Red Star Airacobra

by Evgeniy Mariinskiy

  “Well, did you get to know a German? Or get a greeting from an old acquaintance?” Ippolitov asked me, referring to the shell-hole I’d brought back after one of my first sorties over the Dniepr.

  “No, he simply wanted to test his plane for durability. To find out how many shell hits it can stand”, Lusto objected.

  “Well now, did he find out?”

  I knew that it would be better to keep silent on such occasions. I myself had taken part in this kind of bantering. Objecting would always just egg the flyers on. Besides, I was freezing in my sweat-soaked outfit and wanted to get away into the dug-out closer to the fireplace. The kindly teasing would likely have continued, but I was saved by Arkhipenko.

  “Enough!” He interrupted the bantering. “Get ready, we’re going to take off soon. You”, he turned to me, “are not going. Chugunov will be flying. “Where is he?” Chugunov was present neither on the parking bay nor in the dug-out… Volkov came up to me in the evening.

  “Comrade Commander, do Messers have the same machine guns as Cobras?

  “Of course not! What’s the problem?”

  “An armour-piercing bullet from our large calibre machine-gun got stuck between the brake discs of the left wheel and jammed it fast.” Volkov showed me a bullet from a Colt-Browning machine-gun commonly installed on Airacobras. Korolev was nearby.

  “It’s clear then! Bobrov shot at the Messer but hit you! That’s why the damage is so bad. And I wondered where did a Messer get such powerful guns from? But don’t say a word or Bobrov will eat you up unsalted. You know how conceited he is! And who’s going to admit he shot down one of his own instead of an enemy?”

  No one found out about it in our Regiment. Only the technicians and mechanics giggled maliciously when they saw another star drawn on the Regimental Commander’s plane. A star meant an aerial ‘victory’ in the Soviet Air Force…

  9

  What can you do alone?

  By evening I had a headache. But from habit I still sat closer to a ‘Katyusha’, a lamp made from an empty cannon shell, with a book, and began to read. Ippolitov came up, sat down next to me and asked, “Why do you read so much? Aren’t you sick of it yet? They nearly killed you today. What would you need these books for then? There are no universities up there, so you won’t study any more.” I had been sent to the Air Force from the first year of a geological college. I didn’t want to answer but noticed that the other flyers were listening in.

  “Oh, you! Your head is like a cauldron but there’s not a spoonful of sense in it!” I replied with a Ukrainian proverb. ‘I’m not going to die. I’m going to live a while yet.’

  “You seriously think you’ll stay alive?” Ivan was surprised.

  I even stood up from surprise. “Sure… And if they kill me, so what?”

  “What’s the point of stuffing your head?”

  “Will a corpse live better with an empty head?”

  “You’re wasting your time…”

  “M-m… Your logic’s ironclad. Even cobbled. Following your lines, there’s no point reading or studying. Even without a war, you’ll still die one day.”

  “Well, when there’s no war people don’t get killed every day. And here you don’t know if you’ll still be alive or not tomorrow.”

  “It depends on you, if you stay alive or not tomorrow. Keep your eyes open, make your manoeuvres right, take decisions quickly.”

  Ippolitov didn’t let me develop my idea.

  “You are a great talker, watch out, manoeuvre, make a decision! And you yourself nearly went into a crate. Why didn’t you keep your eyes open?”

  “Sometimes there’s no time to think about yourself. Many guys have sacrificed themselves. Look, Bukchin covered Gulayev with his plane. There are other heroes. Matrosov, the Soviet soldier who blocked the embrasure of a German pillbox with his body. Gastello, the Soviet airman who drove his shot-up bomber into an enemy transport column, and died. Talalikhin, the Soviet fighter pilot who accomplished the first night ramming of a German bomber over Moscow. One shouldn’t think only of oneself.”

  “Who will think about you if not yourself?” Ippolitov used to work as a flying instructor and tell cadets that one should rely only on oneself. “No nanny will fly with you. You yourselves have to be excellent flyers”, he used to tell them. Eventually he had decided it for himself too. And he had come across the necessity of coordination and mutual help only at the front. He had surely known about it before, but theoretically. He had to fly relatively rarely, and it had not been that simple to apply his theory in practice. People say that a habit is your second nature. And his habit of flying alone had been making itself felt at every step.

  I eventually became flustered, but answered Ippolitov’s question.

  “Everybody. The leader, other flyers, everyone who takes part in combat.”

  “They thought a lot about you today, didn’t they?”

  “But Bobrov shot down the Schmitt on his tail”, Victor remarked. “Otherwise Zhen’ka would have been finished.”

  “That’s not the point.” I stood up, came up to the fire-place and went on, “From what you’re saying it follows that you’ll get killed anyway, no need to think about anything, to study, to read. So you live this life. You don’t want to wash your face. You go to the mess-room, to the aerodrome, you fly when you’re taken along, drink your one hundred grams at night and you’re happy. Why not? You’ve survived another day!”

  “Wow, don’t say that!” Ippolitov took offence, but I went on.

  “Recently they showed us a newsreel. Leningrad, the blockade, but schools still work, children learn. They’re shelled by artillery, bombed, they’re starving, but they study. I read once in a paper, during the hardest times, the worst famine, they organised a night-school at their plant. The workers wanted to study. They couldn’t go home from work for they had no strength for it, people starved to death in the streets, but they studied. And it was harder than for us here.”

  I fell silent for a bit, remembering something, searched in my pockets and began to talk again.

  “What can I say about it? I’ve got a letter from home. If you want, listen. They don’t live too well there. They live a lousy life but work and study.” I began to read the letter and pictures of the life of my mother and brothers grew in front of my eyes.

  The whole family is at the table in a small rickety hut. Once numerous, five sons, now it consists only of three people. My mother and two younger brothers, Pavel and Dima, are at the table. The oldest one, if he’s still alive, is somewhere on the occupied territory near Odessa, where all of them used to live before. Two others used to be college students. But before the war they were drafted to the army, and are now in the Air Force, one as a navigator in the Bomber Command and the other one, me, as a fighter pilot. They used to write home that they were far away from the front in reserve regiments. Both of them have written only recently that they are now at the front. But our mother from something known only to mothers, money orders, some words in their letters, had worked out long before that they were in combat. What’s going to happen to them? There’s such a war on. She herself fought in the Civil War. It was much simpler. Nowadays, every mail to the village brings death notices.

  The two youngest sons are in front of her at the table. They are not big enough to be in combat, but big enough to work on industrial machines. Pavel is a lathe operator at a plant. Life’s not easy for him, but he studies at night as well. Dima is in a trade school. It would be good to feed them up, they’re so skinny you can see through them. The only provisions on the table are a small piece of half-chaff bread, and several candies swapped in a workers’ store for wild berries and mushrooms. Luckily the forest helps. Mushrooms and berries grow as well as if there were no war. The boys bring fish from time to time, if they have a chance to get away to fish on the Vyatka or the Shirokiy Arkul. Sad to say, they have no leisure time. All the adults have gone to war and only old people, women and children are on the machines. A
nd meeting the production plan is a must.

  My mother has shared out the bread and candies, puts aside a smaller bit for herself, pours each of the children a mug of boiled water, brewed with roasted carrot instead of tea. “Eat.” Pavel looks at the table, at the pieces of bread, swallows saliva and says, “Why have you left so little for yourself?” “It’ll be enough for me… I’m at home and you have to work.”

  “M-m…” Dima drawls. “What are we going to do without you if you die of hunger?”

  All three begin to eat up their over-modest meal. Silence lasts for some time. Then Pavel remembers something apparently funny, smiles and asks Mother, “Mum, why not take a stick to make us eat better? Remember how you used to make us eat before, in Ananievo?”

  “I’ll take a stick now to make you stop eating!”

  And here we are at the last line. The letter has been read. I folded the paper carefully and put it into a pocket of my uniform…

  “And what’s so unusual about that? All the people live poorly now. All for the front, all for victory, the main slogan in the USSR, during the war.” Ippolitov responded after a short silence.

  “What do you mean ‘unusual’? The boys are hungry all the time, but they study, they work, for the victory, for you. They regard all of us combatants as heroes. Going to get killed? Do heroes think about death?”

  “You’re a hero, are you?” Ippolitov muttered.

  “Well, no, but I think about life not death. If Gulayev thought about death he wouldn’t have shot down thirty-two planes. And Kozhedub? Did you see as he chopped up a Heinkel over the aerodrome?” “They were five minutes late coming over”, Bourgonov pointed out.

  Ippolitov couldn’t object with examples from the regimental life. Nevertheless, he tried to argue about life in the rear. “They study! I know how they study. They are made to do that, and that’s why they study. At flying school they taught us great circles, loxodromics. Do we need them a lot now?” The flyers were on my side in this argument. They couldn’t by nature accept Ippolitov’s gloomy ‘philosophy’. But now the argument had taken on a fundamental character, i.e. did a man need to know that which he wouldn’t need today, immediately?

  Trutnev was the first to get involved. He was usually silent but this time he couldn’t restrain himself. “You don’t need great circles any more, do you? What do you need then? To know how to hold the stick? But you’ve held it longer than any of us. So, that’s it? You don’t need anything else?” Korolev supported Trutnev. “Drivers learn engine theory, the motorcar. Mechanics learn aerodynamics although they don’t fly. But you are a flyer!”

  “He’s like Mitrofanushka, the man from a Russian play who didn’t want to study geography.” Lusto smiled. “The cab driver will get him there”, he said. “Maybe they are made to work. There’s a war on. But to make them study?” Ippolitov retreated under this pressure and even seemingly became a bit shorter. “Now, now, I was just…” He tried to make a joke of it, as he hadn’t expected that all the flyers would turn against him. “Who does make them?” I responded to Lusto instead of Ippolitov. “They study for themselves. And they read what is studied in senior classes. Listen to another letter, from my brother Pavel.”

  Recently, he wrote, “I was working on a machine and got so tired that I began to fall asleep. My eyes were nearly shut, the part was rotating on the machine, everything was running together. I was just about to fall asleep and get into the machine instead of a billet. I thought I would collapse. And suddenly I remembered War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I’d been reading them whenever I had time. I imagined Stiva Oblonsky and Pier Bezukhov, Tolstoy’s heroes, in the English Club. They were sitting there and having lunch. And my stomach even started grumbling, my mouth watered. I thought it would be fine to make them live on our mutton soup. Now that would be a treat for them!” That was what Pavel wrote. I even began to laugh.

  The guys turned off their tools and looked at me as at a madman. “What are you laughing at?” “I just imagined Oblonsky and Bezukhov dining in the English Club. They’ve got one bit of our bread each, a mug of carrot tea each, cranberry instead of sugar. They’re eating, praising the meals, washing them down with boiled water, paying compliments to each other.”

  The guys roared with laughter, holding their bellies.

  “What, boiled water instead of champagne?”

  “And chaff instead of oysters?”

  “Sure, they’d praise that!”

  “They’d ask for seconds!”

  “It’d be great to get them down here to the workshop, to the machines! Instead of exercise! To prevent gout!”

  Pavel’s letter went on, “and I imagined Pier at my machine, and my sleepiness was gone! As if I myself had lunched to my fill in that club. And it seemed to me that Bezukhov fussed about here and there, not knowing how to approach the machine, what to do with it, kept looking at the nearest one, and Oblonsky had the same trouble with it. I was their foreman. I showed them what to do and how to do it. The work is going fine. And I adapted myself to it this way. When it gets hard I remember them and make them work. Bezukhov is already a true lathe operator. He is nearby and works on my machine. But Stiva is not quite with it yet. I have to look after him all the time. And he produces defects from time to time. But he’s getting better bit by bit.” There, Pavel’s letter ended…….

  The guys burst out laughing again. The flyers laughed at this letter with all their hearts. Bourgonov began to talk through the laughter, turning to Ippolitov, “You put Bezukhov or Bolkonsky, hero of War and Peace, in your seat in the cockpit and make him fight. And you just give the orders yourself, prompt what to do and how. You can see better from the sidelines. Then you’ll stay alive!”

  “As far as that goes, Bezukhov and Bolkonsky were brave guys too,” Victor supported him. “But foolish. Why did Andrey in a scene from War and Peace, when Bolkonskiy was mortally wounded with a shell burst at Borodino, wait until the shell exploded, why didn’t he lie down? Needs training!” “How’s he going to put him in his seat in the cockpit?” Lusto objected. “He doesn’t know who Bezukhov is. He hasn’t read the book, has he?”

  “All right now,” Victor became serious. “Laughter has its place, but you, Ivan, have to have a good think. Nowadays people don’t fight like before, when two planes would come across each other and fight. The flyer who piloted better would win. Now large groups meet up and you won’t get through just on piloting techniques. If your comrades don’t help, you can’t do anything. So help your comrades yourself. You’re used to flying as an instructor, always on your own. In a group, all have to operate as one and help each other.”

  10

  Well, we can dance!

  I was slowly trudging towards the squadron dug-out. Everything around me was going past my consciousness and was of no interest to me. Equally, what had just happened at the CP made no impression on me either. Back there, Zharinova, an armourer from the third squadron, burst into the mess-room where we were dining. “Where is the compression here?” she asked, out of breath.

  “What do you need it for?”

  “A mechanic sent for it. He says there is one at the CP and the plane will not fly without it.”

  “Correct, it won’t. But it’s not here.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Go to Bobrov’s office” Lusto suggested. “It’s there to the left of the door, in the corner, lying in a bucket. I’ll take you there.”

  Zharinova went to Bobrov’s office accompanied by Lusto, and the flyers who followed them. In a minute a burst of laughter reached me. But I didn’t even smile, and didn’t try to imagine the Regimental Commander’s face, red both with anger and laughter. I myself never minded pulling the leg of someone unfamiliar with machinery, sending a couple of people with stretchers to bring a cotter-pin, making someone watch a spark supposedly going into the tail skid, and so on. But this time it didn’t cheer me up.

  I didn’t resent the flyers going, not waiting for me, and leaving me
alone to dig into a plate of the main course, which had got cold long ago. I didn’t even pay attention to it. I wanted to get to the dug-out as soon as possible, to tumble down on the straw in the corner of the plankbed, to shut my eyes and think about nothing. Apparently yesterday’s exhaustion was telling, or I’d got chilled badly in the frost while walking to the CP, undressed, after that landing.

  Here is the dug-out, only ten steps left. Why the hell is Oreshchenko heading straight towards me? I tried to get around him but the Sergeant stopped me.

  “Aha, Comrade Sub-Lieutenant! You’re just who I’ve been looking for!”

  “Now he’s going to give me a job,” I thought. Sergeant Oreshchenko was the secretary of the Regimental Comsomol, i.e. the Young Communist League Bureau, and often tried to throw in a Comsomol task to officers, particularly to the flyers.

  “We’ve discussed it in the Bureau and think you can be recommended to the Communist Party. You’ve been fighting well, shot down two planes. And the Party Organiser mentioned you. Write an application.” Oreshchenko continued toward the Regimental CP, glanced back, and yelled as he walked, “Bring me your application tomorrow!”

  I silently walked into the dug-out, crawled into the corner and lay flat on my back. I didn’t want to think about what was at hand. I felt dizzy and all thoughts disappeared at once. How long did I lie like this? An hour or a minute? I woke up because someone was tugging hard at my leg. I opened my eyes. Korolev was standing at my feet. “Why can’t I wake you up today? You’ve gone sort of limp! Off to the parking bay. Everybody’s gone already, we’re taking off shortly.”

  I stood up, checked the map behind the top of my fur boot and followed Victor. I felt much better after the rest, and seemingly no one had noticed anything wrong. Only Volkov glanced at me more attentively than usual when I failed to get on a wing at once. Nikolay helped me put on my parachute, seated me in the cockpit, wanted to ask something, but right then they gave the order to fire up the engines. “Away from the screw!” “Aye-aye!” Volkov replied and jumped off the wing.