A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (38 page)

We constantly had two aircraft on alert. As soon as the enemy was
spotted, we took off to attack. Our planes flew at boo kilometers per
hour, our altitude was as high as 1o kilometers (33,000 ft.), and we
flew with oxygen. Our job was to keep the enemy from getting to
their target.

I was considered to be a second-generation military pilot. I joined
the regiment in 1942. I flew in the daytime, and some of my friends
were night fighters. The night flights were the most dangerous. The
night fighter pilots said goodbye before they left and kissed each other
at dawn when they returned. We waited for them to return, and when
they all came back we were happy.

I had 518 hours of combat flying during the war.

Sergeant Nina Shebalina,
mechanic to the commander of the regiment

First I was a mechanic of the regiment, and then I was the mechanic
to the commander of the regiment. I was surprised when it happened;
I was proud and at the same time a little afraid. It was a very important and responsible position. When the war started I was a third-year
student at the Moscow Aviation Institute preparing to acquire the
profession of designing aircraft. Like all girls at that time I was a
patriot, and I tried to volunteer. I wrote a special letter asking that I
be allowed to go to the front, and at last I was allowed to join the
regiment that Raskova founded. My knowledge then was completely
theoretical-I was a student.

At first I was mechanic to Raisa Belyayeva, the commander of a
squadron, and she was killed. She was returning from a combat mission, and suddenly I saw her aircraft dive into the ground. We never
knew what happened to her or why this happened. She was in communication with the field and the other aircraft in her squadron, and
abruptly the communication stopped, and the plane just dove into the
ground. We think she was overstrained or fainted. No bullet had hit
her. It was a terrible shock to me. When she perished I had already
been reassigned to the aircraft of the regimental commander, even though I was fearful of having such a responsibility on my shoulders.
I remained in this assignment for the remainder of the war.

I was never arrested while I was in the army-it wasn't common. I
remember two or three times girls were arrested, but it was because
they violated some established rules or discipline, and you know that
the army is the army, and discipline is the first and foremost thing.
Probably they were most often arrested because they ran away to a
dance when they were supposed to guard the planes. Some were very
strong-headed, and they didn't want to obey orders.

The living conditions were really very difficult for us. The pilots
were provided with very primitive quarters, but we lived in trenches
that we dug on the airfield at the tails of our planes. These trenches
were covered only with canvas, so we lived underground. First of all,
there was no place to live; and second, there was no time to sleep. In
daytime the pilots flew combat missions, and in the nighttime we
had to repair the aircraft. We worked at night with a cover over the
engine and used torches for light. In some areas we lived in destroyed
houses or in barracks if they were available.

The first shock of being at the front came at Stalingrad. We arrived
by fighter-bomber, and when our aircraft landed and we emerged
from the plane, the artillery shelling began; we were caught in the
shelling. I was a young girl and I was frightened. The regiment had
not been informed of our arrival, and they didn't come to meet us.
When the girls began jumping from the fighter-bomber and the men
in the regiment saw us being shelled, they ran to us and pushed us
into their trenches, covering us with their bodies. Thus we lay still all
together until the shelling ceased. None of our flying personnel perished in the bombings and strafing during this period, but I did see
one girl from the logistics battalion, who had served us our dinner,
killed carrying a tray with dishes.

During the four months that I was a mechanic for the aircraft I lost
two male pilots. At that time there was a great shortage of planes, and
the planes we did have had to alternate between pilots. So when a
woman pilot would return from a combat mission, a male pilot
would take the aircraft on another mission, and the aircraft were
flown nearly all the time. We had to examine the aircraft after every
mission and to fuel it if it had sustained no damage.

In the 586th there was one squadron of male pilots and two of
women with ten planes and pilots in each. During the war we lost ten
women pilots. Both the commander and chief navigator of our regiment were men.

After the war I went hack to my undergraduate work and graduated
as an aeronautical engineer five years after the war ended. It took so
long because I had two brothers who became invalids from the war,
my father was an invalid of war, and my mother was very old, so I had
to go home to the Ukraine to help the family. I worked at the Research Institute of Radio Electronics as an engineer. The war added
much to my courage and much to my character, and later on, when I
received my diploma for a master's degree, it was very different from
the mechanics work I had done in the war.

During the war my attitude toward my aircraft was really like it
was a living creature, like a baby. I cared for it every day and night,
and I had to go through lots of tears when I lost my plane. I saw it off
and said goodbye to it when they went on a combat mission, and then
I was impatiently awaiting their return. If it didn't come back it was a
misery, a misfortune. When I received a new plane, it took some
patience and time for me to accustom myself to it. We all knew our
own aircraft: you didn't have to see it, you just heard it and you knew.
In between flights, when we were waiting for our planes to return, we
had a little time to sit on the grass to talk and laugh.

Sometimes we had a day off, and we gathered in the barracks or
wherever, combed our hair, and trimmed ourselves. We wanted to
make ourselves look pretty and attractive and womanlike, in spite of
the uniform clothing. Our regiment was a female regiment, but there
were a lot of male pilots and mechanics, and we wanted to make an
impression. Lots of us fell in love, and after the war we married,
having been through the war together. Yes, we had time to fall in
love-life is life!

Once before a combat mission my aircraft got out of order. I had to
fix it quickly, but it was a complicated task, and I couldn't finish it in
the short time before the mission. Two male and two female mechanics helped me-that was the way we were-we all helped each
other.

The regiment consisted of very intelligent girls, graduates of universities and institutes. We even had a poet. She studied at Moscow
University in the philology department, and she composed verses and
we recited them; moreover, we sang those verses using the melodies
of well-known songs. We danced a lot, made fun, teased each other,
and laughed.

All of us at the front were obsessed by the idea that our land must
be liberated.

Senior Lieutenant Galina Burdina,
pilot, commander of the formation

I was born into a very large and poor family. We had to exist without a
father, and I had never dreamed of becoming a pilot. At the age of
fourteen I had to work as a laborer, and simultaneously I was attending secondary school in the evening part time. When I was seventeen
I was admitted to glider school. Then I was sent to continue my
studies at the civil aviation pilot school in Ulyanovsk. I graduated and
was sent back to Sverdlovsk to work as a pilot instructor. In September, 1941, our school was turned into a military pilot school; I trained
military pilots there.

When war broke out, all the girls volunteered into the army and
wanted to help the country. At that time we were flying the Ut-2, a
sport aircraft. It was a transitional plane between a training and a
military aircraft. It had a covered cockpit-a canopy. Later we three
girls who were instructors received orders to be in Moscow within
twenty-four hours, and when we arrived we were told that we were to
be admitted to the women's regiment. When we arrived at Engels, the
training base for the regiment, Marina Raskova looked at us and said
that we three were going to be fighter pilots!

At the front, Tamara Pamyatnykh and I first flew as a pair in the
Yak fighters. While I was in Tamara's squadron I was trained to fly at
night. Then I became a night fighter. Our main task was to fly over
the major industrial areas of the cities located close to the front line
and safeguard important positions. We also escorted our dive
bombers over the front line and guarded transports carrying important persons.

We were stationed in the Ukraine, and on April 5, 1943, which is in
the middle of spring, it began snowing. It is a rarity for that time of
year, and all the airfields were shut down and incapable of receiving
any aircraft. It snowed very heavily during the night again, and the
snowstorm blew huge drifts. That night we were to fly combat missions. In spite of the fact that the runways had been cleared, heaps of
snow were here and there. We were lined up and told the flight could
be very risky, and were there any volunteers? Tamara and I were the
first to volunteer, to risk it in any weather. It kept on snowing heavily,
and we wondered how we would take off. It would be very difficult.
Then we received a radio signal that the enemy was approaching; a
large group of German bombers was flying in the direction of the
railroad. We didn't believe we would be given permission to fly, for
that flight might very well be our last in those conditions. But then a rocket was shot into the air signaling me to take off. It was snowing,
and the white reflected light and that helped.

Left to right: Galina Burdina, unidentified, and Alexandra Makunina,
586th regiment

I was ordered to fly to the area of the railroad where the German
planes were approaching. When I saw the German planes I ascended a
bit, to be higher than the enemy. I heard on the radio that Tamara was
also ordered to take off to help with the mission. When Tamara
joined me, we saw a large number of German bombers dropping flares
by parachute to light the area they were to bomb. They thought that
with the bad weather there would be no Soviet fighters in the air. We
were the only two that made it. We were above the bombers, and we
could see that there was a great black mass of them, and I dove into
the mass and fired all my weapons. Then we both turned and made
another run through them, and then again, so that the Germans
would think there were many of us. The bombers began dropping
their bombs a distance from the railway; they didn't reach their target
and turned back.

When the bombers turned back we too were ordered back. Then
we were told that it would be impossible for us to make a safe landing, and we were ordered to jump from our planes. I just couldn't
jump; I loved my aircraft and I begged them to think of some other way. I couldn't give up my aircraft. Beneath us was an airfield of a
male bomber regiment. They didn't want us to die, and their commander had an idea. He had his men gather all the flares from their
planes, and they shot them into the air a few at a time and lit the
runway for me to make a landing. I made a safe landing, but because
of the heavy snow the aircraft nosed down into the snow but wasn't
damaged.

I was very anxious about Tamara and calculated that her plane was
running out of fuel. Moreover, I lost radio contact with her. Tamara
knew that it was impossible to make a safe landing at our own airfield, and she had decided to change her course to Kiev. She told me
later that she had flown to Kiev, but she couldn't land there either
because of the heavy snow. She turned back and decided to jump by
parachute over her own regimental airfield. Then she saw the flares
being shot into the air, and she too made a safe landing. The very
moment she landed the engine quit; she was completely out of fuel.

Another time Tamara and I were to carry a very urgent message to
the Stalingrad front. We landed at a male fighter airdrome, and a
fighter pilot met us and questioned us, asking who we were and
where we had flown from, and we told him we were from the female
fighter regiment. He didn't believe such young girls could be fighter
pilots. Then he accompanied us to headquarters, and we delivered the
message. We were told not to take off because by then it was nighttime; moreover, in the air over the Stalingrad front there were heavy
battles every day. The Germans were constantly loitering over the
airfield, and every time an aircraft took off, they tried to shoot it
down. The commander told us to wait until early morning and take
off with the male fighter regiment stationed there, so they could
protect us.

But the next morning we overslept. When we came to the airdrome
they had already taken off. The commander ordered us to wait until
the next formation went out on a mission. We decided we didn't need
protection and made up our minds to fly alone. We got into our
aircraft and told the commander we only wanted to warm up our
engines. We took off, and the weather was cloudy. We could see the
German aircraft behind us, but they didn't like to fly in cloudy
weather, so we dove in and out of the clouds and made it back to our
airdrome safely.