A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  No one ever saw her again.

  Not long after Lilya’s disappearance, a leaflet was handed out to Soviet troops, encouraging them to fight in memory of the “shining image of pilot Lily Litvyak, as a symbol of eternal, unfading youth, as a symbol of struggle and victory!”

  Double ace Lilya Litvyak had destroyed eleven enemy planes by herself in less than a year, plus the observation balloon. Her commander wrote a recommendation for her to be posthumously honored as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

  But Lilya and her aircraft had vanished. It was impossible to prove that she was dead, so by the Soviet Union’s strict military regulations she couldn’t be given the award.

  It was absolutely Lilya’s worst fear: to disappear, as her father had disappeared.

  But that is what happened.

  On September 16, 1943, a document was filed with the chief directorate of personnel officially listing Lilya Litvyak as “missing.”

  The Great Patriotic War had only just passed its halfway mark. It was nowhere near finished. But Lilya’s part in it was over. The woman who was born on Aviation Day, the woman who was born to be in the air, had vanished in the air.

  Part IV

  The Great Patriotic War

  The Third and Fourth Years: 1943–1945

  29

  “Our Planes Were Burning like Candles”

  During that turbulent final week of July 1943, William Faulkner was on the other side of the world in Hollywood, California, feverishly pulling together the screenplay for the sweeping wartime movie Battle Cry. The film would never be made, but the world would never notice. The world was too busy tearing itself apart.

  World War II really was a world war: it took place across oceans as well as continents. By the summer of 1943, the Atlantic was full of German submarines and British battleships. In the South Pacific, the United States Army Air Force and Navy were fighting a furious offensive against Japan. The Allies had forced the German troops from North Africa earlier that year, but in China there was an ongoing battle to drive out the invading Japanese. Indians and Australians were fighting for the British in the Pacific and the Far East; Canadians were fighting for them in the Mediterranean. In the air, Allied planes based in Great Britain were raining bombs on German cities and industrial sites, killing tens of thousands of civilians. And since May, the Allied nations had been hard at work planning a secret invasion of the western Atlantic coast of Europe to win it back from the Germans.

  Stalin was counting heavily on this second front to stretch Germany’s military to its breaking point and take pressure off the millions of Soviet soldiers who were throwing themselves at death day after day in the Soviet states on the Eastern Front.

  The 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment knew they were a small part of a much bigger machine, but their youth in the newly industrialized USSR had taught them how important a small part could be.

  In their combat missions, the open-cockpit Po-2 biplanes flew toward that night’s harassment target one by one, each three minutes behind the next. One by one, each aircrew dropped their bombs and then returned to their intermediate airfield to refuel. Like so many other Po-2 night bomber regiments on the front, their strategy was to keep the German troops awake all night. The Soviet night bombers were small and slow, but the exhausted Germans hated them. When the Po-2s were in the air, the Germans never had a single moment’s rest.

  * * *

  NIGHT BOMBING WITHOUT PARACHUTES

  The Po-2s were slow. And when a harassment plane was caught in the beams of antiaircraft searchlights and hit by a gunner shooting from the ground, or by an enemy fighter plane shooting from the air, if it caught fire the Po-2 could be entirely engulfed in flames in less than minute. Irina Rakobolskaya, the deputy commander for the 46th Guards, said that “a single incendiary bullet could turn it into a flaming torch.” Ordinary people called the Po-2 a “kerosinka”—a kerosene lamp, because it went up in flames so fast.

  Your only hope flying a Po-2 under enemy fire was to stay low, stay quiet, and stay unseen. For most of the war the Po-2s of the 46th Guards weren’t even equipped with self-defense machine guns.

  Yet for nearly three years, the entire 46th Guards flew their night bombing combat missions without parachutes.

  “Our pilots thought the plane itself to be like a parachute and felt they did not need them,” said Irina. “Over our own territory we could get down quite easily, and over the German lines we felt that it was much better to burn up than to be captured by the Germans.”

  In the summer of 1944, at last the 46th Guards were equipped with parachutes. But the change saved only one single life. In a horrible twist of fate, when Rufina Gasheva and Olga Sanifrova parachuted out of a damaged Po-2, they landed in a minefield. They survived the landing, but Olga was killed by a mine.

  * * *

  On the night of July 31, 1943, the fifteen aircrews of a Po-2 squadron got ready for their nightly bombing run. Thirty young Soviet women walked out to their aircraft together in the dark. Only twenty-two of them would return.

  After the navigators climbed in and the pilots started their engines, fifteen 46th Guards Po-2s set out in a line one after the other, exactly three minutes apart. They were headed for the village of Krymskaya, where German troops were camped along the fortified Blue Line, Hitler’s offensive front in Crimea.

  Squadron commander Mariya Smirnova took off, followed by the other planes. Zhenya Krutova flew with her navigator, Lena Salikova. Exactly three minutes behind them flew Anya Vysotskaya and Galya Dokutovich, the navigator who’d spent six months in the hospital after being run over by a truck. Behind Anya and Galya came Valentina Polunina and Irina Kashirina, who’d had to land her plane after her pilot, Dusya Nosal, had been killed in the air three months earlier.

  As a pilot, Anya was one of several rookies in the air that night. Zhenya Rudneva, the regiment’s chief navigator, had assigned her adored friend Galya Dokutovich to fly with Anya so she could have an experienced navigator in the air with her. Natasha Meklin, a navigator who’d retrained as a pilot, was flying one of her first combat missions at the controls of her Po-2, with Lida Loshmanova as her navigator. And Larisa Rozanova was flying with Nadezhda “Nadya” Studilina, a new navigator who’d started the war as a gunner and had recently retrained. This was going to be one of Nadya’s first missions in the air.

  Behind Larisa and Nadya came Sasha Rogova and Zhenya Sukhorukova.

  As usual, the target was only about fifteen minutes’ flight time from the airfield. The searchlights were combing the sky and the antiaircraft guns were firing as usual as the Po-2s approached the enemy lines.

  Then, unexpectedly, the antiaircraft guns fell eerily silent.

  Mariya Smirnova, the squadron commander, noticed the silence and reasoned—correctly—that the only reason the antiaircraft guns would stop firing was because there must be German night fighter aircraft patrolling the sky.

  Sure enough, from the dark sky came a yellow flare, a signal from the German plane to let the gunners on the ground know he was up there.

  “We had not been attacked in this way before,” Mariya said. “We had not developed tactics to counter the attack of fighter planes.”

  Mariya was a hardened combat pilot and knew how to avoid the antiaircraft searchlight beams. She cut the power to her engine as she approached her target, to give her the advantage of silence. She was ready to throw her plane into a sideslip if a searchlight caught her, a flight maneuver that allows you to dive very fast and steeply without spinning.

  But Mariya managed to avoid the beams in the darkness.

  Behind her, flying far back in the line of Po-2s, Larisa and Nadya were over the Kuban River and halfway to the target when Larisa saw four searchlights suddenly begin to comb the sky. Like Mariya, she couldn’t hear the antiaircraft guns firing. Unlike Mariya, she didn’t guess at first what this might mean, though she thought it was strange.

  Then Larisa saw a white spot caught in the cross
ing of the searchlight beams—a distant Po-2.

  Natasha and Lida also saw the plane that was trapped by the searchlights. They saw the blue light of tracer bullets as the German night fighter fired at the trapped plane—missed—and fired again.

  The white spot suddenly became a bright red spot, and Larisa realized that it was one of the 46th’s aircraft burning.

  Zhenya Krutova and Lena Salikova were in that Po-2. As their plane fell, colored flashes exploded from it—they were the aircrew’s signal flares exploding. The flares were kept where the aircrew could reach them, and their explosions told Larisa that the flames had already reached the cockpits of the burning Po-2.

  Zhenya Rudneva, in line behind Larisa, also saw Zhenya and Lena’s burning plane. The pilot who was now plummeting in flames was another of Zhenya Rudneva’s dear friends. She could hardly believe what she was watching. “My arms and legs shook; for the first time an aircraft burnt down before my eyes.”

  Still the antiaircraft guns were eerily silent.

  As the flaming Po-2 touched the ground, the searchlights came back on and caught a second plane.

  Larisa flew on toward those lights, horrified and terrified. “A bitter tickling in my throat, incapable of breathing. Goosebumps were jumping along my back, and I could hardly feel my feet—they were as if made of cotton-wool.”

  Then, near Anya Vysotskaya and Galya Dokutovich’s plane now captured by the bright searchlights, Larisa and Nadya saw flashes coming from the sky.

  They shouted together, “A fighter firing!”

  The German night fighter plane was picking off the line of Po-2s as they lumbered slowly into the waiting beams of the searchlights.

  Still Larisa headed for her target. But now she was aware of the powerful fighter plane in the sky above her, fully armed and more than four times faster than her flimsy Po-2. “I was so frightened I couldn’t even think of escape,” Larisa said. “I was to be over the target in two minutes.”

  “If only we had a machine gun!” Nadya yelled angrily. “We could at least give him a scare. Should I load my pistol?”

  Larisa told her ominously, “Load it. But you’re not likely to use it.”

  Now, suddenly, the antiaircraft guns began to fire.

  The German guns on the ground hit the plane flown by Valentina Polunina. She and her navigator, Irina Kashirina—who’d that spring flown her dead pilot’s plane home to land safely—were both doomed to burn to death.

  When the third plane began to blaze, Larisa snapped out of her frozen terror. She knew that the German fighter plane could climb faster and more steeply than she could. So she descended lower than she was actually allowed to fly.

  As Larisa glided toward the target, she could see the white cottages and the dark treetops of Krymskaya’s orchards below her. She could also see one of the Po-2s on fire, spinning earthward through the air as its flares exploded.

  “We realized that our friends were dying,” she said.

  When Larisa’s navigator, Nadya, released their bombs, their plane was so low that they were shaken violently by the explosion. “I thought we would split into pieces,” Larisa said.

  Searchlights clawed at the sky all around them. As their Po-2 climbed away from the carnage below, Nadya yelled, “They caught another air crew!”

  Larisa glanced back over her shoulder and saw one more of the line of Po-2s going down in flames. Sasha Rogova and Zhenya Sukhorukova were in that plane.

  “Our planes were burning like candles,” said pilot Serafima Amosova.

  “The tracer bullets set [the] planes on fire; our planes were so vulnerable they were burning like sheets of paper,” Mariya Smirnova said. “It is a horrible scene when a plane is burning. First it explodes; then it burns like a torch falling apart, and you can see particles of [plane], wings, tail, and human bodies scattered in the air.”

  As Larisa and Nadya recovered from the shock of their own bomb exploding beneath them, they found themselves swept by the headlight beam of the German fighter plane. They saw the flash and heard the sharp rattle of the aircraft’s machine guns in the dark, and bullets raked the wings of their Po-2.

  Larisa said, “The entire lower and upper starboard wing portions were pierced by the burst; you could see a straight black line formed by the shot-holes.”

  But Larisa had managed to avoid the antiaircraft searchlights, and the German pilot’s aim in the dark wasn’t accurate enough to destroy their plane.

  Four pilots and four navigators of the 46th Guards perished in flames in the space of half an hour.

  The Luftwaffe night fighter pilot who was in the air that night was Josef Kociok. His plane wasn’t equipped with radar, which at that time was too bulky and expensive to fit in any aircraft, so he’d relied on the searchlights to locate the doomed planes that were his targets.

  The events of July 31, 1943, were the worst blow and the most devastating loss that the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment suffered during the entire war.

  At first, the shocked ground crew waiting back at the intermediate airfield had no way of knowing who’d been killed until the surviving aircraft returned. Then they had to figure it out by process of elimination.

  The rest of that night’s missions were canceled.

  Zhenya Rudneva was utterly heartbroken by the death of the brave, eloquent, determined Galya Dokutovich, who’d suffered so much already and hadn’t let it stop her from flying. Zhenya even blamed herself for having assigned Galya to Anya’s plane. “I kept running up to every landing aircraft, but there was no Galya. My Galya failed to come back!” The words spilled from her like tears. “There was emptiness, emptiness in my heart!”

  The regiment was living at that time in a school building furnished with folding wooden beds, and when the surviving aircrews returned to their bunks they were stricken to see eight beds still folded up.

  “It was impossible not to cry,” said Serafima, one of the surviving pilots. Most of the regiment was too upset to sleep.

  Even so, the next night they still had to take off and fly back to the front in the dark as usual, numbed by tragedy and fear and exhaustion.

  But this time they had protection. Soviet fighter pilots cleared the sky of German night fighters around them for several nights. The Luftwaffe night fighter pilot Josef Kociok himself was killed in air combat eight weeks later.

  Zhenya Rudneva couldn’t quite believe that her friends had died such sudden and horrific deaths. She confessed in her diary two weeks later, “Now that Galya is no more and will never return . . . It is too cruel to take. I carry her photograph with my Party membership card; I can’t yet transfer it into the tiny white envelope in which I’ve already placed the snapshot of Zhenya—I’ve buried this friend of mine, too, and with such an aching heart. But with [Galya] I simply can’t part.”

  I’ll rest and get better after the war, Galya had written in her own diary when she’d come back to the regiment last winter. She’d never even had the chance to fully recover from her back injury.

  Polina Gelman, another 46th Guards navigator who’d been Galya’s best friend since they were in school together, wrote to Galya’s family and promised them: “If no enemy bullet kills me and some day I have a daughter, I shall call her Galya and bring her up to be noble and wonderful like our Galya.”

  30

  Night Witches

  Yevdokia Bershanskaya didn’t always go by the book as the commander of the 46th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, but she was good at her job. One of her original ideas was to make sure her regiment was always in training. That way, if people were transferred or killed in combat, there were always competent airwomen ready to fly the open-cockpit Po-2s on their nightly harassment missions.

  After the disastrous events of the night of July 31, 1943, Yevdokia thought hard about how to avoid the tragedy being repeated. She decided that the 46th Guards should change the way they flew their bombing missions.

  “Let’s fly in two-plane elements,” she su
ggested. “One aircrew should bomb the target and the other ‘tackle’ enemy antiaircraft weapons.”

  Now, instead of flying in a predictable line, the Po-2s of the 46th Guards would fly in pairs.

  Polina Gelman explained the plan: “We flew two planes at a time to the target. The first attracted all the searchlights and antiaircraft guns, and the other would glide in over the target, with its engine idling so the Germans couldn’t hear it, and bomb the target. With all the attention on the first plane, the second could make a successful attack.”

  In the dark, without lights, at a height of about 1,300 meters (over 4,000 feet), the pilot of the attacking aircraft would cut the engine. Then she would silently glide down to 600 meters (less than 2,000 feet).

  After dropping her bombs she’d power the engine up again and climb away.

  Nadezhda “Nadya” Popova and her navigator, Katya Ryabova, were the first crew to test the silent bombing glide. Squadron commander Marina Chechneva and her navigator, Olga Klyuyeva, flew with them to the target. Marina had flown other bombing missions with Nadya, and the two pilots were comfortable flying their Po-2s in formation. The plan was that Nadya and Katya would drop their bombs while Marina and Olga, flying two minutes ahead of them, would have the terrifying task of purposefully attracting enemy fire.

  Commander Yevdokia Bershanskaya cleared her pilots for takeoff. She was as nervous as they were about the dangerous, untested strategy.

  Olga guided Marina through the dark night to the target, an enemy crossing on the Terek River near Mozdok, in the Caucasus region. Now it was up to Marina to distract the enemy. She pushed the control column forward to lower the nose of her aircraft, and applied power to gain speed.

  She said, “In a few seconds, we found ourselves under a veritable hail of antiaircraft fire. The searchlight beams went berserk in the sky. I flew in a weaving pattern . . . now to the left and now to the right. We couldn’t let the enemy catch us with two intersected beams and, at the same time, regardless of the risk, we had to ‘lead on’ the searchlight operators as long as possible.”