A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  At the beginning of the war, women who successfully signed up with the Red Army were only sent to the front as nurses, or in communications or antiaircraft gunner units. The government didn’t like the idea of women fighting in frontline combat.

  For an entire generation of young women who felt they’d been preparing for war all their lives and who knew they already had a skill that could be put to good use in defense of their country, the first few months of the war were incredibly frustrating.

  Polina Gelman, who’d taken up flying in ninth grade, was in her third year of a history degree at Moscow University on June 22, 1941. When she and a group of students and professors went to volunteer for the war, she was told that the army didn’t draft women.

  “We were brought up to believe that women were equal to men, and we thought that we should be allowed to go into the army, too,” Polina argued. She didn’t get anywhere. She had to spend the summer of 1941 digging trenches around Moscow and putting out fires started by German bombs.

  Zoya Malkova and two of her friends visited the local military recruitment officer at least three times, begging him to assign them to combat duty. Her friend Anya Shakhova told the officer: “But we are indeed capable of serving in the army! . . . We can do anything: cover 50 kilometers [over thirty miles] on foot per day, fire a rifle, drive a motorcycle, and sleep in the snow.”

  The man told them they’d be called up when they were needed. To let them know he was done talking to them, he bent straight back to his paperwork while the three young women were still standing in front of his desk.

  In August 1941, Stalin issued a fearful rule known as Order 270. It stated that anyone who surrendered or was captured by the enemy would be considered a traitor to the Motherland. Even family members of these so-called traitors could be arrested or imprisoned. In such desperate times, you’d think that anyone who volunteered to fight for the Red Army would be welcomed. But most of the women who hoped to join the military were at first turned away.

  These young people had grown up during the Great Terror. They understood how dogged patience and persistence could pay off. All over the USSR, young women like Olga, Lilya, Polina, and Zoya would find their way to the front by making appointments and writing thousands of letters to those in authority, offering their skills and their lives.

  And Marina Raskova would lead them there.

  8

  “Dear Sisters! The Hour Has Come . . .”

  Marina Raskova was also persistently looking for war work.

  When the Germans launched their surprise attack on June 22, 1941, Marina, too, tried to sign up to fight at the front. She was already a military officer as well as a national hero who’d been awarded the country’s highest honor. But like so many thousands of other women who volunteered for battle, even Marina Raskova’s application was rejected.

  Meanwhile, young women across the nation were sending Marina thousands of desperate letters begging her to help them go to war. Pilots and navigators, many of them already experienced flight instructors, were all sure that the famous Marina Raskova might be able to influence the highest levels of government in a way that they could not.

  They were right.

  As the USSR lay under siege from the German army, and the front line swept closer and closer to the capital city of Moscow, Marina approached Josef Stalin with the idea of forming a women’s aviation regiment as part of the Soviet Air Force.

  She offered to lead it herself.

  It’s not clear how Marina got the green light to form her group of women aviators. It’s very likely that the Central Committee for the Komsomol came up with the idea, and Marina Raskova was the obvious person to put in charge. Nina Ivakina, who became the Komsomol organizer for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, told a journalist in 1975 that Marina took the bull by the horns and marched into the Defense Ministry armed with a briefcase full of the letters all those pilots were sending her.

  It’s possible she even made the suggestion to Stalin herself. Yevgeniya Zhigulenko, who eventually flew with the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment as both a navigator and a pilot, said that Marina told her regiments about a conversation she’d had with Stalin. According to Yevgeniya, Stalin warned Marina, “You understand, future generations will not forgive us for sacrificing young girls.”

  And Marina answered him: “They are running away to the front all the same, they are taking things into their own hands, and it will be worse, you understand, if they steal airplanes to go.”

  Yevgeniya knew this was no exaggeration. In fact, it had happened in her own flying club. She said, “There were several girls who had asked to go to the front, and they were turned down. So they stole a fighter plane and flew off to fight. They just couldn’t wait. . . .”

  We don’t know how much access Marina actually had to Josef Stalin. Women in general, and Marina in particular, weren’t his number one concern when he faced up to the enormous reality that his country was at war.

  In his first wartime radio speech to the nation, on July 3, 1941, Stalin promised that the USSR would be allied with “the peoples of Europe and America” against “enslavement by Hitler’s fascist armies.” He urged everyone in the Soviet Union to “defend with their lives their freedom, their honour and their country in this patriotic war against German fascism.”

  But Stalin didn’t mention any specific role for women. In fact, in none of his wartime speeches did he ever mention women in the military, though nearly a million Soviet women would eventually fight in the Great Patriotic War. Throughout the war, there were never many formal organizations for women soldiers. By luck or persistence, either women took roles right beside men or they joined volunteer regiments known as “people’s corps” that sprang up all over the nation and later merged with the Red Army.

  Even Marina’s aviation regiments weren’t organized by the military. They were run by the Komsomol. And although the women of Marina’s regiments were trained as strictly as any soldiers, they didn’t receive military status until their training was complete.

  Whatever actually happened, sometime during the summer of 1941 Marina Raskova must have had direct contact with Stalin and received a sympathetic ear. It took several months, but in the end Stalin liked the idea of forming aviation regiments for women.

  At the end of the first week in September 1941, as the German army surrounded the city of Leningrad, Marina gave a speech at a “women’s antifascist meeting” in Moscow. It was broadcast over the radio and printed in major newspapers—even mentioned in American newspapers. In the speech, Marina called on women to volunteer to go to war. She wasn’t reaching out to airwomen in particular, but she was certainly including them, as she urged the youth of the Soviet Union to fight for their Motherland. “Dear sisters! The hour has come for harsh retribution! Stand in the ranks of the warriors for freedom . . . !”

  The USSR was the first nation in the world, and the only nation in World War II, that allowed women to fly and kill in combat.

  There’s been a lot of discussion among scholars and military experts as to why Stalin’s government allowed this to happen.

  People often assume there was a shortage of men to fly the available aircraft. This wasn’t so. There were hundreds of Soviet flight regiments in 1941. Most consisted of two squadrons of ten aircraft apiece; Marina Raskova’s three female regiments were not going to change the outcome of an air war on this scale.

  Stalin may have felt that Marina’s air regiments could eventually be used for publicity. Marina Raskova was already a folk hero. She was a working woman and a single mother. Her daughter, Tanya, was a girl to be proud of, a ballet student at the famed Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.

  Marina’s leadership would be an example to the people of the USSR. The patriotism of her young flight crews would be an inspiration to women serving the Motherland in a host of less glamorous roles—as snipers, tank drivers, antiaircraft machine gunners, technicians, cooks, or launderers. And the participation of Marina�
�s aviators in the war effort would help present a picture of the nation as equal in all ways.

  But the formation of the women’s air regiments was kept quiet at first, because very few other women were being taken into the army in combat roles yet. Thousands of rejected volunteers would have been outraged if they’d found out that an exception was being made for aviators. But at the same time, the creation of the air regiments meant that the mostly educated young women who volunteered their aviation skills would feel their voices had been heard, even if they weren’t accepted.

  On October 8, 1941, the People’s Commissariat of Defense issued Order 0099 to form a combat group of female aviators, including commanders, pilots, navigators, mechanics, armorers, and ground staff, to be created and led by Marina Raskova.

  To give Marina the authority she needed, she was promoted to the rank of major. An official order was made for women pilots from civil aviation and Osoaviakhim to report to an assembly point in Moscow, where Marina would take charge of them.

  For most of the women who joined Marina Raskova’s ranks, this was exactly the chance they had dreamed of. They were wildly enthusiastic. They felt ready to head straight to the front to fly into deadly combat against the invading Nazi fascists.

  That didn’t happen for a long time—nor did everyone who joined Marina Raskova’s aviators end up flying as combat pilots.

  The German army was now closing in on Moscow, and hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers were desperately trying to hold back the invaders. A massive and chaotic evacuation of the city was under way in the middle of the autumn mud season, called the rasputitsa. The mud was caused by heavy snowfall overnight that completely melted during the day, and it was the wettest and muddiest rasputitsa in living memory.

  There were trucks and motor vehicles carving tracks in the road, which froze overnight and then turned to mud again during the day. There were construction projects going on as people built barricades in the mud. There were extra trains coming in and out of Moscow’s station carrying soldiers to the front and civilians to the distant countryside in the east, where they hoped they’d be safe. Museum staff were frantically packing up valuable artworks to remove them from harm’s way—even Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed body was evacuated to the distant stretches of Siberia to keep it safe, leaving on a special refrigerated train reinforced with shock absorbers. German aircraft flew over dropping bombs; there were dead bodies lying on train station platforms.

  In the midst of all this, the young women who wanted to fly for the Soviet Union had to travel in to Moscow before they traveled out.

  Yevgeniya Zhigulenko was a horse rider, an aspiring actress, a night-glider pilot, and a college student. She flew at the club where the pilots had stolen a plane to take to the front when the war started, and she’d had a frustrating summer trying to figure out a legitimate way to get to the front herself. Finally, in October 1941, she and a friend named Nina found the telephone number of a high-ranking air force officer at his Moscow headquarters. The young women called up this important official and told him they had a secret they could only reveal to him in a private meeting.

  When, not surprisingly, they didn’t get an appointment, Yevgeniya and Nina called him again and again, driving him crazy for a whole week. Fed up with being pestered, at last the officer agreed to let Yevgeniya and Nina visit him at work! The two took their passes and found their way through the long corridors of a big concrete building. Finally they were admitted to the man’s office.

  When they told him they were going to refuse to leave until he signed them up to fight at the front, he burst out laughing and said, “Marina Raskova is forming female flying regiments; she is to be here in a few minutes, and you may personally talk with her.”

  And Marina really did turn up. The young women were “spellbound” when they found themselves face-to-face with their national hero, who personally invited them to join the others signing up at the Zhukovsky Academy meeting point.

  There wasn’t any kind of media announcement about how to join the women’s flight regiments. All the information was spread through word of mouth, mostly by the Komsomol.

  Irina Rakobolskaya, who grew up in the “generation not from this universe,” was twenty years old and in her third year as a physics student at Moscow University when the Great Patriotic War broke out. She wasn’t particularly fascinated by aviation—her other interests were theater and poetry. But she’d attended a parachute school and made several jumps just to find out what it was like.

  Irina was on duty in the Komsomol room of Moscow State University on October 9, 1941, when she received a telephone call from the party headquarters. The caller gave her information about what sounded to Irina like a request for women to go to the front. The recruiter was looking for twelve volunteers from Moscow University.

  IRINA RAKOBOLSKAYA

  Irina immediately signed herself up—then quickly found others to fill out the list.

  When she and her friends went to the assigned meeting place the next day, the room they met in was crowded with eager young women who’d received similar calls. Now everybody discovered that the call to arms was being led by the famous Marina Raskova, and that she was specifically looking for airwomen.

  No one who heard the summons could resist.

  9

  The 122nd Air Group

  For the young women who answered the Komsomol call for volunteers on October 10, 1941, their transformation from civilians to soldiers was abrupt. Many of them came straight from digging defensive trenches, carrying only a small bag of essential items with them. No one who volunteered that day went home that night.

  The women from Moscow who joined Marina’s group were all sent to an assembly point where they were fed and assigned to barracks in the old Petrovsky Palace. They wouldn’t be on their own for very long. Throughout the huge nation, members of the Osoaviakhim and civil air clubs had received the same order, and were sending their women aviators to Moscow.

  The young women were thrown into military drills first thing the next morning. One of them, when Marina assigned her to guard duty, struggled to look like a soldier by standing with stiff dignity—a tall order for someone who happened to be wearing a green ski suit and high heels!

  On October 14 the girls were given military uniforms—men’s military uniforms. For socks, they had to wear portyanki foot wraps, squares of linen cloth like those used in the Russian army since the seventeenth century.11 For nearly two years, the young women would have to struggle with men’s boots and oversize, ill-fitting clothing, made for men “right down to the underwear.” Even in 1943, when they received skirts as parade dress uniform, they weren’t issued with stockings. One woman remembered that when a pitying male commander ordered new clothes for her regiment, he sent them high-heeled shoes, of no use whatsoever to a pilot flying into battle or a mechanic working on a plane!

  After the recruitment drive, the next step would be to sort the volunteers by their skills. But it couldn’t happen in Moscow anymore, because now the German forces were only 120 kilometers (75 miles) away. Stalin began to evacuate the Soviet government and told foreign embassies to leave as well. Then, on October 16, 1941, a Moscow radio broadcast announced that German tanks had broken through the Red Army’s defenses and were about to storm the city.

  * * *

  COMBAT BOOTS

  The Soviet women who fought in uniform in the Great Patriotic War had to struggle to adapt to clothes made for men. When Marina Raskova’s aviation recruits were first given their oversize men’s uniforms, many of the young women were still in their teens—the men’s boots were so big that their feet moved around inside them. Klavdiya Terekhova, the 122nd Air Group’s Communist Party secretary, said that in one drill, when Marina Raskova commanded everyone to turn, one young woman’s boots stayed facing forward as her feet swiveled sharply to the right!

  But the young recruits were forbidden to alter the boots in any way.

  They wrapped their fe
et in extra cloth, filled the gaps with balled-up pieces of newspaper, and wore the boots.

  Forcing female soldiers to wear men’s boots isn’t unique to the Red Army in World War II. Combat boots in women’s sizes for British soldiers were introduced in the United Kingdom only in 2012. In 2015, after American women soldiers stationed in Afghanistan complained that the army still did not provide boots in women’s sizes, the United States Congress suggested it might be time for a more up-to-date policy. American soldiers receive an allowance for their uniforms, and it is now possible for American military women to purchase approved boots made to fit their feet.

  * * *

  Everybody panicked. It was a frigid October night, with temperatures below freezing, but people left their homes and poured into the train station with all their belongings, looting food from abandoned stores on their way, desperately trying to get out ahead of the German army. During that single chaotic night, 100 trains carrying 150,000 people left the station in Moscow.

  Aboard one of those trains were nearly four hundred young women who were about to become combat aviators.

  Marina’s recruits had to wait until after midnight for a track to clear so their train could leave. They didn’t have any idea where they were going, and they wouldn’t be told until they were on their way. Their train was made up of freight cars, each heated by a stove in the middle, and the young women kept themselves busy making beds with the mattresses and pillows they’d been issued for the long journey.

  At the station, in the freezing darkness lit only by antiaircraft searchlights looking for Luftwaffe planes to shoot down, one young woman was on patrol. Marina had appointed Militsa Kazarinova as her chief of staff. Right now Militsa was checking up on the recruits she’d assigned to guard the group’s equipment and luggage.