Klava didn’t answer. She might have been trying to banish agonized thoughts of her previous tail gunner, who’d also been killed, less than a year ago. She didn’t like doing two things at the same time. And now, as well as leading the flight formation and dealing with the pain in her wounded leg, she was switching off the Pe-2’s burning engine.
It didn’t help, though—soon the entire left wing was blazing and the plane began to fill with smoke.
Klava and Galya knew that the other pilots in the formation could see the flames streaking behind them. “They were mentally saying goodbye to us,” Galya said.
But Klava and Galya didn’t yet dare to abandon their flaming aircraft. They knew which way the wind was blowing. And they were still so close to German territory that they were afraid they’d be blown back over the front lines if they tried to use their parachutes.
They sped through the sky until the plane became so hot that their parachutes started to smolder. They had to bail out now or never. Galya grabbed the emergency canopy release and the top of the cockpit “flew off instantly, like a piece of paper.”
But when Klava tried to tip the plane forward to eject them, the control surfaces were so badly burned that they didn’t react. Instead, the Pe-2 went into a dive all by itself, and the increased gravity trapped Klava and Galya in the open cockpit.
They fought and struggled to get free of the plunging plane. Dangerously close to the ground, at a height of about 200 meters (about 650 feet), they finally managed to claw their way out and open their parachutes.
Klava’s boots were dragged off in the air by the force of her fall. She landed barefoot and filthy with smoke and soot. But she was still alive. She and Galya were both still alive.
They were rescued on the ground by Soviet soldiers who’d seen the plane crash. This was the moment when they were brought by a flying ambulance back to their own airfield, and Valentin Markov lifted Galya out of the plane himself and carried her to safety.
About a month later, the members of the 125th were honored again for their determined gallantry: they were renamed the 125th M. M. Raskova Borisov Guards. Borisov was a town the 125th had liberated from the Germans in Belorussia. The regiment was so pleased that Masha Dolina and her navigator flew over the town and dropped a message on a banner made of towels sewn together. They sent their best wishes to the city, hoping the damaged buildings would soon be fixed, and that—in Masha’s own words—the inhabitants would “flourish, continue peacetime jobs, and help people survive, while we continued our job at the front.”
It was exhilarating to know that the tide of the war had turned, even though there was still a long way to go before the enemy was defeated. But as the German soldiers grew more frustrated and demoralized, they resorted to new and desperate measures against the relentless Soviet forces.
“Around this time, all kinds of booby-trapped trinkets were being scattered on our airfield,” said Vera Tikhomirova, the 586th Regiment’s deputy commander for political affairs. “Plastic toys, colored little balls, and fountain pens charged with explosives.”
You didn’t know where the next attack might come from. The 586th, whose Yak fighters were stationed in western Ukraine until September 1944, had a creepy and sobering experience between defensive flights during the hot summer. A group of young women got permission from Aleksandr Gridnev to swim in a nearby river—and the following day their legs and backs were covered with strange burns.
The Germans, it turned out, had poisoned the river shore with an yperite mixture—more commonly known as mustard gas. Mustard gas, which had been used in World War I by both opposing fighting forces, was so horrible that it had been banned from warfare in the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol. The 586th added “the need to increase vigilance” to their Party staff meeting agenda.
Belorussia was still crawling with Nazi forces, who would clearly resort to the dirtiest and deadliest of attacks, and that’s where the invigorated Red Army concentrated their efforts now.
That summer the young women of the 46th Taman Guards moved their open-cockpit Po-2s to fly harassment missions in Belorussia’s deep forest, along the northern end of the front. As the Germans were pushed out of the occupied towns, the liberators discovered mass graves that told silently of the horrific holocaust suffered by Belorussia’s Jewish inhabitants. Decomposing bodies hung from lampposts. Among the dead was the little boy of Zinaida Gorman, a staff member for the 46th Guards. When she was close enough to fly to her home village to check on it, she discovered that her parents and her child had been shot along with everyone else in the village.
Zinaida returned to her regiment, climbed from her plane, and sat on the grass sobbing. Every one of her fellow pilots, navigators, and mechanics gathered around her and swore to avenge her grief—not just for Zinaida and her child, but for all Soviet mothers.
The woodland of Belorussia was so thick that there was hardly any place to use as an airfield, so the 46th Guards had to take off and land in forest clearings. In these tight open spaces surrounded by trees, the only way to get enough momentum for a plane to lift off the ground was for the mechanics to use their own weight to hold down the wings while the pilot ran the engine up to full power. Then everyone let go at the same time and the Po-2, heavy with bombs, struggled up from the sandy soil to climb above the pine or birch trees.
The 46th Guards now “led a ‘gypsy’ life,” said pilot Kaleriya Rylskaya, who’d been flying the night that Zhenya Rudneva was killed. “Each night we struck at new targets and each night we slept in a new place, under the wings of our aircraft. This was our work area, bedroom, and dining room.”
A thoughtful mechanic would park a Po-2 so that there was a little rise under the plane’s wing, which meant you wouldn’t be lying in a puddle if you slept there when it rained. She’d hang a cloth cockpit cover on one side of the wing to shield her aircraft’s pilot and navigator from the wind. “Then she would bustle around the engine,” Kaleriya said, “quietly tapping her wrenches, so as not to disturb the sleeping crew.”
As they lay on the grass trying to sleep one day, a ragged and haggard old woman came up to them, followed by a few staring children, and offered the resting aircrew a small basket of berries she’d picked in the forest.
“Please take revenge for me on the Germans,” she told them. “They killed my husband, burned my village to the ground. I have no home, no family, nothing is left.” She and the children were living with the partisan guerrilla fighters in the Belorussian forest.
“For the next few weeks, every night when I was flying, I saw her face and the faces of those children,” Nadya Popova said.
There was misery everywhere, inescapable misery. Even in the air you couldn’t escape it: the memory of the suffering faces of the young and the old.
For the rest of her life, pilot Yevgeniya Zhigulenko never forgot finding a small boy with a haunted, thin face and huge green eyes alone in a deserted village. His mother lay dying in a trench, and he begged Yevgeniya to fly to find his father at the front. She gave him all her emergency rations: chocolate and candy and sweetened condensed milk. But there was nothing else she could do for him—except remember. Years later, as a filmmaker, Yevgeniya made that child “a symbol of the great Russian tragedy of the millions of homeless, orphaned children.”
In August 1944 the 46th Guards moved through Poland, where they would eventually take part in the battle for Warsaw. They spent the last part of that summer in the shady park of a Polish estate, falling asleep as the sun rose after the night’s missions, lying under trees on mattresses improvised from kit bags stuffed with hay. While they were based here, Tanya Makarova and Vera Belik were shot down.
Vera was the navigator who’d been terrified when her previous pilot, Larisa Rozanova, kept falling asleep in the spring of 1943. Now Vera and Tanya, like so many of their companions, perished in the flames of a burning aircraft. Their friends buried them under the maple trees of the estate.
* * *
“RUSSIA HAS NOTE
D WOMEN WAR FLYERS”—AND AMERICA ADMIRES THEM
The Soviet Union’s “women flyers” had made appearances in the American media since the 1930s. When Marina Raskova began teaching at the Zhukhovsky Academy, American newspapers carried the story along with her photograph and the headline “Woman Becomes Soviet Air Ace.” The flight of the Rodina was widely reported throughout the United States in 1938 and 1939. One Missouri paper, in a story aimed at women’s interests, called Valentina Grizodubova a “buxom Amazon of the civil air force”—then transitioned effortlessly into fashion tips for “that problem child—the teen-age girl”!
Though it can’t be said the American press always took the Soviet Union’s women pilots seriously—or any women pilots—you can tell that Americans were fascinated by their achievements. Also, once the United States entered the war, there was a real surge of support for their ally, the Soviet Union. The New York Times ran a story by Ralph Parker in March 1942 about the different wartime jobs Russian women were able to do: “aviation instructor” is one of them. The same reporter wrote an expanded version in February 1943 and upgraded the aviator’s job to flying “ambulance-planes”! In the same month, American radio fans could hear a dramatized version of the 588th Night Bombers’ exploits through the weekly broadcast series Treasury Star Parade. Tamara Pamyatnykh and Raisa Surnachevskaya were mentioned by name as fighter pilots in an Associated Press news report in April 1943. In June 1943, an American ship was named after Marina Raskova.
As the war went on, the stories became more accurate. In December 1943, an Associated Press headline stated plainly, “Russia Has Noted Women War Flyers.” The article mentions dive-bombers and night bombers, although the reporter didn’t point out that the aviation regiment commanded by Yevdokia Bershanskaya was made up entirely of women.
All doubts were cleared up by 1944. In an article called “Those Russian Women” for Survey Graphic in February 1944, Rose Maurer described Soviet women in many combat roles, including that of bomber pilot—and she pointed out that unlike Americans, Soviet women could expect equal pay with men and didn’t have to “fight against race discrimination.”
Quentin Reynolds, an American journalist, interviewed Katya Budanova before her death. In a portrait of “Three Russian Women” for his book The Curtain Rises, published in 1944, he describes her incredible career as a fighter pilot at Stalingrad.
And in July 1944, Aviation magazine ran an in-depth story by Madelin Blitzstein called “How Women Flyers Fight Russia’s Air War.” This article includes pictures of Lilya Litvyak and Lera Khomyakova. Lera, in parachute and aviation googles, is smiling broadly, and the caption beneath the photo says that “she is now a fighter pilot” who had shot down a Luftwaffe bomber.
It’s a little sad to think that by the time the thrilling stories of Katya, Lilya, and Lera reached an American audience, they’d all been dead for over a year.
* * *
No matter what suffering they witnessed and how much they suffered themselves, though, the one thing Marina’s aviators could rely on to bring them strength and comfort was their dependence on each other. Friendship firmly bound the 46th Guards together, and their stretched nerves depended on it.
Every night the sky became for them a strange world of moonlit cloud, the ominous red light of aircraft flares, and too many aircraft for safe flight, all heading for the same target. Sometimes, just knowing that you weren’t alone up there made all the difference.
The 46th Guards were constantly on the move in the fall of 1944, with the task of bombing roads as the Germans retreated near the port of Danzig (now Gdansk, in Poland).
On one of these missions Kaleriya Rylskaya and her navigator, Nadya Studilina—the navigator who’d flown as a rookie with Larisa Rozanova on the terrible night of July 31, 1943—found themselves in cloud beneath a full moon. They dropped their bombs and were glad to be able to make their way free of the eerie, dangerous sky. But partway back to their airfield, unexpectedly, their Po-2’s engine failed.
Thinking they’d have to make an emergency landing in the forest, Kaleriya and Nadya glided down so low they barely managed to clear the frost-covered wires of electrical pylons—and then, to their relief, the Po-2’s engine suddenly roared back into life.
As they flew beneath the bright, moonlit clouds, hoping their engine would hold out long enough to get them home, they were joined by two other Po-2s. The newcomers settled into a formation with them, escorting Kaleriya and Nadya in their struggling aircraft. The very company of planes from their own regiment cheered them up as they coaxed their unreliable Po-2 homeward.
It was broad daylight by the time they made it back to the intermediate airfield. When they got there, the field was almost empty—all the other aircraft had been cleared away until the next night. But two small figures stood waiting there for them, anxiously watching the skies for their return: their beloved regimental commander, Major Yevdokia Bershanskaya, and the squadron commander, Nadya Popova.
It was good to feel that there was always someone watching your back and waiting for you.
The same was true for the 125th Guards.
By December 1944, the three-person flight crews of the 125th Guards were aggressively using their powerful Pe-2 dive-bombers to attack troops that blocked routes to the Latvian port of Riga on the Baltic Sea, though the German forces were no longer in control of the city itself. The Germans had now been pushed back over the entire western border of the USSR.
Klava Fomicheva and her navigator, Galya Dzhunkovskaya, both of them long since recovered after parachuting from their burning plane that summer, flew one of these cold and dark missions over northerly Riga. They led a formation of nine Pe-2s, leading the first flight with two other Pe-2s as their wingmen. Though the December skies were cloudy, everyone felt a little safer when they flew over the airfield to pick up their escort and found thirty-six Soviet fighter aircraft joining them in the sky.
“Now we can relax,” Galya told her pilot, smiling.
They sped on toward the fiery explosions over their target.
There, the sky was so dark with smoke that neither Klava nor Galya could see clear sky anywhere. Around them, shells of all different sizes exploded, flaming and colorful tracer bullets whizzed past, and antiaircraft guns fired from the ground and from ships stationed on the sea below.
The aircraft following Klava had an even tougher flight. Not only did they have to deal with the turbulent explosions, but they also had to try to stay in formation behind their leader as everyone’s planes were buffeted about in the angry sky.
Klava and Galya reached their target and released their bombs, then tried to climb away to escape the battle. At 4500 meters (nearly 15,000 feet) the air grew so thin it was difficult to breathe. But they finally reached the edge of the clouds.
And there, Galya said, “I looked behind and saw that all were flying wing tip to wing tip. So Klava said: ‘Just you look at them; they’re flying like in an air show. Well done! Well done, indeed!’ I had the urge to kiss my dear girlfriends, the airwomen of our squadron, for executing their mission so well.”
Later that day, back at their makeshift base and burning their fingers eating potatoes baked over a campfire in a metal tray that started life as an ammunition box, Galya felt “that the fighter attack of an hour ago, the drop of high-explosive heavy bombs, and the cloud of shell explosions covering the sky—had never happened.”
The 125th Guards paused in their bombing missions for one joyful, hopeful moment to celebrate the new year of 1945. There was a hot blaze in the iron stove, a festive tree smelling of pine needles, professional entertainers from Moscow, and an amateur talent show. One highlight was the very silly “Lost Navigator’s Dance,” which they’d invented themselves, sure to bring laughs. At the end of the evening, Galya and the other airwomen begged Klava to dance for them.
By now, Klava Fomicheva was twenty-seven years old. She was a squadron commander and a veteran; she’d been shot down and wounded twice a
nd had spent six months in the hospital. But she was still flying. When her friends and comrades asked for a dance performance to celebrate the new year of 1945, she had to be coaxed, but she gave in at last.
“Smiling shyly and snapping her fingers rhythmically, she began circling the room,” said Galya. “Dancing transformed her. She moved her shoulders somewhat coquettishly and her eyes and entire face were laughing and exuded joy.”
This new year, they were sure, would bring about the end of the war.
36
From the Volga to Berlin
It should be no surprise that now Josef Stalin was determined that his own Red Army was going to invade and capture Berlin, Hitler’s capital city in Germany. Berlin was the ultimate prize of the war, and Stalin wanted to get there first, before the Germans gave up the battle or the Western Allies stormed into the city themselves. In a fresh and frenzied campaign in January 1945, six million Soviet soldiers surged along the Eastern Front against a scraggling and demoralized German force of about two million.
The Red Army sped forward as much as fifty miles a day, and Raskova’s regiments flew with them. The 125th M. M. Raskova Guards would finish the war in Lithuania; the 586th Regiment would end up in Budapest, Hungary, and after the end of the war were even stationed in Vienna, Austria, for a time. The night bombers of the 46th Guards would fly all the way to Berlin itself.
While the troops of the USSR were relentlessly pushing the Germans back in the east, the Allied forces were doing the same thing in the west. But though the Nazi government of Hitler’s Third Reich was clearly going to have to admit defeat pretty soon, they didn’t give up easily. The German army continued to fight throughout the snowy winter of 1945 and into the spring.
The fighter pilots of the 586th Regiment didn’t see much enemy action during the last six months of the war. They were stationed first in Romania and then in Hungary as the war drew to a close, defending railway junctions, bridges, and factories along the Danube River and around the Hungarian cities of Debrecen and Budapest.
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