A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (24 page)

After we dropped the streamer and returned to our formation the
gunner reported to Commander Markov that there was nothing wrong
with our engine, and he realized that it was a hooligan trick. When
we landed he arrested me and put me for fifteen days in the guardhouse. But I only stayed there two days because they needed pilots.
Markov entered the guardhouse and told me that there was no time
for sitting and relaxing, I must work and fly.

It is distressing even now to speak about the war, because we lost
forty-seven of our girls. And war is not a female profession, but we
were defending the liberty and freedom of our country. Those who
remain alive must live long and remember those who perished and
should relate the experience to the younger generation. The feeling of
all these women in our regiments who remain alive, and of all the
people that had to undergo the hardships of the war, is that all people
should work for the peaceful existence of all the countries so that war
does not come to any land. We are not a militant nation, and we had
to bear twenty million losses, so we call on all the people of the world
not to let that happen again.

Presently, I am in the Presidium of the Republican Council of the
Veterans in War. On May 9, 199o, I was asked to talk in front of our
President Gorbachev on behalf of the Ukrainian veterans.

Sergeant Anna Kirilina,
mechanic of armament

Before the war I was a textile worker, and I was keen on parachute
jumping; I jumped out of sheer sport. When I was jumping I got a strange, unpleasant feeling inside, but there were boys there too, and I
didn't want to show fear in front of the boys! So I didn't show it, and I
jumped several times. When war broke out I went to volunteer for the
armed forces, but nothing happened. There was a shortage of labor at
the plant, and that might have been the reason. Then, suddenly, I was
called and admitted to the air regiments being formed by Raskova.

All our hardships started at Stalingrad. I had to affix i,ooo kilos of
bombs to the aircraft-I alone. The bombs came in boxes totally
unprepared. I had to affix ten bombs to the plane, and each bomb
weighed ioo kilos. We had a special metallic cable that lifted the
bomb, and then we attached it to the aircraft with our hands. I also
prepared the bombs for explosion.

Then I had to prepare the machine guns. It was in winter, a severe,
frosty winter. I had to do my work with bare hands, and my hands
froze; my right hand was completely frozen. I bandaged it and tried to
hide it; otherwise I could be sent back, and I didn't want to be sent to
the rear. Later on the hand came alive again, but for some time it
remained dead; I couldn't feel it at all.

Our underground dugouts were heated by a very small fireplace
called a burzhujk, made from an oil drum. After the revolution there
was a class of people called bourgeoisie, who were known to live in
much better conditions than the peasantry, workers, and average people. They had more wealth, more luxuries, like this fireplace that
during the war was considered to be a luxury-it was our luxury. And
that's why people called it burzhujk, derived from the word bourgeoisie.

We had no place to wash our hands or our linen. We lived in
dugouts with no water to wash, and when we had any it was cold.
When we received the detonators and explosive elements, they were
in special metallic boxes, very small boxes. After we emptied them
we used the boxes for heating water. When you live in a primitive,
ugly domicile, you try to make it comfortable and cozy even if you
are not there except for short periods. Just when it would become
somewhat inhabitable we would move to another location, leave everything behind, and start anew at a different airfield.

Wartime is wartime, and war is not a labor for women. We didn't
even feel what was happening because we were so physically overstrained. But the war made us not friends but relatives. It made us
sisters-dear, dear creatures to each other. On the day of our reunion
we say, I go to meet my sisters, because for the four years of war, we
all went through and experienced so much that sometimes it seems
impossible for a human creature to know it in her whole lifetime.

Certainly there was love and friendship. When I went to the front I
had a fiance-an engagement-and we agreed that when we returned
home, we would marry. Moreover, I belonged to an orthodox church,
and I never violated the rules of the church. If I swore my fiance to be
my beloved man, I could not betray him. I remained loyal to him
through all the years of war, and after the war we came home and
married. I had to conceal my beliefs for a long time because I would
have been persecuted, but now I can speak frankly about that.

I was a devoted textile worker. As a pilot loves her aircraft, I loved
my instrument very much, and when I returned to the plant, entered
the room, and saw my textile instrument standing there, I rushed up
to it. I was extremely happy that I had returned to peaceful labor.
After the war and those bombings, those sleepless nights, the happiest moment of my life was when I entered the plant and realized the
war had come to an end! I now still work at the same plant, and
fortunately I'm healthy and I go on laboring.

Junior Lieutenant Antonina Pugachova-Makarova,
navigator

1a5th Regiment Pe-2 crew preparing
for a flight

I was born in 1924. When I was
a child I dreamed of becoming
a pilot, but because I was short,
I was not allowed to join the air
force. When the war started
I was in the ninth grade in
school.

In 1942 I joined the army. I
was sent to the military aviation school in Moscow, where a
battalion of girls were studying
meteorology and other aviation
sciences. Shortly before graduation, the school received an order to select the best-trained
girls and send them to the regiment of Marina Raskova. Only
ten were selected, and we all
did our best to be among them.
I was afraid that my short
height would be against me. Before the final test I put thick pieces of paper in my high boots to make me look taller, and I was put
on the list to go.

We were sent to Yoshkar-Ola to be trained as navigators. We trained
in the TB-3 dive bomber. It could dive and drop bombs, and it would
shake, rattle, and jump. We were told to bring some buckets along
with us because we weren't used to flying, and all of us were leaning
over the buckets being sick. We also trained in parachute jumping. I
jumped twice, which was required in our training.

After training, the commanders selected nine of us to go to the
front. I was very happy that my dream came true. We then started
training in crews: navigator, pilot, and gunner. My crew commander
was Tamara Rusakova, who was a very fine pilot and a very strict
commander. She made us clean the aircraft after every flight, and
only then did we have the right to leave the airdrome. When there
was snow on the ground we had to make a hangar out of the snow to
protect the plane. Everyone else would have left the field, but we
would still he working.

The 587th regiment had lost the equivalent of a squadron soon
after the war started and needed replacements. In March, 1944, we
were sent to the front. We found the atmosphere in the regiment to be
intelligent, strict, and just. Commander Markov liked order; he was a
very clever and educated man and a gifted pilot. We all tried to do our
best to please him and do our duty in as excellent a way as possible.
Among ourselves we called him Baty, which is a familiar form of
papa. It was because of Tamara and Valentin Markov that my flying
career ended so meaningfully. He had an incredible, magnetic influence on all of us.

At the front our airdrome was near Smolensk. During our first
combat missions, we were flying in formation and escorted by
fighters. It was nothing like I had expected. I thought we would be
endlessly attacked by Germans and firing at them. I fancied to see
explosions of aircraft, shells, bombs, and flames here and there, and
bullets tracing like wildfire in the sky. In reality there were no
German aircraft, and everything appeared very simple: to fly, drop
bombs, and go home. We could see the explosions of antiaircraft
shells. There was black smoke, and then it disappeared. It seems to
me that God saved us, and we felt calm and believed that nothing
would happen to us. There was that feeling that God watched over
us. Usually when we flew missions there were twenty-seven aircraft, and I could not tell if I was a good navigator because we were
in a formation and followed the lead plane.

But many of our missions were difficult, and we lost a lot of our
combat friends. The worst thing was to see the bomber of my friends
being shot down: there is smoke and fire, and it is going down, and
you are flying, and you can't do anything to help them. When we were
bombing Libava city on the Baltic Sea it was especially dangerous.
Each of our planes had five machine guns to defend it, and we had
fighter cover. When there were only a few German fighters in our
area, our fighters started dogfights with them, and our gunners had
nothing to do. But when there were lots of German fighters, we had to
help protect ourselves, using our own machine guns. When I became
a navigator in the Pe-2, I felt I had an advantage. Tall navigators had to
sit, but because of my height I could stand up and see very well. In the
aircraft the fumes of the fuel bothered me like an allergy, and sometimes I felt that I was going to lose consciousness.

Our regiment was given the honor of becoming a "Guards" regiment, and in that ceremony we changed from being the 587th Bomber
Regiment to the 125th Guards Bomber Regiment. We were awarded
two combat orders.

Life goes on. All of us enjoyed the days when we could have a bath.
There was a truck with a large box on top, and each week or so this
truck arrived at our regiment, and we could have a bath in cold water.
It was like a holiday for us. We especially wanted a bath after a
combat mission, but that was often impossible. When we were stationed near a village the people there would sometimes invite us to
their homes, and we could bathe there. We liked to sleep on clean
sheets. There is an old Russian tradition that before going into battle
you should wash all your linen and clothes and put them on; we knew
that any day we could crash and be killed. This is our old, old tradition, and if our logistics personnel could not bring us clean towels
and linen, we washed them ourselves.

Just after the war I returned to civilian life. I realized that I had
only nine years of school and that sooner or later I would have to
continue my education. I went back and finished secondary school,
then teachers' college, and later on a pedagogical institute. All these
years I've been teaching in a secondary school and in other higher
educational institutions.

We have a saying that if you like to climb mountains, they will kill
you; and if you are devoted to flying, the aircraft will kill you. My
pilot, Tamara, continued to fly, and on a flight above the Baltic Sea
something happened to her plane, and she crashed and died.

In the Kremlin after award ceremony of Hero of the Soviet Union Gold Star
medals. Bottom row: Klavdiya Fomichova (left), Nadezhda Fedutenko (center).
7bp row: Mariya Dolina (third from left) and Antonina Zubkova (far right),
1i5th regiment

Sergeant Antonina Lepilina,
mechanic of armament

I was born in Moscow in the family of a confectioner. My mother was
most of the time a housewife. Upon finishing eight grades of a secondary school-there are normally eleven grades-I went to work in
an aviation plant as a controller, checking parts for the aircraft. When
the war started and I heard Raskova was forming the women's regiments, I went to Komsomol headquarters and asked to be drafted
there. I was accepted as a mechanic of armament to her regiment.

The pilot of my aircraft was Mariya Dolina, and my most anxious
moments were while waiting for my aircrew to return from a mission. Both my pilot and her navigator, Galina Dzhunkovskaya, were
awarded the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union. Everyone in my
crew survived the war, and we finished the war together. In the Caucasus region my crew was one of four shot down, and it was the first
time that our aircraft did not return from a mission. I cannot even
describe my emotional experience at the thought that my friends
might have perished.