A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (39 page)

In the Kiev region the Germans were retreating. Large groups of
German troops and armament were encircled by the Soviet troops,
and the Germans tried to break out. I flew my plane along with the commander of our regiment to loiter over the area. We were assigned
the mission of shooting down the aircraft sent in by the Germans to
fly out their high-ranking officers from the encirclement. We shot
down two Messerschmitts and a cargo aircraft.

It was in the territory of Romania, where the Romanian troops had
already gone over to our side, that I met a Romanian pilot. Our regiment was stationed on the same airfield as a Romanian regiment. One
of their pilots came up to me and told me that he knew me. He said
he had seen me in the battle over Kiev. In that battle I had been
covering my commander, and all my attention had been concentrated
on that duty. This pilot had flown quite close to me in that battle, and
when he recognized that I was a woman, he decided not to fire at me,
not to shoot me down. So he gave me back my life.

I participated in many combat missions, and the one time that my
plane was shot down, I made a belly landing. I was wounded in my
head, face, and mouth. Part of my lower lip was torn, and it was
hanging down. I was never shot down or wounded again. All in all I
shot down four enemy aircraft.

After the war I returned to a pilot school and taught flying to
cadets, and then I flew for fifteen years in civil aviation for Aeroflot.

Sergeant Irina Lunyova-Favorskaya,
mechanic of armament

When we meet every five years in October, we tell each other time
after time that the reason we never tire of each other over all these
years is because we all came together at the same time and volunteered to join the regiment. I was a student in the Institute of Geology
in Moscow, a second-year student. I was born in 1921, and in 1940 I
finished secondary school, then entered the institute. I wanted to join
the army to help the country beat the fascist Germans, to liberate the
motherland. My comrades in arms, I discovered, all joined for the
same reason.

When we heard it was Raskova that was forming regiments, and
she was so attractive, so intelligent, we all wanted to serve under her
very much. It happened that on October io all of us had submitted
our papers to the Central Committee asking to be allowed to go to the
front. On the sixteenth the Hitlerite fascists were located only
twenty-four kilometers from Moscow. I am a native Muscovite as
were my parents and grandparents. All were born here, and it is the
loveliest and dearest place in the world, and I didn't want it to be
captured by the Germans-it was an emotion of my heart!

The war broke out on June 22, and on July 3 many of the students
from my institute along with other colleges and universities were
called to the front line to dig the trenches around Moscow, not far
from the town of Smolensk. Two units had been formed at the geology institute to dig the trenches. One unit consisted of the first- and
second-year students, and I was a part of that unit.

When we were called we were asked to take meals for three days.
Concerning clothes and other things, we were not warned about anything, so we were in our summer dresses-light summer dresses. It
was a very hot summer, and all we had with us was the clothes we
had on. We were loaded into trucks and driven on the Minsk highway
to near Smolensk, where we dug antitank trenches. It was a really
hard job for us girls because our hands were not used to this work, and
after the first day of digging, our hands turned to a mass of skin and
blood. We covered them with bandages, and it took much time for
them to recover. We couldn't hear the guns at all. The soldiers helped
us by exploding the soil with gunpowder to make it easier to dig.
Sometimes it was very useless. At one place we had been digging for
three days, and on the third day a commander came to us and said,
"Girls, you have to go because the enemy is advancing, and we have to
retreat." So we put the spades on our shoulders and walked back to a
new location and dug there. When we moved from one place to another, it was almost always at night. We were working along the
forest, and at that time the German aircraft would fly over and begin
dropping bombs on Moscow. When they flew raids over our city we
couldn't fall asleep for two or three hours. We became very tired, and
we would cry when we heard the sound of the engines overhead.

In order not to fall asleep while we were working, the girls would
ask me to sing out loud. I had a beautiful voice when I was young. I
was singing and crying at the same time; we were so tired. I started
singing what the girls called concerts when we were marching; then I
drifted to romantic songs, then folk songs to keep our spirits up, to
help them keep walking, walking-not to fall asleep. Later on I began
to sing to myself. Finally, when everybody was exhausted at night and
I couldn't sing anymore and they couldn't walk anymore, we all fell
into the dust. Because the village roads are not paved, they are dusty;
we fell into this dust and went to sleep.

As I said, when we went to the front to dig we were told to take
food for three days and nothing extra, so we went in our dresses. The
summer was extremely hot, and it was impossible to dig trenches in
those clothes. We spared our dresses because we were haunted with the fear that one day we would finish and return to Moscow and what
would we wear! So in the daytime when we dug trenches we took off
our dresses and dug in our underwear. The native population, the
village population in our country, is very superstitious, old-fashioned,
and traditional. When they saw us almost naked they said, "It is crazy
people, how they appear in the daytime before all the men and
women in their underwear!"

At that time, when our dresses became so very shabby, the Central
Committee of the Komsomol remembered about us, and they sent
Alexandra Makunina to the front line with clothes for all of the girls,
and that is when I met Alexandra for the first time. Since that time
we have been friends, and it turned out that we were later assigned to
the same air regiment.

We were out there digging for more than a month. The choice of
food was very primitive. They brought loaves of bread, sugar, and
some grains from the military in Smolensk, and we had to cook it
ourselves after digging all day. In the morning before we went to dig
we had white bread, a cube of sugar, and water for breakfast; sometimes boiling hot water, but without tea.

When we had done our job there we asked the commander of the
nearest regiment if we could stay, but in vain. When we returned to
Moscow we again tried to volunteer for the army, but we were refused. Always we were sent to local committees. But suddenly I read
in the Komsomol newspaper that the army might take us, and so we
went to be interviewed. They talked with us before determining
where we would go and inquired if we were afraid of fighting-to go
to the front. No one got frightened at that time; we were young and
brave. Later I heard about Raskova founding three regiments and that
I was going to be in one of them.

At Engels, where we trained, I was assigned to armaments. In the
winter of 1941, the cold was the most severe of the whole war. The
temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees below zero centigrade; it
was unbearable. We had to fix instruments on the aircraft with our
bare hands, our skin stuck to the metal, and our hands bled. I wrote
to my mother saying that it was unbearable to work with bare hands,
and she sent a parcel to the front with a pair of pink silk ladies'
gloves! I wore them, and all the girls laughed and made fun of me.

When I started as a mechanic of armament it was hard for me.
There was supposed to be a technician assigned also, but there was
none, so I performed all the work myself. The Yak fighters were new
and intricate, and our education was limited. In March, 1942, the regimental commander brought in a male technician who was to help
with our armament duties.

Later on, this man became the chief armament mechanic of the
squadron. He assigned some work to me, and I didn't succeed in
performing it successfully. I told him that I performed it as best I
could, but he reprimanded me for that. Being not very reserved I
blurted out some not very good words, and he heard them. His order,
and his punishment, was to transfer me from mechanic of armament
to motorist. That job was as an assistant to a mechanic of an aircraft. I
washed the plane and did all the minor work. I was very cross and
angry with this man, but I revenged myself on him; later on he became my husband!

In 1944 we were married, and last year he passed away. We not only
fought at the front together; we also made merry, we fell in love, and
he courted me for two years. I constantly refused to marry him. I told
him, "The idea for my joining the army was to fight for our liberty, to
serve, not to marry you!" Later on, I accepted. We have three children;
we were married forty-five years. We have grandchildren and even one
great-grandchild. My oldest daughter was born in 1945-victory year.
I always say that my daughter was born together with the victory.

When we were stationed on the Volga River, again we experienced
shortages of everything: food, bread, soap; we suffered great hardships. We had to patrol the airdrome, we had to work in the open air,
and the conditions were difficult. My husband, Fyodor, had courted
me for two years, and there was a rule that we must submit papers to
the commander of the regiment asking for permission to marry. My
husband submitted the papers, and the commander responded as follows: "I permit Senior Lieutenant Fyodor Favorskaya to marry Sergeant
Irina Lunyova." But there was not a single mention of my acceptance to
marry him! At that point I felt hurt. It is also customary to register a
couple's marriage in a special establishment called the Palace of Matrimonial Procedures. There are two palaces in Moscow, and one branch
of each in all Moscow districts. There at the front there was no palace,
no establishment, no branch. There was nowhere to register our marriage. My husband was in a hurry to register because I was not an
obedient girl; I was strong-willed and could decline his proposal, and
God knows what could come into my mind. Moreover, he was seven
years older than me, and in the regiment he was called Uncle Fedya
because all the staff of the regiment were very young. My girlfriends
tried to persuade me not to marry him-they said he was too old.

My younger son, having lived with his wife for five years, decided to get a divorce, and he did. He explained to me that they quarreled a
lot, and they didn't want to be married any longer. I asked my son,
"Do you think that we have lived for forty-five years together and
never quarreled?" We did, and at one point my husband came to me
and said, "Irina, I want to tell you we haven't quarreled for a long
time," and I said, "Yes, I have noticed it." He asked, "Why?" and then
answered for himself, "Because why should we quarrel when we
know that in a few moments we'll have to reconcile!" If he hadn't
been a really kind and wise man, always helpful to me with the
children and household duties, I would never have given birth to our
three children.

When I retired I joined the War Veterans Council here in Moscow,
and I was responsible for the work in the Propaganda Committee,
which gave many lectures at schools and institutes.

About our regiment: we haven't only cherished all these relationships for so many years, we have doubled them! When we don't see
each other for a long time, we feel we lack these attachments, we lack
these feelings, we miss each other greatly.

junior Lieutenant Tamara Voronova,
pilot

I was born in the Volga region in 1922 in the town of Yaroslavl. When I
was in the last grade of high school I learned to fly, and then I became
a flight instructor. I graduated three groups of pilots, and then the war
started. I flew my aircraft to a combat military regiment-it was a
male fighter regiment-and I retrained to fly the Ut-4 aircraft. When
a plane needed to be repaired, I was assigned to work in the regiment
as a dispatcher.

The division commander came to my regiment, and when I told
him I was very eager to fly, he transferred me to the liaison unit. I
flew in that section one year and was given the rank of junior lieutenant. I carried messages from one unit to another. The commander of
my regiment wanted me to retrain to fly the Yak-3 fighter, and I flew
the Yak-3 as the only woman pilot in that regiment.

Later I flew the Yak-7 aircraft, and about that time I was transferred
to the 586th Fighter Regiment. I arrived at the regiment in June, 1944,
not long before the end of the war. I stayed with the 586th until the
end of the war, when I was among a group of pilots ferrying aircraft to
Vienna, Austria, and from there to Ploesti, Romania.

When I came to the female regiment I had a short training course
with the commander of the squadron, and then I was assigned as a combat pilot. I was put on patrol over the Danube River. When I
wasn't flying, I was in the cockpit in a state of alert called readiness
one, waiting to intercept enemy aircraft when the remainder of our
regiment was away on a mission. By the time I joined the regiment
the Germans were retreating, and we seldom had encounters with
enemy planes-we controlled the skies.

When the war ended, it came so suddenly that even though we
expected it, it was a shock. We cheered and cried and shot our pistols
off in the air. Our regiment met the victory in Hungary, not far from
Budapest. The civilian population there was very friendly to us; we felt
no hostility at all. I was discharged from the army in November, 1945.

After the war I returned to my native town, married an 11-2 pilot,
and had four daughters. They all graduated from universities. Now I
have four grandchildren.