Over Fields of Fire

by Anna Aleksandrovna Timofeeva-Egorova

  Standing on the spot and pondering it over, I suddenly noticed an ambulance rushing and the pilots running across the field towards me. “Well, — I thought, — I’ll get it now!” And would you believe who was the first to run up to me? The very same trainer from school who had unfairly given me just a ‘good’ mark for a problem I’d been the first to solve! Then, having left the vehicle, out of breath, Doctor Kozlovskiy appeared with his first-aid kit on him. Finding me in one piece and unharmed he began to wail, wiping off sweat and tears from his wrinkled face, “My sweetheart, you’re safe! I’m so glad!”

  The regimental commander, who would also fly with us to get a plane (the whole regiment flew) then told me: “Anna Alexandrovna”, now for the first time he called me by my name and patronymic, “you’ve done well, you saved the plane. Whatever is damaged the mechanics will fix up in no time, grease up the percale, put on a lick of paint and it’ll be alright — we’ll fly again!”

  By evening the Sturmovik’s engine had been examined, repaired and tested. They turned the plane away from the ravine towards the sea and Captain Karev (being the most experienced pilot of the regiment) took off and safely landed at the aerodrome. And the next day after these events all the personnel of our unit were lined up. No one knew for what reason it had been done but suddenly I heard the following: ‘Junior Lieutenant Egorova, step forward!”

  My new comrades moved aside letting me forward from the rear row. I hesitantly stepped out of the line and stood to attention: “What’s going to happen? Will they ascribe the fault for the forced landing to me? I’m going to get it in the neck! They’ll say, ‘she can’t handle the engine’. How will I prove it wasn’t my fault?”

  And suddenly the regiment commander said ceremoniously: “For the excellent sortie in the Il-2 plane and salvation of the fighting equipment entrusted to you I express my gratitude!”

  “I serve the Soviet Union!” I responded with breaking voice after a long pause.

  After this incident attitudes toward me in the regiment changed abruptly…

  21. Dropping bombs through a ‘bast-shoe’

  Now the training flights began: each time more and more complex and crucial — flying in the zone, bombing, shooting. We had our own firing range in the mountains in a desolate area. There were dummy tanks, guns, railway cars, planes with white-cross markings — they served us as targets for drill attacks. How many times, having gained altitude, I threw the Sturmovik

  into a steep dive, pressed all the triggers and fiercely attacked the targets! Then our group set about flying in a pair, a flight, a squadron. As I said before, Valentin Vakhramov and I had been assigned to the 3rd Squadron. Its commander, Lieutenant Andrianov, having listened to us report for duty, stood silent for quite a while, puffing on a pipe with a long stem. From the first encounter I remembered him like that: tall, dark-eyed, with weather-beaten face, in a black leather raglan, a red-topped black kubanka102 tilted onto his eyebrows. Andrianov’s raglan was girdled by a wide officer’s belt with a holster on it holding a pistol, and on another, narrow, belt slung across his shoulder, hung a map in a mapcase. And it didn’t just hang — it hung with style, nearly touching the ground. All his looks and bearing said: “I’m not a boy any more, I’m a seasoned comesk even if no older than you in years”.

  “So”, at last the comesk delivered without pulling the pipe out of his mouth, “whichever of you masters the Sturmovik faster and better, learns to bomb and shoot accurately and keep in good formation will be taken on by me as wingman for the very first combat sortie…”

  To become wingman to an experienced leader — what else could we dream of? A good leader knows how to assemble the planes that took off after him into a group, how to lead it precisely along the established route and close in on a target which is not that easy to locate on ground pitted by bombs and shells. He knows how to cunningly avoid the ack-ack guns and screens of enemy fighters, and to strike as the situation dictates. It was no accident that the Hitlerites tried hard to shoot down the leader first of all — both from the ground and from the air. If they shot him down the formation would scatter and there would be neither accurate bombing nor well-aimed shooting — and in fact the combat mission would not be carried out.

  In order to learn the craft of a flight leader one had to have been a wingman and to have survived. A wingman repeated his leader’s movements during the first combat sorties. He had to keep in formation, and he had no time at all to glance at the dashboard, to notice Messers, to see flak shell bursts. He had no time even to orient himself and often he didn’t even know where he was flying to. Most of the Sturmovik pilots who died, died in their first ten sorties.

  Valentin Vakhramov was mastering the Sturmovik quickly and easily and we stubbornly competed with him: who of us after all would be the comesk’s wingman? But once… Vakhramov had flown back from the firing range, landed the plane confidently and already on his run-in, accidentally confusing the levers, he retracted the undercarriage… The Il’s undercarriage immediately folded back and the plane began to crawl on its belly… When we ran up Valentine was already climbing out of the cockpit, gloomily looking at the prop blades bent into ‘ram’s horns’. There were tears in his eyes. No one was scolding him then, nobody was reprimanding him, but he was suffering so badly that it was sad to look at him.

  By nature Valentin was a reserved, outwardly rather a coarse man. But this put-on roughness originated from his desire to look more adult. There was nothing funny or mysterious in him but for some reason the pilots had nicknamed him ‘the Fakir’. Just once, forgetting about his ‘dignity of seniority’, he had shown us tricks with cards and burning matchsticks — and the nickname had stuck to him! I knew Valentin was fond of poetry and wrote verses himself, not daring to show them to anyone. I also knew that his mum — a worker on a military production-plant — and a sister he loved tenderly, lived in Siberia. When he got letters from them he would go off somewhere well away where no-one would bother him, and read them several times. Once he had showed me photographs of his family. Eyes similar to his looked at me from them with sadness.

  “You have a beautiful sister”, I remarked once.

  “Yes”, Valentin agreed, “but she’s badly ill. I doubt whether I’ll see her again. And my mum too — tuberculosis…” Only then I understood from where the Vakhramov’s inescapable sadness came from…

  Travel orders to pick up new planes arrived unexpectedly. We thought it wouldn’t hurt if we trained some more over the firing range and in formation as well, but the commanders knew better. And now we were on our way from Baku to Krasnovodsk across the Caspian Sea. From there we would have to make our way to the Volga Region by train via Ashkhabad, Mary and Tashkent.

  The Caspian Sea raged so, that it made all the airmen seasick, that was why we got off the ship in Krasnovodsk pale, worn out, and staggering. “Well, ‘Stalin’s falcons’103, why are you in the dumps? It’s not the ocean of the air!” one of us joked bitterly.

  We reached the train station with difficulty, took seats in the wagons and the train carried us to the rear across the Kazakhstan steppes. The train moved so slowly that one could easily walk next to it without falling behind. Having recovered from the sea voyage we felt much more confident and calmer than at sea. Some read, some played dominos, and song lovers gathered around Zhenya Berdnikov, an aerial gunner — Zhenya was a good guitar-player.

  During stopovers we would run out to buy milk. It seemed to Vakhramov that a half-litre can, with which a woman was ladling out milk from her bucket, was too dirty, and he was outraged: “How can you dip a dirty can into the common bucket?”

  The farmer’s wife silently lifted her skirt, wiped the can with the hem, and smiling sweetly measured out three times half a litre into Valentin’s mess-tin. Valya paid for the milk and with curses handed it over to someone in the queue. Everyone there burst into loud laughter…

  Training started on the third day of our trip. The head of the aerial-gunnery service
Captain Koshkin was the first to come to our wagon. “We’ll be talking today about targeted shooting and bombing from a Sturmovik,” he proposed and pulled out the manual from his map-case. “We need to practise it and pass a test.”

  “Why a test?” Rzhevskiy asked. “Let’s sign on the brochure that we’ve read it — that’s all the labour we need for such a thing.”

  The special instruction on the use of factory markers and viewfinder pins necessary for correct determination of the plane’s diving lead during bombing indeed deserved attention. In order to shoot there was a crosswire gun-sight on the plane: once you’d led the plane close enough to the ground, you pulled the triggers. The cannon, machine-gun and missile tracers might be corrected by one movement of the rudders, and the target would be knocked out. But there was no bomb-sight. Each flyer had worked out his own method of bomb delivery. We’d been bombing as if by eye — using a ‘template’ of ‘bast shoe’ or ‘flying boot’ size. Jokers suggested the following ‘models’: ‘bomb-sight B-43’ for a bast shoe size 43, or ‘F-43’ for a flying boot size 43. “And Egorova will have her own bomb-sight: BF-38 — box calf flying boot size 38!” the pilots laughed.

  “Joking apart, how to handle it in reality?” I unwillingly wondered. Well, you could go into a dive using the mark on a wing, but then you had to determine the angle by eye and begin to count seconds: “twenty one, twenty two, twenty three”… At the same time you were not supposed to miss the right altitude — you had to watch the altimeter. But then you were under ack-ack fire, and on top of that you couldn’t break away from your formation — then you would become easy prey for fighters. Generally speaking, although the instruction was just a nuisance to us, we practised it and passed that test before the captain. I have to admit that later our squadron bombed rather well. Either that instruction had helped or we all had the same size of flying boots…

  We stayed three days in Mary. Fortunately the news from the front was cheering — our advance in the Stalingrad area had begun. We found out during one of the numerous stopovers that the encircled German troops were in an exceptionally bad situation. They were being systematically bombed by our air force, harassed by the infantry and shelled by the artillery. However, our journey wasn’t without its ‘extraordinary incidents’. In the area we were traveling through were many evacuated families of our regimental comrades. Some had left Derbent earlier so they could catch up with us after seeing their families. One of those who caught up with us reported directly to the commanding officer: “Arrest me, Comrade Lieutenant-Colonel, I’ve killed a man…”

  It appeared that he had been in a hurry to see his wife and the daughter he had seen only on the day she was born. His wife had been writing him letters full of love and faithfulness and tracing on the paper sometimes the daughter’s hand, sometimes her foot. And here he was turned up at home — his wife opened the door and gasped… She didn’t want to let him in but the pilot burst into the house — there was a rear-area serviceman nursing his daughter… Turning into some kind of madness, our comrade shot him, grabbed his daughter and off he went to the train station. He made it to a big city, handed his daughter to an orphanage and rushed to catch up with his regiment. And here he was — come with cap in hand…

  Investigators would later find out the rear-area man had not been killed, only slightly wounded: the bullet had hit his leg. The girl would be returned to her mother, our comrade would be demoted in rank but he would be still in combat. But in the meantime our ride went on and on…

  Here we were in Tashkent. We called in at the oriental bazaar, buying there the famous dried apricots that were allegedly a cure for all possible diseases. But the main point was, they were said to make one young and beautiful. Sure, we were young but everyone without exception also wanted to be beautiful and that was why everyone was buying dried apricots. If one had no money he would borrow from his mates. I also bought Tashkent sultanas but they turned out to be merely dried grapes with pits.

  When approaching Kuibyshev at the Grachevka Station we heard a Sovinformbureau communiqué from the loud-speakers: “The Southern grouping of the German troops under command of General Field-Marshal Paulus has capitulated. The Northern group has capitulated too”. This happened on 2 February 1943. It got noisy straightaway in our wagon: we rejoiced in the great success of our Army, shouted ‘hurray’. And one more thing — we were outraged that they had been so slow taking us to pick up our new planes. We had missed out on the Stalingrad fighting…

  22. Wingtip to wingtip

  At last we arrived at the plant where we were to receive brand-new planes and fly them to the front. In expectation of the machines the pilots lodged in a huge dugout, as big as a Metrostroy tunnel, with two tiers of bunks. Here I received a letter from Raya Volkova, a Metrostroy girl. She wrote that the construction of the Moscow Metro was continuing, that the third-stage line with the stations ‘Sverdlov Square’, ‘Novokuznetskaya’, ‘Paveletskaya’, ‘Avtozavodskaya’, ‘Semyonovskaya’ would start operating soon. “At all stations”, she wrote, “there will be bas-reliefs on the walls with the inscription: ‘Constructed during the Great Patriotic War’. There’s a war on but we are in peaceful construction work. It’s true many Metrostroy men are building defensive installations as well. We’ve helped the men of Leningrad erect fortifications, laid out the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga… The guys from our aeroclub are all at the front. Your instructor Miroevskiy and Serezha Feoktistov are fighting in Sturmoviks. Vanya Vishnyakov, Zhenya Minshoutin and Serezha Korolev, in fighter planes. Louka Mouravistkiy, Vanya Oparin, Sasha Lobanov, Arkadiy Chernyshev, Vasya Kochetkov and Victor Koutov have been killed…”

  “Victor who?..” I felt as if I had been struck by lightning — everything grew dark: there was neither sun, nor people, nor this war there… It seemed there was nothing to breathe, my eyes couldn’t see, my ears couldn’t hear. When I had come to my senses I saw Doctor Kozlovskiy above me with a syringe in his hand. He kept saying:

  “Have a cry now, sweetheart, have a cry. You’ll feel better straightaway…” But I couldn’t cry. Something unbearably heavy lay on my heart and would not ease even for many long years after…

  A kind soul, our doctor! He looked after me and healed my soul back in that hard time of mine. And not only mine… In the regiment there was no man more caring and attentive to us. Kozlovskiy literally looked after each airman: how and what he ate, how he slept, what his mood was. He always organised a Russian bath for us along with a change of underwear. He would pick some shack on a riverbank, skilful mechanics would put together a stove out of rocks, put on it a petrol drum, heat plenty of water — and the bathhouse was ready! Doctor Kozlovskiy always requested that a ‘tub’ be prepared for me — in other words a separate drum of hot water, and demanded insistently that I sit in it for no less than ten minutes. We airmen called our doctor ‘Specially for You’. And here’s why: when giving out to us chocolate or vitamins he would call each of us aside in turn, look around and say secretively: “Specially for you!” Wags among the pilots, catching sight of the Doctor, without pre-arrangement would pull chocolate out of their map-cases and yell all together: “Specially for you!” The doctor would take no offence and would do exactly the same at the next distribution of chocolates or vitamins. Kozlovskiy wouldn’t refuse medical help to anyone where we were based. I remember in Timashevka near Krasnodar I ran up to him with a request to help my billet-hostess and her baby when it was born: and snatching up everything necessary straightaway he rushed to save the mother and her baby. And this kind of thing happened many a time.

  Our doctor once sent his wife a parcel along with a sergeant-major going via Moscow to Kuibyshev on service business. The sergeant-major found the hospital in which Kozlovskiy’s spouse worked. Worn out by the heat, he unbuttoned the collar of his blouse, took off his field-cap and sat in a chair in the hospital ward. Then the woman he was waiting for turned up. The sergeant-major stood up, staggered up to the woman and said, “Hello! I b
ring you your husband’s greetings from the front, and a present.”

  “Why are you out of uniform? What sort of way is this to talk to someone senior in rank?” he heard her squeaky voice turning to a screech. The sergeant-major was taken aback. He sharply turned around, put the parcel on a table, put on his field-cap and silently left the building. When he came back to the regiment he wouldn’t upset the doctor, he just passed on greetings from his wife and added: “I handed the parcel over personally, don’t you worry!” The sergeant-major was maligned and mocked in the regiment for quite some time after that but it had nothing to do with our doctor. Him we respected…

  There was always a long line in the plant canteen. When your turn came you would give them you ear-flapped hat and get an aluminium spoon. Our lunch would consist of three meals: ‘hasty’ soup, ‘shrapnel’ porridge and ‘blancmange à la raspberry’. The guys would joke: “You can survive on it, but will not chase the girls”.