by Anne Noggle
At the end of my story I want to tell everybody who is going to read this: don't believe those who say they had no fear in the war. I did fear the war, and death-I feared each combat mission. After bombing and having escaped the enemy's fire, I couldn't pull myself together for ten or fifteen minutes. I was shivering, my teeth were chattering, my feet and hands were shaking, and I always felt an overwhelming striving for life. 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. And never again a war! That is why today's hardships seem to me a trifle in comparison to what we had to go through in the war. I am grateful to each passing day for the life it gives me.
After the war I married, had two sons, and did not fly anymore. One of my sons is a helicopter navigator; the other is an engineer of the air defense aviation.
Major Irina Rakobolskaya,
navigator, chief of the commanding staff, deputy commander of the regiment
Irina Rakobolskaya, 46th regiment
I come from a family of teachers. My father was a physicist, and my mother taught Russian. I was born in a very small settlement called Dankov, 30o kilometers from Moscow, in the Lipetsk region. My father died when I was only eleven, and my mother raised my sister and me. Before his death we moved to Moscow, and I finished secondary school here. In 1938 I entered Moscow University Physics Department and was a third-year student when the war started. Earlier I wasn't interested in aviation, but I attended a parachute school and jumped several times just out of curiosity. I was mostly interested in poetry and theater.
When the war broke out we realized that our country needed soldiers, not physicists, and our one aim was to defend our country. Marina Raskova was forming the women's air regiments, and I was drafted as a volunteer into the regiment. I was then twenty years old.
We were piled into trucks in Moscow and taken to the train where we departed for Engels. At that time the country had a lot of female pilots, but unfortunately there were very few women navigators, gunners, or mechanics. Those of us who were to train in these fields were taken from civilian colleges. I was immediately assigned to the group training as navigators.
Our regiment, the 46th, was formed in December, 1941. At that time a commanding staff of the regiment was appointed, and that staff comprised mainly navigators. I was appointed chief of the commanding staff. I cried because I wanted to fly. Raskova told me that she didn't want to hear civilian talk, only military, and that I must abide by army regulations. If I was appointed chief of the commanding staff, then I was to obey orders and do my duty!
We did not fly in formations with a leader but instead flew one after another in a line toward the target. We then looped back to the field to rearm, took off again, and flew another mission with the same pattern. There were no radios in the aircraft and thus no communication while the planes were in the air. That was the pattern of our particular night missions. The commander's duty was to coordinate the whole effort, and so she flew very few missions. She could not be in command if she flew a mission.
Until 1944 our regiment flew without parachutes. Our pilots thought the plane itself to be like a parachute and felt they did not need them. Over our own territory we could get down quite easily, and over the German lines we felt that it was much better to burn up than to be captured by the Germans. But then one of our outstanding crews was shot down over Soviet territory by a German fighter and burned to death, and only then was it ordered that all Po-2 crews must wear parachutes.
In 1945 the lives of Rufina Gasheva and Olga Sanfirova were saved by parachutes. Rufina was the navigator and Olga her pilot, and commander of the squadron, when they were shot down over Polish territory. The plane was set on fire, and they both jumped. They landed on neutral territory between the Germans and the Soviets, and Olga stepped on a mine and was killed. A Soviet soldier saw that happen, and he went out and took Rufina in his arms and carried her from the mine field.
For our regiment, airdromes were not constructed at all: we used just fields. When we advanced into Poland it became extremely difficult, because the fields were so muddy our aircraft, the Po-2, could not take off-the wheels stuck in the mud. The fuel trucks could not move in the mud, either. We took apart log fences and laid them down to make runways. The crews would seize the wings of the plane and hold on while the pilot revved up the engine; then, when she signaled, they would let go, and the plane took off. When they landed, it was in the mud where the crews again seized the wings and pushed the plane back to the log runway. It was then refueled by carrying the fuel in jerry cans to the plane. The bombs had to be carried by hand to the planes also. Trucks couldn't come to the aircraft, so everything had to be carried to it. Each night the ground crews hand-carried three tons of bombs to the planes. The lower wing panel was quite close to the ground, which made it especially hard for the girls to carry them under the wing and fix them to the plane. They crawled on their knees with the bombs in their arms.
Our regiment made 300 combat missions from that field in those conditions. The total combat missions flown by our regiment during the war was 23,000. I personally made 23 combat missions as a navigator, and Bershanskaya made 35. We lost about thirty members of our regimental air crews. For us, those were great losses; for the army, it was not considered heavy losses.
Our whole regiment took to embroidering. We had no threads, no real cloth, but we had underwear, usually of a blue material, and we had cloth-not socks-that you put your foot into and then pulled on the boots. You see, the boots were very large for us, and these cloths made them fit comfortably. We embroidered flowers on those cloths with thread made out of the blue underwear.
When we moved forward into Poland and Germany, we found many pictures of beautiful flowers to use in our embroidery. My mother would send colored threads to me at the front. Once I came on inspection to one of the dugouts because there had been much rain, the dugouts were flooded, and we wanted to repair the trench to make it more livable. I saw that the floor was covered with water and that water was streaming down the walls. There was a table near the light, and I saw one of the girls standing on the table embroidering, oblivious of the conditions in the room.
The squabbles that went on between the flight squadrons were almost always about who was to take off first. The first to take off usually flew the most missions, and they were competitive. The spirit in the female regiments differed greatly from that in the male regiments. But we were quite ordinary people, and we sometimes violated the strict code of army discipline. It was required that we always fly with flares, which came with a parachute attached to slow their descent so we could see where to land. Once two of our navigators, who did not use the flares while on a mission, separated the parachutes from the unused flares. They used the material to sew underwear and pants, because we were supplied with only male underwear. These crew members were brought to trial in the regiment for destroying military ammunition and were each sentenced to ten years' imprisonment. They were allowed, however, to stay with the regiment to show their ability to settle down and he adequate military officers through their work. One of them was killed in action, and the other survived the war with her chest covered with decorations and orders. At that time the girls agreed with their sentence and thought it to be quite just!
There were a few cases when the aircraft would he over the target, and a bomb would stick and not drop. The navigator would get out of the cockpit, stand on the wing, and reach down with her hands to try to push it loose. The women were as brave as the male crews.
We had parties and danced and sang, and we had amateur contests and wrote poetry. The first slogan of the regiment was: You are a woman, and you should be proud of that. When weather caused the cancellation of a mission, everyone stayed at the airfield and danced. It would never come into any man's head to do that, while waiting for permission to fly.
When I was appointed deputy commander of the regiment, it was a part of my duties to give orders to the girls that I had
trained with and to know that they had to stand up when I entered the room. We were friends, and this was a shock to me and was the hardest thing I had to endure during my first year of army service. Later on the regiment was reinforced by girls I didn't know personally, and it was easier.
Once I lost the seal of the regiment. I thought life would end-life was over for me. The only thing left to do was shoot myself in the head. Just as I knew I had to tell that I had lost it, I found it! But I remember feeling as though I were standing on the edge.
As the deputy commander, I stayed at an advanced temporary airfield all night while the combat missions were being fulfilled. I had a special map that showed what time each crew was to fly over the target and return, and we were so near the front lines that each aircraft over its target was visible from the airfield. There were occasions when I saw our planes shot down and on fire, and I could look at that map and calculate who it was burning in the air. It was the most grievous torture I endured in the army during the war-to calculate who was dying.
My good friend Yevgeniya Rudneva, who was awarded the Gold Star (Hero of the Soviet Union) posthumously, was an astronomer and a poet and was fond of fairy tales. When we were not on missions, she would gather us all together at the airfield and recite fairy tales by Zhukovsky. When she was burning in the air over Kerch, I was standing at the airdrome watching it. I was losing my friend, she was burning away above my head, and I could do nothing to save her. Grief paralyzed me-I was blind and deaf. I could hardly pull myself together to keep on handling the combat of the regiment on the ground.
There were 200 women in the regiment. We were the only regiment in the whole of the Red Army without any men serving in it. Once a male was assigned to us for one month to install air-to-ground communications. He was very shy and quiet and even ate by himself. At one time he was supplied with female underwear, because his surname was one whose ending could be either male or female. On that day he said that not one single day would he remain after he finished with the installation!
Our aircraft flew i,ioo nights of combat. We started the war with two squadrons and finished the war with four. We trained our personnel at the front and had one auxiliary squadron used only for training. Usually we were assigned the combat mission for that night during the day, and I was responsible for receiving those missions from the army. Normally both the target and the number of combat missions directed at that target were indicated. The peculiarity of our missions was that we always bombed the front line of the enemy. The planes flew to the target at one altitude and back at another. One night an aircraft returning from a mission was approaching for a landing, and it let down on top of another aircraft, also landing. Three of the crew members were killed, and one survived with a broken leg.
Sometimes we used flares to see our target, and sometimes a Soviet searchlight directed our aircraft to the target. These two methods were used when our troops were moving and their location constantly changing. Otherwise we bombed in the dark. It is complicated, this lesson in tactics. It was impossible for our planes to bomb from a low altitude, because the explosion would damage our own aircraft.
We bombed from at least boo meters up to 1,200 meters and never used delayed fuses, because the enemy could pick them up and take them away. We usually started from an altitude of 1,300 meters, then throttled hack and glided silently down to about 6oo meters so the enemy couldn't hear us approaching the target. We suffered losses not so much because of the antiaircraft guns as because of the German night fighters. Six crews were shot down by German night fighters. In one episode over Poland, Polina Makogon was killed when her aircraft collided with a German night fighter.
NOTE: Irina Rakobolskaya is chair of the Physics Department at Moscow University. Her son teaches physics at Stanford University.
Major Mariya Smirnova, commander of the squadron
Hero of the Soviet Union
I was born in 1920 in a peasant family. Until I was thirteen years old I went to a village school. Then my family moved to Tver, on the Volga River. At the age of sixteen I completed the three-year course at a teachers' college and taught at a primary school. In the neighborhood there was an airdrome, and every day I saw the planes flying. Thus was born my decision to train as a pilot.
In 1937 I began my flying and continued on to become an instructor. Among one hundred cadets I was the only girl. In 1939 1 began training cadets. After the Great Patriotic War started, on November 1, 1941, I joined the regiments formed by Marina Raskova.
I was appointed deputy squadron commander of the 46th Guards Bomber Regiment. We flew to the front on May 2, 1942, and we didn't know our exact destination because the front was very unstableliquid, so to speak. The situation might change several times a day. We were assigned to an airforce division, and the pilots were not enthusiastic when they heard that a female flying regiment was to link up with them. They accepted us with great mistrust, and each of us was flighttested by a male pilot. My record in the logbook was "excellent!"
On the first combat mission we lost our commander of the squadron, and I was appointed to take her place. There were ten pilots and ten navigators in my squadron; eight pilots became Heroes of the Soviet Union. Two crews were shot down, and they perished. All of the pilots made more than Boo combat flights-I made 935. We carried out very risky assignments. We flew through the front lines, breaking through three defense lines fortified with German artillery to bomb targets such as fascist airdromes, railway stations and tracks, field headquarters, and bridges. We flew in a line three minutes apart, and the enemy was well aware of our timing. They had to be on the alert all night long-they didn't have a wink of sleep. This strategy was deliberate to tire the enemy around the clock.
46th regiment. Front row, left: Mariya Smirnova; third from left: Yevgeniya Zhigulenko
We faced risks every night. You shouldn't misinterpret my words and think we faced death openly and bravely-it is not true. We never became accustomed to fear. Before each mission and as we approached the target, I became a concentration of nerves and tension. My whole body was swept by fear of being killed. We had to break through the fire of antiaircraft guns and also escape the searchlights. We had to dive and sideslip the plane in order not to be shot down. All this affected my sleep enormously. When we returned from our missions at dawn, I couldn't fall asleep; I tossed in bed and had anxiety attacks. We slept two to four hours each day throughout the four years of the war. Once my regiment sent me to a recreation center for medical treatment to restore my health. But I ran away after three days because I couldn't stay when the others were risking their lives, so I returned to my regiment. Fear was always an inseparable part of our flights, but we knew we had to go through it for we were liberating our motherland. I feared for my squadron; each night when I climbed into the air, I thought not so much about the assignment as of the possibility of crashes and death.
On a mission near Novorossijsk, I had just dropped my bombs on the railway tracks and was turning away when I saw a German fighter, a Focke Wolf, flying toward me. I managed to dive and make a sideslip. Only pure chance saved me, and I escaped the enemy's fire. But the aircraft behind me, piloted by Dusya Nosal, was caught by the enemy fire. She was killed in her cockpit. Her navigator, Irina Kashirina, in the back cockpit knew how to fly and took over the controls, but the dead pilot had slumped forward over the control stick, and she was not able to use the controls. So she had to reach forward and hold the dead body by the collar with her left hand and control the aircraft with her right hand. The rough air over the Crimean hills almost caused her to crash, but she brought the plane with the body of the dead pilot back to the regimental airfield. She was in a state of shock.
On the Taman Peninsula the Germans had a strongly fortified line known as the Blue Line, stretching from Novorossijsk to Timruk. This line was firmly backed by strong antiaircraft defenses, and the whole territory was networked by searchlights, antiaircraft batteries, and machine guns. Here and there were spread the e
nemy airdromes with fighter aircraft on alert. The Blue Line was stuffed with German staff, and our regimental task was to bomb this concentration of enemy troops and weapons. My crew was the first to map the route for the regiment and simultaneously reconnoiter the disposition of the enemy troops.
Usually, on my way to a target when the searchlights were off, I tried to approach and hit the target before they knew my aircraft was there. I would idle the engine and glide over the target noiselessly. But when a searchlight lit up and caught me in its web other searchlights also lit up, and I would find myself in their cross of lights. To escape the searchlights, I idled the engine and sideslipped down into the darkness. Even though it was a slip into pitch darkness, I could always determine the angle in relation to the ground. I never used flares to clarify where I was; I was never disoriented because the searchlight mirrors and the ground itself were my orientation. No matter how blinded I was by the lights, I had to think and act quickly to level out the aircraft. The next moment the enemy was fiercely trying to locate my plane again, combing through space.
On this flight the antiaircraft guns were silent. I sensed something very uncommon about that and then thought of the only reason for the silence-German fighter aircraft! We had not been attacked in this way before; we had not developed tactics to counter the attack of fighter planes. I had considerable experience in combat and maneu vered to escape the searchlights, for to escape the searchlights was to escape the fighter. But behind me flew young, inexperienced crewsreinforcements who did not escape. Four of the aircraft following me were shot down. The tracer bullets set their planes on fire; our planes were so vulnerable they were burning like sheets of paper. We were not equipped with parachutes at that time, so eight girls burned in the air. One was Irina Kashirina, who had landed the aircraft with the dead pilot. It is a horrible scene when a plane is burning. First it explodes; then it burns like a torch falling apart, and you can see particles of fuselage, wings, tail, and human bodies scattered in the air. The other crews who were in the air at that moment witnessed that tragedy. I saw it with my own eyes as I returned from the mission.