A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II

by Anne Noggle

  Our squadron commander, Olga Sanfirova, was shot down when a bullet hit the fuel tank and the aircraft caught fire. They landed between the German and Soviet trenches, and when they got out of the cockpit, a Soviet officer called to them and said, "You girls, you go to the right!" because that area was a mine field. But he meant to his right, and they went to their right, and Olga stepped on a mine. It exploded and tore off her leg and she was screaming, and the Soviet officer ran out to help her and stepped on a mine. So it ended that they and several soldiers nearby perished, and only her navigator, Rufina Gasheva, survived.

  On a bombing mission one night I nearly lost my navigator, Galina Bespalova. The searchlights caught our plane, but I dove and escaped from it. Galina was thrown completely out of the cockpit by this maneuver, but she was caught on the machine gun, and when I leveled off she dropped back down into her cockpit. She was on her first mission and had forgotten to fasten her safety belt. I called to her from my cockpit several times, but she wouldn't respond. This was directly over the target, and she had already dropped the bombs. I returned to our airdrome and didn't know if she were dead or alive, because I was busy dodging projectiles and couldn't look back. When I landed I found Galina alive but so shaken that she couldn't report to the commander about the mission. I was also shaken when I thought I could have lost my navigator above the target. We became friends then and are friends now. We were like sisters in our regiment, and we took care of every member of our family.

  In Poland in 1945 we were bombing Konigsberg as a snowstorm was approaching, but we persuaded Commander Bershanskaya to let us make one flight. We bombed successfully and then started to return home, but the ground was covered with heavy, heavy snow, and we were flying just above the trees. When we arrived at the area of the airdrome we couldn't find it, because we were flying in a milk of heavy snow. The stress was so intense my legs began to shake, and I knew the plane was turning yet I couldn't do anything to make it fly straight. Then I tried to land at another airdrome, and when we crossed the Vistula River approaching the field, the ground personnel turned on the lights. But I couldn't see the runway; it was impossible-we couldn't land anywhere. Finally I noticed a flat area and I landed, but when I saw a high-voltage mast in front of us, we both started nervously shaking.

  We didn't know whether we were on our territory or German-held territory. I stopped the engine so as not to attract attention. In the early morning we looked around and saw a farm, so we took our pistols out and started approaching. Then we fired our pistols to attract someone's attention, but no one responded. As we came closer we heard a cow moo, and we were frightened even more. We returned to our plane, started the engine, and took off. The weather had improved greatly, and we found our Soviet airdrome. Eight of our planes didn't return that night to their home field. One crew crashed, and one lost its landing gear while landing.

  We slept in the daytime. When something happened to our aircraft, or we weren't allowed to fly for some reason, we were very upset, because we wanted to fly as many missions as possible. So for us it was a terrible thing not to fly. As we became used to the danger, we didn't think about death or the losses. When we were going to the airfield to fly we sang, and when we were going to our quarters after flying we also sang, that is if the night was good and we had no losses. We had a tradition that when some crew didn't return, their plates and silverware were put out for them in the mess even when we knew they had been shot down. Their places were set for some days in hope that they might return, which in fact sometimes happened.

  The men pilots would look for the airdrome of our regiment, and when they saw the linen outside they started doing acrobatics, and they didn't let us sleep in the daytime. When we were returning from a mission, most of our ground troops knew we were women pilots. When I was flying very low I would close the throttle and say, "Hey, brothers how are you?" and they would light their torches. I wanted to encourage them with a voice from the sky.

  We used no illumination in our bombing because dropping flares by parachute lit up everything, and the enemy could see our planes and shoot us down. So no lights, no navigation lights. When a new pilot arrived at the regimental airdrome she had orientation flights with an instructor, and their conversation went like this: "You see this? I cannot see it! Do you see this? I cannot see it! This is a road. I cannot see it!" But after three or four flights she would start to see the small differences in the shadings of the terrain and adjust to seeing at night. When we went on bombing missions we were told only the approximate location of the target, and it was our responsibility to find the target, bomb it, and return to our airdrome. I flew about eighteen hundred hours during the war from 1943 to 1945.

  In December, 1945, I left the army, and in February, I joined the Ministry of Geology as a pilot. I had a crew, and together we flew looking for minerals, oil, and uranium. I was working on the aero magnetic picture of the Karelia territory in the northern Karelski Peninsula near Finland, and the mission was to find iron ore deposits. That year we found a rich deposit of iron ore, and I received an award from that republic. On this expedition I married a pilot, and after this we began flying together. I was commander of that detachment in civil aviation.

  My husband became a navigator of civil aviation, flying with Aeroflot. I flew under the Ministry of Geology, but we flew from the same airdrome.

  I continued to fly until 1951 when I crashed, and my face was scarred and my head was broken. I was flying a Yak-Ii, a big plane, and the propeller broke, the engine stopped, and I could do nothing about it because our altitude was only seventy meters. I warned the crew that we were going down. We crash-landed between the trees on the slope of a hill, and the plane started burning. I had hit my head and was unconscious. The doors jammed, and the crew, the navigator and the radio operator, managed to pull me out through a small window in the door of the cockpit. There were also some secret devices aboard the aircraft, and they took them out along with some food and chocolate. Then the fuel tanks exploded. We were one hundred kilometers from the nearest village.

  When I regained consciousness, I opened my eyes and asked about our plane. I didn't remember anything that happened, and they worried about that. My eyes were all right, and they bandaged my face. We had a map from the plane, and it saved our lives. We walked out of there, and it was a miracle that the other two weren't hurt at all. There is a saying that if you are really lucky, you were born in the placenta. I believed in that saying and asked my mother if I really was born in the placenta, and she said, "Yes, it is true!" Well, we walked about one hundred kilometers. All the villages in that area are located along the rivers and waterways, and we finally came to a village. So my flying career ended that year.

  I have two daughters: one is a doctor, and one is an engineer. My husband crashed and died in 1956. He was the navigator of a Tupolev-I14 on an international flight, a technical flight to the Congo, and while taking off something happened. There was a mist and they couldn't see anything, but you know there is this Russian tradition to rely on a miracle, hoping that something will help us survive when everything is against it. So they would say, 'All right, God will help us," and take off. There were two crews on that aircraft, because it took thirteen hours to fly to the Congo nonstop. When the plane took off it crashed. One crew was in the tail part, which broke in half, and all in the tail lived; all in the front of the plane died. My husband was in the front crew cabin and he died.

  Senior Lieutenant Alexandra Akimova, navigator of the squadron

  I was born in a very common family. My father was a worker, and there were four children in the family besides myself. My father even participated in the First World War, and both he and my uncle were in the Civil War. All my mother's relatives from the old times were determined Communists, and I was born, educated, and brought up in that atmosphere, in the ideas that were proclaimed by Marx and Lenin. My mother was a housewife because there were many children to be looked after, and my father was a schoolteacher. He
went to college to learn to be a teacher right after the revolution. We lived in the Moscow region, not far from the city. Later on he graduated from Moscow University and became principal of the school.

  After finishing school I entered the Moscow Pedagogical Lenin Institute. While I was a first-year student war broke out. Even before the war started we could feel the strain in the atmosphere, and we took an active part in defense work. There was an appeal to all the young students in the colleges to acquire some knowledge or profession that could be of use to the country if war did break out. So I trained as a military nurse at the same time I was attending college.

  After the Germans invaded our country there was an appeal for young girls to be drafted into the female regiments. I was then eighteen, and I decided to join an air regiment. The number of those who could join was very limited, but I had the advantage of being a member of the Komsomol Committee of the institute.

  The navigators in the female regiments were recruited from the colleges or higher educational establishments, and I became a navigator. Our education allowed us to more quickly master the aviation techniques. I had never flown an aircraft, but I had made parachute jumps.

  In May, 1942, our regiment, then designated the 588th Air Regiment, was sent to the front. Ours was the only purely female regiment. I was an officer in the regiment from the very first day to the day of victory.

  In the Kerch area there was a place that was known as Black Death. Over that area my pilot, Katya Peskaryova, and I were shot down. We lost control of the aircraft when it was hit by antiaircraft fire. We had already released our bombs and were then caught in the searchlight. I shot off a flare and the pilot could see the landmarks, but we couldn't find a landing place. I shot off a second flare and we could see, but the ground was very uneven with hills and bomb craters. We landed in that rough area, and the plane veered to one side and nosed into the ground. I had slight facial injuries, but the pilot's leg was caught by the fuel tank. Soviet soldiers from a fighter regiment came to rescue us and took us to a trench where we spent two nights, because it was right on the front line.

  In Poland, in early spring, 1945, the visibility was bad, and most of our crews were grounded. Several of us, however, were allowed to go on a mission. After dropping our bombs we couldn't find our airfield because of the weather, and we landed in a field near a forest. It was sleeting, and the ground was very muddy. Some young people ran up to our plane, and we didn't feel very much at ease because they spoke a foreign language, but fortunately it was Polish. We had to wait till morning to take off, when the ground would be frozen; it was impossible to taxi or take off in the deep mud. We asked the boys to guard the plane, and we were taken into the village.

  In each settlement there is a head man called staros. We stayed at his house all night and negotiated our departure the next day, asking that they help us with the plane. We didn't want to sleep, so we asked the young men guarding the plane to join us in our pilots' rations of vodka, biscuits, and milk. The next morning the ground was frozen, and we took off.

  Another time, in 1944, on the Belorussian front along the Neman River, there was a very brisk advance of our troops. We were stationed near a small settlement with very wide streets, and we made them our runways. Suddenly, at night, there was an order for us to get into our planes and train the machine guns in the direction of the front lines-some of the Germans had broken through. We were to shoot at the Germans from the aircraft on the ground. We stayed in our planes all night and fired at the enemy. The next day at dawn we could plainly see the Germans who had broken through. They were nearby, behind the house where our aircraft were stationed. We were to shoot as much as possible so as not to let the Germans intrude into our territory. There were many small groups of Germans cut off from their army by our fast-moving troops. These were a part of them.

  Again, in Belorussia, we were stationed in one of the villages, and after dinner we went into the woods to pick strawberries. The commander of the front called our unit because one small German group had broken out, and we were to look for them. We took off on a reconnaissance flight and saw smoke coming out of a small woods, and we also saw some German troops. In another small woods there were Soviets. At that point I was scared. Now I could see how very close the fascists were to our regiment. Then we were ordered on a strafing mission. We could see the Germans very clearly, and I fired at them with my machine gun. They scattered-some of them firing at us, some of them running. Aircraft from one of our male regiments were circling with us, and one of their planes was shot down. We did not want to kill, but we were in the regiment to fight and free our motherland.

  When we saw the captured Germans, in spite of the fact that they were the enemy and had committed such atrocities in our country, we couldn't look at them without a throbbing of the heart. They were miserable figures in shabby clothes, absolutely starving, thin and weak, and we experienced a kind of pity even for the enemy. If I had been given a pistol at that moment and a command to fire at them, I could not have done so.

  The very nature of a woman rejects the idea of fighting. A woman is born to give birth to children, to nurture. Flying combat missions is against our nature; only the tragedy of our country made us join the army, to help our country, to help our people.

  Russia, for the whole period of its existence, has been an object of assault. At the cornerstones of our history, women were together with men-they stood beside the men. To be in the army in crucial periods is one thing, but to want to be in the military is not quite natural for a woman.

  I think American women have the idea of romanticism connected with being in the military, and it leads them to want to be a part of it. That is probably because they have not fought a battle in their own country for a hundred years and don't know the nature of war. If the women of the world united, war would never happen!

  Senior Lieutenant Mariya Akilina, pilot

  I was born in 1919 in the town of Ryazan. There were seven children in the family. I don't remember my father; he was drafted into the Red Army right after the revolution and was killed in the Civil War when I was two months old. It was very difficult for my mother to raise us all. She was a cashier at one of the plants and didn't have the means to give us everything we needed, but my aunt was married and childless, so they adopted me.

  When I was in secondary school, three of us were selected to attend a parachute training school to learn to jump. While I was in the parachute school I learned to fly gliders. I was sent on to the parachute center to continue my training, and when I finished I became an instructor. I was in lots of aviation parades where we jumped in groups to show our skill. These parades were held at the Tushino Airdrome near Moscow, and government officials, including Stalin, were usually present. At that time the government was appealing to the younger generation with slogans urging, "To the tractors! To the aircraft! To the collective farms! To the plants!" in order that they master the new fields of industry.

  In the 193os aviation was in its glory; young people wanted to become aviators. They were all striving to fly. While I was a parachute instructor, I attended an air club. It was an obligation of a parachute instructor to be able to fly an aircraft. Then I became a flight instructor. I taught one class of cadets; then I married and had two children.

  My husband was a military pilot flying bombers. When the war broke out, he flew away to the front that same night. The three of us who had gone to parachute jump school together went to the Military Commissariat and asked to join the army. I was accepted because I had by then made 109 air jumps. I was assigned to a special male airforce regiment training landing forces. I joined the flying squadron making reconnaissance flights. These flights were to be made both day and night, but I flew in the day because I had so few night flying hours. I was assigned to fly the Po-2. It was easy to fly, but it was also defenseless.

  On my first actual combat reconnaissance, I was sent to the front at Vitebsk and could clearly see the German advancement. I counted
the number of enemy tanks at seventy-nine. They were so occupied with moving on toward Moscow that they did not even fire a shot at my plane.

  Later I began flying night missions. On these missions I flew parachutists into areas of German occupation for the purpose of intelligence gathering. I also brought supplies in to the partisans. We flew deep into the German rear areas, and at night it was difficult to maintain our orientation. There were no landmarks to help me in the winter, when everything was covered with snow. When I came to the partisans' area they would signal where to drop the supplies or where to land, whichever was required on that mission. Landing was a special problem because the partisans were in the forests, the space was so short to land in, and there was always a threat that the Germans would appear. The partisans would burn two or three fires to show us the landing place. The German antireconnaissance personnel built fires of their own to trick us into landing there, instead of the partisan landing site. It was difficult for us to know if the lighted fires were ours or theirs, and there were cases where our planes landed where the Germans had built fires.

  Such an incident happened to me on the Volkhov front. I was flying behind two aircraft that landed on the false German landing strip and were captured. I landed and was taxiing toward those two planes when I heard a Russian voice shouting, "Fascists! Fascists! Fly away!" I opened the throttle and took off across the runway, climbing up and hitting the tops of the trees. When I came to the partisan runway, I could see a lot of leaves and sticks caught in the landing gear of my plane. While this episode was taking place I had no fear, but when I landed safely at the partisan landing strip I began to shake, and it took a long time to calm down.