voice shouting, "Fascists! Fascists! Fly away!"
I opened the throttle and took off across the runway, climbing up and
hitting the tops of the trees. When I came to the partisan runway, I
could see a lot of leaves and sticks caught in the landing gear of my
plane. While this episode was taking place I had no fear, but when I
landed safely at the partisan landing strip I began to shake, and it
took a long time to calm down.

One night four of our planes were assigned a combat mission to
drop bombs on a German fortification near the town of Mozhajsk. We
were circling to drop our bombs and lost one aircraft and crew because the Germans had massed antiaircraft guns to protect the area,
and we were under heavy fire. As I turned to fly back to our airdrome,
I could see the flashes of antiaircraft bombs around me but couldn't
hear them because of the roar of the engine. Suddenly my engine quit,
and in its silence I could hear everything. I was shocked at first and
didn't know what had happened to the engine. I looked down and saw
that the whole floor of the cockpit had been blown away by a shell.

My altitude was about eleven hundred meters, so I decided to try
to glide to the Soviet territory, which in fact I did. When the distance
between the aircraft and the earth was about one hundred meters the
right wing of the aircraft fell off, and the plane crashed to the ground.
At that moment my thought was of my children; I couldn't reconcile
my thoughts knowing that they would grow up without me. It was
winter, and there was a heavy wind building up high drifts of snow.
When our plane crashed I lost consciousness. The aircraft had fallen
straight into a high snowdrift.

Some hours later I regained consciousness, crawled out of what
remained of the plane, and tried to understand what had happened to
my navigator and my aircraft. I fumbled with my right hand and
found a body under the snow. It was my navigator, dead and frozen. I
tried to stand up and immediately fainted. When I again regained
consciousness, I knew I must move some way. I couldn't walk, but I dragged my body from one bush to another. I couldn't go far because I
was so wounded. Early in the morning a Soviet reconnaissance unit
found me and took me to a medical station. When they unbuttoned
my flying suit and removed my helmet, they realized for the first
time that I was a young woman of twenty-two. They sent me to a
nearby military hospital in Moscow.

I was operated on and remained in the hospital for four months.
My jaw was smashed, and all my lower teeth had to be extracted. My
feet were also badly crushed. Even now I walk with difficulty. Other
pilots in the hospital came to see me because they had heard that a
young girl pilot had crashed at the front and had been brought to the
hospital as a sack of bones. All my ribs were broken and my spine
injured. I lay in bed covered with bandages and encased in plaster.
The surgeon wanted me discharged from the army, and I wanted to
return to flying. He wouldn't allow that and said that I must learn to
walk with crutches.

While I was in the hospital a letter came to the regiment informing
me that my two children, ages two and five, had been killed in a
bombing. The regimental commander decided not tell me until I
recovered, because the news would be too much for me in my poor
condition. He came to the hospital to take me back to the regiment,
not wanting me to go home and discover the death of my children.
Back at the regiment the doctor worked with me to train my legs to
walk again. She forced me to exercise my legs and feet, and the pain
was terrible. At times I would call her a fascist, and she said that
someday I would thank her for her strict regime. In time, as I progressed, I worked in the regimental office as a clerk. Sometimes I
would get into the cockpit of a plane and found I could work the
controls with my hands, but it was nearly impossible to use my feet
on the rudder pedals.

One day the whole squadron was to go out on a daylight mission,
and they were short two crews. The regimental commander asked
the squadron commander if there were two more crews, because we
were flying day and night. These crews had to be formed from the
pilots and navigators who had been injured and had just returned
from the hospital. I asked the commander if he would let me pilot
one of the planes, and he didn't want to, but he couldn't find another
replacement, so I flew the mission. Within two weeks I flew a number of missions, and then a medical board approved my flying.

About the time we were liberating the Baltic area, at the end of
1944, the regiment received orders that women who were flying in male regiments must be transferred to female regiments as reinforcements. I was transferred to the 46th Guards Bomber Regiment. I was
glad to be in a female regiment. It was easier for me because, well,
men are men and women are women; I was more comfortable. On the
eve of the victory parade in Moscow I was finally told that both my
children and my husband had been killed in the war.

After the war I flew in civil aviation until 1964. I crop dusted and
flew in the medical squadron until I retired. I adopted two childrentwo boys-one my nephew, and one an orphan from the siege of
Leningrad. I never remarried.

Introduction

The 587th Bomber Regiment was honored during the war by being
designated a "Guards" regiment and officially became the 125th
M. M. Raskova Borisov Guards Bomber Regiment. The aircraft flown
by the regiment was considered to be the most complex of the Sovietmade aircraft in World War The Petlyakov Pe-2, a twin-engine,
twin-tail dive bomber, was powered by two 1,100 HP liquid-cooled
engines for a maximum speed of 336 MPH at 16,400 feet. The bomb
load was specified as i,ooo kg, but the more experienced women
pilots regularly carried 1,200 kg. The landing speed was quite fast,
and the airfields were not well constructed and at times were nothing
more than potato fields. The small forward compartment of the plane
was difficult to exit, with the pilot and navigator riding back-to-back.
The aircraft carried a crew of three: pilot, navigator-bombardier, and a
tail-gunner in a separate rear compartment. Less competent and less
experienced pilots were known to be afraid of this unforgiving aircraft, while skilled pilots loved it.

Combat missions were flown in a "V" formation. This was considered best for the bombers, because their machine-gun field of fire
overlapped, giving them mutual protection from enemy fighters. If a
bomber was forced to drop out of this protective formation for any
reason, it became instant prey for enemy aircraft.

All of the pilots and navigators in the regiment were women, while
some of the tail-gunners were men. The bombers were escorted by
fighter aircraft and protected by them against enemy attack. Earlier in
the war the German Luftwaffe fighters, with their overwhelming
superiority, often broke through the Soviet fighter protection and
engaged the bombers directly.

The first commander of the regiment was Major Marina Raskova.
When she was killed Lieutenant-Colonel V. V. Markov, a male commander with extensive combat experience, was assigned to the regi ment. Although no statistics
were available, ground personnel included a number of men,
mainly mechanics with advanced skills in maintaining
this complex aircraft. There
was no antifreeze available for
the aircraft early in the war.
Each engine was drained of water and oil in the winter, whenever an aircraft was on the
ground for any length of time,
to keep it from freezing. The
regiment comprised two squadrons with ten aircraft in each
squadron.

When the war ended, Markov
married a navigator from the
regiment. Retired from the air
force as a lieutenant-general,
Markov requested an interview-such was his pride in the
regiment. General Markov died
in 1992.