A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  LILYA LITV YAK

  In 1937, when Lilya was sixteen, her father, Vladimir Litvyak, was arrested, for crimes he’d supposedly committed against the Communist Party. Lilya never saw him again. After his arrest all trace of him simply vanished, and Lilya and her mother and eight-year-old brother, Yuri, could only guess what had happened to him. They never even found out how he died.

  When he got older, Yuri changed his name. He dropped his father’s family name, Litvyak, and replaced it with his mother’s, Kunavin, so that his identity wouldn’t be associated with his father’s arrest.

  Lilya didn’t change her name. She felt fiercely that she had to make up for her father’s criminal disloyalty, if it had existed, whatever it might have been. She was determined to devote her life to flying in support of her Motherland, both for her own protection and to redeem her missing father.

  Again, it’s hard to know how honest individual storytellers are about their feelings for Stalin, even with themselves. Lilya’s story is told in hindsight—she didn’t live long enough to be able to reflect on her youth, and much of our knowledge of her thoughts is filtered through the memories of her friends.

  Antonina “Tonya” Khokhlova, who became a tail gunner in the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment, tells a different story about how she felt about the leader of the USSR. Fifty years later she admitted frankly, “I hated Stalin throughout my life, beginning with the murder of Kirov. I was fifteen then, in sixth grade, and I said, ‘That’s Stalin’s deed!’ . . . and I hated Stalin when the war started.”

  Tonya was the coxswain for a young men’s rowing crew, and they all went to enlist as soldiers together when the war started—“eight boys and myself,” Tonya said. She told them that fighting “[for] the motherland is all right, but why should I fight for Stalin? He’s a man—let him fight for himself!”

  An outburst like that could have actually killed her. But none of her friends told on her.

  “I was not brave, I was lucky,” said Tonya; “like all fools I was lucky. If someone had turned me in, of course I would have been shot, shot on the spot.”

  Irina Rakobolskaya, who was born in 1919 and who became the second-in-command of the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment during World War II, expressed how hard it is to understand these young people through the lens of hindsight.

  “We are a generation not from this universe,” she said.

  We don’t know Marina Raskova’s personal take on the Great Terror. But while in the past she’d been a civilian working on the edges of the military, now she made a positive decision to follow a military career herself. Early in 1939, she began a two-year course at the M. V. Frunze Military Academy.

  Marina had seriously injured her legs during her wilderness adventure after the Rodina crashed, and it took her several months to recover. But she’d been rewarded with a pile of cash and a new two-room apartment for her role in the record-breaking flight, and now with time on her hands, she became a writer. She wrote a full-length autobiography, Notes of a Navigator. It was published by the Central Committee of the Komsomol in 1939, and anybody who couldn’t get hold of the physical book could read it as a serial through the hugely popular program Newspaper Novels. Marina also worked at answering her steady stream of fan mail.

  Young aviators throughout the nation adored her. All over the USSR, young women were taking to the skies and trying to join the Red Army so they could be like their modest and hardworking hero, Marina Raskova.

  Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler was steering Europe headlong into World War II.

  6

  “Now Europe Is Mine!”

  To the Soviet Union, which had been left out of the Munich Agreement, the rate at which Germany was gobbling up European territory was seriously alarming. So Stalin’s government decided to make its own deal with Germany. On August 23, 1939, Soviet Premier Vyacheslav Molotov, the same official who’d hosted the Rodina’s crew at his summer house, signed a treaty with Germany’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

  In the new treaty, called the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact10, the distrustful neighbors pledged not to go to war with each other for at least ten years. To sweeten the deal, they also secretly agreed to divide up parts of Poland, the Baltic States, Finland, and Romania, as if European nations were a box of candy.

  Hitler was so delighted when he heard the results of this agreement that he is said to have exclaimed, “Now Europe is mine!”

  Feeling confident, happy, and hungry, Hitler sent his forces to invade Germany’s half of Poland on September 1, 1939. The United Kingdom and France, finally shocked into action, declared war on Germany two days later.

  And the USSR sent its forces to take over its half of Poland in the middle of September.

  World War II had begun.

  As soon as the United Kingdom had rallied its military and told civilians to prepare for war, the British government set up a new aviation service called the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). The ATA allowed nonmilitary pilots to ferry aircraft from factories and maintenance units during wartime. With civilians doing this unglamorous but necessary transport work, Britain’s fighter and bomber pilots could concentrate on flying into battle against the Luftwaffe, the fearsome second-to-none German Air Force.

  In November 1939, a respected and diplomatic British pilot named Pauline Gower was allowed to choose eight highly qualified women to join the ATA’s initial forty-three men. At first, these women were restricted to flying obsolete training aircraft. Despite those regulations, in February 1940 the British ATA became the first organization in the world to officially allow women to fly aircraft in wartime.

  Thousands of miles across the Atlantic, the United States was still trying hard to stay out of the war. But it too was preparing new pilots—just in case. In 1939 a Civilian Pilot Training Program began to offer sponsored flight instruction to young Americans. For the first two years of the program, one in ten of these flight students was a woman. Most Americans, however, like the British, still objected to the idea of women flying. By June 1941 women were banned from the Civilian Pilot Training Program to make room for men.

  Meanwhile, in the USSR—which, thanks to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, wasn’t under attack—young women across the nation were continuing their state-sponsored flight training and flight instruction as though nothing had changed. By now, one in every three or four pilots in the Soviet Union was a woman.

  For most Soviet citizens at home, 1940 remained a period of uneasy peace. But the thunder-rumble of war was ominous. The Red Army tested its strength by invading the states on its western borders that the USSR had divided up with Germany. After he’d taken over half of Poland, Stalin had a go at invading Finland in the winter of 1939–40. The Soviet soldiers involved in this war found themselves in an icy stalemate, freezing and starving to death. The USSR backed off and signed a peace treaty with Finland in March 1940.

  Meanwhile, Nazi Germany became bolder and bolder. In April and May of 1940, Hitler’s armies snapped up western European nations including Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and finally, in June 1940, France. Next on Hitler’s list was the United Kingdom.

  But the United Kingdom is separated from the rest of Europe by the English Channel and the North Sea. The closest the German troops could get to the island of Great Britain was at Calais, France, about thirty-three kilometers (twenty miles) from England. And Britain’s Royal Air Force, in a gallant and furious fight against the Luftwaffe, turned out to be a stronger opponent than Germany had expected. By September 1940 it became clear that the German invasion of the United Kingdom was not going to happen.

  Europe’s invaded countries set up governments in exile in London, the capital of the United Kingdom, to make war plans as a group of “Allied” nations fighting together against German aggression.

  Hitler immediately turned around and made a treaty with Japan and Italy, creating his own group of allies known as the “Axis” powers. By the end of September 1940, Hungar
y and Romania had also joined the Axis nations—both countries shared borders with the Soviet state of Ukraine, and hoped Germany would help protect them from the Soviet Union. And now Germany sent troops into Finland, which was still mad at the USSR for their “Winter War” earlier that year.

  Hoping to soothe Soviet anxiety about all this military might sitting right on its doorstep, in October Germany invited the USSR to join it as another Axis power. But the Soviet government was suspicious. It came up with all kinds of conditions that Germany didn’t want to let it have. Months went by, and the waffling was still going on, and then in April 1941 the USSR signed a nonaggression treaty with Japan without consulting Germany.

  Hitler had had enough. He didn’t actually have anything to gain from another treaty with Stalin, and he was annoyed with the nitpicking negotiation. He detested the Slavic people of eastern Europe with a murderous racist hatred similar to what he felt for Jewish people, and was greedily eyeing the Soviet Union’s enormous agricultural areas, such as Ukraine.

  So Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union.

  For all Stalin’s preparation for the “future war,” he seems to have had some kind of mental block against believing that Hitler was really going to attack him. In the spring of 1941, the Luftwaffe regularly sent spy planes over Russian troops and Russian cities. Nobody close to Stalin dared to give this adequate attention. Soviet informers sent their chief of intelligence nearly a hundred warnings of a planned German invasion. Winston Churchill, the British prime minister himself, sent warnings based on captured German codes to the Soviet government. Again, nobody dared to take action.

  People were scared to bring Stalin bad news, and he was sure he couldn’t be tricked. And of course it must have seemed that even the army of Nazi Germany couldn’t possibly manage to launch an invasion into a country whose border with eastern Europe was over twenty-five hundred kilometers (over fifteen hundred miles) long.

  But they did.

  The entire length of that border was about to become a battlefront.

  Hitler’s plan was to sweep across the USSR in a lightning-swift strike that would capture its agricultural and industrial resources, its important cities, and its capital. His code name for the invasion was “Operation Barbarossa,” after the great twelfth-century tactician and emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who unified many European kingdoms under German rule as leader of the Holy Roman Empire.

  In the early hours of the morning on June 22, 1941, the German forces hurled themselves at the Soviet Union. Hitler’s invasion of Marina Raskova’s Motherland blazed into life.

  Part II

  The Great Patriotic War

  The First Year: 1941–1942

  7

  The Storm of War Breaks

  June 22, 1941, was a Sunday, and it happened to be Olga Yakovleva’s day off. The young flight instructor was dozing in the sun after a swim in the river when she heard a radio announcement coming from a nearby stadium.

  She couldn’t tell what the announcer was saying. But from the strangely urgent tone of his voice, she could tell it wasn’t an ordinary broadcast. Olga scrambled up, gathered her things, and ran home to listen to her own radio.

  That’s how she discovered the terrible news—the war had begun.

  The next thing she did was to go straight to her flying club to volunteer as a fighter pilot.

  She wasn’t alone. All over the USSR, citizens raced to defend their Motherland. They stood in long lines outside recruitment offices, hoping they’d be able to join the Red Army and immediately get sent where the fighting was fiercest.

  One shocking feature of the Germans’ early-morning attack on June 22 was that they destroyed hundreds of Soviet aircraft on the ground. The Soviet pilots were so taken by surprise, they didn’t even have a chance to get into their planes and fight back. The Luftwaffe aircraft swooped in low, bombing and gunning the easily targeted empty planes where they stood parked in rows on the Soviet airfields.

  Meanwhile, German troops were marching and motoring forward along a line running from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south—about the length of the entire East Coast of the continental United States. When the Red Army met the invading Germans to fight back, the concentrated force and fury along that line became known as World War II’s Eastern Front.

  Imagine, if you can, three million armed soldiers and an army of tanks and guns and bomber aircraft, all hurling themselves in a ferocious attack across the United States from Maine to Florida. Imagine them fighting, burning, looting, and bombing every city and farm in their path until they reached the Great Plains. That’s what the Soviet Union was facing and fighting: destruction on that scale.

  Early on, supplies became so short and the fighting so chaotic that many Red Army soldiers were reduced to wearing rags and going barefoot. In desperation, they resorted to tactics such as strapping small bombs to dogs’ backs and sending them to blow up German tanks.

  A VILLAGE BURNS AS THE GERMAN ARMY INVADES THE SOVIET UNION.

  The Germans first stormed through the cities of the Soviet states of Belorussia and Ukraine. The Red Army correspondent Vasily Grossman’s notes give a vivid snapshot of a Belorussian city under attack: “A cow, howling bombs, fire, women . . . The strong smell of perfume—from a pharmacy hit in the bombardment—blocked out the stench of burning, just for a moment.” Traveling with the Red Army to the front, Grossman saw the panicked population as people left their homes and tried to escape the German army. They traveled in carts and herded livestock on foot, carrying children. When Grossman tried to interview the refugees, they would begin to cry when he asked them a question. Ripe grain went unharvested; unpicked orchard fruits were left in trees to rot as communities fled from the invaders.

  For the Germans, the big targets were the cities of Leningrad, the old imperial capital in the north, which had been the birthplace of the Soviet Union, and the new capital in Moscow. In 1941, Leningrad had a population twice the size of modern Manhattan; Moscow was bigger than Los Angeles is today.

  Twenty-year-old Mariya “Masha” Dolina was a flight instructor at the Dnipropetrovsk Flying School when the war started. The club was part of the Soviet Air Army, and Masha and two other women—another pilot and a navigator—wanted to join the club’s military division along with the men. Their commander agreed to let all three of them sign up.

  In every town and village the Germans invaded, they took over and set up their own soldiers and government to occupy and replace the Soviet system. Masha’s first wartime assignment was to fly her club’s aircraft away from the enemy’s grasp, and to make sure the Germans couldn’t use the airfield when they got there. So before the flight school pilots left their airfield for the last time, they had to get rid of all the fuel they couldn’t take with them and destroy the hangars where the aircraft were kept.

  Masha ferried three planes away from the advancing front that night. Before she took off for the last time, she and her companions set fire to the flying club’s hangars and even to her own house—a building she and her friends had built, Masha said, “with our own hands, where we had lived so happily.” A dreadful scene lay below her as they left the airfield. “When I flew over that night the river was burning with oil, and everything on the ground was burning,” she said. “It felt as though even the air was on fire.”

  As the Red Army mobilized its soldiers to fight for the USSR, civilians had to do all the defensive work they could. They got to work digging trenches that might slow down the German tanks. Emergency laws added three hours to the workday and banned vacation days and public holidays. There weren’t any air raid shelters in Moscow; when the Luftwaffe planes got close enough to bomb the capital, women and children would have to hide in dugouts that they’d built themselves, covered with dirt and wooden boards. People in Leningrad also worked frantically to build makeshift defenses.

  And all over the country, teens and young adults who had grown up believing they would come of age in wartime
rushed to military posts and recruitment offices to volunteer to defend their Motherland. Everybody wanted to be sent to the front, and young women who had grown up firing guns and flying planes in clubs and schools were just as ready to fight as the young men were.

  But because military enlistment had only ever been a requirement for men, the USSR didn’t have a system figured out that would suddenly allow thousands of young women to sign up for active service. Sure, flying clubs had allowed female pilots to become instructors, but not to move directly on to military flying schools. Masha Dolina, whose first wartime job was to fly aircraft away from her burning airfield, was one of only a few lucky women whose commanders found a place for them right away.

  Most young Soviet women found themselves struggling against the inconsistency of the Communist Party’s approach to gender equality. Olga Yakovleva, who’d been sunbathing when the war started and then ran straight to her flying club to volunteer for the air force, was stunned to find that instead of being sent into battle at the front, she was going to be assigned to train a group of girls to replace the flying club’s male instructors, who’d now be going off to war.

  Olga wasn’t alone. All over the USSR, women who could fly were now assigned to train new pilots—many of them young men who’d be flying off to combat missions. Lilya Litvyak, born on Aviation Day, had already trained forty-five pilots at the Kirov Flying Club in Moscow. At eighteen, only a month before the war began, she’d been praised in the Soviet Union’s Airplane magazine for carrying out a record number of training flights in a single day (over eight hours of flight time). She wanted desperately to take part in the fight against the enemy. But when Lilya tried to sign up for military duty, she too was rejected.