A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (37 page)

The day Lilya didn't come back from a mission-when she perished-I was not there at the airdrome. I had been sent to take the
entrance examinations for the Airforce Academy, so that day, unfortunately, I wasn't there. I was the only woman who entered the academy and there were no barracks for women, so I had to come back to
my regiment. When I arrived I was told Lilya had not returned yesterday. I served on her crew for about eight months.

It was very difficult to work as a mechanic-that is a man's job.
The airdrome was often bombed by the Germans, and there was some
artillery shelling, but I wasn't afraid for my life. I was just waiting for
Lilya to come back; I was impatient for her to return from her flight.
The aircraft flew about five flights a day when the weather was good,
starting at sunrise. The pilots stayed in a village nearby, and we mechanics slept at the airdrome near the aircraft in open trenches. When
it became cold in the winter, we took the engine cover and put it over
ourselves, and in the morning we would wake up with ice on our hair
and faces.

My hands are scarred and misshapen because of the kerosene we
used. Many parts of the engine were very hard to get to, and it was
impossible to wear our gloves when we worked. When it was very cold I would touch the engine, and my fingers stuck to it, and it
pulled the skin off. The brakes worked by air pressure, and the compressor air container weighed sixty kilograms. In the summer I could
roll it, but in the winter I had to carry it. I would put it on my
shoulder and carry it from one plane to another, because the engines
started with pressurized air.

Sometimes men flew the same aircraft as Lilya, for there was a
shortage of planes. Lilya was very small and short, and each time the
men flew it I had to fix the pedals, then fix them again when Lilya
flew, and it took time. My friends used to say, "You are always with
your legs up," because I had to go head first into the cockpit to change
the rudder pedals; I had to dive into the cockpit.

Lilya was wounded twice before she perished. She was first
wounded in her leg, and even after this she kept on fighting. She
managed to land the aircraft, but she couldn't taxi or get out of the
cockpit because of her wound. The second time she was wounded she
belly-landed on German territory, and she could see them running
toward her but she escaped them. It happened that if you were shot
down and landed, one of your aircraft would land next to you if they
saw it. At that time another Soviet fighter pilot landed and picked up
Lilya, and she escaped. There were two different airdromes in our
area, and when the pilot flew back with Lilya, he landed on the other
airfield so nobody knew who he was; she never found out.

Lilya shot down twelve enemy planes by herself, including a balloon; she shared three others. The balloon was a threat to that whole
area of the front, and it was protected by many anti-aircraft guns and
had a German officer observing from it. Many Soviet airmen tried to
shoot it down but turned back, because there was a wall of fire from
the guns. Lilya volunteered to shoot it down. She was just out of the
hospital from her wounds, promising the doctors she would go visit
her mother and recover, but she spent only one day, then returned to
her regiment. She went to the regimental commander and said, "Let
me shoot down the balloon." He said she could not, for she was still
ill and had no right to fly. She told him that if he did not let her do it
she would do it without his permission, and he told her in that case
she should tell him how she was going to do it.

She took off and flew-not straight to the front line, but parallel to
it, to the area where there were no German troops or artillery. She
crossed the front line and flew to the rear, choosing the time of day
when she could approach the balloon from the direction of the sun.
Nobody expected her to appear from that side; she fired, and it caught fire and went down. This was in the spring of 1942. She was a senior
lieutenant. Lilya's real name was Lydiya. Her mother called her Lilya,
and Lilya herself liked to be called that name because in Russian lilya
means lily-flower.

When Lilya approached the airdrome after a victory, it was impossible to watch her; she would fly at a very low altitude and start doing
acrobatics over the field. Her regimental commander would say, "I
will destroy her for what she is doing, I will teach her a lesson!" After
she landed and taxied to her position she would ask me, "Did our
father shout at me?" And he did shout at her, and then he admired
what she had done. She flew over the field so low the covers of the
aircraft would flap and fly around, she created such a wind! When she
was shot down the first time, she received a new Yak-i aircraft. Men
pilots tried to stop her from flying because they wanted to save her,
but it was impossible. She was a flight commander; there were three
aircraft in a flight.

Earlier Lilya flew as wingman with the squadron commander, Alexei Salomatin. They loved each other, and he taught her about combat. One day Lilya was sitting in the cockpit in readiness tworeadiness one is on the runway. Lilya and I were talking, with me
sitting on the wing of the plane while she was waiting for her turn to
take off, and at this time the squadron commander and a new, young
pilot were up flying. Alexei was training him, doing aerobatics with
engines roaring, and then one of the aircraft started coming down
with a roar, crashed, and exploded. Everyone thought it was the new
pilot, but no, it was the squadron commander, it was Alexei. Something happened to his plane, and he didn't have time to bail out. We
buried him, and after this happened Lilya didn't want to stay on the
ground, she only wanted to fly and fight, and she flew combat desperately. This happened in May, 1943, and Lilya perished on August I.

She was returning from a mission of escorting the 11-2 aircraft,
sometimes called the flying tank, and from somewhere behind the
clouds, two German aircraft appeared. Lilya and her wingman, who
were flying along the edge of the bomber squadron, were attacked, and
she was shot down. She tried to escape by diving into the clouds, and at
this point another Soviet pilot, Ivan Borisenko, saw this scene and tried
to find her after she dove. He looked everywhere but couldn't find her.
He never saw an aircraft explode or a pilot jump with a parachute. She
never returned from that mission.

In reality she managed to belly-land the aircraft near a village. She
was buried under the wing of the plane. We don't know who buried her, the fascists or the Soviet soldiers who liberated the village the
next day. And we also don't know whether she was mortally wounded
in the crash or killed by the Germans on the spot.

Left to right: Valentina Guozdikova, Klavdiya Pankratova,
Lilya Litvyak, 586th regiment

In August, 1943, the commander of her regiment wrote all the
documents to posthumously award her the title of Hero of the Soviet
Union. But because there was no evidence of her death, no trace of her
or the aircraft, this procedure was stopped, and the rumor was that
she might have become a prisoner of the Germans. There were many
rumors of various sightings of her as a prisoner in camps and speculation about what happened to her, but until this year (1990, there was
no evidence. I personally searched for her plane for three years with
my husband and grandchildren, using a metal detector. We found
thirty aircraft but not hers.

Lilya's father was killed in 1937 during the repressions, and Lilya
was very afraid to die somewhere unknown. It was her feeling, and
she was very afraid of it. Lilya's brother had to change his name to his
mother's name. He said his father was tortured and killed in 1937, and
he changed his name to save his own life. I don't blame him; nobody
would blame him who lived in that time. He said his father was killed in a concentration camp; his sister, no one knows where; and there
were rumors about her going over to the Germans. It was very hard
times for him. Lilya's mother decided to treat me as Lilya's sister. She
never knew about the happy ending of this story.

A few years ago, two boys were playing in a field in Belorussia and
saw a snake that went into a hole. They decided to widen the hole to
take the snake away, and they found a body-her body. So they dug it
out and invited the commission, the specialists, to inspect the remains. This commission wrote a paper that said it was the body of a
woman pilot, very small; and they found hair, her flying suit, and a
gold tooth. Then the commission reburied her in a village nearby.
People had been searching for her body for fifteen years. In May, 199o,
President Gorbachev signed the decree that made Lilya Litvyak posthumously a Hero of the Soviet Union. Now I have a right to die. I
swore that I would find Lilya before I died and that has happened, so
now I can die.

NOTE: Lilya Litvyak's brother, with great pride, showed me her Gold
Star of Hero of the Soviet Union medal and the citation signed by
Mikhail Gorbachev.

Senior Sergeant Valentina Kislitsa,
mechanic of the aircraft

My parents were teachers in a small village settlement where I was
born in 1922. It was in the region of Stavropol in the Caucasus, the
same region where Gorbachev was born. My father was killed in 1922
in the Civil War. In 1938 I finished secondary school and came to
Moscow, where I enrolled in the Moscow Aviation University. I was a
third-year student when the Great Patriotic War began. It was summertime and I was supposed to go home to spend my holiday, but
because of the war I stayed in Moscow to work in a plant as a controller. My university was evacuated to an Asian republic. So at that time
I decided to volunteer for the army and was accepted into Raskova's
regiments. After training I was assigned to the 586th Fighter Regiment, and we went to the front. I stayed with the regiment until the
end of the war.

After the war I returned to the university, and upon graduation I
worked for the Central Aerohydrodynamic Research Institute. This
institute resembles NASA in its research. I am not retired; I still work
as an engineer economist. I have been working at this institute for
forty-two years.

Lieutenant Valentina Volkova-Tikhonova,
pilot

Valentina Volkova-Tikhonova,
586th regiment

Before the war, I was a pilot instructor in the glider school. I
had a great amount of flying
hours. When the war broke out,
I taught the young men to fly
the U-2. I was twenty-three
when I started flying. When I
went into the women's regiment
in 1942, I was twenty-seven. We
flew the Yak-1, and we guarded
certain important places on the
ground. When we moved forward into Voronezh, the remains
of the Germans and Soviets
killed in the fighting had not yet
been removed, and when snow
and ice started melting and the
river began moving, the river
was red with blood.

We landed in an area formerly occupied by the Germans, and the town was completely destroyed. Apart from the
wreckage we could see gallows everywhere, used by the Germans to
hang their own people. The airfield was mined, and they couldn't find
the mines because they were a special kind, so only the runway was
clear. There were a lot of aircraft in the air, and one of my girlfriends
who was a pilot stood on the side of the runway and shot a rocket into
the air to identify the airfield for our pilots. A rocket malfunctioned
and fell into the grass at the side of the runway and started burning
the dry grass. My friend threw a blanket on it to put out the fire and
started jumping on it to smother the flames, and she jumped onto a
mine. She was thrown into the air, and I was thrown aside by the
explosive force. She was taken to the hospital, and none of us could
tell whether she was alive or dead-she was alive. Gunpowder got
under her skin, and the doctors could do nothing about that. Her face
remained dark with powder burns for the rest of her life.

When I was young during the war, I was convinced it was a job for a
woman to fly combat. In those times our only thought was to defend the motherland, to save the country. I didn't think of it as emotional
and physical pressure. I had become a pilot before the war, and it was
only natural for me to become a military pilot. Now I realize that the
stress was very great and that it is not a female job. The task was even
more aggravating because when you are the sole person in the plane,
you have to be extremely alert and aware; you are the gunner, navigator, and pilot all in one person.