A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II

by Anne Noggle

  In the morning, when we realized that the girls had perished and we would never see their smiling faces, never hear their voices, horror seized us. We didn't sleep that day and the next night fulfilled our combat missions without a wink of sleep. The everyday ration of vodka in the army was 200 grams, and we were daily allowed 200 grams of dry wine. But the regimental commander forbade us to drink, and we gave our word of honor not to break her order. Even after that tragedy we kept our word.

  Our airdrome was occasionally attacked from the air. In the Crimea our field was bombed by a group of fascist fighters at dawn, when we were in the field mess eating breakfast. We were at a new location, and the logistics battalion hadn't yet camouflaged the airfield and planes. We rushed from the mess to our planes, which were dispersed on the field, and we flew off in all directions in order to save the aircraft. I must confess that when I am telling you all these stories, I am shivering as if going through hell over and over again. If I talk about my war experiences, I cannot sleep afterwards, so much is my agitation.

  In the Taman area I was assigned to bomb a column of enemy trucks and weapons moving along the road. The night was moonlit, and this was not in our favor. The altitude was low, and the silhouette of the aircraft was clearly discernible to the Germans, but for awhile they masked and didn't fire at me. We dropped three flares to light the area. Hardly had my navigator, Tatyana Sumarokova, dropped half of the bombs when four antiaircraft guns burst out firing at us in rapid succession. These were Oerlekon tracer missiles. All of the tracers hit the aileron wires, and I lost control of the ailerons. The tracers also hit the bomb wires under the left wing, and we couldn't drop those bombs. The most urgent necessity was to get out of the fire zone. But I couldn't maneuver because of the aileron damage; the only possible escape was to dive. My altitude dropped from 60o to 200 meters. That made it especially risky, because at that altitude we could be hit by submachine gun fire, or even by a gun! My navigator was wounded in the forehead and was blinded by blood. Without her to guide me, I headed back to our airdrome. I didn't know to what extent our aircraft was damaged. We were lucky to have no wind that night; if the wind had banked our plane, I would have never been able to level it. The bombs still attached to the left wing were pulling the aircraft to the left. I held the plane with my right rudder. But how to land the plane? The landing strip was ninety degrees from my heading, and somehow I had to turn. Using the rudder, I kept applying pressure to the right. Soon I saw the airdrome, and I shot three red rockets to indicate an emergency landing. Since we were landing with the bombs still under the left wing, I made a decision to land a distance from the other planes so as not to blow them up if we exploded. When the altitude dropped to six or eight meters, I completely lost control and stalled. The fact that we didn't fall flat saved us from exploding. The aircraft went to pieces: the fuel tank fell on my right foot and squeezed it; I hit my head against the control panel and lost consciousness. Our ground personnel ran to our plane and extracted the navigator from her cockpit, but they couldn't pull me out because I was trapped by the fuel tank, which was too heavy to lift. So they had to axe the fuselage to break into the cockpit. I was happy to remain alive.

  I can't help trembling when I recall an accident that happened in my squadron, for in recalling, it again comes alive. It took place on a mission over the Taman Peninsula. A very young crew of pilot and navigator came into my squadron as reinforcements. I always escorted new, unskilled crews to the target on their first flight, so after takeoff, I joined up with them. Our target was Mitridat in the Crimean. We dropped our bombs and made a turn to fly back when I saw a very low overcast rapidly advancing from the Black Sea. I idled the engine and dove to escape the overcast, but the clouds were growing incredibly fast, like a snowball, in front of our eyes. For awhile we could dive into the holes between heavy clouds, but they soon disappeared in that gray, scary mass. The wind increased, and I could see we were drifting. I made a sixty-degree drift correction, for the wind was strengthening, and there was extreme turbulence. I came out of the overcast at 300 meters. Below me was the sea-no shore in sight. The Taman Peninsula separates the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov. I understood that I had not corrected my heading enough, and I had been blown to the Sea of Azov! The overcast pressed me lower to the water, and the aircraft was shaking heavily from the extreme turbulence. I corrected my course to fly back; I was thrown back and forth, up and down. I could hear the sounds of the water splashing below me, the sea spray streamed off the waves-my insides were throbbing and jumping. Around me was nothing but pitch-black emptiness, and the head wind was almost equal to the speed of my aircraft. For three hours I was suspended in the air and seemed not to move. Then, in the distance, I saw land; I prayed to the skies to help me to the land. Finally, I was able to land on the Taman Peninsula. I feared for the young crew, for there was no news of them-I knew they had crashed. A month later their bodies were found on the shore of the Sea of Azov. They ran out of fuel and fell into the sea.

  On another mission over the Kerch Strait the engine quit. I couldn't even think of making a forced landing on the waters of the strait because it was winter, and our heavy fur overalls made it impossible to float to the surface. I throttled back to save on fuel and took advantage of the tail wind to make it to land. It was night, and I had to land in an area that had been mined by the Germans; the land was uneven, torn by explosions. I landed at minimum speed to reduce the landing roll. When we came to a stop, I was so happy and relieved that I jumped out of the cockpit and immediately fell into a deep trench! Fortune had smiled on me again.

  When we were flying in the northern Caucasus, we would take off in clear weather and often return in dense fog that reached from the ground up to fifty meters. We found the location of the airdrome by orientation, for we knew all the terrain landmarks. On those foggy nights, the ground personnel would shoot a red flare to indicate the landing strip and a green one if they thought the aircraft was not in position to land. Landing in thick fog, I would enter that milky sheet, and when the cockpit began to darken, it was a sign that the land was close. Then I would pull the nose up and sink to the ground for a landing.

  In Belorussia the Soviet troops began their major offensive on all fronts, pushing the enemy to the west. The front-line troops advanced very fast, and small numbers of enemy troops were encircled and scattered in the Belorussian woods. They were hiding there and were trying to fight back the attacks of the Soviet army. Our new location was a clearing in the woods, and when we landed, some of the girls went into the forest and saw very closely-nose to nose-German tanks masked among the trees! Our aircraft were short of fuel because the logistical battalion had been detained. But we had to leave because at any moment we could be attacked by the tanks, so we flew away. The situation itself was ridiculous. Here we were, encircled by the German tanks, while their tanks were encircled by the advancing Soviet army!

  What did we all think then, the girls from the flying regiments? Was the war a woman's business? Of course not. But then we didn't think about that. We defended our fair motherland, our people whom the fascists had trampled. We won the greatest victory of the twentieth century! I never dreamed to see the victory. We sensed it, but by then I had a feeling I would not live to see it. Now having gone through that hell it has become priceless to me as never before.

  There is an opinion about women in combat that a woman stops being a woman after bombing, destroying, and killing; that she becomes crude and tough. This is not true; we all remained kind, compassionate, and loving. We became even more womanly, more caring of our children, our parents, and the land that has nourished us.

  After the war our regiment was released, and we all wanted to fly in civil aviation. I applied to the medical board, but I could not pass the medical examination. I had undermined my physical and mental health at the front; I was completely exhausted by the four years of war and combat. There was a period when we went without a day off for one hundred days.

 
I have always been a devoted Communist, and I have worked for the benefit of my people.

  Lieutenant Polina Gelman, navigator

  Hero of the Soviet Union

  When the war broke out I was a sergeant, and when I retired I was a major. I didn't fly after the war, but I still served. My pilot, Dusya Nosal, was killed, and the night she was killed I didn't fly with her. She was training another young navigator, and the navigator brought the plane back. Dusya was the first woman pilot to become a Hero of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War. My next pilot was Maguba Syetlanova, a Tartar.

  We flew one after another over the target every three minutes. The Germans liked to sleep at night, and they were very angry with the planes. They spread the rumor throughout the army that these were neither women nor men but night witches. When our army advanced again, the civilians said to us that we were very attractive and that the Germans had told them that we were very ugly night witches!

  The English book Night Witches is fictionalized; only the names are real. The book by Raisa Aronova of the same title was written during the war, tracing our path. She collected the events associated with a particular place and wrote chapters about the different personalities: a true chronicle. She herself flew in the regiment as a pilot and carried out 96o combat missions.

  Polina Gelman, 46th Guards Bomber Regiment

  I was born in igr9 and grew up in the first postrevolutionary period. Right after the revolution it was like in your Civil War: everything was burning. I read the book Gone with the Wind, describing the events between the South and North, and it was all burning. We didn't know exactly what was going on then, we didn't know the real truth, the real roots of the events, but still it was a kind of an adventure for us. We were young, we had a very good time-we enjoyed it.

  My father was killed in our Civil War when I was only five months old. My mother raised me by herself. She didn't have much education, but she was a very cultured woman who was well-read. She participated in the revolution in October, 1917, as a nurse. I remember her telling me how she brought bread, tobacco, and papers to the revolutionary prisoners, pretending to be a rich lady, and she also got clothes and false papers to the prisoners to help them escape. This all happened in the Ukraine region when power was switching from the Reds to the Whites, back and forth.

  In 1919, when my mother was giving birth to me, a shell from the air destroyed half of the hospital, and my mother was in the half of the building that was safe. I consider it to have been a good sign because I am still alive! I went to a secondary school, finishing ten grades with excellent marks. When I was in ninth grade, my girlfriend and I decided to enter a glider school that had started in our town. In the glider school we first jumped with parachutes. On my first flight in the glider, the instructor told me to do a maneuver that he had shown me, and I had difficulty reaching the controls. I was very low in the cockpit, and he couldn't even see me, and that frightened him because I had disappeared! When we landed he called me such bad, dirty names that I have never heard again, and he said that I couldn't fly anymore because I was too little. I was in love with aviation and wanted to devote my life to it, but I was so unhappy that I could not become a pilot that I chose to go to Moscow University and study history.

  On the day the war started, I was about to take my exams for my third-year courses. It was a Sunday, and when we heard the war had started, all the professors and students gathered at the university. We were patriotic and wanted to do something, to enlist or whatever. When we women applied to join the army along with the men, we were not accepted because the army would not draft women. We protested that we were brought up to believe that women were equal to men, and we thought that we should be allowed to go into the army, too. That summer all we could do was dig trenches around Moscow and put out fires, started by the fascist bombs, on the roofs of buildings.

  In October, 1941, we learned that three women's air regiments were to be formed and trained, with Marina Raskova, Hero of the Soviet Union, as the commander. By this time there were many experienced women pilots in the USSR, but few women trained as navigators and mechanics. The women they wished to train in those fields were those who had completed at least a few years in universities, glider schools, or parachuting or aviation technical schools.

  I applied and was accepted for training in the regiments and was selected to become a navigator. I was then assigned to the 588th Air Regiment, later to become the 46th Guards Bomber Regiment. We hated the German fascists so much that we didn't care which aircraft we were to fly; we would have even flown a broom to be able to fire at them! But we didn't fly brooms: we were given a biplane, the Po-2, to do our night bombing, without even any optical sights to indicate when to drop the bombs. Instead, we devised a method of visual sighting by making a chalk mark on the wing of the aircraft to indicate when to drop the bombs. This sight was unique in that each of us, being of different heights, would make a mark in a slightly different place-a personalized mark, it could he called-to help us in bombing accurately. This method proved to work extremely well in practice.

  The slow speed of this aircraft, only ioo kilometers per hour, made us a target from both small-arms fire and antiaircraft guns. The plane was covered with fabric, and the fuel tanks were not shielded, which made us very vulnerable to being set on fire if we were hit. We wore no parachutes until late in the war.

  In Mozdok, in the Caucasus, where we flew missions attacking the headquarters of the German staff, they had the most powerful searchlight we had yet encountered. If a searchlight caught our planes in its beam, we couldn't see anything-we were blinded. The pilot flew with her head very low in the cockpit because she could see nothing outside, and when we managed to get out of the beam we were still blinded for a few moments. It was difficult to even maintain the aircraft in level flight, because we flew only by visual references. The numerous searchlights caught and held us in their beams as spiderwebs hold a fly. They followed us even after we crossed the front line, and the guns followed us also. When we returned to the main airdrome and examined our aircraft, we found so many holes in it that it was like a sieve.

  Later on we devised new tactics for our missions. We flew two planes at a time to the target. The first attracted all the searchlights and antiaircraft guns, and the other would glide in over the target, with its engine idling so the Germans couldn't hear it, and bomb the target. With all the attention on the first plane, the second could make a successful attack.

  We carried flares with us on our night missions that were equipped with parachutes, so we had maximum use of their brilliant light as they drifted down to earth. We sometimes used them to find an emergency field, to light our airfield, or to locate a target. When we were to use a flare, I had to screw a pin out of the cylinder with my fingers, and when the pin was removed, I had just ten seconds before the flare was activated. So I immediately threw the flare over the side. In the winter we were provided with fur gloves, but I couldn't complete the procedure with the flare unless I removed the gloves. It was very cold, and my skin would stick to the metal of the cylinder. That was also true when I used the machine gun that was on a swivel rail on the back of my cockpit. Our aircraft was very primitive, and other planes more sophisticated than ours were provided with a mechanical means to drop the flares. There was a hook on the cylinder for use by those aircraft.

  Once when we were on a mission, I was to drop a flare to make sure we were over the target, and I had taken off my gloves to activate the flare. In order not to lose my gloves, I always had them tied together with a leather cord. When I had activated the flare I tried to throw it over the side, but I couldn't because the hook had caught in the cord. I had ten seconds before we would have been on fire from the flare. The pilot was calling out that she was blinded by the searchlights and needed my help to orient herself, and I had to think what to do. So I stopped trying to free the flare and threw the flare with my gloves attached over the side. When the Germans had our plane in the searchligh
ts and my pilot was disoriented, the only way she could orient herself was to have a flare light up the landscape. She would then be able to see in spite of the searchlights.

  Once we were given a holiday on November 7 to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution. This was one of our few holidays, and we were constantly flying missions without any break. On this day we celebrated the holiday with wine. We were so out of the habit of drinking anything alcoholic that we got drunk immediately. In the middle of the celebration, about io P.m., the Germans began maneuvering, and the commander of the regiment ordered us to fly a combat mission. We put on our men's flying suits, which were too large for us, and the fur boots, which were very heavy and much larger than our feet. We were stationed in the Kuban region, and there was mud everywhere on our airdrome.

  While we were running toward our planes, we sank into the mud. I felt quite drunk, and I would say to my pilot I wouldn't go; I would take another step and sink again into the mud, and my pilot came to me and dragged me out of the mud by the collar of my flying suit. In this way we finally got to the aircraft. She placed me in the cockpit, and we took off for the mission. It was overcast, and we were told to return if the overcast was lower than 56o meters. It really was lower but we continued. We felt very jovial and were not at all serious about the mission. When we saw the shadow of our aircraft on the clouds, we thought it was another plane flying along with us. We saw that when we turned right it did also, and when we turned left again it turned with us, and it made us laugh to see it. We laughed so much we didn't notice that we were flying over the target. We only realized it when the German searchlights caught us. Our interphone quit, and in order to warn the pilot that we were over the target, I had to lean forward and shout into her ear.