A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (32 page)

Two pilots before the war: Mariya Kuznetsova (left)
and Valentina Volkova-Tikhonova, 586th regiment

I was shot down several times, but God saved me. My mother was
a believer, and she prayed to God for my safety. But rumors reached
my parents that I had been killed, and, figuratively, they buried me
twice. Once my propeller blades were hit by bullets, and they skimmed
down the fuselage, just missing the fuel tank. Another day I was
fighting with a German aircraft and didn't notice that I was out of
fuel. The engine stopped, and I dove away from the combat. I felt so
sorry for my aircraft-I didn't want it to crash-I had to spare it. I
knew we were extremely short of planes, so I decided to belly-land,
and I was fortunate that it stopped just short of a very deep trench.

In 1943, because of the shortage of planes, the regiment could only
make six or seven combat missions a day. There were more pilots
than planes. When I was fighting I could see the gunfire and flashes of
shell, and I remember the Germans didn't even let us have dinner!
They knew from reconnaissance flights what time we usually had
our meals, and they would attack the airdrome. Once they knew the
location of our canteen they strafed it. The cook jumped into a trench
but was killed by gunfire. We pilots usually had dinner on the surfaces of the wing of our aircraft, and the food was brought to us there. In the evening we were given ioo grams of alcohol to relieve the
stress. We gave our alcohol to the men, but after heavy losses of our
pilots we did drink it. Otherwise we couldn't fall asleep.

One day we were guarding a railroad station near a lake at Stalingrad, and we were given an order to intercept a group of enemy
planes coming to bomb this station. Another woman pilot, Belyayeva,
and I took off, and when we arrived in that area we saw a group of
about ten German bombers, and we started a dogfight. During the
maneuvers Belyayeva's plane was shot down, and I kept on fighting. It
is our pilots' tradition to do that. We did our best not to let the enemy
bomb the objective. Moreover, we shot down two fascist aircraft. The
German bombers dropped their bombs in an open field and turned
back. You must watch for your friend who has been shot down, and I
kept looking for her; she jumped with her parachute and was safe.

Our male regiment flew the Lavochkin-5 aircraft. They were more
modern and advanced than our Yak fighters. From the very start the
male regimental commander didn't believe we were good pilots. Once
he decided to test us and said, "In the afternoon we will have a
training dogfight between male crews and you two, so two men and
two women compete with each other." Belyayeva and Budanova flew,
and the male squadron commander and wing commander took off.
When Belyayeva was in her cockpit she said, "I will approach their
aircraft from the rear," and she did it, and won the mock attack. They
were so carried away by the dogfight that they didn't even notice
several German fighters approaching above them, getting ready to
attack. The fascist fighters had the advantage because they were
above our fighters, who were instructed to land on another airdrome
because ours was blocked by the Germans. These two girls proved
that in their Yaks they could fight the men in the more sophisticated
aircraft-everything depended on skill.

One day I miraculously escaped death. I performed my mission and
left the plane with the parachute in the cockpit and went to report. It
was early in the spring with the temperature above zero centigrade.
The mechanics had to start the engine occasionally to keep it warm
in case I needed to fly, and suddenly it burst into flames. The mechanic escaped, but the aircraft burned completely. Probably a hole
had been shot in the fuel tank and fuel was leaking, so for the third
time I was very lucky.

By this time, in the summer of 1943, the Germans did not send any
combat planes to our area, only reconnaissance aircraft. That is why
we women pilots flying in the male fighter regiments in Stalingrad were about to be returned to our own regiment, the 586th. One of the
girls who had remained with 586th regiment learned that we had
fought severe dogfights with the enemy. Out of envy she escaped
from the female regiment in the plane of a male pilot who had fallen
ill and flew to the male regiment where we served. Her name was
Anna Demchenko. She did this without permission and was punished for it.

When I was escorting a cargo Li-2 aircraft-constructed in the
Soviet Union using the design of the American C-47-that carried
blood from Moscow to the front for the wounded, I asked the pilot to
take me home to Moscow, my native city. He didn't want to take me
on board the plane. He was superstitious and believed that when a
woman is on the plane it may bring misfortune. I shamed him; I had
been protecting him for three days on his flights to the Stalingrad
front, and he did not want to take me. At last he agreed, and I flew
home and spent three days.

I came back to the airdrome and there were no planes at all, because the regiment had moved to another airdrome. But there was a
Yak-i fighter the mechanics were repairing, and after a plane was
repaired, it was required that a pilot test fly it. The commander of the
airfield ordered me to test it, because I was the only pilot at the
airfield. I had a scheme to escape in that plane and catch up with my
male regiment. Nobody knew about it except the mechanic. He
threw all my belongings into the cockpit the night before, and in the
morning I innocently took off, wagged my wings, and flew away. No
one knew that I wasn't going to return.

In 1943 General Osipenko decided to assemble the female pilots
who had been sent to male regiments back into the 586th regiment,
and he ordered us to return. We refused to obey his order because we
wanted to fly with our male regiment. Then the general cabled us and
ordered the regimental commander to put us to a military tribunal.
But we had strong support and protection from the commander, who
encouraged us not to return, because, he said, we had not deserted the
army. To the contrary, we deserted to the front! Nevertheless we
came back to the 586th.

In Romania, when the regiment was released, I married the commander of the air regiment, a major. I know one woman, Yamshikova
by name, who flew for thirty years after the war was over. She tested
jets.

NOTE: Mariya Kuznetsova died in 1991.

Technical and mechanical staff, 586th regiment,
May, 1945, in Budapest, Hungary

Sergeant Nina Yermakova,
mechanic of armament

I was born in Moscow in 1920. I went to secondary school but only
completed seven grades. Then I worked in a factory as a tailor's cutter. I was a very good Komsomol member, and when the war broke
out the plant received certificates from the Komsomol headquarters
allowing some of us to be enrolled in Marina Raskova's regiments,
and I was chosen. On October ro, 1941, we left for Engels where we
trained. Then I was assigned to the 586th Fighter Regiment. Before
the war I hadn't even been close to an aircraft.

I started and finished the war in the same regiment. We lived as a
large family. They called me the best singer in the regiment, and they
jokingly named me the USSR Honorable Singer. I even sang solos
when our regiment marched. When we were marching the commander
of the regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Gridnev, would call
out, "Yermakova, sing out!" and I would start the song, and then the
rest of the regiment would join me.

After the war I went to an aviation plant and worked as a mechanic
of armament because I didn't want to give up aviation. My work was very hard; it was mostly manual labor. I worked there after the war
for fifty years, and now I am a pensioner. Because of that hard labor
I've got strong hands. I also have a very strong body. I participated in
many athletic events when I was young.

Senior Sergeant Valentina Kovalyova-Sergeicheva,
mechanic of the aircraft

My father perished in the Civil War of 1919. When my mother found
out about my father's death she became very ill. It was the year of my
birth, and my father had never seen me. I was carried into the orphanage because my mother couldn't take care of me-she was deathly ill.

In 1924 my mother's sister married and took me from the orphanage and brought me up. In 1933 I finished the secondary school of
seven grades and went to a technical school. When I finished that
school I was sent to a factory that produced searchlights for the front.
When I went to the plant to work, my cherished dream had already
formulated in my mind-I wanted to be a pilot. I decided to join the
glider school. When I finished the courses I became an instructor
pilot.

When we came to serve in the regiments they cut our hair very
short and issued us male uniforms-we looked boyish. The commander of the army came to our regiment for an inspection and when
he saw what we looked like he thought we looked very ugly. When
the command was given to about-face we turned but the hoots didn't,
because the sizes were much, much larger than our feet; they were
men's boots. Afterward he said we should be given smaller boots and
skirts. He also allowed us to grow our hair.

In the regiment I became a mechanic. I was full of grief. I wrote to
officials and asked them to let me be a pilot, but they said then they
would have to train another to be a mechanic, because we needed
mechanics. I had done technical work in the plant, and that is why it
was appropriate for me to become a mechanic. We would warm the
planes at night every two hours to keep them from freezing, and after
warming them we covered them with special blankets as if they were
children-babies. We wore padded trousers and padded jackets, and
one night when we all rushed to warm the planes, everyone put on all
their padded things, but I managed to only put on my padded jacket.
When I stretched up I realized I was dressed only in underpants, and
behind me was a man. He didn't know what to do, whether to look at
me or do his job. I realized what was happening and jumped over the
truck so as not to embarrass the man.

Galina Butuzova (left) and Valentina Kovalyova-Sergeicheva, 586th regiment

I was very disciplined and I liked order. I was never arrested during
the war, but the people who provided for the aircraft were arrested
routinely. In our dugout we had a pichka, a Russian fireplace, a stove.
Each crew lived together in one dugout. When it rained we always
knew it because the water came in. We would ask the girl next to the
entrance how much water had flowed into the dugout, and she would
put her hand into the water and say, "No, no, not much yet, sleep
quietly, not much yet!" And then when we came to realize that there
was so much water in the trench that everything was floating, we
would jump up and go out in our underwear to ask the men on the
truck with a pumping machine to come and pump out the water so
we could go back to sleep.

The first house we stayed in was a house of wood with very thin
boards, and the temperature was as low as forty degrees below zero
centigrade, and it was dangerous to live in under those cold conditions. We had lower and upper bunks, and on entering the house you
could see two containers of water brought into our quarters by the
logistics battalion to use for washing ourselves. We washed immediately and very quickly, because the water might freeze before we
finished. Those of us living together tidied and cleaned the room daily; one day one girl and the next day another. When we washed the
floor, it was so unbearably cold outside that the floor dried only by
the fireplace, and the rest of the room was slippery-covered with
ice. We had a girl with us who slept with her head to the east, and she
always wore a cap on her head at night because it was so cold, and
every morning she awoke and the cap on her head was glued to the
wall-frozen to the wall. We dried our clothes over the fireplace,
hanging them on strings. The heat from the fireplace was so hot that
sometimes our clothing burned.