The battle in the air, usually fleeting, dragged on. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes of fighting had passed, but the Fascists’ target, the city, was still as far from them as before. Several smoky fires were already burning out on the ground. A Messerschmitt shot down by Victor was also burning there. Black spots made by bomb explosions began to appear on the white snowy background. It meant the bombers were in a hurry to get rid of their dangerous load, and flee like cowards from the battlefield. But the battle continued. The German fighters were still in the air. One of them flashed in front of me and rushed to the ground. Apparently he wanted to follow the bombers’ example and retire to his own territory.
“You won’t get away!” I muttered through clenched teeth and also went into a dive.
“Vit’ka, cover me!”
“Come on, knock him down!”
“He’s too far…”
The Me-109 pulled out of his dive just above the ground and went to the west in contour flight. I followed him very tightly trying to reduce the distance. The Fascist noticed the pursuit. He began to manoeuvre to stop me aiming well. “Eh, I should have struck before! But you still won’t get away! So, you’re going to throw yourself right”. At the moment when the Hitlerite began to turn right I pressed the trigger. The Me-109 ran into the gun burst by itself, then hit the ground with its right wing, and rolled over the snow-field like a wheel of fire. Only a strip of flame and debris was left behind him. “That’s the way!” I heard Victor’s voice. “Turn around by one-eighty and climb up!”
The battle had lasted forty-five minutes instead of the usual five or ten. And our ‘sixer’ whizzed over the airstrip in full strength after it. We all had run out of ammunition, and only I by some miracle, still had seven cartridges, three in one machine-gun and four in the other. But the ammunition had not been spent in vain. The joy of victory flowed over all the flyers!
I had already taxied to the parking bay when Lusto’s pair was approaching the landing strip. His wingman Fedya (Fedor) Trutnev was already gliding down with his undercarriage and wing-flaps lowered, when a direct hit from an anti-aircraft shell slashed away his plane’s tail. He came down some two hundred metres before the beginning of the concrete strip. Our own anti-aircraft gunners who had just arrived from the Ural region had ‘distinguished’ themselves. They knew the silhouettes of neither of our planes, nor the German ones. But they shot well, having knocked down a Pe-2 bomber closing for landing the same day. After that they were transferred away from us.
Volkov met me at the parking bay. Nearly the whole technical staff had managed to move to the new air-base. Only a few people had stayed on the old one to get the planes ready for transfer. Chugunov had stayed there as well. He was to wait until one of the damaged fighter planes was fixed up and fly it to the new aerodrome.
Nikolay had just seen Trutnev die. The mechanics had always awaited the return of the flyers carrying out combat missions. They had cheered their successes and mourned their failures. Sometimes planes had not come back. Then the mechanics couldn’t sit still till a flyer returned. Sometimes flyers had died. But it had happened somewhere far away, over the frontline, in combat. A death such as the one that had happened today, over our own aerodrome, from the fire of our own anti-aircraft gunners, shook all who saw it. Although emotions have their place, we had to carry out our duties…
“Comrade Commander let me have your remarks”, Nikolay began officially but didn’t keep it up, switching to the friendly tone usual between us. “My congratulations on your third kill!”
“Leave it.” I told him sullenly, looking towards the fourth turnaround.
Volkov grew gloomy again but tried to distract his commander.
“Korolev said that you’d shot down a Schmitt. He shot one down too.”
“I saw it. The engine was alright, the plane was in order. Where is Korolev?” There were no flyers at the parking bay. “There, they’ve gone to the dug-out.” Nikolay pointed at a hump bulging near the parking bay. It was impossible to tell from the parking bay what it was. A hump like any other hump. There are lots of them in the fields. Only a thin limpid slightly quivering jet of not smoke but hot air gave away a habitation if one looked hard.
In the meantime Nikolay was examining the plane. It seemed to be alright. No holes. It looked that way on superficial inspection, but then he noticed two holes in the propeller blades. One was from a bullet and one from an armour-piercing shell. A bullet had gone into a blade from the front. Obviously the gunners from Heinkels or Junkers had done their job. A shell had hit from behind. It was from a Schmitt.
“Did the engine jolt?”
“Didn’t I tell you! It worked fine.”
“It couldn’t have! It should have jolted. You see, the propeller is shot through!”
“I’m telling you it worked fine. No jolting. Check it yourself.”
We studied propeller balancing in the aeroclub and in the flying school, so I knew that the smallest change of weight of one of blades causes propeller throbbing. It is jolting that can even destroy an engine. But strange as it might be, this time, there had really been no jolting. I went to the dug-out, walked down through a trench, and came across a door obviously brought down from some apartment. Loud voices and the odd exclamation were coming from behind it. The flyers were discussing the battle that had just ended.
I came in and sat near an iron oven, not a modified iron drum, the usual substitute for an oven, but a standard German oven on iron legs, with paper burning in it. This time Bourgonov was not at his usual place. I felt dead tired. Of course! Aerial fights rarely last for longer than five minutes. Or rather, they do go longer, but very seldom. And these minutes, short on the ground, stretch into eternity in a battle, taking away all a flyer’s energy, even a young fellow in excellent health. This time the fight had lasted forty-five minutes! I was looking at the fire thinking about nothing. The paper had burnt up and only a small pile of ashes was left. The dirty-grey fuselages of Heinkels and Messerschmitts came into my eyes again along with grey-green Junkers. The black ash of burnt paper reminded me of the smoke of burning German planes, and the occasional spark running through it seemed to be fire traces crossing the cloudy skies in all directions…
“What are you dreaming about, Zhen’ka? Throw some paper into the oven.” Victor’s voice brought me out of my reverie. I looked at him, shifted my gaze to the ground right of the oven and only now noticed the compact stacks of paper. I took a batch and automatically stayed my hand, having noticed some printed text. “Throw it in! What are you scrutinising? Haven’t you seen leaflets before?”
I separated one sheet, crumpled the rest and threw them into the oven. Why didn’t I throw the whole lot at once? Firstly, I didn’t understand it myself. There could only be Fascist leaflets at a Fascist aerodrome. What kind of interest could they have for us? The Hitlerites had often dropped them on the frontline and, at night time, on aerodromes. Then we were made to pick them up and burn them. What for? What could they change now? An old song. Life hadn’t taught the German propagandists anything. In the memorable year of 1941, during their impetuous and universal advance, these leaflets could have influenced the morale of our soldiers. But now, during their retreat, when most of the territory occupied in 1941–2 had been already liberated, it was obvious to any sensible man that our people would prevail. But they kept singing the same song, surrender. Come over the frontline to the German side, your safety will be guaranteed. It was silly to write all that at the beginning of 1944!
1941… On that terrible Sunday morning of 22 June, I was standing guard near the storehouse of the Ostafievskoye Military Aviation School. I had no watch, any more than the great majority of the Soviet people. I could judge the timing only from what went on behind two rows of barbed wire. There were convicts behind it. There had been rumours that they would be building a concrete air-strip on the School aerodrome, but so far no one had seen any work done on the airfield. I could judge the timing by the behaviour of the guar
ds and by their shift changes. I still had about an hour’s guard duty left, by my estimate, when I saw the guard commander and relief running, not walking, towards me. I recognised all of them, but acted according to the regulations. “Stop, who goes there?”
“Guard Commander with relief.”
“Commander, approach, the rest stay where you are!”
The commander came up, and the relief did as well.
“Come on, Mariinskiy, come off duty, let’s run, the rally will start soon!”
“Rally?” I was surprised. There was no holiday that day. What reason was there for a rally?
Having gone off duty, I ran into the guards’ quarters with the Commander, unloaded my rifle, put it on the rack and went towards the parked planes, with half of the guard personnel. It had never happened before that only half of the personnel had stayed on duty.
The rally was scheduled to be in the birch grove, behind the I-16s’ parking bay on which the cadets were supposed to graduate from the flying school. They had trained on a Soviet fighter plane model that was common in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The square bell-mouths of loud-speakers had already been fixed on the trees. The cadets were lined up in formation, but the rally wasn’t starting. At last, exactly at 12 o’clock it was announced from the loud-speakers, “Attention! Moscow broadcasts! Listen to the statement of the Chairman of the Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov”. Then the loudspeakers fell silent and only some rustling was coming from them.
Then the rather muffled and alarmed voice of Molotov resounded. The Chairman of Sovnarcom, i.e. the Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars, announced that Hitlerite Germany had breached the Non-Aggression Pact. With no ‘war declaration’, suddenly and treacherously, without any demands, Germany had attacked the Soviet Union, and invaded Soviet territory at several points. He was saying that our border guards were heroically beating off ferocious enemy attacks, and holding out in expectation of the arrival of regular units of the Red Army.
I was listening to him with amazement. What treachery! All Hitler’s policies were built on treachery. He finished off his closest henchman, Roehm, during the well-known ‘Night of the Long Knives’. The rest was the credo he had described openly in his Mein Kampf. He treacherously broke the Versaille Peace Agreement and so on… What else could be expected from him? Suddenly attacked? What kind of suddenness is that! Everybody in the Soviet Union had known about the inevitability of war against the Fascists. Last year, in 1940, the Military Commissar of the Kievskiy District of Moscow had summoned the youth of pre-conscription age, and openly declared they would have to fight against Hitler’s Germany. Therefore, it could be seen that the whole nation had been expecting a war, but it came suddenly to the Government!
The Chairman of Sovnarcom gave no more news. No details at all, but the confused intonation of the speech, of the head of the Soviet Government, told about the real situation better than any details. But Molotov finished his speech fairly boldly, “Our cause is just! Victory will be ours!” Nothing wrong with that. There was no one in the whole immense country who doubted our final victory! Molotov’s speech ended. “This has been a broadcast of a speech by the Chairman of the Soviet of Peoples’ Commisars of the Soviet Union!” said the announcer, and the loud-speakers fell silent.
But afterwards the constant repetition of this slogan, “Our cause is just!” began to annoy, since there was no point proving what didn’t need proofs and confirmations. And for a long time after that, up until our victory at Kursk, references to the treachery and suddenness of the invasion sounded in the speeches of political officers. Only after the victorious salutes in Moscow, in honour of the liberation of Orel and Belgorod, did they stop talking about the suddenness of the German invasion, as well as about their treachery. Also they forgot about the breach of etiquette. The Germans hadn’t declared war, instead, they began to talk about seizing the strategic initiative, in general and strategic air supremacy in particular.
The school’s Deputy Political Commissar took the floor. He was saying the perfectly proper words about loyalty to the oath the cadets had sworn just recently, on 1 May 1941, about love for our Motherland, about the sacred duty of every Soviet man, the strength and might of the Soviet Union, the Red Army which was stronger than any other, from ‘the taiga to the British seas’. These were verses from a popular song, of the times of the Civil War in Russia, of 1918–22. What was implied under ‘the British seas’ in this boastful song, was the English Channel, the Atlantic, Indian or Pacific Ocean. But no one knew, or even wondered, neither the author nor the singers nor the listeners… It was a matter of course that the Red Army was the mightiest in the world. Back then, we didn’t know that two terrible years would go by, before these words began slowly but surely to make sense.
I didn’t throw the leaflet into the fire. Something stopped me. What was it? I looked at the leaflet again, and saw the boldly printed word ‘Terkin’.
“Terkin in captivity”, I read aloud the headline of the leaflet. Several lines of prose were printed below and then, verses.
“What?”
“Terkin in captivity”, I read again.
“What kind of rubbish are you talking?”
“How did you come up with that?”
“What would he be doing there?”
“It’s nothing to do with me! It’s only a leaflet! The Germans wrote something about Terkin.”
“They can’t have!” Bourgonov snatched the leaflet from my hand and read it himself: “Terkin in captivity”…What nonsense…
At the front, being close to danger, people don’t like to talk much about death, and are glad of any chance to change the subject and draw away from such thoughts. Nobody would have thought about discussing the Fascist leaflet under other circumstances. But today everybody grabbed a leaflet in order to forget about Trutnev’s death, at least for a while.
It was written in the leaflet that ‘Terkin understood the righteousness of the Germans and the injustice of the Soviet system, and voluntarily walked over to the German side’.
“Who the hell is going to walk over to the Germans now? Look where we have come to, soon we’ll be at the border, and here it says ‘walked over voluntarily’!”
“Remember our Sima?” Lusto reminded us about a relatively recent case.
Major Sima, nobody knew her surname, was the Divisional Signals Commander. She was a very beautiful woman, still young even in the eyes of the young fly-boys, with a splendid female form. There were rumours that she was the PPZh of the Divisional Commander Nimtsevich. Pokhodno-Polevaya Zhena, meant a field marching wife, the nickname for officers’ girlfriends in the Soviet Army, at the front, during the war. Sima was disliked in the Division for her petty tyranny, and contemptuous attitude towards all lower than her in rank, as if everything was allowed to a ‘beauty’.
When our bridgehead had rapidly expanded to Krivoy Rog she was sent to reconnoitre aerodromes. Those who piloted these planes flew at the lowest altitudes, in order to throttle back momentarily, and land if Messers or other enemy fighter planes came over. And the motherland would give you cover. Apart from that they tried to use ravines and gullies during the flight for concealment. On the way back, such a ravine had led them to the enemy territory. No altitude, the wheels were just about on the ground. They were shot up, maybe from a simple submachine-gun. They were armed, the pilot and Sima, only with pistols. Sima preferred to surrender straight away. The next day, a radio-station from Kirovograd broadcast her address to the Soviet combatants and, personally, to the Commander and the flyers of the 205th Air Force Division. She was telling how well she had been accepted, how comfortably she had been lodged and, in general, praised the Hitlerites fulsomely. The flyers had no doubts that she’d been accepted well considering the luxurious form of the woman. She’d never been heard of after this address but we were confident that she’d managed to ‘settle in well’. It turned out to be much worse for the commanders. The Divisional Commander
, Nimtsevich, was removed from his position, and sent far to the rear, to run, as it was rumoured, a flying school for beginners.
Eventually, it became known that Serafima Zakharovna Sitnik was shot down on 29 October 1943, and seriously wounded. She was obviously tempted by the Nazis, with a chance to see her mother and 5 year old son, who lived on the occupied territory, and that was eventually done. Later, because of the consequences of her injuries, she was transferred to a propaganda unit. But then, after a provocation of Nazi security services, the SD, she was executed.
Nobody had foreseen her address. But it had happened and her voice had been well-known. But Terkin! That was a different matter!
“Terkin wouldn’t have surrendered! He would have gnawed a Fascist’s throat as he died!”
“Well, it’s out of character for him,” Victor drawled slowly. “That’s why he ‘surrendered’.”
We all knew that Terkin was a literary hero but spoke about him as a real man.
“What do you mean by ‘surrendered’?”
“Very simple. The Germans know that our soldiers are absorbed in the Terkin story, as they’d been keenly looking forward to each instalment in the newspapers. And recently there’s been nothing heard about him. And the Fascists decided to pass him off as a prisoner.”
“Tvardovskiy, the man who wrote the verses about Terkin, has missed his mark hyar,” Arkhipenko said in support of Victor.
“But he should have known that people at the front were waiting for the next instalment,” Misha Lusto put in.
“Of course he did,” Bourgonov said, as confidently as if Tvardovskiy has been consulting with him when compiling his artistic plans.
“He knew… But he is a poet. He writes what he wants. He’d got bored with Terkin and took on something else,” Victor suggested.
“And what now?”
Red Star Airacobra Page 13