A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (40 page)

Senior Sergeant Marina Muzhikova,
mechanic of the aircraft

I was born in 1923 in the Urals. When I voluntarily joined the regiment I was a second-year student at the Moscow Aviation Technical
University. I served in the 586th Fighter Regiment from the first day
of its formation until our release in 1945.

After the war, I returned to Moscow and entered a university to
study law. Before the war, I was studying to be an aircraft designer. I
changed my mind drastically after the war-only a woman who possesses the mind of a designer should connect her life with aviation.
Being a mechanic of the aircraft was very difficult, both mentally and
physically. It is not a woman's job. All our work at the front was hard
labor.

I really wanted to study languages at the Linguistic University, but
unfortunately they didn't provide hostels for the students and the
university did, so my choice was influenced by that. I have been a
lawyer now for thirty-six years and have never regretted my decision.
It is my dedication. For the last eighteen years I have been a state
arbiter in the Supreme Court of Arbitration. But I couldn't escape
aviation-I have been considering cases connected with aviation all
these years.

Lieutenant Yelena Karakorskaya,
deputy engineer of the squadron in special aircraft equipment

I was born in July, 1917. I was the sixteenth child in the family. My
father was a Cossack peasant of pure Russian stock from the area of the Don River. Some of my brothers and sisters and I moved to the
town of Novocherkask. I moved there to get an education. One of my
sisters, who was nineteen years older than me, was married, and she
and her husband adopted me because my parents by that time were
very old. My stepfather was the commander of the North Caucasian
Military District in Aviation. One of my brothers was a pilot in the
Civil War and perished at the front.

In 1935 I entered a pilot training school in the navigation department; then that department was closed. At that point I could enter
any aviation institute, and I did apply to enter, but my stepfather was
repressed by Stalin, and I was not accepted. I stayed on at the school
and entered their instrument department. In 1939 I became an engineer
in aviation instruments. I was sent to the Finnish front and worked
there as a technician in aircraft instruments during that war. The
instruments were very primitive, and my work was manual labor
under difficult conditions, because it was very cold there.

After the Finnish War I was transferred to the Moscow Central
Aviation Detachment, where we worked on the Li-2 version of the
American Douglas transport aircraft and other planes. This was on
the eve of the Great Patriotic War. I already had the rank of a junior
lieutenant, but I did all the work myself, checking the instruments
after flights and repairing them.

When the war started, Marina Raskova selected me for her regiment. I became the engineer, and I supervised a group of five women
who were specialists in instruments.

In September, 1942, I lost my close girlfriend, a pilot in our regiment, whom I had known for many years before the war. She took off
on a mission and was climbing up to join the other aircraft when
something happened to her plane, and it fell and crashed onto our
airdrome. It was a great shock and loss for me.

When our regiment was stationed in Voronezh, a famous Russian
pilot, A. I. Pokryshkin, three times a Hero of the Soviet Union,
landed at our regimental airdrome. The Germans were afraid of him,
and they even recognized his voice in the air. Our commander was
away, and the deputy commander of our regiment, who was a former
Tsarist officer, came to me and ordered our group (of engineers) to
refuel Pokryshkin's aircraft. I replied that the manual forbade the
engineers from fueling the aircraft; it was the duty of the mechanics.
He grabbed me by my collar, and I pulled away; his hand slipped down
onto my breast, and I slapped him on his face instinctively. He pulled
out his pistol and wanted to shoot me, but the girls hung on his arm and prevented it. He then ordered me to be imprisoned for ten days,
even though the officers' manual forbid the imprisonment of officers
in the guardhouse.

The guardhouse of our regiment was situated in the basement of a
house, and I was ordered to whitewash the walls. Every day he came
there and checked my work. The basement had no electricity, and I
had to whitewash the walls with the aid of a torch. There were lots of
rats in the cellar, and I was without light. Only when I was working
on the walls did I have light. I was afraid that one night a rat might
bite me. I had to sleep in my uniform, and I wore my gloves, a cap on
my head, and a scarf around my face to keep from being bitten.

While I was imprisoned I was the last to be fed in the mess, and the
people on duty there sympathized with me and gave me extra food. I
was always guarded, even when I went to the bathroom.

When the commander returned from his trip to Moscow, I called
to him. He came to the cellar, saw the conditions, immediately released me, and gave me a day off to recover. The deputy commander
was cruel to everyone, and for that he was discharged from the
regiment.

Senior Sergeant Kareliya Zarinya,
mechanic of the aircraft

I was born in Saratov in 1919. My father was an economist. After
finishing secondary school, I entered an automobile engineering university. Before the war I had attended a parachute school and made
three jumps. When the war broke out, I voluntarily joined the 586th
Fighter Regiment as a reinforcement. Until the end of the war I served
in that regiment.

I was discharged from the army in August, 1945. I returned to my
civilian profession and graduated from the university as an engineer. I
am still working in Riga, Latvia. I come to Moscow to attend our
regimental reunion.

NoTE: This interview was cut short because she had to catch a train
back to Latvia.

Lieutenant Zoya Pozhidayeva,
senior pilot

I lived and worked in Moscow after I graduated from a trade school. In
the evenings I attended a glider school. Then I was sent to pilot
school to become a pilot instructor. When I graduated, I returned to
Moscow to instruct. We flew both the Po-2 and the U-2 aircraft. When the war broke out, we all went to the military commissariat
and asked to be taken into the army. I was then twenty-two. I applied
to the Komsomol Central Committee and the Communist Party
Central Committee in Moscow, to no avail. I wrote to Marina Raskova,
who received millions of letters from young girls all wishing to join
the army and go to the front. She had received so many letters that
she went to the government with a proposal to form a female air
regiment. But so many girls had applied that it was decided to form
three separate female regiments.

When our regiment, the 586th Fighter Regiment, was stationed
near Saratov in September, 1942, I knew the grief of the first loss. My
friend Olga Golisheva and I were to protect a railway and bridge. We
fulfilled our mission and were returning home when we were assigned a training flight over our airdrome. I don't know what happened to her plane, but it nosed down into a dive and crashed. She
might have been diving and couldn't pull it out of the dive. She didn't
respond when I cried out to her over the radio, "Jump!" She never got
out; she perished right in front of my eyes. I felt so terrible-it was
not only my first loss but the first loss of the regiment.

I mainly escorted important people to the front, but I never knew
who they were. They usually were flying to the Stalingrad front. Six
of us were ordered to escort a high-ranking military officer from the
Stalingrad front to the town of Kujbishev. We missed him because the
weather conditions were very misty with poor visibility. When we
were landing, the commander of our squadron, Yevgenia Prokhorova,
crashed because we got into a dense fog and couldn't tell the earth
from the sky. We were held at that airdrome for a long time while
they investigated the cause of the crash, and it was at that time we
also learned about Raskova's death.

In 1943 our regiment was transferred to Voronezh, and there I flew
with two different wingmen. On one mission I took off with my
wingman at 5 A.M., on an alert signal, to an altitude of 8,ooo meters
where we intercepted a German reconnaissance aircraft, a U-88. I
transmitted that we had in sight an enemy aircraft and were approaching it. The German made a left turn and made it easy for us to
attack. To escape, he made a deep dive and we followed, but the speed
of our aircraft was so high it was impossible to attack. Very close to
the ground, he pulled out of the dive and I followed, but I lost sight of
my wingman, thinking she must have run out of fuel. I went on
attacking him, and I could see the white trail of steam coming from
his aircraft. But he crossed into German-held territory, and I ran out of fuel over the neutral ground between the Soviet and German lines
and had to make an emergency landing.

All in all, I flew 237 combat missions. My husband was also a
fighter pilot, and after the war I applied to the commander of the air
army to be transferred to his regiment. I flew together with my husband until 1946, when I had a child. My husband was forming a
fighter division in the Urals area, and we lived there until 1985, when I
buried him. He flew the American Airacobra during the war and was
a Hero of the Soviet Union.

I returned to Moscow to my daughter, and now I raise her two
children.

Sergeant Zoya Malkova,
mechanic of the aircraft

We lived in a small textile city near Moscow where I graduated from a
secondary school, and then, in 1937, my parents moved to Moscow
and I entered the Moscow Aviation Institute. That was in 1939, so I
finished a two-year course and wanted to he an engineer. It was a very
prestigious institute. When the war broke out, all the young people
were so very, very patriotic, and we visited military offices asking
them to take us and send us to the front. That September, when I
came back to the institute, my friends from the Young Communist
League Committee told me to please be in a hurry and go to the
Central Committee. That was in October, and I saw a long line of
young people standing in line to join the army. I joined the army and I
was nineteen.

At that time we looked at Raskova as a rather old woman, but we
were very young then. She was an outstanding woman in our country;
she was a military officer and navigator. Stalin's son, Vasily, was a
pilot, and Stalin's favorite military field was aviation. That's why
before the war, aviation was held in such high prestige, and that's why
he liked three women fliers, Grizodubova, Osipenko, and Raskova.
He liked and admired them greatly. He had made them Heroes of the
Soviet Union even before the war. When Raskova wrote a letter to
Stalin asking him to authorize a women's detachment and permit her
to organize such a unit, he granted her request.

At that time and now, my position is that war is not for women;
women shouldn't participate. In a way it's against their nature, because women's first purpose is to preserve peace and not to permit
conflicts. Now, looking back from 199o, I think that at that time we
didn't need this women's detachment, because 1941 was an awful time for the Soviet army and people. The fascist army was eighteen
kilometers from Moscow, and even men pilots wasted their time
because there were not enough aircraft for all of them. To some extent it was a kind of propagandist action, but still and all we were
mostly happy that we joined the army.

We were elitist because students from aviation and pedagogical
institutions and universities joined the army, and that is why the
atmosphere in our detachments was intellectually high. We had serious discussions, we took a record player with us and listened to
classical music, and then we swore not to be in love with anybody
until the end of the war. We thought that our main task was to fight
and not to have dates.

In 1943 there was a kind of breakthrough in the war at Kursk. At
last our people realized and could see the victory, and that's why we
permitted ourselves to be loved! Our detachment often had the same
airfield as the men. We had dates and were in love with the boys. But I
want to tell you that I speak rather often before young people, and I
tell them that only during the war did I feel an atmosphere of man's
nobility, a readiness to help. After the war, I never felt that in men's
attitudes toward myself or the ladies.

I was a mechanic, and my duty was to prepare the planes for flying.
There was severe frost at Stalingrad, our fingers stuck to the metal,
and we had to carry very heavy things such as oxygen containers. At
the same time this life gave me a lot. From my point of view, all the
people should have some hard life to stimulate their energy, to open
their abilities, and simply to bring them up adequately. I think that
owing to my war experience I am strong, and I learned how to reach a
goal and not to postpone or retreat but to be persistent, to be strongheaded. War gave me wide experience; my wartime service taught me
how to live in a collective body, to communicate with other people,
to subordinate my wishes, and to coordinate with the needs of other
people.

After the war I was fed up with aviation, and I decided to choose
the most humane profession-teaching. I graduated from a teachers'
training institute and worked as a teacher for ten years in secondary
schools. Then I defended my dissertation, took the doctor's degree,
and finally moved up to the position of director of the Institute of
Theory and History of Education. And really I am happy.

It was a noble war for our people; it was a great patriotic, enthusiastic feeling for all young people. For example, my younger brother was
seventeen years old, and he added one year to his age to be accepted into the army. He was only at the front one year when he was killed
near Kiev. His friend wrote to me how he had been killed, and I went
there because it was twenty kilometers from where our regiment was
stationed. I rushed there and opened his grave, and with their help I
put him into a coffin, and then we reburied him. I could never do that
now, when I'm sixty-eight years old, but then I was so young and
brave, and he was so young, eighteen years old, and he had never even
kissed a girl. Eighteen, and he was a commander of some detachment.
We lost so many, and the best people, the best men. Some specialists
think that we spoiled our genetic fund because we lost the best. The
first to fight and the first to be killed.