A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  It wasn’t long before the splendid Yak-1 fighter planes were delivered to Engels. They were painted in white winter camouflage and had skis instead of wheels so that they could take off and land from the snow-covered airfield. It was a clear and sparkling day when the Yaks arrived, and the young pilots of the 586th were thrilled at the dangerous beauty of their new snow-white planes against the snowy landscape.

  Those fighter planes only had room for a single pilot. She would have to act as her own crew, doing her own navigation and gunning at the same time as she flew the plane. The new Yak-1s all came with radios, but only the planes for the squadron commanders had transmitting radios that would let one person talk to others in flight.

  Marina wasn’t happy about the radio situation, and neither were the women who were supposed to fly the Yaks in formation. In fact, they refused to fly unless they were able to talk to each other in the air. So the factory sent radio equipment over to Engels, and one of the first real jobs for the women training as aircraft mechanics for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment was to install radio transmitters in the new Yak-1s.

  They had to do this “outside when the wind was blowing and the temperature was forty below zero,” according to Galina Drobovich, who became the 586th’s chief aircraft mechanic. “When we touched the metal of the engine our skin would stick to it, and some of it came off on the metal. Our cheeks and foreheads were frozen too. On returning to the barracks our hands would be a deep blue color.”

  There was a world of difference between working on models in the classroom at Engels and having to go to work on the real thing.

  Once the radios were installed, the 586th Regiment loved their new Yaks and couldn’t get enough of flying in them. Soon the young fighter pilots at Engels were practicing shooting at targets and working on aerobatic loops and rolls. They weren’t supposed to fly more than three loops in a row, but Anya Demchenko got in trouble for doing six!

  A YAK-1 FIGHTER PLANE

  Lilya was full of energy and excitement over the new plane when she wrote her next letter home. “The machine is splendid! What a speed! A few times I fell into a spin, but in the end I learned how to turn.”

  14

  Not Quite Ready for War

  The women of the 122nd Air Group who were going to be fighter pilots and dive-bomber pilots had to learn to fly new planes before they went to war. But even the future night bomber pilots who would fly the familiar little Po-2s had a big challenge to face. They had to learn to fly at night.

  Hardly any of Marina Raskova’s pilots had ever flown in the dark, so the women of the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment had to pick up this skill very quickly when their planes arrived in February. The Po-2s didn’t have to fly in formation and would never be equipped with radios, so the navigators couldn’t use radio signals for blind flying. The only way to get anywhere was to use your eyes in the dark.

  But when you’re in the sky at night, fields and forests and villages all look the same: dark. According to pilot Raisa Zhitova-Yushina, a conversation during a nighttime training flight might go like this: “You see this? I cannot see it! Do you see this? I cannot see it! This is a road. I cannot see it!”

  It took three or four flights before you could pick out the subtle shapes of the land when you were high in the sky in the middle of the night. A clear sky, or a moonlit night, made it easier. But a dark and cloudy sky could be deadly—even without the Luftwaffe.

  On March 9, 1942, it was deadly for the 588th.

  That night, several of the flimsy open-cockpit Po-2s took off from Engels on a practice bombing mission—dropping concrete “bombs” on a parade ground at another airfield. Yevdokia Bershanskaya, the 588th’s commander, was flying with them. The dark sky was clear when they started out, but as the flight went on, the wind picked up—and then it began to snow.

  Soon the young women on the training mission couldn’t see a thing. They couldn’t see the horizon, so they couldn’t even tell which way was up—without a visible horizon in the air, speed and centrifugal force make your brain believe that the bottom of the plane is always down. The only thing they could see was the faint light of the instruments in the cockpits. If a light winked through the darkness outside the plane, they couldn’t tell if it was a star or a light on the ground.

  Yevdokia said, “It was like flying through milk.”

  Unable to see the other planes and without any way to communicate with them, Yevdokia turned around and flew back to Engels. There was nothing else she could do except to hope that the other pilots would do the same.

  After Yevdokia landed, Marina stayed up late, waiting for the other aircrews to come home. It was past midnight when a frantic telephone call came in from the site where the practice bombing was supposed to take place.

  There had been a crash.

  It’s not clear what happened that night, or how many planes were involved—different people tell different stories. The rookie navigators might have been lost in the bad weather, or the rookie pilots might have run out of fuel. It seems that two planes collided, unable to see each other in the dark. Yevdokia’s plane was the only one that made it back.

  When Marina and Yevdokia organized a search party the next day, they found the wreckage of the Po-2s and the broken and twisted bodies of their pilots and navigators. Four young aviators had been killed—even before they’d had a chance to fly into combat.

  Back at Engels in the days that followed, Marina’s recruits organized a funeral themselves for the four young women who had died, placing flowers alongside their bodies and lifting their coffins into the truck that would carry them to the burial site. The young women sobbed brokenheartedly during the ceremony.

  “My darlings, my girls, squeeze your heart, stop crying, you shouldn’t be sobbing . . . ,” Marina told them. “These are our first losses. There will be many of them. Clench your hearts like a fist. . . .”

  The incident shook everyone, but the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment took it hardest. They were supposed to be the first of Marina’s regiments to leave for the front. Now they were grieving for their friends and it was clear they didn’t have enough night flying experience to go to war yet.

  Because of the accident, the 588th was given another two months of training before they left Engels to fly into combat.

  The 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment must have been nervous and excited—it was the end of March 1942, and the newly trained combat pilots in their fast and dangerous solo Yak fighters were eagerly awaiting their first wartime assignments.

  Lilya Litvyak wrote home on March 29, “We are having remarkable summer-like flying weather every day. . . . It is very warm aboard fighters—not like in the [open Po-2]. The cockpit is heated; sometimes, it is even too warm in it.” She finished up with assurance, “I am very confident and completely grown-up.” She was twenty years old.

  But before they could go to war, the 586th first had to fly to Moscow to get the skis on their Yaks replaced with wheels now that the snow was gone. This was a tedious assignment, as they ended up waiting around for days and days with nothing much to do. Bored and frustrated, Katya Budanova led the others in a constructive project—they scrounged some planks to build themselves a private wooden hut around the hole in the ground they had to use for a toilet, and decorated it with leaves and twigs!

  At last the wait was over, and their Yak-1s were fitted with wheels. But when the 586th’s assignment came, they were disappointed to find that they weren’t being sent to the front after all. Instead, they’d be protecting the strategic city of Saratov on the banks of the Volga River. It was hardly any distance from Engels, where they’d been training for the last six months. This wasn’t going to be the heroic heat of battle they’d been hoping for.

  PILOTS OF THE 586TH FIGHTER AVIATION REGIMENT

  But an assignment was an assignment, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. On April 16, 1942, the women of the 586th flew to their first base, in a village called Anisov
ka. They would live here in wooden summer houses until February 1943; the airfield itself was just two wooden huts and some dugouts that the women had to dig themselves. Skylarks sang in the fields around them, but every night the air raid sirens wailed in the darkness as the Luftwaffe planes tried to bomb the nearby city.

  The 586th’s main mission in their dangerous Yak fighters was defense. They were going to protect Saratov’s bridges and railways from enemy bombers, and to guard the Saratov Aviation Factory, the very factory where their own planes had been built. Sometimes they also had to deliver urgent messages, or provide a fighter escort for important officials who needed protection in case they encountered armed German aircraft.

  In addition to being disappointed that they weren’t flying into battle, the young pilots didn’t like the food at their new air base—they knew that frontline soldiers were getting better rations than they were. And there was another problem: they weren’t crazy about their commander.

  Marina had appointed Tamara Kazarinova to lead the 586th. Six months earlier Tamara had been badly injured in an air raid with a compound fracture to her left leg, which left her with a permanent limp. She didn’t join the others training at Engels until February 1942, which meant she didn’t get to share the ups and downs of becoming soldiers or making friends during the first few months there.

  Most of the women under Tamara’s command found her hard to like. The highest praise you could get from her was that you’d done “fairly well” or that you were “not bad.” Tamara didn’t often fly along when the 586th was given assignments, either because of her leg injury or because she wasn’t familiar with the high-performance Yak-1 fighter aircraft. She probably lost a little respect from her regiment because she stayed on the ground while the rest of them were risking their lives in the air.

  This would all cause trouble later, but for now, the young pilots of the 586th were busy getting used to flying real combat missions—even if they weren’t at the front.

  Soviet fighter pilots were alone in their single-seat planes, but they typically flew in pairs. They kept their planes close together so they could look out for each other in a fight. Three of the 586th’s fighter pilots, Zoya Pozhidayeva, Anya Demchenko, and Mariya Kuznetsova, became close friends almost immediately, and Zoya and Anya flew together as a pair. So did Galina Burdina and Tamara Pamyatnykh.

  Lilya Litvyak and Katya Budanova also became inseparable friends. Katya, like Lilya, was a natural pilot, and like Lilya, she’d been a flight instructor before the war. She wasn’t as flashy as Lilya, but she was every bit as confident. Neither one of them was happy about not being at the front yet.

  “So May has almost ended . . . ,” Lilya wrote to her mother. “We are training a great deal now and this fills us with enthusiasm, since it brings us nearer to . . . [our] goal—to fight at the front. Virtually no one amongst us wants to live in wartime as peacefully as we do now. . . . All of us are thirsting for battle, especially me.”

  The 122nd Air Group’s limited military career so far hadn’t done a thing to reduce that thirst for battle. They had joined Raskova’s regiments so they could fight for their Motherland, and they must have felt very cut off from the rest of the world during the time they spent in Engels. They knew there was a world war going on: It meant that they were cold and hungry, separated from family and home—some of them even from their own children. It meant that they were working and studying day and night to cram a three-year training course into six months so that they could fly into battle as combat pilots, which they were eager to do. But beyond the grubby clay-and-straw houses and the concrete official buildings that surrounded them in Engels, beyond the daily flights and mechanical drills, what was going on in the world?

  Ever so briefly, this is what much of the world looked like in the spring of 1942:

  There were now more than twenty-five nations allied against the Axis powers.

  The Americans were fighting an air and sea war against the Japanese in the Pacific.

  The British were everywhere: they were fighting the Japanese in Burma, and they were fighting the Germans in North Africa. Back home in the United Kingdom, food, clothes, coal, gas, and electricity were in such short supply they had to be rationed.

  Throughout Europe, Hitler was beginning his murderous holocaust of Jewish people and other ethnic groups—he wanted to wipe out the entire population of Poland to clear the land for German citizens. His disregard for humanity was fierce and random. In the first half of 1942, the terrible machinery that formed the horrific Nazi death camps was grinding into action, beginning to exterminate hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of men, women, and children.

  As the snow began to melt in Russia, Leningrad was completely surrounded by German troops. Its three million people were slowly starving to death. Hitler’s plan was to keep them blockaded and wait till everyone dropped dead; it would be cheaper and easier than fighting to get into the city.

  But Moscow was still free. And now that spring was here, the Soviet Union tried to strike back against the German forces. In March, the Red Army began fighting in Crimea, a huge peninsula in the Black Sea on the southern edge of Ukraine, the Soviet state that produced most of the nation’s food. The German troops wouldn’t budge.

  This was the area where the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment was about to be sent on their first combat missions.

  Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s attempt to take over the USSR in a speedy lightning invasion like those he’d won throughout western Europe, had failed. But he was nowhere near ready to give up.

  Encouraged by the warm weather, Hitler decided to try attacking the Soviet Union from the south. If German forces could control the huge Volga River, it would create chaos for Soviet shipping, and cut off the USSR from its own oil supplies. Hitler’s new target was Stalingrad15, a large industrial city on the Volga—and the one that bore Stalin’s name, an insult to Stalin himself. Once the Germans captured the Volga River and destroyed the Soviet Union’s defenses, they could head north to get at Moscow. The new strategy was called Operation Blue.

  There was no end in sight to the conflict that was slaughtering so many people. It had been the hardest winter since records began; the Red Army was stretched even thinner than it had been at the beginning of the war. And for Marina Raskova’s young aviators, the real battle was only beginning.

  Part III

  The Great Patriotic War

  The Second Year: 1942–1943

  15

  The 588th: In Combat at Last

  In May 1942 it was the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment’s turn to get their first taste of combat. In their open-cockpit Po-2s, their number one job would be to harass the enemy. They were going to work all night to ensure that the German invaders didn’t get a wink of sleep.

  The 588th was sent to help prevent the Germans from taking over the Caucasus region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, an important source of oil for the USSR. If the Germans seized this area, the Soviets would run dangerously low on fuel.

  Here, along with a men’s night bomber regiment, Marina’s recruits would fly low over the German troops in the dark, bombing their headquarters and ammunition and supply depots on the southern end of the front.

  Marina Raskova’s young aviators were thoroughly excited about finally being able to do the enemy some real damage.

  Marina flew with the 588th as they traveled to their new base, which was only twenty-five kilometers (fifteen miles) away from the fierce fighting on the front lines. She led the regiment’s pilots and navigators in twenty Po-2s on a two-day journey, including an overnight stop at an airfield on the way. The rest of the staff made their way more slowly in trucks on the ground.

  THE 588TH NIGHT BOMBER AVIATION REGIMENT. IRINA RAKOBOLSKAYA IS ON THE FAR RIGHT IN THE FRONT; COMMANDER YEVDOKIA BERSHANSKAYA IS THIRD FROM THE RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF THE FRONT ROW. ZHENYA RUDNEVA KNEELS BETWEEN THE BACK ROW AND THE THIRD ROW, WITH HER FRIEND GALYA DOKUTOVICH ON HER
LEFT IN FRONT OF HER.

  Ten minutes before the planes of the 588th arrived at their new airfield, a squadron of speedy fighter aircraft joined the regiment in the air. Navigator Raisa Aronova, flown by her pilot, Katya Piskareva, in their fragile Po-2, saw the red stars of the Soviet Air Force painted beneath the wings of the fighter planes and assumed they were there as a protective escort for the new regiment—which they were.

  But the pilots of the fighter squadron decided they’d have a bit of fun with the rookies. Instead of flying along with the Po-2s, they wove and dived around them. Most of the 588th pilots had no idea what was going on. They didn’t have much experience identifying other aircraft in the air, and some of them didn’t see the red stars that Raisa and Katya had noticed—it’s very difficult to spot details of an aircraft in flight. Most of the young women thought they were under attack from enemy fighter planes. Panicking, the 588th pilots broke formation and tried to escape.

  When the squadron of fighter planes saw the chaos they’d caused by scattering the Po-2 regiment, they didn’t have any choice but to fly on to the airfield alone.

  One by one, the pilots and navigators of the 588th eventually straggled into their new airfield. Below them as they came safely down to land, the surrounding orchards were foamy with white apple and cherry blossoms, in spite of the bloodshed so close by. When the young women climbed out of their cockpits, they were teased mercilessly by the men who were now waiting for them to turn up. “Hey, spineless, can’t you tell a star from a swastika?”

  The 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment was not off to the best start.

  Once again, the young women’s morale and nerves were badly shaken. Because of the errors they’d made in reacting with panic to potential danger, their first taste of combat was pushed back yet another two weeks, into June, so they could have still more time to train. Adding insult to injury, they also now had to have their flight skills checked by male pilots.