A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (23 page)

A second time I also might have been shot but was only punished
very severely: they didn't let me fly for several months. One of our
mechanics liked to paint. He was rather an old man, about forty-we
were so young, and we thought he was so old. Our plane was beautiful-it was streamlined; especially when it flew low, you couldn't
turn away your eyes from it-like English is beautiful. I like English,
and I liked my plane. I like the way English sounds when Mrs.
Thatcher begins to speak, or Bush, or Reagan, anyone-I just begin to
melt down! Well, on one side of the plane he painted a swallow in
flight, and on the other side he wrote, For the Country, for Stalin. So I
took the paint and the brush and I smeared it. Then he painted some thing else very quickly, but there were no traitors, no traitors. I said,
"No, I don't want to fight for Stalin!" I was not brave, I was lucky; like
all fools I was lucky. If someone had turned me in, of course I would
have been shot, shot on the spot.

I graduated in languages from the military institute, and I taught
there; I was a senior lieutenant then. I ought to have been something
more, but I was so undisciplined. I got out of the service in 1954. After
the war I married, and we have one son.

It wasn't the phenomenon itself, the girls being called up and
volunteering into the army: it was the spirit, the spirit not of fighting
for some person but of fighting for the freedom of the country from
those German fascists.

NOTE: After the war Antonina married the brother of her crew navigator, Klara Dubkova. This was the only interview conducted completely in English.

Captain Mariya Dolina,
pilot, deputy commander of the squadron

Hero of the Soviet Union

One of my sons is a pilot; the other is the captain of a ship. I was a
flight instructor before the war. In comparison to my comrades-inarms, the women who dreamed of becoming pilots, I never hoped to
be one because I grew up in a very poor family that experienced great
hardships. I am a Ukrainian by origin, but I was born in Siberia in the
Omsk region. My father, a peasant who had experienced great suffering in the Ukraine, went to Siberia to work on the land, and I was
horn there on December 18, 1920. There were ten children in our
family, and I was the oldest. My father lost both legs and couldn't do
much, so I had to labor for the whole family. In 1934 we returned to
the Ukraine.

My mother had asked me to quit school because my father couldn't
support the family, so I left school and went to work in a plant. At the
same time I began attending a glider school. I really came into aviation by chance. Mother didn't want me to attend the glider school
because I had to labor. She said that she had asked me to quit secondary school to help the family, and now that I was attending glider
school, who was going to work? The head of the glider school came to
my mother and asked that I be allowed to continue, because there
were fourteen of us, and I was the only girl. Our group of cadets was
to be sent to a military flying school to continue flight training. No
matter how much my parents objected, I knew from the moment I first got into the plane that I
was born there in the air, and it
became my main purpose in
life-to fly. And it was also the
matter of my ambition, too, because I wanted to achieve something in life. I was eager to get
an education. Because I had to
quit secondary school, I thought
of acquiring a good profession
in aviation.

Mariya Doling, 125th regiment

I graduated from the Kherson
military aviation school as a
lieutenant in the reserve air
force. I became a professional
pilot, an instructor, and I was
teaching at Dnepropetrovsk
Flying School when the Great
Patriotic War started. On the
eve of the war, we had received
some new sports aircraft, U-2s,
and yet we sat there waiting,
but there was no call to activate
us. The male pilots from our
school were taken to the front. The fascists were advancing rapidly,
and at any moment our area could be occupied by the enemy. I
couldn't even think of surrendering to the enemy, but I had never
dreamed of fighting, either. According to Tolstoy, war and women are
things that don't go together-they exist apart. But when I witnessed
all the atrocities of 1941, the death of my friends and relatives, peaceful
civilians, I wanted to help liberate my people from the enemy. I want
you to underline in red that it was the cherished dream of the girls to
liberate the land, but none of us wanted to fight-to kill.

My flying club was stationed with the 66th Fighter Division of the
air army, and we women wanted to voluntarily join it. Finally the
commander agreed to take us-we would all retreat together. There
were one other pilot, a girl navigator, and myself. We were ordered to
ferry our aircraft at night across the Dnieper River. Before we left we
were assigned to set on fire all the petrol and to explode the hangars
where the planes were kept. I was to ferry three aircraft to the field
where the division was moving. We set the hangars on fire and also the house we had built with our own hands, where we had lived so
happily. When I flew over that night the river was burning with oil,
and everything on the ground was burning. It felt as though even the
air was on fire. The next morning I was enlisted into the air division,
and I became a military pilot in one of its regiments.

I flew 200 missions with that regiment. I was assigned to special
missions, such as ferrying important people and the wounded. My
plane was very small, and although it was hit it was not shot down.
The German fighters tried from time to time to shoot it down, and I
would maneuver. The U-2 was a slow biplane, and the fighters' velocity was so much greater that I could fly very low to the ground and
make turns so that they didn't hit me. It was difficult for the enemy
fighter, for he quickly overshot me-God saved me!

The morning Raskova came to the staff of the southern front to
select women for her regiment, I was the only woman there. Raskova
said I must join the women's regiment. I said, "No, I don't want to go,
this is now my family, my regiment; how could I?" I cried bitterly at
losing my friends. She showed me Stalin's order saying that all the
women should be in her regiment. Raskova was a strong-willed and
strong-hearted personality. I was transferred to the training base at
Engels, where I was assigned to fly the Pe-2 dive bomber.

A most difficult flight took place in 1942 at the northern Caucasian front. It happened in the village of Krimskaya, where the military situation was very complicated. This village was first liberated
by the Soviet army, and then was recaptured by the Germans, and
again liberated by the Soviets, and again captured; this went on twice
or thrice a day. The combat going on in this area was quite severe.

On June 2, our forces managed to free the village. The weather
conditions were very bad, with low clouds at about nine hundred
meters. Nine aircraft were assigned to fly that mission, to try to
destroy the enemy fortifications in that village by bombing. Yevgeniya
Timofeyeva, deputy commander of our regiment, led our nine bombers. On this mission my left engine was hit by enemy fire and quit,
and I began lagging behind in the flight. We were alone at the target,
because the other aircraft had already bombed. We had to fly there
and bomb without a fighter escort, because our fighters had started a
dogfight with enemy fighters. The German planes attacked us, and
we had to fight alone; of our nine bombers, five were shot down. My
aircraft was set on fire while fighting with the Messerschmitts. Our
squadron shot down four of the enemy fighters by ourselves. So we
simultaneously bombed and shot down the four aircraft. Two were shot down by other formations and two by the formation that I led.
Afterward my tail gunner was given a gift, a bonus of I,ooo rubles for
shooting down a German aircraft.

When the fight was over I was trailing behind, and my formation
stayed back with my plane because they didn't want to leave us alone.
Although the plane was shot up, it was not on fire until the German
planes, seeing that my formation was alone, returned and fired on us
again, and my engine caught fire. It was only because of my friend
Tonya Skoblikova that we remained alive. One aircraft from my formation went ahead to our airfield, and our two planes were left alone.
So Tonya held off all the German fighters with machine-gun fire to
protect and save us. Then Tonya's plane was hit, and she had to leave
and land on one of the fighter airfields.

I proceeded alone, and our plane was attacked again by a German
fighter. The right engine was hit and caught fire also. By that time my
navigator and tail gunner had run out of bullets, so they started shooting flares instead. Then the German fighter came around and flew
right up next to me, and I could see his face. He showed his teeth, and
he looked so ugly. His face was freckled, and I remember his face until
now. He was ferociously smiling at me, his face distorted with hostility, and he showed me his fingers, gesturing one, two. I didn't know
what it meant, and later on, when I was in the military hospital, I
asked a fighter pilot what he was signaling. I was told he was asking,
"How would you like me to shoot you down, in one attack or two?"
Then he left, apparently thinking that because both engines were
now on fire, our aircraft was done for. As we descended Galina
Dzhunkovskaya, my navigator, pulled my goggles down over my eyes.
She realized that I needed to see to land, and smoke was beginning to
enter the cockpit. The goggles saved my face and eyes when the fire
entered the cabin. I sustained burns only on my chest. We made a
belly landing, and our gunner pulled us out of the cockpit, because
Galina and I were already being burned. We were beginning to burn in
the cabin.

Our gunner was a man, and he saved our lives. He was wounded in
the leg and sustained other injuries from the rough landing. The canopy was jammed, and he succeeded in prying it open and saving us. We
beat the canopy with our hands and heads, trying to force it open. I was
in shock. We landed just two kilometers from the front line. When he
pulled us from the cabin, we fell on the ground, and the grass around
us was burning-it was about one meter high in the summer-and we
had to roll about to put the fire out around us and on us.

The artillery men saw us land, picked us up, and took us to a
military hospital. There I fainted. I had a spinal compression injury
from the shock of landing and was hospitalized for a month before
returning to duty. Now (1991) I must have surgery on my spine because
of that injury. No one could believe we were still alive because they
saw an explosion in the air, our two engines were on fire, and they
saw no parachutes. So, at our regiment, they thought we had perished.
We were too low to jump when we were set on fire, and the wind was
blowing in the direction of the fascist troops. If we could have jumped,
we would have drifted across the front line.

Another time I was shot down on the northern Caucasian front. I
had received an order to leave the aircraft and parachute down, but I
loved the plane and wanted to land it, and I did. The controls were
disabled, and I landed using the engines for control. The dive brakes
were also damaged and had fallen down.

On another occasion, one engine was set on fire, and I landed the
plane with the one remaining engine. When I was on final approach to
our field all the systems quit, and the other engine quit, but I managed to land and save the airplane. Every flight in the Pe-2 was a game
with death, a very dangerous game. That was why in the air force
there was a certain lore that if a pilot or navigator made seventy
missions in a Pe-2, they were awarded the medal of Hero of the Soviet
Union. I made seventy-two combat missions in that aircraft; I was
horn under a lucky star! All in all I flew 2,800 hours.

Once we were stationed at an airdrome that had a male air regiment, the 124th, nearby. About half of our regiment made happy
marriages with members of that regiment. My first marriage was
with a navigator from that regiment, who died in 1972. My mechanic
of armament in our own regiment divorced about that time, and we
married. We had been through the hardships of war together so we
knew each other well, and we started a new family. My friends told us
that two broken hearts had been united.

In Operation Bagration we suffered very great losses and severe
battles. After fulfilling these combat missions we were awarded various orders, medals, special streamers, and certificates. For that operation I was awarded the Order of Combat Red Banner. For all combat
during the war, I was awarded two Orders of Red Banner, one Order of
Lenin, and the Hero of the Soviet Union.

When we had successfully freed Borisov town, our regiment was
titled Borisovski Regiment. After that operation the girls asked me to
throw a streamer out of my plane, on which they had written an inscription: "To the Inhabitants of the Town of Borisov with Military
Regards, from Women Pilots of the Borisovski Regiment" with the
signature of Mariya Dolina. They had made the streamer out of ten
military towels sewn together. I didn't know how to throw the
streamer out of the plane, because I was a little afraid of Markov, our
regimental commander. I decided that at a very low altitude, I would
say there was something wrong with my engine and that we were going
to land at the Borisov airdrome. Markov said all right. So I lagged
behind and made a circle over the town, and it was burning, all afire; it
looked like Stalingrad had looked. Besides the streamer itself, we
penned a letter to the Borisov Party Council. The letter said that we
wished the inhabitants to restore the city, to flourish, continue peacetime jobs, and help people survive, while we continued our job at the
front. We threw the streamer out, and the city people carried it into
their museum and kept it there, and now it is in the Minsk Museum.