A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II

by Anne Noggle

  On July 24, 1944, when I was on a combat mission, I received a heavy wound in my belly from a fascist shell. We were assigned to bomb a certain target, and the weather was bad, with low clouds. When we made our first try we did not manage to bomb the target, because it was completely covered with clouds. We went back to our airfield and then returned and made a second pass over the target. The enemy artillery was ready for us: they fired at us so much that many planes were set on fire, but there were no planes shot down. My plane was not set on fire, but I was shot and severely wounded. I realized I was wounded, but I didn't feel extreme pain. I told my navigator, who was also named Yelena, that I was wounded and asked what I should do. The navigator said: "We must go on because there is no place to land. We will all crash if we don't go on to a field where we can land!"

  We lagged behind our unit, because it was difficult for me to continue flying the aircraft. Fortunately we found the airfield of a fighter regiment, and I managed to land. But very many times while in the air I fainted, and my navigator gave me liquid ammonia to inhale so I would regain consciousness. When I finally landed the plane, I lost consciousness completely. I was carried to the military field hospital but didn't know anything until I awakened surrounded by three thousand wounded. They operated on me, and it turned out to be very serious, as are all wounds in the belly. The girls from the regiment visited me there when they could. I had eleven holes in my rectum. I was transferred to the Moscow Military Hospital, where I stayed for two months, and then returned to my regiment.

  I returned and flew combat, even though I was not considered fit to fly. I couldn't stand not to fly, so I finished the war with my comradesin-arms. I also participated in the victory parade in Red Square. I stayed in the army until 1949•

  After the war I also flew the Tu-2. I was a lieutenant. We have three lieutenant ranks: junior lieutenant, lieutenant, and senior lieutenant. When the war ended and our regiment was released, I joined a male regiment. While I was in the regiment I married a pilot, got pregnant, and retired in 1949.

  Sergeant Nataliya mechanic of armament

  I was born in 1921 in the town of Penza, 6oo kilometers from Moscow toward the Volga River. My father was a teacher in a higher school, always beyond secondary school. My family moved to Moscow when I was a child. I entered teachers' college there, and I also started in a parachute school. But the year before the war, the government stopped women from engaging in any kind of military sport that could endanger their lives, so I wasn't allowed to finish.

  When the war started I heard about the women's air regiments, and my girlfriend and I went where they were interviewing for the three hundred positions in the regiments. There were thousands of girls in line waiting to apply. I was accepted into the 125th Guards Bomber Regiment as a mechanic of armament. We trained from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon and then from six to nine in the evening. When we finished our training, we trained the next group of mechanics.

  At the front, one of our difficult jobs was cleaning the machine guns. The guns became very dirty inside, choked with smoke and burned particles. We had to lift them; they weighed sixteen kilograms and were two meters long. We were all so small and thin-what was Raskova thinking about when she chose small girls for such jobs? In the winter, especially, we had to carry the machine guns through the snowdrifts on our shoulders to the dugout to clean them, because it was too cold to properly clean them outside. Everything to do with ammunition was bulky and heavy.

  We were given only forty-five minutes to rearm the aircraft after a mission and often worked almost beyond our physical capacity. Soon we devised methods for rearming that were not in our manuals but were necessary in order for us to finish on time. When we loaded the bombs we usually had six girls to carry and attach them to the aircraft.

  My first aircrew perished on a mission. I had a very emotional feeling about their deaths. I wondered if I had in some way failed them; perhaps I had not charged the machine guns properly or erred in some duty I was to perform. I lived with that uneasy feeling until the tail-gunner, who had survived, wrote to me from the hospital. He told me that the pilot and navigator had been killed by one shell and that the aircraft and guns were operating properly. It was chance, not something I had done improperly, that had caused their deaths.

  Lieutenant Galina Brok-Beltsova, navigator

  I was born in 1925 in Moscow, and I finished secondary school there. I was very sports-minded. When the war broke out the government sent out an appeal to the strong, mighty people to join aviation. The boys and girls were tested in a centrifuge and drafted into aviation. We were then trained to be gunners or navigators. Without any boasting I can say we were all mighty, healthy, robust, and patriotic young people. I trained in 1941 and 1942 in a military school. Then I was drafted into the Emergency Aviation Regiment, became a navigator in the Pe-2 dive bomber, and was sent to the front as a replacement. My pilot was Antonina BondarevaSpitsina. I flew thirty-six missions during the war.

  Galina Brok-Beltsova, 125th regiment

  When I was sent to the 125th regiment, I was struck by the skill and competency of the personnel and inspired by being there with a group of young girls whose uniforms were covered with medals and orders. The pilots and navigators were so confident and well-trained, and it was all because of Marina Raskova: she was their ideal, their hero. We all need an ideal, an example to follow. It makes you develop your own energy. The "old ladies," or "aged," as we called the crews that had been with the regiment since the beginning (even though they were only twenty-three or so), taught us not to be afraid but to face the reality and the hardships with courage and to overcome. We learned not to lose our composure but to have the stamina and agility to survive.

  On one mission we took off and were flying toward the target, and one of our engines quit. We began lagging behind the formation. A dive bomber never flies to a target alone: it always flies with a squadron, and that squadron is protected by fighter aircraft. If your plane is falling behind the squadron, you are to return to your airdrome. Otherwise the enemy fighters will shoot you down. And now we were alone without fighter cover. The bombs were affixed to the aircraft, and we had no emergency area to drop the bombs, which meant we might be dropping them on our own troops. But we couldn't land with the bombs, either.

  We knew they would explode when we landed, because these were not Soviet bombs but captured German bombs. The peculiarity of the German bombs was that they had no mechanism on them to prevent them from exploding if you landed with them still attached to the aircraft, as ours did. So there was no way out but to continue on to the target.

  The German antiaircraft guns filled the air around the squadron, which was by then way ahead of us, but our lone aircraft didn't attract their attention at all. We dropped the bombs and turned to fly home. Then we were attacked by two German fighters coming in from different directions. We all did our best with our machine guns, but it was quite useless; the tracer bullets we were firing did not even reach the fascist aircraft. They attacked us from positions from which we couldn't return fire. This was a section between the tail and the wings that could not be covered.

  We could see their faces: they were smiling at us and made another circle with their guns firing and terrible smiles on their faces. Antonina thrust the plane abruptly to the right and to the left, weaving and jumping in the air. All of a sudden we heard nothing. Then we saw that the Soviet fighters had come back to help us after they finished escorting the formation back to our airfield. And so the German fighters vanished. No one believed that we would ever return from that mission.

  Another time, in east Prussia, they decided that we could carry more bombs if we carried less fuel. As it turned out, we were completely overloaded. A Pe-2 from a male regiment took off just before us, crashed into a hangar, and exploded, not being able to clear the hangar. We were next in line to take off. You have to forbid yourself from thinking that your plane will end up the same way. You concentrate on a succes
sful mission. On takeoff, our pilot held the aircraft on the ground until it had adequate speed, and when it lifted off, it was apparent that we were extremely overloaded. We felt it dragging us back to earth. But we made it; our aircraft cleared the hangar, and we did have a successful mission. It was a victory-not over the German troops but over ourselves. You fight your own cowardliness.

  While I was awaiting assignment to the front I had met a male pilot, and we became engaged. After I went to the regiment at the front I received a letter from him every single day. The whole of my squadron read them, because very few of the other girls received letters. They used to say to me, "Galina, it's true love." Later I married him, and the whole squadron was present at our wedding. He came to our regiment to marry me, and it was the happiest episode of my life.

  Once we had to land with the bombs still attached to our plane. While we were being fired upon by antiaircraft guns as we approached the target, our plane and another in our squadron collided in the air. Our aircraft became partially uncontrollable. Our pilot made a decision to return to the emergency airfield, a fighter base, to land. As we maneuvered to approach for a landing all the fighters were turning away, because everyone knew we were carrying unexploded bombs. The airfield was very small, and we couldn't brake because it could cause the plane to go on its nose. We landed, and we continued to roll and roll and ran out of smooth runway. There were trenches there, and we nosed into a trench, but it was in sand. The bombs stuck into the sand, and that stopped them from exploding.

  There were cases during the war when some Soviet planes did drop bombs on our troops when they had to turn back. That was a very good lesson: for the rest of my life, I swore that if I took up something and was determined to do it, I must do it until the very end. This part of my character led me for all of my life up to the present moment. Only when I fulfill the mission do I feel content.

  Now I am a history lecturer in twentieth-century history. And I specialize in the Second World War-The Great Patriotic War. I have a doctor's degree, and I am the head of the History Department at the Moscow Engineering Institute. I am interested in all the changes that have gone on and are going on in the world; I am not old-fashioned. I want to be up-to-date and in a new wave, so to speak. As SaintExupery said, nothing can be valued as highly as man-to-man relationships and understanding.

  Major Marta Meriuts, chief of regimental intercommunications

  When I was young I worked in a drugstore, and my dream was to become a pharmacist. Then, in 1929, there was a call from the party and the government for twenty women to be admitted to military colleges to test a woman's ability to survive as cadets. At the time I was told about this opportunity I didn't know what I would do in a military college. At first I thought no, but then I applied and was admitted to the College of Communications-military engineering communications. I had never even seen a soldier at that time and had no idea what I was getting into!

  So I became a military cadet. We had to wear a man's uniform: very large, with heavy boots, pants, and jackets. I had long braids down to my knees, and I received an order to cut my braids because we had to look like the male cadets. We girls went to the hairdresser, and he said that he couldn't cut off such gorgeous braids; his hands wouldn't perform such a sacrilege. He gave us scissors and told us to cut off our braids ourselves; only then he would he give us a man's haircut. We had to wear men's underwear and use the same bathing facilities as the men, but at separate times.

  All these things were not for a girl's soul. I was eighteen then; we were young, and the male underwear was the worst. After some time they made female uniforms and special underwear for us, and life seemed better. But it was very difficult to study and be with the male cadets, for we were required to take thirty-kilometer marches with all ammunition. When we came to a certain location, we had to set up and establish communication at an exact time. The male cadets didn't even think of us as women. There were ten of us girls in that institute with about a thousand male cadets!

  In 1933 I graduated and was sent to the field as a lieutenant. There I met my husband, who was also in the military, and we married and had two children. We were stationed together, assigned to different regiments but on the same base in the Kiev region, when the war began.

  In 1941, when the war broke out, I was thirty-two years old and held the rank of senior lieutenant. By then I had been in the armed forces for some time. On the eve of the war I was serving on the staff of a Kiev army regiment. I had taken my eldest son to the Crimean coast-we have such camps for children to have a summer holidayand had returned to Kiev. I was on duty when the war began.

  On August r, 1941, I was given an order from the commander of the southwestern airforce group to communicate with an aircraft flying over us. We were to tell the pilot, carrying an army commander, to land at our base. I went to the airfield communications and asked the signal engineer to connect me with that plane. The engineer told me the radio system was not operational, and the only possibility of communicating with that aircraft was for me to get into a plane, take off, fly to the proper altitude, and contact the plane air-to-air. So I got into an aircraft, and the pilot prepared for takeoff. At that moment the German dive bombers bombed the airfield and hit our plane. I was seriously wounded in the head. At that time I was communications officer of the regiment. Our aircraft was among many more destroyed in that raid, and a lot of people were killed on the airfield.

  After I was wounded I was in hospital for three months. When I recovered I was assigned to Raskova's regiments and became chief of intercommunications for the three regiments. Later I went in that capacity with the 587th Bomber Regiment. I was not allowed to fly after the head wound, and I had lost the sight of my right eye completely. I told this to Raskova, because when we went into combat I was supposed to fly with the regimental commander. Raskova said not to worry, one of my deputies could fly with her. I had to leave my two sons, one five years old and the other three. The children were given to the orphanage when both my husband and I were drafted to the front.

  In our regiment there were some men in maintenance. There were very young girls who wanted to be liked by them, and they made friends and made love. There was one girl who had been a hairdresser before the war. Once they asked her to curl a girl's hair, and she put a metal rod into the oven and heated it. Its real purpose was to clean the guns, and she used it to curl her hair. The temperature was very high, and it burned her hair; she had wanted so to look nice!

  The girls in my ground communications unit worked well in a very difficult job. We had to reorient for new targets whenever we moved. We would be told, for example, that spot one should be bombed, or spot two, and so forth. Later into the flight, we would be told by the ground forces to tell our aircraft that a different target must be bombed, because the troops would have advanced.

  Not many women in the regiment had children, and they knew I had to leave my children in the orphanage. When I thought of them, I sobbed bitterly. Once the army commander came to our regiment and learned that my children were in the orphanage, and he let me fly to the orphanage for one hour. Everyone in the regiment gave me small presents for the children, and I went to visit them with a rucksack full of chocolate bars, sweets, and biscuits.

  All of us in the regiment were friends and liked each other, and we helped in any way possible. We all had such strong beliefs that our first and foremost task was to liberate the country. And none of us ever fell ill during our work period. Mentally we were overstrained, but physically nobody gave in. Our regiment was highly valued by the commanding staff of the army of the front, and we were awarded, on the banner of our regiment, two military orders. The first was Kutuzov, named for the commander of the army in the First Patriotic War in 1812, a national hero. The second was Suvorov, also a great Russian commander, who climbed over the Alps with the army.

  Once, after the war, there was a reception in the Kremlin, and the military commanders of all fronts and armies were present. The girls
from the regiment were invited to that reunion. The commander of the front, under whom we fought during the war, asked why we had been asked to this reception and who we were. We had to explain that we were the pilots and the mechanics of the 125th regiment. He had thought it to be a male regiment, and it was a surprise to him to learn about us after the war. Even now very few men can believe that women crews could fly the dive bomber.

  I finished the war in the rank of major, and I retired from the military in 1956 as a lieutenant-colonel.

  Senior Lieutenant Galina Chapligina-Nikitina, liaison pilot, flight commander

  I was in sixth grade when an amphibious plane landed in the lake and then took off from the land. That was when the idea of flying came to my heart. I was among the best Pioneers; that is what we called this group who were like American Scouts. Three of us were allowed to go up in the plane. I remember the pilot, but I don't know what happened to him, because at that time our people disappeared in a very strange manner.

  I was born in Leningrad in 1920, and when I was eight months old I lost my parents. I spent my childhood in boardinghouses. Finally I found myself in my mother's sister's family, and I called her mother. When I was finishing high school some pilots came to our school and asked, "Who wants to fly?" Many children raised their hands, of which three were girls, and I was one of them. I was about eighteen, and after school I went to the aviation club to study theory of flight. I had six lessons at school and four or five hours at the club, and I didn't have the time to study at both places. I went to a girlfriend, told her of my difficult situation, and asked her advice. My girlfriend told me that in Bataisk city there was a flying school with a female squadron, and I decided to enroll.