A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  As Marina threw her little Po-2 from side to side among the searchlights and gunfire, Nadya and Katya glided silently behind her toward the target and dropped their bombs.

  Then Nadya powered her engine to climb away from the explosions. Now she and Marina had to swap roles. With full power roaring, it was Nadya’s turn to caper around in the searchlights while Marina climbed out of view, then idled her own engine to glide silently back to the target.

  When she’d successfully glided to the right place, Marina’s navigator, Olga, released their bombs.

  They’d done it! Both Po-2 crews had dropped their bombs over their target, and neither aircrew had been caught by enemy gunfire.

  When the triumphant flight crews returned, another pair headed out to try the new strategy that very same night, and were just as successful.

  Later that month, chief of staff Irina Rakobolskaya ordered new planes for the regiment. In addition to losing four aircraft on that terrible night at the end of July, the Po-2s they’d been using for the past year were wearing out—each small plane had already flown about 450 missions. And the 46th Guards weren’t going to let anything stop each flight crew from flying at least that many more.

  Maybe it was the sweeping sound made by the Po-2s’ canvas wings as they dived low over the German troops in the dark. When the 46th Guards were quietly idling their engines, maybe the cowering soldiers below imagined that the swooping wings sounded eerily like witch’s broomsticks soaring through the dark sky.

  Maybe it was because the voices of women calling to each other in the night above them were so unexpected.

  Maybe it was because of their screams as their flimsy aircraft went up in flames.

  Whatever the reason, the German troops at the front invented a name for the young women of the 46th Guards, who bombed them so relentlessly, three hundred times a night throughout the war.

  The Germans called them Nachthexen—“night witches.”

  “Nobody knows the exact day when they started calling us night witches,” said pilot Serafima Amosova. “We were fighting in the Caucasus near the city of Mozdok. . . . We were bombing the German positions almost every night, and none of us was ever shot down, so the Germans began saying these are night witches, because it seemed impossible to kill us or shoot us down.”

  According to a German prisoner, the radio broadcasts to the German troops at the front warned, “Attention, attention, the ladies are in the air, stay at your shelter.” Nina Yegorova-Arefjeva, an armorer for the 46th Guards, said that “sometimes, when our planes were throttled back gliding in over the target, the Germans would cry out, ‘Night witches!’, and our crews could hear them.”

  Soviet soldiers were more sympathetic. They called the airwomen in their Po-2s “heavenly creatures”; male pilots called them “little sisters.”

  The women of the 46th Guards were liked and admired by the men who fought not far away from them. When male pilots flew over their air base and spotted the women’s underthings hanging out to dry—a big clue that this was a women’s regiment—they’d perform noisy aerobatics in celebration. This was not entirely appreciated by the pilots and navigators, who were trying to sleep during the day!

  Raisa Zhitova-Yushina liked to encourage the Soviet ground troops when she flew over them in the dark. “When I was flying very low I would close the throttle and say, ‘Hey brothers, how are you?’ and they would light their torches.”

  PO-2 BIPLANES RETURNING TO THEIR AIR BASE AFTER A MISSION

  The women who worked and flew as pilots in the Great Patriotic War fought as relentlessly as the rest of the Soviet forces did. But it’s an error to believe that they were fearless. It’s an error to believe that most soldiers are fearless. Fear is part of being a soldier, something that you live with and battle as long as you’re fighting.

  During the course of the war, squadron commander Marina Smirnova flew 935 night bomber missions for the 46th Guards. But she never got used to being afraid. “Before each mission and as we approached the target, I became a concentration of nerves and tension,” she said. “My whole body was swept by fear of being killed.”

  “After bombing and having escaped the enemy’s fire, I couldn’t pull myself together for ten or fifteen minutes,” said Nina Raspopova, another 46th Guards pilot. “I was shivering, my teeth were chattering, my feet and hands were shaking. . . . I didn’t want to die. I dreamed of a small village house, a piece of rye bread, and a glass of clear river water.”

  Larisa Rozanova and Alexandra Popova agreed about the physical terror. Larisa said, “When you leave behind the area of the target, the sea of antiaircraft fire, and the searchlights, the next instant you start shivering—your feet and knees start jumping—and you cannot talk at all because you are wheezing in your throat. This was a normal reaction after each flight. In a few minutes you recover.”

  When Alexandra was given a cardiogram after the war, the examining doctor found that her heart was so scarred, it looked as though she’d had a heart attack.

  Irina Rakobolskaya, the 46th’s chief of staff, could tell how difficult the night’s flying might be just by the way a nervous pilot smoked a cigarette between missions.

  How did they ever make themselves go relentlessly back up into the air, night after night, day after day, for three years and more?

  Tonya Khokhlova, one of the few women who was a tail gunner for the 587th Regiment, sheds a little light on how people manage this fear. She and her crew got stuck one day in a Pe-2 whose engine failed on takeoff, and the pilot had to crash-land the plane with live bombs attached beneath the wings. Tonya said afterward, “Either you have no time to be frightened or you have to act very quickly, but somehow it’s not a helpless fright. You have to act, you have to do something, you have to save your life—not only your life but the lives of your friends.”

  Even today, a pilot is trained to learn emergency flight procedures as a memorized sequence, so that if your engine fails, you have an automatic routine to help you ward off panic and land safely. But knowing you are responsible for another life can sometimes add that extra strength of spirit you might need to hold yourself together until the danger has passed—especially if it’s someone you have grown to love.

  * * *

  EQUALITY IN THE AIR

  While the Soviet women of Raskova’s regiments were flying, fighting, and sometimes dying in battle over Voronezh, Taman, and Kursk, in the United States the efforts of the American women Jackie Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love finally came together. On August 5, 1943, the Women’s Flying Training Detachment and the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron merged to become the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP.

  The WASP wasn’t a military organization—at first the women who joined even had to invent and supply their own uniforms! They were paid less than men doing the same job and received no benefits or pension; if one of their pilots was killed in flight, her companions chipped in to pay for the funeral themselves.

  But at last American women were able to fly in the service of their country, and over a thousand women completed the WASP training course and began ferrying military planes all over the United States and across Canada.

  WASP pilots had to cope with appalling gender discrimination during the war, ranging from a temporary flight ban when they had their period to being told by radio controllers to stop talking because a plane was landing—when the woman pilot was in fact the person landing the plane!

  There was even nasty and deliberate sabotage, presumed to be by American men: practical jokes such as sugar in a fuel tank, which could—and did—prove deadly. A 1944 Hollywood movie called Ladies Courageous portrayed the WASP fliers as hysterical airheads prone to flirtation and pilot error. “I was never so embarrassed in my life,” said pilot Caro Bayley Bosca after watching the movie.

  In the United Kingdom, the women who flew for the ATA struggled with similar discrimination issues. But at least no one tried to sabotage their planes, and in general they were t
reated with more gender equality than their American counterparts—possibly because the ATA included both men and women. By the end of the war there were no restrictions on the types of aircraft ATA women could fly. But perhaps best of all was that, in June 1943, the ATA became the first British government organization to give men and women equal pay—which meant their women pilots now earned twenty percent more than they had at the beginning of the war!

  * * *

  31

  Loss and Honor for the Dive-Bombers

  The 587th M. M. Raskova Bomber Aviation Regiment would spend the next year moving from base to base, but in the summer of 1943 their crews of three flew the powerful Pe-2 dive-bombers on aggressive missions in the Battle of Kursk in Ukraine. Early in July, the German army made a huge effort to take control of the front in this region. For the next two months, thousands upon thousands of armored tanks on both sides stormed at each other in the largest tank battle in history. The tanks were defended by nearly as many planes, and about two million soldiers were involved in the fighting—a larger number than the combined populations of present-day Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

  By the end of August, the Red Army had smashed the Germans at Kursk. So now the women and men of the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment moved on to help take back the Smolensk region, where the Germans had held Soviet territory for the past two years.

  The 587th suffered some terrible blows in Smolensk—not all of them in the air.

  Ground crew weren’t flying into battle on a daily basis the way the aircrew were. But they were close enough to the front lines that nobody’s life was safe. One hot, hazy, dusty day when all the 587th’s planes were in the air on their way to a new base, the mechanics and armorers were left behind to clean up their abandoned site before traveling by rail to catch up with the aircrew. When they’d finished their work, they set off marching along the road through fields of corn to the train station, singing as they went.

  Suddenly, rifle shots broke out around them. The young women dropped to the ground. They didn’t lie there cowering, though. They fired back into the cornfield with their own guns.

  But when they dared to raise their heads from the dusty road and get up on their feet again, one of the armorers, Tonya Yudina, was dead.

  They never found out who’d fired the deadly shots. But after that, the armorers scrawled “For our Tonya!” on the bombs they loaded on the 587th’s Pe-2s.

  Meanwhile, with every flight, the Pe-2 aircrews risked their lives with a determination that’s unimaginable for most of us.

  Where do you get the nerve to keep flying, when in a single year you’ve already survived being shot down twice? That’s what happened to pilot Sasha Yegorova, with her navigator, Nina Karaseva, and their tail gunner, Aleksandr Kudriavtsev. In one of their crashes, Aleksandr dislocated his shoulder as Sasha glided their doomed Pe-2 down to rest in a swamp. But all three of the crew survived, managed to get out of their wrecked plane, and found their way back to their airfield. They were issued a new plane, and as soon as Aleksandr’s shoulder was in working order, they were back in the sky.

  When their Pe-2 was again hit by enemy gunfire in battle on September 2, 1943, Sasha found she couldn’t control the plane to glide to earth for a crash landing. “For the third time, we were going down in a knocked-out machine, enveloped in black smoke and fiery tongues,” said Nina, Sasha’s navigator. “Our fuel tank, [airframe], and the starboard wing were burning.”

  Sasha ordered Nina and Aleksandr to parachute out of the uncontrollable aircraft. Aleksandr let himself out of the hatch in the gunner’s rear cabin, but when Nina tried to open the canopy over the pilot and navigator’s cockpit, the release catch broke off. She and Sasha had to crawl into the back of the plummeting plane and clamber out through the lower hatch, too.

  Both young women managed to claw their way out while their Pe-2 was still in the air. They opened their parachutes, but they lost each other in the sky as they fell. In the distance Nina could see another parachute, but she didn’t know which of her crewmates it was.

  The wind carried Nina farther and farther west, over the front line and into enemy territory. Luftwaffe planes fired their guns at her and at the other parachute as they drifted defenselessly to the ground.

  Sasha, the pilot, hit the ground hard and lost consciousness.

  When she woke up it was raining, and she was lying in a ravine full of bomb craters. She got up and started to make her way toward the sound of the familiar Soviet guns. She dropped to the ground in fear when she saw a German soldier standing with his back to her.

  Sasha began to crawl.

  Worming her way on all fours through the bomb craters made the night seem to last forever. But by dawn, Sasha finally reached a group of Red Army soldiers. They helped her find a truck driver who could take her to a nearby airfield. And from there, Sasha was able to get a flight back to her own base.

  Behind enemy lines, Sasha’s navigator, Nina, and her tail gunner, Aleksandr, weren’t so lucky.

  Nina’s pistol had fallen out of its holster while she’d been falling through the air. Now she was in the worst possible of situations: she was in enemy territory and had no way to defend herself, or even to kill herself.

  She didn’t have long to wonder about what to do. As she was looking for a place to hide, two German shoulders came running toward her with machine guns.

  “Their eyes were wild-looking and their faces distorted,” Nina said. The furious Germans ordered Nina to raise her hands. As she stood there with her hands up, they went through her pockets. It wasn’t until Nina pushed one of their hands away from her chest and told them sharply, “Don’t touch!” that they realized, with surprise, she was a woman.

  It all happened so quickly that Nina could still see the distant fire of her own burning aircraft as the German soldiers led her away.

  Later, Aleksandr was also captured. In the beginning of their imprisonment, he and Nina were together briefly, and Nina could see that the gunner was in bad shape: he had “a wound in one leg, a cut eyebrow, and hands covered with blood.” But the two Soviet prisoners weren’t allowed to talk to each other. They could only hope that their pilot, Sasha, hadn’t met the same fate.

  Nina and Aleksandr had been taken prisoner behind enemy lines by the Germans: the Soviet soldier’s worst nightmare.

  Sergeant Artur Gartner, a Luftwaffe pilot, said that most Germans were shocked to discover that there were Soviet women fighting against them in the air. When a German pilot shot down a Pe-2 dive-bomber and found that a woman had been flying it, his commanding officer told him: “Don’t mention it to anyone. We don’t shoot at women.”

  Not surprisingly, the Germans didn’t have prisoner-of-war camps set up to accommodate women soldiers. So Nina had to endure something far more terrible: she was eventually sent to the women’s section of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, Germany.

  It would be years before the pilot, Sasha, found out what had happened to the rest of her crew. As the September days dragged on without word from them, the grieving regiment had to assume that Nina and Aleksandr had been killed in battle.

  Yet another Pe-2 crew came to grief in September 1943 while bombing lines of German tanks near Smolensk.

  Enemy shell explosions were jolting and rocking the planes as they flew toward their target, and suddenly, the Pe-2 flown by Klava Fomicheva lurched as its left fuel tank was pierced by one of the shells. But even though the plane was trailing a streaking white jet of leaking fuel, Klava and her tail gunner didn’t try to parachute out: Klava kept on flying, because her navigator, Galya Turabelidze, had been hit in the head and couldn’t jump out herself.

  Klava managed to find an airfield where she thought she could land. But a group of Yak fighters was taxiing along the runway. With fuel fumes filling the cockpit and making it difficult to breathe, there was only one chance to land the plane. Klava tried to set down her Pe-2 on the ground next to the runway.

  Unfortunately, as she was br
aking to a halt, one of her wheels hit a bomb crater and the aircraft flipped upside down. The wounded navigator, Galya, was thrown clear, but Klava was trapped in the burning plane.

  The local aircraft maintenance team came to the rescue. They dashed to the crash site and used axes to chop a hole in the floor of the cockpit of the upside-down plane.

  They managed to drag Klava out just before the aircraft exploded; but her tail gunner was killed.

  Klava was in the hospital for five months recovering from third-degree burns.

  There were so many deaths and injuries in the 587th at Smolensk that they had to bring in reinforcements.

  Antonina Bondareva—the pilot who tucked her knitting behind her parachute—was one of these. She’d become hooked on flying when a biplane landed in her village while she was in seventh grade, and she joined the local gliding club as one of eighteen students—and one of only two girls.

  Antonina’s father, who worked in an ore extraction factory, aggressively disapproved of her flying. As she’d leave to go off to the gliding club, he’d say, “Don’t come back, you may not come back, I won’t let you in!” But her mother let her go, as long as she did all her household chores first.

  Antonina graduated from the glider club at sixteen and began to learn to fly powered aircraft, in the typical Soviet training plane, the open-cockpit Po-2. She was only seventeen when she became an instructor.

  Of course, Antonina wanted to volunteer immediately for Raskova’s regiments when the war started. But like so many other young women, she wasn’t allowed to leave the flight school where she was an instructor. Also—she had a toddler to take care of. In the morning she would lock the little girl in the room they shared, leaving her on her own with some porridge, and go to work to train new—male—cadets to fly.