Over Fields of Fire

by Anna Aleksandrovna Timofeeva-Egorova

  We had our dogfights against the Hitlerite planes too. I remember our battle in which the pilot Rykhlin distinguished himself, his glory roaring all over Kuban. Rykhlin had joined the regiment with no military rank — in his OSOAVIAKhIM blouse with ‘birds’ on the collar patches and a magnificent sleeve insignia — the Air Force emblem. Rykhlin had used to work as a pilot-instructor in an aeroclub, had accumulated a lot of flying hours, and was put into operations quickly. By his second combat sortie yesterday’s instructor was flying in the group of Sturmoviks led by the Hero of the Soviet Union Captain Mkrtumov. I was in the same sixer too…

  …The greyish strip of the Kuban river flashed past. Mountains were sometimes seen through the shroud of low clouds. We were supposed to approach the target unseen, coming from the seaside, and the leader began to descend steadily carrying us behind him towards the ground. I saw Mkrtumov’s intent profile through the open pane of my cockpit. The helmet tightly covered his handsome head with its Oriental profile, the throat-mikes fastened to the last button were visible on his neck, and from under his helmet a white strip of lining was visible — that was why his face seemed even darker and more sun-tanned.

  Now the stanitsa Krymskaya was gone under my wing on the right, and that was when our leader again changed course, at the same time gaining altitude. So as not to fall behind I energetically revved up and gained speed. We crossed the frontline and the blue of the sea appeared through the risen mist. Far below gun flashes began to sparkle — we were under flak fire. Small grey puffs of shell bursts began to leap about the plane. I saw a large splinter hit the right wing of Mkrtumov’s Sturmovik but his machine kept flying obediently.

  The last seconds before an attack place an especially strong strain on one. It seems nothing else exists in the world for you — all your attention is concentrated on the leader and the target. In that flight, tanks with white crosses on the armour were our target. Our tankers and artillerymen were holding off pressure from the enemy with their last strength, and assistance from the air arrived in the nick of time. The bombs covered the target accurately, the ground attack followed. Attacking tanks is a complicated business involving a lot of risk. Tank cannon had enviable precision and more than once hasty pilots had paid for their errors with their lives. You had to watch your altitude really carefully. Our Goldy (that was what we called Rykhlin among ourselves, after his fiery-red hair) got a little carried away, forgot about his altitude in the heat of battle, and one of the Hitlerite tanks instantly pulled up the barrel of his cannon and opened fire at the plane! Rykhlin’s damaged machine, barely pulling out of the attack, turned away towards Gelendzhik. But four Messerschmitts pounced upon it like a bolt from the blue. The pilot had no choice but to accept the fight with them.

  Knowing the power of the forward fire of our Sturmoviks, the German fighters feared to attack from the front. In the current situation the high speed of the Messerschmitt was a nuisance for them and Rykhlin decided to capitalise on it. When two vultures, having put down their undercarriages to reduce their speed, sneaked up to the Sturmovik and began to shoot at it point-blank, Rykhlin abruptly turned his plane around towards the enemy and went on the attack himself. One of the Messerschmitts found itself in the Il’s gun-sight with its yellow belly exposed. The pilot pressed all the triggers and the yellow-belly began to smoke, tilted on one wing and fell into the sea. The second Hitlerite met the same end. The aerial gunner Vanya Efremenko, already wounded in the arm, shot up a third one; a fourth Messer exhaled smoke as well. Quitting the dogfight it turned towards his aerodrome.

  On his own, badly damaged, our Sturmovik had faced four Fascist fighters and got the upper hand! And this miraculous victory was made by a pilot flying only his second combat sortie. Rykhlin managed to make it to a narrow strip of land by the Black Sea in his bullet-riddled plane. Many of our troops saw the scene of the aerial battle from the ground, and when the pilot had landed his machine, sailors who happened to be nearby were ready to carry the fearless hero in their arms.

  The Military Council of the 4th Aerial Army highly appreciated the feat of the gallant warriors. N.V. Rykhlin was appointed a flight commander and promoted to the rank of Senior Lieutenant, and Sergeant I.S. Efremenko became a Junior Lieutenant. By Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union on the 24th of May 1943 N.V. Rykhlin and I.S. Efremenko were awarded the ranks of Heroes of the Soviet Union.

  Then Rykhlin went on a course to improve his qualifications. Running a bit ahead I will say that many years after the war I suddenly received a letter from Rykhlin in which he advised that he was in hospital and asked to see me. By that time I was the only living person from of all our regiment, and I went. He was so happy to see me when I came to the hospital! It turned out that after the war he had married a woman with a son. The latter took a great dislike to him, wrote some kind of complaints against him, some kind of cock-and-bull stories — and they believed him: Rykhlin was arrested and stripped of his rank of Hero… And his wife didn’t stand up for him. It was a somewhat strange story… After all, he was a kind and good man!

  24. Tit, Petr and the rest

  Sorties, sorties… We were all were by now exhausted but there was no let-up. The losses were mounting. The weather was frequently bad, clouds pressed down to the ground, the planes came back after sorties literally riddled with bullets and the technicians barely had time to patch them up. We kept flying to the Choushka Spit and the Blue Line: we raided aerodromes, railway junctions, trains of enemy troops and materiel, attacked and bombed enemy ships on the Black Sea. This kind of work required meticulous preparation and we painstakingly prepared ourselves for each mission.

  On one day of combat, awaiting the order to fly, the pilots lying back on the ground in the ‘sun’ pattern (a circle, head to head), were just about to tell each other funny stories in turn. If it was not funny the unlucky author would get a flick on the nose. This was in its way a psychological relaxation. Everybody grew hungry because of idleness but lunch was late, and we were casting our eyes to the road leading to the village from which the catering service girls were supposed to bring us lunch.

  “They’re coming!” Vasya Kosterov, a sturdily built Moscovite yelled, being the first to notice the battalion’s ton-and-a-half truck. But at the same moment a messenger ran up from the CP and announced: “Combat crews, to the regiment commander!”

  Forgetting about food we rushed to the headquarters dugout. Lieutenant-Colonel Kozin in his blouse with decorations on it, his head bare, stood at the table. His fair wavy hair was combed perfectly and it seemed he had just come from the barber’s shop: a light wind blew us the smell of cologne. This time his faithful pipe lay on an ash-tray — a flattened shellcase. And Michael Nikolaevich began to explain us unhurriedly the oncoming combat mission: “Many trains of enemy troops and materiel have concentrated at the Salyn railroad station on the Kerch Peninsula. Your task is to bomb and strafe them so as not to let the Hitlerites shift them across the Kerch Strait to Taman. I appoint pilot Usov the leader. Let’s think over and plot the route of your flight together. It seems to me we ought to do a low-level flight over the Azov Sea, dart out over the station and make a sudden strike…”

  We discussed the oncoming sortie, and when the flare soared above the aerodrome we taxied out to the start point and took off one after another. The escort fighters — a sixer of LaGG-3 type — took off after us. Approaching the Azov Sea we began to descend, and at this moment the Hitlerites opened fire at us with the shore batteries. Captain Pokrovskiy’s plane flared up before my eyes and crashed into the sea in flames. It seemed to me that for an instant our group even slowed down, but then the wingmen caught up with the leader and we rushed forward, towards the target.

  “My God! Why him?..” The appeal to God, learned by heart in childhood, burst out of me.

  Tit Kirillovich Pokrovskiy… A fearless pilot, an honest and gallant man! He joined our regiment as an established combat flyer, with three Orders of the Red B
anner. He had got his first Order for fighting near Lake Khasan,111 his second, in Spain, the third, at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War. Everyone had been surprised by the appointment of the captain as a flight commander. “A pilot like that, and only a flight commander?” his brother-officers grumbled. Pokrovskiy was older than all of us, born in 1910, and we began to call him just ‘Kirillych’112 as a sign of respect. Sometimes he would relax and tell the airmen funny stories that ostensibly happened to him, and we would laugh. But more often he was tight-lipped and would shrink into his shell for long periods. Once after dinner at an aerodrome near the Popovichevskaya station we organized a dance. Pokrovskiy was sitting very sadly and wouldn’t talk to anyone. Then I approached him and invited him for a waltz.

  “Thanks, Egorushka113. Let’s go for a walk instead”, Kirillych said. I agreed, and we walked off. The evening was warm, the moon was shining. We headed along the stanitsa, and then the captain told me his story. When he was shot down for the ninth time at the end of 1941, there were no more planes in his regiment. Five or six pilots remained, and they were sent to a training regiment (UTAP) to learn to operate new planes. However, no new planes were found there either.

  All the ‘horseless’ pilots without exception were eager to get back to the front. They didn’t want to be idle during such a hard time for the motherland, and Tit Pokrovskiy tried harder than the rest to be sent to the front (to any combat arm!). He approached the commissar of the UTAP and had his say about this sore point that was eating at many of them. The pilot, of course, lost his temper, and the commissar immediately sent him to the osobyi otdel114 to sort him out…

  The osobist115 gave Pokrovskiy a good talking-to, like an interrogation, for minutes, arrogantly, rudely. And then Kirillych called the osobist “a parasite sniffing for easy ‘prey’ among the airmen” — “You earn decorations during interrogations and hide from the front!” the pilot said furiously. The osobist silently closed his folder with the unsigned minutes and left. Pokrovskiy was arrested, then he was court-martialled and sentenced to be shot for “shunning frontline service and for anti-Soviet propaganda”. There was indignation and outcry in the regiment. Immediately after his arrest his pilot comrades went to a post office straightaway where they talked a young telegraph-girl to send an urgent telegram to the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the USSR himself. The telegram arrived in time and at its destination. Pokrovskiy was rehabilitated with the return of his rank, Party membership card and decorations. After all this horror Kirillych was assigned to our 805th Ground Attack Aviation Regiment.

  And now Tit Kirillovich was no more… After his death we lost the escort fighters too: apparently an aerial battle had broken out somewhere high up. Some time later our group crossed the coastline and darted out not over the Salyn train station but over the enemy’s Bagerovo airfield. About thirty or more twin-engine bombers with crosses were lined up down there refuelling. Messerschmitts were already taking off along the airstrip towards us. The group leader Pavel Usov opened fire at them without hesitation.

  “Smash the bastards!” Pasha116 was yelling into the air. And we, his wingmen, struck at the Fritzes with everything we had. Usov set ablaze two Messerschmitts that hadn’t managed to get into the air, and we kept strafing the bombers’ parking bays with long bursts. After raking the aerodrome we gained altitude, and shot over to the Salyn Station straightaway. We dropped bombs on the trains of materiel and enemy troops and headed home across the Kerch Straits.

  Several days later reconnaissance reported we had done a great job at the Bagerovo airfield and the Salyn station. We had indeed done well, but we had lost five crews…

  I remember the mechanics rolling up the covers of the planes that had not made it home — as if they were shrouds. And before my eyes my comrades were still falling into the sea and onto the ground… I climbed out of the cockpit without taking off my parachute and helmet with its earphones, jumped down on the ground and ran away from the parking bay. Unable to contain myself any more I fell on the ground and burst into tears.

  “You’re really tired, Egorova, aren’t you?” I heard the regimental commander’s voice above me. “Have a rest, calm down. I haven’t included you in the next combat sortie group.”

  “No, I’m flying!” I jumped to my feet. “And, please, don’t make any exceptions, don’t insult me!”

  And here we were — my plane was refuelled, bombs and rockets fixed, cannon and machine-guns charged. I saw a flare soar into the air and again I hastily climbed into the cockpit, wiping my tear-stained face on the run… This time our leader was Petr Timofeevich Karev — a Moscovite from Zamoskvorechie117. I liked flying with him: from my point of view there was no better leader in our regiment. It was somehow uncomplicated flying with him: he would tell a joke, then drop a catchphrase — and all that right before an attack! Look, we’ve done three or four passes on a target and haven’t noticed the pressure! More than once fate forgave him his bold and openly reckless escapades in the air…

  I remember Karev once, having drunk up to 300 grams of vodka at dinner (that day he had made three sorties, and 100 grams were allowed after each sortie), leaving to tell the flak gunners defending our aerodrome what was what. “My old pals, you send far too many shells into the blue sky when the bast shoe-bearers appear”118, Karev said. “I’ll take off in my Il now and you shoot at me. I’ll be shooting at you. Let’s see who gets who!”

  Of course, Karev failed to bring off that experiment but all the pilots — witnesses to that argument — were as confident of Karev as of themselves: of his infallibility and invulnerability. Everybody in the regiment loved him for his straightforwardness and approachability. He was always together with his comrades, lived their joy and problems, and during a hard moment he was more capable than anyone in his ability to raise spirits. The captain didn’t disdain rough work, and one could often see him shoulder a bomb that was a bit heavy and quickly carry it to the plane. The young girls from the armoury worshipped such a voluntary helper and would vie with each other in offering to wash his clothes and handkerchiefs… Petr would decline, thank them and sing in reply: “How many sweet girls, how many tender names…”

  Pilots, mechanics, technicians, aerial gunners would always gather round Karev in a tight circle, and then a confidential discourse would begin, usually ending in a burst of laughter — this would be Petr telling his ‘abracadabra’, as he liked to call his anecdotes.

  Karev could be sent on the most complicated flight with confidence that he would carry out his mission completely. He fought bravely and boldly. Scornful of death, he would fly to a target through a wall of fire of Fascist flak and attacks by enemy fighter planes. During debriefing the regimental navigator set various tactical tasks before the pilots. All together we analysed how to attack a train or a tank column most successfully, or to bomb a bridge or river crossing, and why it would be better to approach such narrow elongated targets not perfectly parallel to the course but at a narrow angle. We talked about speed, wind direction near the ground and at intermediate altitudes, taking into account how in that case the dissipation ellipse would look when bombing or shooting. Karev’s idea to manoeuvre inside a group of Sturmoviks became a common practice in the regiment. Initially, the pilots had been required to stick strictly to their positions in a formation. But Karev had got the tactics changed and required pilots to manoeuvre within certain limits: to fly above or below the leader, to change the distance between planes… All this improved alertness, impeded attacks by Fascist fighters and hindered their ack-ack from directing accurate fire at the Sturmoviks.

  At Taman Karev was the idol of the young pilots. We all remembered Petr Timofeevich when he was Acting Regimental Commander, finding at a very difficult moment a courageous, clever and expert solution to a problem. During one sortie a bomb tore away from its clamps and exploded during a plane’s take-off run. The surviving pilot and gunner managed to run aside and lie down but there still were five 100-kilogram bom
bs on the plane. The group’s take-off was stopped then, but the combat mission couldn’t be cut off! Karev ordered the start realigned by about thirty degrees. The planes began to take off again. Despite the realignment of the start the departing planes were passing close the burning machine on which there were still bombs, ammunition and rockets. Everyone could probably expect an explosion, but the plane blew up when the last Il-2, flown by Karev, was already in the air.

  But from that sortie made by a sixer, when a bomb exploded on one of the Ils during the take-off, only two crews returned — Karev’s and mine — his wingman’s. We had found the target and dropped our bombs, then strafed everything in three or four passes, and retired with not a single loss. Although battered we got away. But we shot over a German aerodrome, and it was full of German planes — they were landing and taking off. Flak guns held us as if in a ring! We were over the Kerch Straits when somehow we broke out of that ring, but only Karev and I: all the other crews perished over the German aerodrome. I didn’t even see who smashed them — either the planes taking off, or the flak. Now we had broken out into the Kerch Straits, and we had to go to the other side. Down below us white domes, the parachutes of our comrades, shot-down airmen, hung in the air like giant mushrooms… I still had two bombs unreleased, but behind us there were Messsers ready to make short work of our pair. Suddenly I noticed a loaded barge right underneath me, moving from Kerch — the temptation was great. I wasn’t supposed to land with bombs, but I would have been told off had I dropped them just anywhere. So I fell behind Karev a little, turned the Sturmovik towards the target and jerked the lever of the emergency bombload release. I wobbled in the air a bit, the plane shook, wavered and became uncontrollable for a while — yet I kept watching the barge: how was it feeling down there? I hadn’t missed: the barge listed and went down. But suddenly doubts pricked me like a pin: whose barge had it been — ours or the Germans’?.. I’d seen no markings on it. I had been moving away from Kerch busy with the enemy and besides, our men would have spread out canvas as a distinguishing mark, but this time I’d seen nothing. But you never can tell! That was why I decided to say nothing about it, and when reporting to the regiment commander on the sortie said not a word about the sunken barge…