A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  Militsa was a career military officer like Marina, an Air Force Academy graduate who’d already taken part in several Moscow air shows and even had some training as an attack pilot. She was cool, organized, and efficient, and used to working mostly with men. She wasn’t pleased when she found that the young women she’d assigned as sentries had made a cozy bunker for themselves in a pile of mattresses!

  Marina was understanding, though, and laughed when she heard the story. She assured her new chief of staff that they’d go over field service regulations with the new soldiers when the train started to move.

  In the dark hours after midnight on October 17, 1941, along with many other eastbound trains carrying soldiers and refugees, the train carrying Marina Raskova’s aviation volunteers crawled away from Moscow.

  In total, nearly a thousand young women answered the Komsomol and Osoaviakhim summons to join Marina Raskova’s aviation unit. All of them would make their way to Engels, a town on the Volga River about 800 kilometers (500 miles) southeast of Moscow, where there was a military flight school. There, they would train for several months before they were assigned to combat regiments.

  It took nine days for the Moscow group to travel to Engels. Their train moved slowly and often had to wait at stations or stop to let other trains pass. Marina and Militsa took positive action to get priority for their train, which sometimes meant crawling under a dozen other stopped trains in the dark to get to a platform where they could talk to a railway official.

  During the long trip, Marina went from freight car to freight car visiting with the young women, chatting and interviewing them personally. She made time for everyone.

  And the recruits started to make friends. Yekaterina “Katya” Budanova led the others in singing to pass the time. Lilya Litvyak, friendly and curious, talked to anyone who’d listen. Yevgeniya “Zhenya” Rudneva, an astronomy student from Moscow University, had a head crammed full of poems and stories. She provided nonstop entertainment for the other young women.

  You didn’t have much choice about getting to know each other, because the trains didn’t have any toilets. People had to hold on to your arms while you leaned out the door of the moving rail car! One young woman lost her footing and nearly fell out of the train in the middle of a toilet break, but fortunately her friends hung on to her. Everybody collapsed in laughter when they were safely back inside.

  There wasn’t a lot of food available. Most of it was bread, herring, and porridge. At one station there was a pile of cabbage, and some of the recruits jumped off the train and stole it. They were so hungry they started to nibble it right off the head, “just like rabbits,” said Valentina “Valya” Kravchenko. “Then Kazarinova discovered us and made us take it all back.”

  Stolen food wasn’t the only thing Militsa disapproved of. At one station, a pair of the new recruits jumped off the train at a run. But they stopped when they saw Marina and Militsa, and asked permission to mail bundles of letters their companions had given them. Pleased that the recruits were beginning to recognize her authority, Marina let them go, and they ran for the mailbox holding hands, their long hair flying in the wind behind them. Long hair, often braided into crowns, was stylish with Russian women of the time.

  “Service personnel must cover their heads,” Militsa commented, and suggested to Marina ominously, “and something should be done about the hairdos. The permanents of many of our girls have turned into mops.” Militsa was no-nonsense about her own appearance, and already wore her hair in a man’s short haircut. Marina filed this comment away in her head for later.

  There were no lights showing when the train arrived at Engels on October 25, 1941. It was dark and wet, and no one was waiting to meet the young women. Militsa, who’d graduated from the Engels Flying School herself seven years ago, led the group between the clay houses of the town to their new home. Their hearts must have lifted a little when they arrived at the entrance gate with its decorative blue propellers!

  The gymnasium of the Red Army Officers’ House had been transformed into a dormitory for the recruits, with bunks made out of wooden planks and straw mattresses. But when Marina was given a private room with a double bed and flowers, she was disgusted. “Is this some kind of a boudoir? Take the bed away. Exchange it for two ordinary cots. My chief of staff and I will share this room. Take the carpet and the flowers away, too. After all, the girls don’t have them either!”

  Now a military representative called Colonel Bagaev met with Marina Raskova and confirmed that the formal name for her aviation unit would be the 122nd Composite Air Group.

  When they finished training, the 122nd would be split into three regiments. The numbers for these future aviation regiments had already been assigned. They would be called the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment, and the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment of the Soviet Air Force.

  Colonel Bagaev asked Marina if she was sure she wanted to go ahead with the project.

  She definitely did.

  10

  “Now I Am a Warrior”

  Marina hadn’t forgotten Militsa’s comments about the young recruits’ lack of military polish, and the first order that she gave at Engels was for them all to get men’s haircuts.

  For Olga Yakovleva, the sunbathing flight instructor, it was a shock. The haircuts drove home to everyone that they were in the military, not on a Komsomol-club-sponsored winter camping adventure. Even though they were totally dedicated to defending the Motherland, having to “part with their braids” was so traumatic that many of the recruits cried about it.

  At first, headstrong, talented Lilya Litvyak downright refused to get her hair cut. When all the other recruits had had their long hair shorn off, the air group’s Communist Party secretary, Klavdiya Terekhova, anxiously had to report Lilya’s disobedience to Marina Raskova.

  Marina was determined: She’d given an order and it was going to be obeyed. So Klavdiya, nearly in tears herself, went back to Lilya and begged her to cooperate.

  Lilya did, but that wasn’t the end of her insurrection, or of her battle to maintain her femininity.

  When the young women of the 122nd Air Group were given winter uniforms, of course once again it was standard military issue meant for men. Lilya had reluctantly cooperated with the regulations about haircuts. But now she couldn’t bear to be forced to wear still more oversize and unflattering clothing. In a move that caught everyone’s attention, she cut the woolly lining out of her men’s boots and sewed it onto her coat to make a decorative collar.

  When she turned up at the next morning’s roll call, Marina must have had a hard time keeping a straight face.

  She asked Lilya to step forward. Lilya did, and her companions burst out laughing.

  “Litvyak, what do you have on your shoulders?” Marina asked.

  “A goatskin collar,” Lilya answered innocently. “Why, doesn’t it suit me?”

  Marina had to admit that it did. But she couldn’t let such an outrageous violation go unpunished. Regardless of Lilya’s fashion sense, the bottom line was that her feet needed to be protected from the below-zero Russian winter cold. Marina ordered Lilya to spend the next night sewing the lining back into her boots!

  Hanging on to their femininity was something that remained important for most of these young women throughout the war, and often something that brought them together. In fact, many of them grew their hair back after that initial haircut, and no one tried to stop them. But in the beginning, Marina felt she had to play strictly by the book. She still had to train her recruits and prove that they could make their mark as serious combat teams.

  Marina divided the young women into pilots, navigators, and technicians. But one of the first problems she ran into was that everybody wanted to fly fighter planes. Anyone who was already a pilot was convinced she should be flying straight into combat.

  And it was absolutely impossible for everyone to be a fighter pilot. Only one of the three proposed regiments would be
equipped with single-seat fighter aircraft. The other two regiments were to fly planes that would need a navigator to go along as part of the aircrew; Marina was going to have to appoint nearly as many navigators as pilots. Other women would have to become gunners.

  To avoid argument, Marina made the decision that the women who would become pilots had to have already logged a minimum of five hundred hours’ flying time. Very few of the young women had training as navigators, so some of the recruits were going to have to retrain. Marina gave these assignments to women who’d been to technical college or other higher education, such as Polina Gelman, the Moscow University history student who’d been digging trenches and putting out fires all summer, and Yevgeniya Zhigulenko, the aspiring actress who’d badgered the air force officer with telephone calls. Women with physical strength were assigned positions as mechanics or armorers.

  Many of the young women were bitterly disappointed with their assignments. But it didn’t stop them getting to work. They began lessons immediately—ten classes and two hours of drilling every day. Theory in the classroom included the principles of flight, aircraft and weapons mechanical instruction, and navigation skills. And in addition to classes, in weather that grew colder and stormier every day, the pilots were given flight tests to decide which aircraft they’d be best suited for.

  MEMBERS OF THE 588TH NIGHT BOMBER AVIATION REGIMENT POSING WITH A PO-2 AIRCRAFT. FROM LEFT, MARIYA SMIRNOVA, DINA NIKULINA, ZHENYA RUDNEVA, IRINA SEBROVA, NATASHA MEKLIN, AND SERAFIMA AMOSOVA.

  Inna Pasportnikova worked hard at the daily routine set for the recruits.

  “Our days were filled with intensive training. Reveille was at 6 a.m., and then we were marched off to breakfast; the trip to the canteen and back was utilized for drill training. An order would ring out in the frosty air: ‘Sing!’”

  When they sang, it always seemed to warm everyone up.

  Sometimes, to get people used to combat conditions, they’d have unexpected drills in the middle of the night. Then they had five minutes to leap into action, get dressed, and line up outside.

  On November 7, 1941, less than a month after they’d been recruited and on the official anniversary celebrating the Russian Revolution, Marina Raskova’s 122nd Air Group took the Red Army oath. Marina spoke to the young women herself during the ceremony, telling them, “Let’s vow once more, together, to stand to our last breath in defense of our beloved homeland.”

  After taking the oath, Zhenya Rudneva finally confessed to her parents that she was off to war. She wrote to her mother, “Now I am a warrior . . . not studying at university as you think, mummy, but getting ready for the front . . . mastering a fearsome weapon.”

  Less than a month later, on December 5, 1941, Hitler decided to postpone his attempt to seize Moscow until spring. The Red Army had held the invasion back from the Soviet capital, but it was the wretched Russian winter that really turned the tables. On December 6, Soviet soldiers began to push the frozen and exhausted German troops away from the city. Most of the western Soviet Union was in German hands, but its largest cities still hadn’t fallen, and the Red Army was still fighting. Operation Barbarossa had failed.

  This was Germany’s first defeat on the ground since the outbreak of war over two years earlier.

  * * *

  UNITS OF MEASUREMENT

  Military language has its own systems for naming different groups.

  In World War II, in the USSR, nearly twenty air armies were stationed throughout the country. The air armies were set up in divisions, each with its own job—for example, bomber, fighter, or ground attack.

  Within the divisions, there were any number of individual regiments like Marina’s 586th, 587th, and 588th. There were usually about twenty or thirty aircraft to a regiment, with a similar number of pilots to fly them. By the time you added in navigators, gunners, mechanics, armorers, communications technicians, Komsomol organizers, and cooks, a full regiment was likely to have at least 250 people in it—all living together, and often dying together, in improvised dugout shelters or abandoned bunkhouses or hosted in local homes.

  A regiment was usually divided into three squadrons of ten planes, with a squadron leader and deputy assigned to each. A squadron could be split into flights of three aircraft for smaller missions, too.

  If you do the math, it turns out that there would rarely be more than about thirty pilots flying for each regiment—sometimes as few as twenty, if the regiment was made up of only two squadrons. In the beginning, of Marina Raskova’s thousand recruits, only about fifty of them could count on starting out as pilots.

  But by the end of the war, well over a hundred women flew planes for Marina’s regiments.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, another ferocious wind was rising in the Pacific. On December 7, 1941, the Axis power Japan surprised the United States with an air attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor in the territory of Hawaii12. Furious, the United States at last joined the global conflict by declaring war on Japan the next day.

  The world’s nations rushed to choose sides, and within a day, eighteen other countries, including the United Kingdom, also declared war on Japan. Hitler was long since fed up with the Americans undermining his battle against the Allied nations while claiming to be neutral, and on December 11, 1941, Germany declared war on the United States, which declared war right back.

  Six months behind the Soviet Union, the United States had also entered World War II. The two huge nations, so different from each other, were allied against Germany.

  While the United States was still reeling from the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 9, 1941, under an order of Stalin, the first of Marina Raskova’s aviation regiments was created. Marina chose Militsa Kazarinova’s sister, Tamara, as its commander.

  MILITSA AND TAMARA KAZARINOVA

  Marina also assigned commanders to the other regiments. She herself would take charge of the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment. She planned to keep Militsa as her chief of staff there, and her deputy commander would be Yevgeniya “Zhenya” Timofeyeva. People liked Zhenya, whose husband was fighting at the front. Their two small children, left with their grandmother, were trapped in a town that had been taken over by the Germans during the summer of 1941.

  Marina chose Yevdokia Bershanskaya to be the commander of the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. Yevdokia wasn’t happy about this at first. She wanted to be a fighter pilot, and she was worried that she wasn’t going to be able to live up to the responsibility. But Marina wanted her to take charge, because Yevdokia would be the oldest member of her regiment as well as the most experienced. In time, she would become the only woman to remain in command of a women’s regiment for the entire war—and her regiment would turn out to be the only Soviet military unit of the war made up entirely of women.

  YEVDOKIA BERSHANSKAYA

  Yevdokia’s second-in-command and chief of staff in the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment was Irina Rakobolskaya, the physics student who’d taken that first recruitment phone call from the Komsomol office. Irina had gone to war without even telling her mother—she was pretty sure her parents would have objected. Now, when Marina Raskova told her that she was going to be given a position of command, Irina started to cry. She wanted to fly.

  Marina’s response? She reminded Irina that she was in the army. The Soviet Union, and all the world, was at war. Orders and regulations must be obeyed, and Irina would have to do her duty whether she liked it or not.

  In any case, no one in Marina’s aviation regiments would be doing any fighting until their training was finished. And they would have to complete it during the most terrible Russian winter on record.

  11

  Winter Training

  The winter of 1941–1942 was the coldest winter of the twentieth century. The average temperature in Leningrad that winter was −14 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit), and in Moscow it was even colder at −15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit). But Engels, where the 122nd Air Group was tr
aining, beat them both. It sat in the middle of an empty plain offering no protection from the bitter wind, with an average temperature that winter of −16 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit). And the young aviators were training in open-cockpit biplanes, with the wind biting at them. They covered their faces with masks made out of mole fur, but they ended up with spots of frostbite anyway.

  MOLESKIN MASK BELONGING TO LARISA ROZANOVA

  Throughout that fearsome winter, the young women of the 122nd Air Group lived and breathed flight training, cramming a three-year military program into six months. Sometimes new volunteers arrived at Engels and joined them. The students flew every day as long as the weather let them, working on flight skills and cross-country navigation. Veteran combat pilots trained the recruits in air combat tactics.

  Beginning in January 1942, some of the young women who’d never flown before but who were training as navigators took their first flights. They went in groups in a big four-engine heavy bomber, to give them experience calculating unplanned routes. Training in wartime meant that in the middle of an exercise, the plane might land in a snow-covered field where the navigation students would have to help refuel it by carrying buckets back and forth from a tank truck that couldn’t drive through the snow. Then they’d be escorted back to Engels by armed fighter planes ready to protect them if the enemy tried to shoot them down. The skies that the young pilots and navigators were learning to fly in were already unsafe.

  The harsh winter would give the young women a taste of the trials that lay ahead of them, although of course they could have no idea that they’d be fighting for over three more years.