A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II

by Anne Noggle

  I came back to the airdrome and there were no planes at all, because the regiment had moved to another airdrome. But there was a Yak-i fighter the mechanics were repairing, and after a plane was repaired, it was required that a pilot test fly it. The commander of the airfield ordered me to test it, because I was the only pilot at the airfield. I had a scheme to escape in that plane and catch up with my male regiment. Nobody knew about it except the mechanic. He threw all my belongings into the cockpit the night before, and in the morning I innocently took off, wagged my wings, and flew away. No one knew that I wasn't going to return.

  In 1943 General Osipenko decided to assemble the female pilots who had been sent to male regiments back into the 586th regiment, and he ordered us to return. We refused to obey his order because we wanted to fly with our male regiment. Then the general cabled us and ordered the regimental commander to put us to a military tribunal. But we had strong support and protection from the commander, who encouraged us not to return, because, he said, we had not deserted the army. To the contrary, we deserted to the front! Nevertheless we came back to the 586th.

  In Romania, when the regiment was released, I married the commander of the air regiment, a major. I know one woman, Yamshikova by name, who flew for thirty years after the war was over. She tested jets.

  NOTE: Mariya Kuznetsova died in 1991.

  Technical and mechanical staff, 586th regiment, May, 1945, in Budapest, Hungary

  Sergeant Nina Yermakova, mechanic of armament

  I was born in Moscow in 1920. I went to secondary school but only completed seven grades. Then I worked in a factory as a tailor's cutter. I was a very good Komsomol member, and when the war broke out the plant received certificates from the Komsomol headquarters allowing some of us to be enrolled in Marina Raskova's regiments, and I was chosen. On October ro, 1941, we left for Engels where we trained. Then I was assigned to the 586th Fighter Regiment. Before the war I hadn't even been close to an aircraft.

  I started and finished the war in the same regiment. We lived as a large family. They called me the best singer in the regiment, and they jokingly named me the USSR Honorable Singer. I even sang solos when our regiment marched. When we were marching the commander of the regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Gridnev, would call out, "Yermakova, sing out!" and I would start the song, and then the rest of the regiment would join me.

  After the war I went to an aviation plant and worked as a mechanic of armament because I didn't want to give up aviation. My work was very hard; it was mostly manual labor. I worked there after the war for fifty years, and now I am a pensioner. Because of that hard labor I've got strong hands. I also have a very strong body. I participated in many athletic events when I was young.

  Senior Sergeant Valentina Kovalyova-Sergeicheva, mechanic of the aircraft

  My father perished in the Civil War of 1919. When my mother found out about my father's death she became very ill. It was the year of my birth, and my father had never seen me. I was carried into the orphanage because my mother couldn't take care of me-she was deathly ill.

  In 1924 my mother's sister married and took me from the orphanage and brought me up. In 1933 I finished the secondary school of seven grades and went to a technical school. When I finished that school I was sent to a factory that produced searchlights for the front. When I went to the plant to work, my cherished dream had already formulated in my mind-I wanted to be a pilot. I decided to join the glider school. When I finished the courses I became an instructor pilot.

  When we came to serve in the regiments they cut our hair very short and issued us male uniforms-we looked boyish. The commander of the army came to our regiment for an inspection and when he saw what we looked like he thought we looked very ugly. When the command was given to about-face we turned but the hoots didn't, because the sizes were much, much larger than our feet; they were men's boots. Afterward he said we should be given smaller boots and skirts. He also allowed us to grow our hair.

  In the regiment I became a mechanic. I was full of grief. I wrote to officials and asked them to let me be a pilot, but they said then they would have to train another to be a mechanic, because we needed mechanics. I had done technical work in the plant, and that is why it was appropriate for me to become a mechanic. We would warm the planes at night every two hours to keep them from freezing, and after warming them we covered them with special blankets as if they were children-babies. We wore padded trousers and padded jackets, and one night when we all rushed to warm the planes, everyone put on all their padded things, but I managed to only put on my padded jacket. When I stretched up I realized I was dressed only in underpants, and behind me was a man. He didn't know what to do, whether to look at me or do his job. I realized what was happening and jumped over the truck so as not to embarrass the man.

  Galina Butuzova (left) and Valentina Kovalyova-Sergeicheva, 586th regiment

  I was very disciplined and I liked order. I was never arrested during the war, but the people who provided for the aircraft were arrested routinely. In our dugout we had a pichka, a Russian fireplace, a stove. Each crew lived together in one dugout. When it rained we always knew it because the water came in. We would ask the girl next to the entrance how much water had flowed into the dugout, and she would put her hand into the water and say, "No, no, not much yet, sleep quietly, not much yet!" And then when we came to realize that there was so much water in the trench that everything was floating, we would jump up and go out in our underwear to ask the men on the truck with a pumping machine to come and pump out the water so we could go back to sleep.

  The first house we stayed in was a house of wood with very thin boards, and the temperature was as low as forty degrees below zero centigrade, and it was dangerous to live in under those cold conditions. We had lower and upper bunks, and on entering the house you could see two containers of water brought into our quarters by the logistics battalion to use for washing ourselves. We washed immediately and very quickly, because the water might freeze before we finished. Those of us living together tidied and cleaned the room daily; one day one girl and the next day another. When we washed the floor, it was so unbearably cold outside that the floor dried only by the fireplace, and the rest of the room was slippery-covered with ice. We had a girl with us who slept with her head to the east, and she always wore a cap on her head at night because it was so cold, and every morning she awoke and the cap on her head was glued to the wall-frozen to the wall. We dried our clothes over the fireplace, hanging them on strings. The heat from the fireplace was so hot that sometimes our clothing burned.

  We each were provided with a rucksack; a piece of soap; men's underwear and our padded uniforms, jacket and pants; a blanket; a mattress cover; and a pillow. The pilots were provided for in the same way. Except for our initial training when we were all together, we were not billeted with the officers and pilots. One of our pilots kept a little bit of perfume in the cockpit, and she was punished for that. It was a violation of rules; not even a lipstick in the cockpit.

  The first pilot of my aircraft, Irina Olkova, demanded order in our work from beginning to end, and before she got into the cockpit, she personally examined the aircraft. Only after that did she get into the plane. We clashed because she said something went wrong with the aircraft during the flight, and it was my fault that it did not work properly. I invited an engineer to examine the engine and aircraft, and he did. He then declared that it was in perfect order. We had different personalities that didn't work well together, and this pilot had a sort of male character, you know. Then reinforcements came-new pilots-and I was assigned to one of the young pilots, Tamara Voronova, and after the war she married and had four children. I was her mechanic until the end of the war and we became great friends, and to this day we visit each other.

  For the last seventy years of this socialist existence we have been used to saying no words about anything at all, to refrain: that is why now we look upon this chance with you as an opportunity to relate our stories.


  NOTE: Yekaterina Polunina, archivist for the regiment, was present and asked to add something to Valentina's story, saying that Valentina would not tell it about herself.

  "Valentina comes from a very famous and outstanding family, the Popkov family, that was repressed during the Stalin period. Her father perished during the Civil War, and the family, the Popkovs, brought her up. After the war it turned into a very tragic situation. Her girlfriends, with whom she had been serving in the army for all those years, couldn't even phone her. All her telephone conversations were monitored. She was pursued by the government because her uncle was repressed during this period and was imprisoned and pronounced to be 'the people's enemy,' and he was rehabilitated only this year (1990]. "Valentina was at the front, which is why she was not imprisoned. All of her family and relatives were imprisoned at that time. She was the only one who survived outside prison. She was dismissed from the plant where she had worked before the war-just because she was alive! She was brought up in the 'family of the enemy,' as they called it, and for that reason she was isolated, totally isolated, from all of her friends. Each of us was warned by the KGB after the war that we could never see her or phone her because she came from a family of an imprisoned enemy of the country, and only one girlfriend called her. Later on they threatened to imprison her friend's husband just because she had been phoning Valentina. She suffered very much.

  "Now she is responsible for the work of the regimental council. She writes to everyone in the regiment, she cries for them, she is very sorry for everybody else-but not herself. Life made her keep silent."

  Lieutenant Valentina Petrochenkova-Neminushaya, pilot

  I was born in a small village near Smolensk, and when I was five years old my family moved to Moscow. While I was in school I heard that some of our women pilots, Grizodubova, Osipenko, and Raskova, made a nonstop flight to the Far East. All the country greeted these brave women in Moscow. After this I decided to become a pilot. I was then under sixteen, and when I went to the aero club I was not allowed to join because of my age. I went to the classes anyway, even though I was not listed as a student. In the spring, when the cadet pilots started flying, I was not allowed to fly. I went with my father to the militia station and asked an officer to give me a new birth certificate with my birth listed as eight months earlier, and he did it! That is the way I started flying.

  When I finished the course at the aero club I was not allowed to study at the flying school because I was under eighteen. So I joined the glider school. In the summer of 1940 I took part in a glider allunion competition, and I became a Champion of the Soviet Union by flying seven and one-half hours, maneuvering, looking for the clouds and updrafts, and finally arriving at the destination. Because of that, I was sent to the glider school as an instructor.

  When war broke out I was appointed as an instructor in the Po-2. In 1942 Stalin signed an order that we must prepare forces who would be delivered behind the lines by parachute. Many of my girlfriends from glider school wrote to me from the front that they flew fighter aircraft, and I envied them. I wrote many letters to my command asking to he sent to the front, but I was told I was needed there to train landing-force parachutists. At Kazan city there was a parachute training center, and I was awarded the title of parachutist in February, 1942. We jumped from an altitude of 80o meters, and it was so freezing cold that we hid our hands in the spare parachute and couldn't control our landings. The airfield was icy, and it was so windy that when we landed, the parachute remained full of air. We were sliding away across the icy field with the wind, and only the instructors or hushes could stop us! I was told that when I had prepared sixty men for this airdrop operation they would let me go to the front.

  So I was given an airplane, a mechanic, and thirty parachutes. It was my mission to teach those men. There was one incident when one of the men was to jump, and he was frightened and refused to leave the aircraft. Then he caught the rudder cable in his hand, the plane started descending, and I could not control it. He held on tightly, and I tried to calm him down, begged him to release the cable, patted him on the head, even kissed him, and then I beat his hand with the rope, but he held on. I pulled him hack into the cockpit with his legs up in the air and finally landed the plane. After this event the man was released from parachute duty.

  I finished the training of parachutists and went to Moscow, where they wanted me to fly the PO-2 with the 588th regiment, but I refused and said I only wanted to fly fighters. I was sent to the training center for air defense pilots, and when I reported to the commander, I said that I wished to train in fighters. He said, "No! No women!" and I said to him, "I will go nowhere, I will fly fighters," and I sat in the chair. 'All right, you can sit here!" he said, and turned and left the room. I spent all the night in his office, and when he returned in early morning I was still there, sitting on the chair. I said that I would sit there and go nowhere, and he said that there were two hundred men in the center and they lived in the dugout, and where should he put me? Finally they took some plywood and made a small cabin for me in the corner of the dugout.

  It was very difficult for me when the flying started. The cadets had about thirty-five flying hours when they came there, and I had about four hundred, and my instructor said there was no use training me like those men because I could fly. Because of my flying hours I was not allowed to fly but sent to duty in the kitchen and other services. The commander said that when the first man could fly the fighter aircraft then I would he the second one.

  When flights in the fighter started, all the pilots and mechanics were near the runway. When it was my turn I started taking off, and it looked like a zigzag because my legs were trembling with nervousness, but when I was up and flying everything went well, and I was crying, "Hurrah!" in the cockpit. It was a small plywood aircraft, the main fighter before the war. If a bullet hit the plane it would catch on fire, and a lot of pilots died in it because of that. I made three flights that day and three perfect landings. I reported to the commander, and he told the men they should follow my example and fly as I did. Then I flew the Yak-7 and -9.

  We were trained to dogfight in the air, and I was the last of the pilots to complete this training for combat. It was the end of November and it was snowing. We had a dogfight, and as we approached the runway the snow started. The instructor landed and then it was my turn, and I saw a wall of snow with no ground visible. The commander at the field radioed to me: please land your aircraft. We had a wind tee pointing down the runway we should use, but I couldn't see it because both it and the snow were white. So I asked them to please put a car at the beginning of the runway for me to see, and I made two approaches and finally got the plane down, and the commander said I did perfectly. That was my last training flight.

  In December, 1943, I arrived at the 586th Fighter Regiment in Kiev. Kiev had been liberated in November, and there was a lot of combat in that area. So I made my first combat flight in December, 1943, to guard the railroad bridge crossing the Dnieper River. Step by step we approached our own borders, and then in Budapest we celebrated victory day.

  I was flying an older Yak on a training mission near Budapest when I lost flying speed doing an Immelmann maneuver. It fell into a spin and the wings began shaking, and finally I pulled it out. I was so low and the countryside so hilly that the people on the ground saw what was happening and turned away, because they thought I was going to crash. During that time my whole life flew before my eyes, and I pulled out so low that the aircraft radiator touched the ground, and it bent the blades of the propeller! I landed, taxied, stopped the engine, took off my parachute and went to my quarters pale as death, opened the door, and fell down unconscious. The doctor came to see me, and it was three days before I made my next flight.

  I was eager to fly more, but my brother was killed in the war, and when the war ended my mother asked me to come home and not to fly any longer.

  In 1946 I married a pilot I met during the war, and he said, "You choose-avia
tion or me." So I stopped flying. My husband was a test pilot, and we moved many times; he died in 1981. After the war I was the senior test technician at the parachute center. I worked at our space training center, and when there was a program for women to fly in space, I trained them to use parachutes. During the war I flew 250 combat hours, and I left the army in November, 1945.

  (Officer, rank not stated) Nina Slovokhotova, deputy regimental navigator

  I am a professor and doctor of science and chemistry doing research in radiation physics and polymeric chemistry. I graduated from Moscow University before the war, and I was a postgraduate student in chemistry when the war started. I was invited by Raskova to be chief of chemical service, but there was no chemical warfare.

  In 1943 1 was trained as navigator for the regiment. I was then twenty-four. I planned the routes for the pilots, showed them how to escape the anti-aircraft fire, and trained pilots in navigation, but my major responsibility was to work with the radar location station. It was the first model of our radar, and I watched enemy aircraft on the screen and directed our planes to intercept. The area of regimental responsibility for air defense was divided into squares, and I was a guidance officer. I was one of the first radar navigation officers in our country.

  When we moved to a new area I would fly with the regimental commander and mark the maps of the area with landmarks for the pilots. I was also responsible for ground information. We had communication with ground forces, a net of air surveillance. As an inspector I would go to the posts of air surveillance centers, where the girls working there were supposed to know the difference between Soviet and German planes.

  The first radars were delivered in 1942, but it wasn't until 1943 that a net was formed and we knew how to maintain it. Because pilots flew missions for many hours both day and night when the situation was very intense, we had no time to sleep for four or five days at a time. The radar was set up far from the runways and airdrome, usually three to five kilometers, and it was camouflaged so we were not bombed. We lived underground in dugouts, but later we lived in houses. Early in the war the fighter pilots had only radio receivers, no transmitters, in their aircraft. In 1943, our planes were equipped with two-way radios. There was one episode when a woman pilot sighted an enemy aircraft, and then he dove into the clouds, and the girl burst out crying on the radio, "He escaped, he has escaped!" I would call to the artillery and ask them the altitude of the enemy aircraft, and there was close cooperation between us. The pilots usually thanked me for identifying the fascist planes in the air so they could attack, but sometimes the pilots reproached me for not finding any. After the war, when I was defending my doctoral dissertation, one of the women who had been a famous pilot during the war, Olga Yamshikova, came to the restaurant where we were celebrating and said, "I don't know what kind of chemist she is, I don't care, but she was a very perfect guidance officer during the war!" When the pilots landed after a mission they reported, and I was to write a combat message. They also related the episodes of dogfights to be forwarded. One day our pilots Tamara Pamyatnykh and Raisa Surnachevskaya were in the air, and I informed them that in a certain area there were some German aircraft. They flew there and saw forty-three German bombers flying toward the railroad station they were guarding near Kursk, and the girls attacked the leading aircraft, split the formation, and shot down four planes. The Germans turned back, never bombing the station. It was an important target for the fascists, because a massive concentration of Soviet troops and ammunition had been drawn to that sector to prepare for the Kursk Bulge battle. A British war correspondent saw this dogfight and described it in his press release. The Queen of England made her husband, the King, give each of these girls a gold wristwatch. Tamara Pamyatnykh is a remarkable woman.