A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  In the personal histories of the Soviet women who flew and worked on aircraft during the war, there are many stories of gender discrimination, but there’s practically no mention of sexual aggression or assault. It’s not obvious whether this is because it didn’t happen, or because it simply wasn’t something these women chose to talk about when they looked back on their wartime experiences. Women from other branches of the military rarely mention it either.

  There certainly were problems, whether or not people volunteered to talk about them. In many cases, a male commander would try to pull rank to take advantage of an enlisted young woman. Harassment—indeed, flirting or having an affair or any kind of hanky-panky—was considered a disgrace to the Communist Party. The gravest issues seem to have occurred among the partisans, the guerrilla resistance fighters on the German-occupied side of the front lines. Beginning in 1943, the Komsomol even took steps to campaign against partisan sexual harassment and discrimination.

  Olga Lisikova, who flew as a transport pilot in a men’s regiment, was grabbed after a formal dinner by a general in the division where she’d just been transferred. She knew he’d overpower her if she struggled, and the really frightening thing was that she was sure no one dared to come to her rescue. She lied to him desperately, “I fly with my husband in my crew!”

  The general was so surprised that he let Olga go. She rushed out to find her radio operator and mechanic and commanded one of them to pretend to be her husband—she’d completely made up the excuse just so she could get away from her attacker.

  Olga was so shaken by this that she couldn’t sleep that night.

  “I couldn’t believe any commander would behave like that,” she said. “Were generals allowed to do anything that came to mind?” It was a huge relief to be able to fly away from the situation early the next morning.

  Yelena Karakorskaya, the deputy engineer in special aircraft equipment for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, experienced another incident. She tells of how a famous Russian pilot and a triple Hero of the Soviet Union, A. I. Pokryshkin, landed at the airfield to refuel his fighter plane. The 586th’s commander, Aleksandr Gridnev, was away, and the deputy commander at the time, also a man, ordered Yelena and her group to fill the famous flier’s aircraft with fuel.

  Yelena replied that engineers weren’t allowed to refuel planes—the mechanics were supposed to do it.

  What happened next was suddenly, shockingly violent.

  “[The deputy commander] grabbed me by the collar, and I pulled away,” said Yelena. “His hand slipped down onto my breast, and I slapped him on his face instinctively. He pulled out his pistol and wanted to shoot me, but the girls hung on his arm and prevented it.”

  Instead of being shot, Yelena was imprisoned in the basement of the officers’ guardhouse for ten days with the job of whitewashing the walls. When Aleksandr Gridnev returned, he released her. He gave her a day to recover—and the deputy commander was discharged from the regiment, although it’s not obvious this was a direct result of the incident.

  Stories like this one are rarely recorded. Far more common are examples of ridiculous misunderstandings made by male soldiers, or men treating the airwomen like children or inferiors. When a Soviet air army VIP, General Vorzheykin, visited the 125th Guards and inspected the regiment, he stopped by Katya Fedotova’s plane and demanded of Commander Valentin Markov: “Why aren’t the pilots in their cockpits by now?”

  All the young women were already sitting in their planes, but they were so much shorter than men that the general couldn’t see them from the ground. Katya had to unfasten her straps and climb up out of the cockpit to prove that she and her crew were ready for combat.

  Tail gunner Tonya Khokhlova, of the 125th Guards, told how on one occasion some Soviet pilots flew low over their airfield and dropped an object out of their plane. When the commander sent someone to clear the airfield before an accident occurred, the thing turned out to be a big teddy bear.

  It was from a men’s regiment of fighter planes who’d been assigned to protect the Pe-2 bombers on their next mission. There was a note pinned to the bear that said: “Dear young girls, we just learned we are escorting you. Don’t you get frightened; we’ll do everything to defend you, fight for you with the last drop of our blood. Thank you!”

  A cute present—but presumably the men didn’t feel the need to drop reassuring teddy bears off at other men’s air regiments just before a combat mission! However, the 125th Guards seem to have laughed it off, returning the joke by dropping homemade wooden dolls over men’s airfields.

  For us, looking back at these events and trying to understand them, there is a frustrating paradox at work here. The men who flew and worked with the women of Marina’s regiments, more often than not, treated them as “little sisters.” Their caring and reassuring attitude is genuine. At the same time, though, military women throughout the USSR were often viewed by their superior officers as fair game for sexual exploitation.

  The women of Raskova’s regiments seem to have generally escaped assault and unwanted attention. It’s likely they were so segregated from ordinary fighting units and considered so special that the women of these regiments were, to a certain extent, untouchable.

  34

  Allied Forces

  The threat of assault from superior officers was certainly an unwelcome hazard to negotiate. But for the Soviet women aviators of the Great Patriotic War, it seems that the norm was cooperation and respect from their male counterparts of equal rank—the pilots who flew with them and the ground crews who worked with them.

  Because so little is known about the men who flew the solo Yak fighters for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, it’s easy to forget that they were flying and sharing in daily life alongside the regiment’s women. The 586th spent the fall of 1943 defending Kursk and then the Ukrainian city of Kiev, newly liberated from German occupation. But they didn’t stay in the Kiev region long, moving on in February 1944 and again in March. For the next six months they were assigned to protect railway lines and other industrial targets near the border with Poland.

  They still weren’t seeing frontline action, but when a fighter pilot of the 586th was involved in an aerial battle, it could be fierce and grim. You could lose a friend as quickly as you made one—men as well as women.

  On June 5, 1944, 586th pilot Klavdiya Pankratova flew alongside a new male pilot, Kolya Korolev, to hunt down a Luftwaffe spy plane. Kolya had been assigned to the 586th after being wounded while ramming a German aircraft. When the two pilots in their Yaks caught up with the Luftwaffe plane, they fired at it together, then turned around and fired at it again, until Klavdiya could see that one of its engines was aflame.

  In and out of cloud the three planes flew, with the two pilots of the 586th teaming up after every pass, until they saw that their prey had crashed.

  “We flew home wing tip to wing tip, like in an air show,” Klavdiya said. “I saw Kolya’s white-toothed smile and his thumbs-up sign. He was a good lad. He spent only one month with us; in the next air battle he received a fatal wound.”

  The day after Klavdiya and Kolya’s shared victory, on June 6, 1944, the Allied nations finally launched their organized attack against the German occupation of western Europe. Ground, sea, and air troops from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, supported by the French resistance, stormed onto the beaches of Normandy in France. This “D-Day” invasion was the beginning of the “second front” which Stalin and the USSR had been urging and hoping for. Now the German troops would have to fight on front lines in both the east and the west of Europe.

  The “second front” had been a dream for so long that everybody in the USSR had started to make cynical jokes about it—but now it was really happening. The night after the Normandy Invasion, restaurants in Moscow were packed with excited people thrilled to have a reason to celebrate.

  In the June weeks that followed, the Red Army launched a renewed attack on the Eastern Front. The 46th
Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment was part of the storm of bombing when the Soviet Air Force flew massive assaults on the German lines on the third anniversary of their entry into the war. Now the Soviets began to prepare to take back the eastern region of Belorussia from German occupation.

  * * *

  TARAN: AERIAL RAMMING

  Aerial ramming—or, in Russian, taran—was a desperate tactic to be undertaken as a last resort. The idea was that if your plane ran out of ammunition, you could still destroy an enemy plane if you crashed into it on purpose. That’s just what Kolya Korolev had done before his transfer to the 586th.

  Ramming wasn’t necessarily fatal. Unlike the kamikaze attacks flown by Japanese pilots, taran wasn’t meant to be a suicide maneuver. But it was hugely dangerous and often did result in the pilot’s death. The celebrated Russian aviator Pyotr Nesterov—who, incidentally, was the first person ever to fly an aerobatic loop, in 1913—also made the first known taran attack. On September 8, 1914, Nesterov rammed an Austrian plane flown by Franz Malina. Both pilots were killed—the very first pilots to die in World War I.

  On the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, at least eight unarmed fighter pilots rammed German aircraft.

  As you can imagine, this desperate measure wasn’t encouraged by the air force. But the government talked it up as a patriotic move, and early in the war pilots did it anyway when they had no other way to force down an enemy plane.

  There is a technique to it, and it took an expert and daring pilot to pull off a taran attack—the idea was to try to hit the other plane’s control surfaces, such as the tail.

  Only one woman, the Soviet pilot Yekaterina Zelenko, is known to have performed a successful taran attack. She was a flight commander in the all-male 135th Bomber Aviation Regiment. She’d been wounded in a furious air battle and her navigator had been killed, and when she ran out of ammunition, she destroyed a German plane by ramming it with her own aircraft.

  She’d done such a calculated job of using her aircraft as a battering ram that she was still able to use her flight controls afterward. But another enemy fighter shot her down and killed her.

  Yekaterina Zelenko died early in the war, in September 1941. But it took so long to pull together evidence about what she’d done that she wasn’t awarded a posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union and Gold Star until 1990, only a year before the collapse of the USSR.

  * * *

  The combined Allied forces’ Normandy Invasion in June 1944 is famous the world over. But a smaller group of Allies had been helping each other out on the Eastern Front in Russia for some time now. Late in 1943, an unusual section of the French Air Force, later known as the Normandie-Niemen Regiment, had joined the Soviet troops to defend them in the air. They stayed with the Soviets until the end of the war. They were the only Western force to fly on the Eastern Front, and they were stationed right by the 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment.

  For over a year, the male French pilots of the Normandie-Niemen Regiment, flying dangerous Soviet Yaks, frequently served as fighter escorts for the women of the 125th Guards in their powerful Pe-2 dive-bombers. On their first few aggressive missions together, the French pilots didn’t even realize that the pilots and navigators of the Pe-2s’ crews of three were women.

  Léon Cuffaut, one of the Normandie-Niemen pilots, was there for the first face-to-face encounter of the two regiments. It happened when a Pe-2 dive-bomber landed at Normandie-Niemen’s airfield during a snowstorm in the winter of 1943–1944.

  “Delighted, we watched the daredevil make an excellent landing in very poor visibility,” said Léon.

  He and the other French pilots were utterly amazed when the aircrew that climbed out of the plane turned out to be “young girls”—pilot Lelya Sholokhova and navigator Valya Volklova.

  The women of the 125th Guards liked and appreciated the Frenchmen who flew for the Normandie-Niemen Regiment and protected them in the air. They even kept in touch and had a couple of reunions in Moscow after the war. Galina Brok, a navigator for the 125th Guards who flew with pilot Antonina Bondareva, found it reassuring when she sometimes heard the “broken Russian” of the French pilots coming over the radio.

  “When there were friends in the sky, the attacking enemy fighters seemed less terrible,” she said.

  Perhaps the most joyful alliances from this time were those that ended in marriage—and quite a few of them did.

  Yevdokia Bershanskaya, the commander of the 46th Guards, married the commander of a nearby men’s regiment. Tamara Pamyatnykh, the 586th Regiment’s squadron leader who helped chase off the forty-two Luftwaffe bombers, married a fighter pilot from a male Soviet regiment based close to hers in 1944; she even transferred to his regiment so they could be together. He was shot down and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp only a month later, and Tamara didn’t see him again until the war was over. But she stayed in his regiment and flew there with the men until the end of the war.

  Several women of the 125th Guards ended up married to men of the 124th Regiment stationed near them. Tonya Khokhlova, the tail gunner for the 125th, married her navigator Klara Dubkova’s brother. After the war, Valentin Markov himself married one of the 125th Guards squadron navigators, Galya Dzhunkovskaya, the young woman who sang songs and told stories to her pilot, Masha Dolina, while they flew.

  Antonina Lepilina, the armorer for Galya’s aircraft, said that the regiment guessed these two had feelings for each other, even though “they didn’t act in any way but properly, ever.” But Antonina noticed a giveaway: after a battle “when the girls were brought back burned and injured, Valentin Markov himself carried Galya out of the plane.”

  There was, however, a bit of a double standard when it came to romance. The women of Raskova’s regiments, with Soviet society reinforcing their heterosexual standards, felt that marriage was acceptable; but affairs were not. In the 46th Guards, the regiment was stunned when, near the end of the war, one of their pilots had a baby. The general of the air army that they flew with thought that the joke was on the enemy, and said that the new mother should be given a medal.

  “She bombed the Germans while pregnant. What a hero!”

  It wasn’t a joke for the 46th Guards, though. Commander Yevdokia Bershanskaya and Chief of Staff Irina Rakobolskaya were scandalized. Irina called it a “nightmare” bringing “shame” on the whole regiment. This was the only Soviet regiment to be staffed entirely by women throughout the war, and they took pride in this segregation. On the whole, they felt that they should also keep themselves out of relationships with men during the war—going so far as to condemn even walking home with young men, as there “must be no affairs whatsoever.”

  Brotherhood and sisterhood in wartime was necessary and acceptable—for the Motherland. But sexual relationships were not.

  35

  The Edge of the Clouds

  Without a doubt, the most intense wartime relationships formed by any of Marina Raskova’s aviators were the bonds formed by a flight crew in combat.

  In the spring of 1944, as poor weather kept the challenging, powerful Pe-2 dive-bombers on the ground, there had been a lull in the aggressive fighting as the USSR prepared for their offense in Belorussia. The 125th M. M. Raskova Guards had spent the winter in a village practically destroyed by the Germans. Administrative staff, and some of the aircrew, lived in one of only two local houses that were still standing; everybody else lived in dugouts among a few scattered oak and birch trees that hadn’t been blown up or used for firewood. The 125th had a chance to draw breath here. Their reinforcements settled in, some of the more senior pilots and navigators were promoted, and the three-person flight crews got changed around.

  Navigator Galya Dzhunkovskaya, who used to sing to Masha Dolina in the air, now flew with Klava Fomicheva. Klava was the one whose plane had crashed the previous September and who’d spent five months in the hospital with third-degree burns. Now she was in command of the regiment’s second squadron, and Gal
ya was a little shy of her battle-hardened and serious pilot. There was no more singing—Klava found it distracting. “I don’t like doing two things at the same time,” she said.

  But Galya liked her. Klava let Galya lean over her shoulder in the air and try out the flight controls as they flew toward their targets. And she noticed that Klava still carried a photograph of Marina Raskova in her map case.

  As the Allied forces moved through western Europe following the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the Soviets moved on the Germans in Belorussia, bringing another wave of desperate combat for the 125th. Soon they were engaged in air battles just as fierce as those they’d fought the previous summer.

  KLAVA FOMICHEVA OF THE 125TH GUARDS

  On June 23, 1944, the 125th’s commander, Valentin Markov, led a formation of Pe-2s, including Klava and Galya’s plane, to bomb German positions in Belorussia. When Valentin’s own navigator, Nikolai Nikitin, was wounded, it didn’t stop either of them. Valentin and Nikolai didn’t turn around until they’d dropped their bombs over the target. Then, when they’d flown back through the storm of antiaircraft fire and enemy fighter planes and were safely over Soviet territory again, Valentin let Klava take over to lead the flight home. He left the formation so he could rush his bleeding navigator to the hospital.

  What Klava’s commander didn’t know was that her aircraft had also been hit. Her starboard engine had been pierced by a shell and her tail gunner, Grigoriy Grishko, had been killed. Klava herself was wounded in the leg, and before long, fire began to spread along the wing of their Pe-2 from the damaged engine.

  Only minutes before, Galya had been checking with Grigoriy to make sure the camera hatch was open to record their bombing. He’d been cut off in the middle of a sentence.

  “Was he killed?” Galya couldn’t believe it. “Was he really killed?”