A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II

by Anne Noggle

  I was sent to the Kherson Flying School and completed that program. The sports club gave me basic knowledge about navigation and the behavior of the aircraft in the air, but the advanced school for pilots lasted for two years. I finished flying school before the war started. I then returned to the sports club and worked as an instructor. I was eighteen.

  I was very shocked when in the early days of the war my brother was killed. We were close, and I cried for days and nights. When my mother heard that her son had perished-he was only twenty and had never even kissed a girl-she met me at our house and embraced me and sobbed, "That damned Hitler!"

  I saw the German aircraft flying along our roads filled with people who were leaving their homes, firing at them with their machine guns. Seeing this gave me feelings inside that made me want to fight them. During the war our house, in the German-occupied territory, became the fascist police office. They destroyed the apricot trees and the flowers and used our garage to torture our people. They blasted our school, and it was like a terrible storm had invaded our country. The war changed our lives forever.

  When the war started, I sent a cable to Moscow asking to be sent to the front. They refused, but then I was drafted into the regiments Marina Raskova was forming. She had become a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1939. She was a beautiful woman with wide blue eyes and long hair; she worked at the air academy as a teacher. After our training she became the commander of the dive bomber regiment. But before they had made a single combat mission, she perished in bad weather. In February, 1942, she was buried in Red Square.

  Irina Sebrova (seated, center) and Nadezhda Popova (standing, 46th regiment. Photograph by Khaldei

  We trained at Engels, on the Volga River. After training, our regiment of night bombers was sent to the Ukraine. I was in that regiment from the very first day until the last. We were innocent of lifeour motherland was endangered, and we would fight the Germans. My first unhappy day was in training when Raskova told us we must get out of our skirts, put on trousers, and have our hair cut very short. Many girls were crying because of their braids, but the order was fulfilled. We came there to learn bombing and firing tactics, code, navigation, and how to fire machine guns as well as small arms, and we flew day and night under different conditions. There was a firing range, and we dropped bombs there.

  One night I was the commander of a flying formation on a training mission to our bombing range. Each plane had a crew of two, the pilot and a navigator. It began snowing heavily. Two aircraft crashed, and we lost four people that night; these were the first losses in our regiment. One was a very close friend of mine; it was a grave moment. We were very stressed by our flying conditions; we were without instruments to help us orient ourselves. At that time the equipment was very primitive, and inexperienced pilots became disoriented. Some thought it was my fault because I didn't teach well. When I landed near the bombing range I saw Lilya, my friend, lying on the ground under the aircraft. Raskova asked me, "Where are your pilotsdead! Why are you here, and where are they? You are flying together, and why did it happen that you are here and they crashed?" I was flight commander, and they blamed me for not instructing them properly. When something like this happens, they always look for a scapegoat. I was nineteen years old.

  Two other pilots came to the commander and explained how this had happened. The other aircraft had taken off after me, and we started practice-bombing that night. My aircraft was first to bomb, and they followed at about one-minute intervals. I dropped my bombs and made a turn toward the airdrome, and so as each plane approached the bomb area, there were no aircraft ahead of them. On the bombing range there was a circle and some lights illuminating it. We each were to bomb the target and then fly on into the darkness, make a turn, and come back to the airdrome. But the pilots of these two aircraft became disoriented and flew into the ground from boo meters up. It was snowing, and there was no horizon, no up or down, no aircraft leading them. It was a tragic lesson for us.

  I made 852 combat missions, and I was a squadron commander. At the front some of the crews crashed and were killed, and reinforcements came every month as replacements. I was shot down several times, my aircraft was burning, and I made some forced landings, but my friends used to say I was born under a lucky star; I was never even wounded.

  During the battle at Novorossijsk, a city on the Black Sea, our regiment was located about twenty kilometers from the city, in a resort area behind a low hill. While we were stationed here we fulfilled two combat missions in cooperation with the naval fleet. One day we were invited to the command post, a dugout where we were briefed by the chief of staff of the naval fleet. A part of our navy troops occupied a small territory of the city on the seacoast, and they had sent a radio message that they had no water, ammunition, medical supplies, or food and asked for urgent assistance.

  Our aircraft were supplied with containers filled with supplies to drop to our troops. We took off, and my heart was pounding because this was an unusual mission-not to destroy but to save our sailors. I was fond of seamen; I liked the uniforms and thought they looked like knights. The army and air force changed their uniforms with time but not the navy. So I went on this mission like a child with an open heart.

  When we approached that area we saw mountains on the right side covered with forest and the sea under us. Of course we had no parachutes or rubber safety boats, only a small safety jacket. We always joked about these jackets, that they would drag you down into the water instead of keep you out of it. We flew at about one thousand meters, and I knew there were antiaircraft guns and spotlights in that area. We had become clever enough to evade them, so I throttled back and dropped the flare to find the target. While I was looking for the place to drop my cargo I came down a little too low, and my navigator called out, "What are you doing-you could hit one of the city towers!" lust then I saw a torch blinking from the roof of a building, and my knees started shaking. I cried to Katya that we would drop the supplies together because if we missed, the cargo could drop into German positions. So then we dropped the cargo. I increased my speed and glided to the edge of the Black Sea.

  About that time the antiaircraft guns started, and all the guns were firing. I felt a shell explode near my aircraft; it hit the wing and made a large hole. My controls were sticking, and I was afraid to be shot down over the German positions, so I started maneuvering at an altitude of about one hundred meters over the sea. I managed to fly back to my airdrome and land. Then the colonel who gave us the order to drop supplies climbed up on the wing and thanked us. The sailors had sent a radio message that they got everything. There were bullet holes in the wings, map holder, and even my helmet. But we were not hit. I said, "Thanks to God, everything is all right."

  When the war was over, I came to my native town and was met by a brass band. Lots of people threw flowers, and the flowers were put in the car and they filled it. Then we came to the theater, and there were more than two thousand people there. I was a Hero of the Soviet Union, and the town made this a festivity-I was made an honorable citizen of the city. I was asked to tell an episode of the war, and I told them that particular story. Then a man came up and embraced me and said now he knew who saved them, and he thanked me. He was one of the sailors in that unit on the Black Sea that our regiment had saved. He told me that all the sailors had then prayed to God for our lives, to save us from the enemy's wild bullets.

  My friend Yevgeniya Rudneva was killed during a mission. When she came to the regiment she became the regimental navigator. She made many flights with me, and one night, when we were in the Crimea, we were given the assignment to bomb Kerch city. That night she was to fly with me, but she said that it was the first night flight of a new pilot, and she would like to bomb with her. The assignment was very dangerous, and there were lots of fascist troops concentrated near the target. When I was approaching my aircraft that night before takeoff I tripped, and I thought it was bad that Yevgeniya was flying with the new pilot-something would happen. I felt this
in my heart, and when I looked into the face of that young pilot I saw something unusual, a disturbance.

  We took off, and they were flying in front of me. I watched them approach the target and drop their bombs, and then the searchlights were switched on and caught the plane in their web. A burst of fire shelled their aircraft, and it was immediately set on fire. I changed my direction and started dropping my bombs on those gun positions, and the lights started searching for me, but they didn't find me. I saw their aircraft burning, and the flares they carried began exploding. The burning plane crashed while the searchlights continued to hold it in their lights. It was the 645th combat mission of Yevgeniya Rudneva. After her death, she was decorated with the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union. She was the only daughter of her family, and she had never been kissed. She wrote letters to her professor at the university saying she couldn't be a scientist until her fair motherland was liberated from the fascists. She wrote, "There can be no real science in an occupied country." Later, the astronomers named an asteroid after her. She was a senior lieutenant when she perished at twenty-three.

  Early in the war, after a bombing by the Germans, you would look down and see horses, people, vehicles, everything mixed. We are very impressionable people, and when you see all these things your brain becomes overloaded with this terror. I remember some nights I would fly eight or ten missions, and when we were fighting in Poland, I made eighteen combat missions in one long winter night. I stayed in the cockpit almost all the time, and I would have some tea while the aircraft was being reloaded. I remember once we received a message from Warsaw saying that the Polish people had started a rebellion and asking for our assistance. We flew many missions over Warsaw, and it was burning and covered with smoke. It was difficult to breathe the air. After those missions I couldn't get out of the cockpit from exhaustion.

  I took part in the battles in Belorussia, Poland, and Germany. We finished the war near Berlin, and we bombed the Swinamunde area in the northern and eastern part of Germany. By the time we reached Germany, there were fewer German planes in the air. In 1943, the forces of our aircraft and the German aircraft became equal, and then we gained air superiority. When the war ended, we were in Brandenburg. Our regiment was released, and the flag of our regiment was passed to the air museum in Moscow. In hall thirteen of the museum you can find our flag today.

  When we were released there was a meeting of our regiment. The commander read the order, and lots of us began to cry because of what we had been through together. This was October, 1945. We decided to meet after the war on the second of May in a small park across from the Bolshoi Theater. In 1946, we had our first meeting. During the years the veterans began to show up with their husbands and children, but many of them never married. At these meetings we were crying and laughing. And now every year fewer and fewer of our people come. We were very young and our friendship very warm, as it is now.

  Senior Sergeant Nina Karasyova-Buzina, senior mechanic of armament of the squadron

  I was born in 1923 in the Tula region in the village of Kluchyovo, and in 1930 the family moved to Moscow. I finished nine grades of secondary school and went to work. There were four children in our family, and we were not well-to-do. Together with my father I was a breadwinner, and I worked two and one-half years in a plant before the war broke out. When the war started, the Komsomol organization of our plant appealed to the young people to voluntarily join the army. I volunteered and was assigned to Marina Raskova's regiment.

  In Moscow at the Komsomol headquarters I was interviewed by an army officer and Marina Raskova herself. I was warned that the service I was volunteering for would be very difficult, because I would have to carry heavy bombs to the aircraft, work in freezing conditions, and probably stand in cold water day and night with little rest. I was told I should think it over, and I replied that I had and wanted to join. We were taken to the town of Engels, where we trained. I completed the eight months' course in armament and was sent to the front with the 588th Air Regiment. Initially I had thought I would be a gunner in an aircrew, and I was disappointed to know I would only load the bombs, not drop them.

  This work we did was not really women's work, because of the weight of the bombs that we manually attached to the aircraft. At first I was just an armorer, then a mechanic of armament; then I became a senior technician in armament. A technician not only arms the aircraft but has the added responsibility of overseeing the other armament personnel and their work. We attached the fuses to the bombs, which armed them, and only then attached the bombs to the aircraft.

  The bombs weighed 25, 32, or ioo kilos each, and we lifted them into place manually. Some nights we lifted 3,000 kilos of bombs. Three of us lifted the bombs, working together. We did our work at night and were not allowed to have any light to work by. So we worked blind, fumbling in darkness for the proper place to attach the bombs. But the missions never had to be delayed because the bombs were not loaded in time. We worked in mud, frost, sleet, and water, and we were always precise in fixing the bombs. We had to work barehanded so that we could feel what we were doing. They issued us gloves, but working in the dark with a locking mechanism forced us to work without them.

  We worked all night, then had a two- to three-hour rest and returned to the planes in the morning to examine the bomb racks under the aircraft. The racks were so low to the ground that we had to kneel to examine and attach the bombs. Each aircraft made about ten missions a night. Early in the war each plane carried a maximum of 250 kilos of bombs, but later they could carry 30o kilos.

  We slept in dugouts. A dugout is a large underground trench covered with logs and soil. Inside we had plank beds and a fireplace made of an oil drum. At times we even had a window in the dugout. When we had to move often and quickly, we didn't have time to dig but slept outside under the wings of the aircraft.

  After the war I married a military pilot. We moved from one place to another so I didn't work, but I raised two sons. There was some question as to whether we mechanics could bear children after the heavy work and the overstraining of our strength during the war, but it didn't affect us. We were very small and slim during the war, and we had bad nutrition, never enough sleep, and very hard work, but no one complained. I never even felt tired.

  junior Lieutenant Raisa Zhitova-Yushina, pilot, flight commander

  I was born in 1921. When I was four or five years old I would ask my mother if I would ever fly, and she would reply, "Yes, from the stove to the floor!" Of course no one believed that I would fly. At seventeen I started flying gliders, and after a year I entered a flying school. When I went to Minsk, in Belorussia, I was nineteen, and I became a pilot at the sports club. Then the war broke out, and I became a flight instructor preparing male pilots. I was only twenty years old.

  In the first days of the war, the Germans started bombing all Belorussian cities, including Minsk. At that time I was in the hospital with pleurisy, and I think about five hundred aircraft were in the air bombing our city. In late June I was told that I should leave Minsk, because the Germans were advancing and were about to capture the city. I began walking to the east, and along the way I lost consciousness because of my illness. I was wearing my flying suit and had a map holder and my belt across my chest. I decided if I found an aircraft without a pilot I would fly somewhere. That was my dream.

  I was lying in a field, and some people found me and put me in a car. They were driving east on a highway along with military vehicles, and on the sides of the road there were civilians who were fleeing the area. Suddenly I saw three German aircraft approaching the highway, and I cried, 'Aircraft!" and jumped off the car and stayed behind. The fascist aircraft were firing their machine guns, and most of the people in the car were killed or wounded. When I jumped off the car I broke my leg. A military vehicle picked me up and delivered me to the hospital in a nearby city.

  While I was in the hospital two pilots that I didn't know came to me and asked if I was a pilot, and I replied that I was. Th
ey said, "Tonight a train will go to some other area, and if you want you can come with us." It took us about a month to get to Tambov city, in the center of Russia. There I stayed in the hospital because of my broken leg, and when it had healed I was assigned to the flying club. I worked there until 1943 teaching flying to three or four groups.

  Then I went to air-force headquarters in Moscow, and they asked how many flying hours I had. I told them more than a thousand. They assigned me to the 46th Guards Bomber Regiment on July 13, 1943. I started in the regiment as a pilot, then a senior pilot, and later as a flight commander.

  My first mission was in August, 1943, in the northern Caucasus.

  Left to right: Raisa Zhitova-Yushina, pilot; Polina Petkelyova, navigator; Mariya Pinchuk, navigator-46th regiment

  The aircraft flew on their missions at three-minute intervals between planes. It was like a conveyor belt: every three minutes an aircraft took off. When we were approaching the field and runway we would cry out, "Refuel, bombs, get ready!" because we were eager to bomb the positions of the Germans. I still had some problems with my leg, and sometimes, because of nerves, I couldn't move one leg. On my last combat mission, on March 30, 1945, when I landed I couldn't move either of my legs. It was a nerve problem, and the central nervous system was paralyzed. I made 53S combat missions during the war.

  Once, on a reconnaissance flight with bombs under the wings, the weather was very bad. I couldn't get to the target, so I decided to turn back. When I landed, the ground personnel were holding the wings of my aircraft to stop it from swinging because of the strong wind. Otherwise, it could turn over and blow up. I watched that scene from the cockpit. When I saw all of them rushing away from the plane, I cried out to them, "Why are you running away?" I learned later that I had lost the vane of one of the bombs attached to the wings, which meant that any second my aircraft could have blown up from the slightest movement.