A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

“If a[n enemy antiaircraft] searchlight caught our planes in its beam, we couldn’t see anything—we were blinded,” said navigator Polina Gelman. “[Then] the pilot flew with her head very low in the cockpit because she could see nothing outside, and when we managed to get out of the beam we were still blinded for a few moments.”

  The night bombers took off in a line three minutes after each other—just like a factory production line. The targets weren’t much more than fifteen minutes away. A plane would fly to its target and come back, land, refuel, and reload with fresh bombs. Then you were ready for the next mission. With thirty aircraft flying in the regiment, it was possible to keep a steady stream of bombers headed over the enemy lines all night long.

  Zhenya Rudneva spent the night of December 14, 1942, flying seven missions as Dina Nikulina’s navigator. Her diary entry the next day makes her teamwork with Dina—whom Zhenya adored—sound like a kind of dark comedy duo. “My pilot had a stupid navigator and I had a mindless pilot. . . . By her fifth sortie, Dina felt very tired and kept falling asleep.”

  Sometimes pilot and navigator both fell asleep in flight. Navigators in the 588th usually had piloting skills as well; Larisa Rozanova said, “We even had a kind of agreement between the pilot and the navigator that one of us would sleep going to the target and the other returning to the airfield.”

  According to Irina Rakobolskaya, the chief of staff and Yevdokia Bershanskaya’s second-in-command, “The pilots were so tired they never even came out of the cockpit. In the winter [people] even brought hot tea to the aircraft.”

  The ground crews worked just as hard as the flight crews. All night long, the chief engineer, Klavdiya Ilushina, and the other technicians checked every single aircraft as it came and went. All night long, mechanics refueled the planes and checked the oil and water levels as quickly as possible. They filled cans from the fuel trucks and carried them by hand to the aircraft. All night long, armorers loaded bombs by the faint beams of flashlights. If the batteries failed, or when it was too dangerous to let a light show, they’d have to feel their way in the dark to fix the heavy bombs in place beneath the Po-2s’ wings.

  Nina Karasyova was nineteen when she started loading weapons. The bombs the Po-2s carried could weigh from 25 to 100 kilograms (55 to 220 pounds), and they had to be lifted into place manually. In a single night, Nina might sometimes have to lift over three tons of explosives.

  There weren’t any machines that could do this work, so three women at a time worked together to lift the bombs. Nina said, “We worked in mud, frost, sleet, and water. . . . We had to work barehanded so that we could feel what we were doing. . . . We worked all night, then had a two- to-three-hour rest and returned to the planes in the morning to examine the bomb racks under the aircraft.”

  And just the way the lack of sleep was a constant battle for the aircrew, so it was for the ground crew. When the nighttime bombing missions were over, the technicians could snatch about two hours of sleep. Then they had to repair and test the same planes during the day so they’d be ready for the next night.

  The mechanics and armorers felt a fierce sense of competition with nearby men’s night bomber regiments doing the same job, and the women wanted to prove they were just as capable as the men. So they put their heads together and came up with a system to help make their work more efficient.

  Instead of the usual Soviet routine of assigning a team to wait for and do all the work on one particular aircraft, they reorganized their teams so that one person did the same job for every aircraft. That job might be meeting each plane and guiding it to be refueled in the dark, or holding its wing before takeoff. Someone else would be working steadily at filling fuel cans, and someone else would carry them out to the planes. The armorers operated in teams of three as they loaded bombs.

  This way, instead of every mechanic and armorer having to wait for their own plane to turn up, people could work efficiently on whatever needed to be done all night long. They got so good at it they could turn a plane around in five minutes. Soon the pilots and navigators of the 588th were flying a dozen bombing missions or more in a single night, far more than the men in the other Po-2 regiments.

  Irina Rakobolskaya, the regiment’s chief of staff, was so proud of this new system that she convinced her chief engineer, Sonya Ozerkova, to write a report suggesting that other regiments try it out. Not surprisingly, Sonya was reluctant. She was the one who’d been arrested and nearly shot just because she’d got stuck on the German side of the front lines. But Irina was persistent, and finally Sonya sent in her report.

  The result? Sonya was scolded for violating the air force Technical Maintenance Manual.

  For a long time Sonya was angry with Irina for getting her in trouble. But it didn’t stop the 588th from working in teams. They kept on using their new, efficient system; they just didn’t make the mistake again of telling anyone they were doing it. Sometimes the best way to get around Soviet regulations was to quietly ignore them.

  In February 1943, the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment was awarded a prestigious honor. They were given the special title “Guards”—the mark of an elite military unit. It was the reward for their success in combat that Marina had wished for them in her speech on the day they’d said goodbye to her.

  The 588th’s new name became the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. There were four other regiments of Po-2s in their division, all staffed by men, but only the women of the 588th were honored by becoming a Guards regiment. They felt it was because their maintenance system allowed them to fly nearly twice as many missions each night as other Po-2 regiments, and they were extremely proud of themselves for outflying the men!

  After they became the 46th Guards, they were allowed to form a third flight squadron and a training squadron. The training squadron was another unique innovation for this regiment, a bright idea credited to their commander, Yevdokia Bershanskaya. It meant that the 46th Guards could replace their own staff and aircrew, so they didn’t have to get reinforcements from outside the regiment when they suffered combat losses (although they still received untrained new recruits).

  Coming on top of the victory at Stalingrad, the honor of being made a Guards regiment must have been a fine boost for the night bombers’ morale. But it didn’t make their work any easier, and it didn’t make the horrors of war any easier to accept.

  Pilots, unlike ground troops, don’t always experience the close-up destructive work they cause on the ground. It wasn’t until February 1943 that Irina “Ira” Sebrova and her navigator, Natasha Meklin, saw their first dead German, when they nearly tripped over the corpse of a soldier that was lying in the snow on the side of the road between the airfield and the village where they were staying.

  The pale, waxlike body was wearing nothing but a pair of blue underpants, and his blond hair was frozen to the ground.

  It was impossible not to pity the young man, and impossible not to imagine how easily they could end up just like him—fighting and fighting until they were killed.

  The 46th Guards were now stationed only about forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) from the front lines. As the snow began to melt, the ground around their base became so thick with mud and slush that supply trucks couldn’t get through to them. To make matters worse, one night after a bombing mission, their aircraft got stuck at their intermediate airfield without food and low on fuel.

  Resourceful as always, the young women collected the remaining fuel from each of their twenty aircraft and distributed it between eight lucky planes. After pushing and dragging the planes through mud and slush—“almost carrying them in our hands,” said Larisa Rozanova—the young women got the eight Po-2s onto a makeshift runway made of logs. Then pilots, flying without navigators so the rear cockpit could hold the supplies they picked up, took off for a round trip of about 400 kilometers (250 miles) to a town called Kropotkin. There, they would be able to collect flour, sugar, and other provisions, as well as explosives and fuel.

  The
Po-2s didn’t usually fly in daylight because their slow speed made them easy for enemy aircraft to chase and shoot down. So to make this trip safely, they had to fly at treetop level—that way they were camouflaged against the ground.

  The hunger, the slush, the lack of sleep, the constant tension, the grime, the grief, and the cold were all exhausting. Larisa Rozanova was one of the pilots who flew to Kropotkin to pick up the supplies. Having eaten nothing but corn for three days, Larisa made three flights back and forth to Kropotkin in daylight, covering 1,200 kilometers (750 miles). Heavy cans full of fuel for the planes were attached to her wings and stacked up in the rear cockpit, weighing down the little Po-2 so that skimming the treetops was even more hazardous.

  Then, when dark fell and the temperature dropped below freezing, everybody got ready to fly bombing missions. Larisa wasn’t going to be the one who backed out because she was tired. She set out with navigator Vera Belik, who’d be able to help her with the flying if she needed to.

  “The moment we took off I was almost snoozing away,” said Larisa.

  It was cloudy as well as dark, and Larisa couldn’t keep her eyes open. She and the aircraft were both nodding, to Vera’s alarm.

  Still half asleep as she approached the target, Larisa couldn’t figure out what she was looking at. She exclaimed, “Vera, fighters are attacking us; do you see them?”

  “What fighters? You are dreaming! Do wake up!” Vera told her.

  But Larisa kept mistaking the antiaircraft searchlights on the ground for the headlights of enemy fighter planes. She made the aircraft turn and dive violently, trying to avoid an unseen danger that didn’t exist. The terrified Vera screamed her friend’s nickname over the intercom to wake her up: “Speed, speed, Lorka!”

  Vera’s yelling finally cleared Larisa’s head a little.

  “I glanced at the instruments,” Larisa said. “There were circles before my eyes; I couldn’t discern any digits. I shut my eyelids until they hurt, rubbed them with my hand, opened them again, and still couldn’t see anything. But Vera kept screaming: ‘Speed, speed! Adjust speed!’”

  Then Larisa put the Po-2 into a dive that was so fast and steep it made the plane vibrate. She was so disoriented she couldn’t tell the ground from the sky.

  “Larisa, wake up, what are you doing? There are no fighters; these are the searchlights!” said Vera. Larisa wouldn’t let her take over the control stick—Vera had to fight her for it. At last, only 200 meters (about 650 feet) from the ground, Vera managed to straighten out the plane.

  By now Larisa’s teeth were chattering and her hands and feet were shaking so badly that at first Vera thought she must be wounded.

  “You shouldn’t have flown tonight,” Vera scolded her.

  Vera flew the Po-2 back to their base. When they landed, they discovered that their plane was so full of bullet holes that they couldn’t fly another mission that night.

  “Between us we had to fly three hundred missions every night,” said pilot Nina Raspopova—thirty aircraft flying ten missions each. “But one night we were a single mission short and I was told to do one final flight. As we crossed the front line, I saw the Germans sitting close to each other, miserably looking up at the sky. Nobody fired a shot. Tanya, my navigator, grabbed the megaphone and shouted insults at them in German. I was so exhausted I didn’t care if they shot me or not or if I lived or died.”

  Even though the pilots didn’t have to fly during the day, the huge strain of the nightly combat missions affected their ability to relax. Irina Rakobolskaya said that sometimes the pilots wouldn’t sleep for days, “afraid of having nightmares during which they struggled with searchlights.”

  “When we returned from our missions at dawn, I couldn’t fall asleep,” said Mariya Smirnova. “I tossed in bed and had anxiety attacks. We slept two to four hours each day throughout the four years of the war.”

  But just as fog didn’t stop them from flying and an official reprimand didn’t stop them from using their own maintenance system, exhaustion and anxiety attacks didn’t stop them from fighting.

  25

  Two against Forty-Two

  Like the night bombers, the pilots of the 586th Regiment in their dangerous solo Yak fighters were growing hardened in combat too.

  In February 1943 they were assigned to defend and protect railroad junctions and bridges near a city called Voronezh. Less than two weeks before, Soviet forces had won a fierce battle to free the city from German occupation. Now, “Operation Star” was planned to free the cities of Kharkov (the Russian name for Kharkiv), in Ukraine, and Kursk, in Russia, 450 kilometers (280 miles) southwest of Moscow. Part of this effort meant that first the invaders would have to be pushed back from Voronezh. For the next seven months, under Aleksandr Gridnev’s command, the young women and men of the 586th would experience the most intense fighting of their entire war.

  Sofya Osipova was one of nine mechanics who went to the new airfield at Voronezh ahead of the rest of the regiment. Their job was to get the living quarters ready, and to make sure the pilots could land when they arrived in their Yaks.

  Sofya said that when she and her companions got there, “We found nothing all around but ruins.” They camped out in a single building that was still standing among the remains of a burned-out factory complex.

  The pilots turned up at this wasteland the next day and had to land in slushy snow. “The first machine touched down and a fountain shot up into the air,” said Sofya. Once they’d landed, the planes couldn’t get off the runway because they couldn’t taxi—their wheels just sank into the slush. The propellers were in danger of hitting the ground. So the mechanics had to jump up on the tails of the aircraft to keep the planes’ noses raised.

  Sofya had to do this again and again as each plane arrived. The work was freezing, soaking, and exhausting. “I am lying on the tail. The wind forcefully presses me to the fin and penetrates my body, spattering snow on me. I can hardly breathe. The tail keeps rising and falling down. . . .

  “When you climbed down from the tail, for a few minutes you were disoriented. Your ears, mouth, and nose were filled with wet snow. Your clothes were soaking wet, like a laundry which had not been wrung out. But you had to meet the next plane.”

  Of course the German forces had to deal with the exact same conditions. “General Mud and General Cold are helping the Russian side,” said journalist Vasily Grossman at the time.

  By now there was a drastic shortage of planes in the Soviet Air Force. For the fighter pilots of the 586th, this meant that every single one of their aircraft was constantly in use. As soon as one pilot returned from a mission, the ground crew quickly reloaded its guns, refueled it, patched up any damage, and another pilot would take off in it.

  As a result, during the first month at Voronezh there was no relief for anyone working on the ground. Fourteen young women were in charge of keeping all the 586th’s Yaks armed and flying.

  “One machine is airborne, another is landing, and still another is being inspected and refuelled,” Sofya said. “As soon as you finish, you run to help. . . . Quickly inspect and refuel the machine. It has had no time to cool down and again it takes off. Soaked, chilled, tired and, at times, hungry as well, but never downcast and always optimistic . . .”

  TECHNICIANS OF THE 586TH FIGHTER AVIATION REGIMENT AT WORK ON A YAK

  Later that spring, the regiment was lucky enough to be equipped with new Yak-7s, an upgraded version of their familiar Yak-1s. The Yak-7 was a simpler and more powerful aircraft. It was stable in the air and easy to handle, and thought of as one of the best Soviet fighter aircraft available.

  The 586th Regiment was kept so busy that almost every single one of its aircraft was in the sky on the morning of March 19, 1943—with two exceptions. Pilots Tamara Pamyatnykh and Raisa “Raya” Surnachevskaya, aged twenty-three and twenty at the time, were reserved as “scramble fighters” in case an unexpected mission came up.

  The pilots already in the air had all been sent
together to turn back a huge raid the Germans were launching on a nearby town just south of Voronezh. When the 586th arrived in their Yaks, the enemy planes dropped their bombs in a snow-covered field instead of on their populated industrial target, and beat a hasty retreat. Nobody was hurt, no planes were damaged, and the regiment flew back to their home field, where the fuel trucks came driving out to meet them as they landed.

  As the pilots climbed out of their planes, they were surprised to discover that Tamara and Raya had taken off while they were away. Inna Kalinovskaya, the ground staff officer in charge of keeping track of missions, explained what was going on: There was a large group of bombers heading to the railway station at Kastornaya, where huge numbers of Soviet troops were gathering as they prepared to join the battle to liberate the city of Kursk. Tamara and Raya were now the only fighter pilots in the air. But their radio messages were coming in clearly.

  * * *

  RADIO VERSUS RADAR

  Marina Raskova made sure her fighter planes were equipped with radios, which let her pilots to talk to each other in the air. But they weren’t using this equipment to track other aircraft. Radio had been around for most of the twentieth century by 1940, but what we call radar, using radio waves to look out for distant objects, was a very new technology in World War II.

  Radio is a way of sending out a signal made of electromagnetic energy. The radio that picks up the signal doesn’t have any way of knowing where it’s coming from, unless the person who sent the signal tells them—which is what Marina was doing as the Rodina’s navigator.

  But with radar equipment, it’s possible to send out radio signals that bounce off another object and return to the sender—revealing where that object is. This way, people can detect where a plane is even if it’s not trying to contact them.

  Early radar played a big role in preventing Germany’s planned invasion of the United Kingdom in 1940, because British radar stations were able to find raiding Luftwaffe planes in the air before they reached their targets. Radar stopped the Germans from being able to launch sneak attacks. When British radio technicians on the ground spotted incoming swarms of German aircraft, they were able to tell their pilots where to find the enemy.