A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  Zoya Malkova would soon become a mechanic for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment. Here’s what a typical day of her training at Engels was like:

  “It was early morning and still dark. A strong wind knocked you off your feet. Dry snowflakes pricked your face like needles. Dressed in quilted pants and jackets, girls bustled around an aircraft. . . . Flying practice was about to commence, but the aircraft[’s . . . ] lubricating system malfunctioned. . . . And again (for the umpteenth time) we take off the pump and check the lines and the tightness of the nuts. It is cold. The wind penetrates to the bone marrow, and hands freeze to the metal.”

  When one of the young women began to cry with cold and frustration, another started to sing, and soon Zoya would be singing along with them.

  “Other girls join in. Now they are no longer tired. Glancing at the smiling faces of your girlfriends, you immediately forgot your swollen hands and the cold, and somehow you found new strength.”

  The young airwomen truly did adore their commander.

  Because Marina Raskova was at least five years older than most of them, and in some cases ten years older, they thought of her as a teacher and an authority. She had the wonderful ability of being able to make all who knew her feel that they were special to her as individual human beings. Everyone who flew with her spoke of her beauty, her love of music, her love of children, and her dedication to her work. They’d admired these aspects of her personality from a distance before they actually met her, but now that she was living and working with them in the flesh, she was their ideal leader.

  She hummed along to Rimsky-Korsakov on the radio; she’d take a moment to sit down at the piano in the evening if she got a chance. She played duets with Ekaterina Migunova, her deputy chief of staff and an old friend from the Zhukovsky Academy. At the end of the day’s training and briefings, Marina would suggest, “Let’s sing!” Years later, when war veterans who’d been under her command gathered together, they’d inevitably end up singing a favorite of Marina’s—“The Dugout”:

  A fire’s aflame in the stove,

  Teardrops of pitch on the logs.

  The accordion sings in the dugout

  To me of your smile and your eyes.

  MEMBERS OF THE 122ND AIR GROUP IN WINTER UNIFORM

  And she had a sympathetic ear. Masha Kirillova, Yekaterina “Katya” Fedotova, Alexandra “Sasha” Yegorova, and Antonina “Tonya” Skoblikova were a group of friends working together at the same flying club when war broke out. The four of them had written a letter together begging Marina to help them become combat pilots, and they joined the 122nd Air Group together. When it came time to divide the women into separate regiments, knowing how close these friends were, Marina assigned them all to the same squadron.

  Some of the women, like Irina Rakobolskaya, were young mothers and had left small children in the care of family or friends. If Marina knew that someone’s child had fallen ill, she’d find a way to send medication and, on occasion, an air ambulance. She even granted leave to one pilot to visit her child, and she reached out in person to comfort a parent whose child had died.

  Marina had sent her mother, Anna, and her daughter, Tanya, to safety in a town far up the Volga River when war had first broken out. Their only way of keeping in touch was by writing letters. No wonder she was sympathetic to the other young mothers.

  The one thing Marina didn’t make time for was rest. She was so busy she’d sleep in her uniform, or fall asleep at her desk.

  Years later, when other men and women who’d served in the military in the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War referred to their units, they’d call them by their official name or by their regiment number. But the women who trained in the 122nd Air Group, though they split into three separate units when they went to war, would say that they belonged to “Raskova’s regiments.”

  12

  Ground Crew

  Marina took advantage of the loyalty she inspired and used it to get her recruits to cooperate. Some of the women who’d volunteered for her aviation regiments were going to have to face disappointment, because they were going to have to do jobs that kept them on the ground.

  SERGEANT LIZA TEREKHOVA LOADING AMMUNITION FOR THE 586TH FIGHTER AVIATION REGIMENT

  All those pilots, navigators, and gunners in the air were going to need support from dedicated teams working as aircraft mechanics and weapons technicians. All the regiments would need armorers to load bombs and machine guns, and the fighter and dive-bomber regiments would also need radio technicians and parachute packers.

  It’s true that many of the young women who imagined themselves soaring through the sky as they chased away Nazi aircraft over the heads of Soviet soldiers were sorely unhappy about their assignments.

  But for Marina, they accepted their tasks determined to make her proud. Somebody had to do it, after all.

  Irina Favorskaya was a student at the Moscow Institute of Geology when the war started, and like many other young women her age, she’d spent the summer of 1941 digging fortification trenches. She and her friends had marched off to enlist without packing anything, and the only clothes they had with them were the dresses they were wearing when they jumped into the trucks that drove them to the distant outskirts of Moscow. All summer they dug in their underwear to save their dresses.

  Irina was assigned to become an armorer, loading bombs and guns and doing necessary maintenance work. Training days at Engels when the cold dropped to −35 degrees Celsius (−31 degrees Fahrenheit) were especially brutal. “We had to fix instruments on the aircraft with our bare hands, our skin stuck to the metal, and our hands bled,” Irina said. “I wrote to my mother saying that it was unbearable to work with bare hands, and she sent a parcel . . . with a pair of pink silk ladies’ gloves! I wore them, and all the girls laughed and made fun of me.”

  Zinaida Butkaryova came from a peasant family. As a child in 1931, when Soviet farms were being collectivized during the first Five Year Plan, she’d gone to live with relatives in Moscow because her parents were worried that if she stayed in her home village, she’d starve to death or be killed. Zinaida had worked in a textile factory for five years before joining the 122nd Air Group, and she was assigned to become a parachute packer for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment.

  With little higher education, Zinaida had known all along that she wouldn’t be flying. But she couldn’t keep the tears back when she realized she wasn’t even going to get to work on aircraft.

  She soon found that her assignment was anything but boring—for one thing, she had to make a few practice jumps herself before she learned to pack parachutes. On Zinaida’s first parachute jump, one of those too-big men’s boots slid off in the air, taking with it the cloth she’d wrapped around her foot to fill out the boot. She landed with one bare foot, causing a lot of laughter among her fellow trainees! And wonderfully, after that, the young women were finally allowed to find ways to alter their boots to make them fit better.

  It was a job that had its rewards, too. “When one of our aircraft was shot down and the pilot jumped with the parachute I had packed, I felt proud because it was also the result of my job that the pilot got down safely,” Zinaida said.

  She received a medal for it.

  When you look at the faces in the photographs of Marina Raskova’s regiments, the first impression is that most of these young women share a wholesome, rosy-cheeked appeal—their grins are brave and eager as they ham it up for the camera, like the resourceful heroines of Russian folktales.

  They also look as though they pretty much all come from the same eastern European background, and it’s true that these young Soviet citizens weren’t a diverse group by modern standards. Most of the women in the 122nd Air Group were from Russia, even though the USSR was made up of fifteen different states sprawled across Europe and Asia, all with unique cultural traditions and even their own separate languages.13 Some of the women of the 122nd Air Group were from Ukraine and Belorussia (now Belarus). One, Khivaz Dospano
va, was from a town in Kirghiz (the town is now part of Kazakhstan), in central Asia. Another, Polina Gelman, was Jewish. Based on the records we have access to, these ethnic differences don’t seem to have affected the way the airwomen got along.

  The women of Raskova’s regiments were from a wide range of educational and economic backgrounds. Some were from peasant families, some were the children of intellectuals, some were the children of factory workers and had worked in factories themselves. Some were from tiny villages in the middle of nowhere, while others were from the big cities of Leningrad and Moscow. Only a third of one percent of Soviet women attended universities at this time, so the education level of many of Marina’s recruits was off the scale by ordinary standards.

  In an ideal world, communism is supposed to create a society without class. Its utopian aim is to give equal opportunities to all people. In theory, goods are shared according to the level of contribution people make to a society, which means that hard work gets rewarded.

  In the reality of the USSR, millions of people were tortured and starved to death in the first years of the Communist Party state. Of those who managed to live ordinary lives, some already had more education than others, or their parents were peasants, or they came from a small village or a big city. No matter how noble the ideal, some people had better jobs or nicer apartments whether or not they had earned them. All these differences contributed to a distinct class awareness, and even snobbery, in some of the young women who joined Marina Raskova’s regiments. Zoya Malkova, the aircraft mechanic who described the bone-chilling training routine at Engels, called the students from universities and aviation institutions “elitist”—including herself.

  There’s no doubt that Soviet pilots, navigators, and commanding officers were privileged during the war. Life was harder for ground crew than for aircrew. Their living conditions were worse, and because of the way the Red Army gave out rations according to rank, the ground crew was not as well fed as the aircrew, even though they worked every bit as hard. Some of the mechanics, who had been pilots before the war, struggled not to feel bitter about it. There was bickering and quarreling that sometimes ended in tears and even name-calling.

  * * *

  KITCHEN DUTY: ANOTHER FORM OF ELITISM

  Family, culture, race, religion, wealth, and education can all affect your social status, even in a society that makes an effort to ignore these things. In the USSR, gender equality in law didn’t always mean gender equality in everyday life.

  Valentina Petrochenkova was so inspired by the flight of the Rodina that she’d faked her own birth certificate so she could take her flight test early. But when the war started, Valentina was told she couldn’t join the air force because she was a woman. She had to keep working as a flight instructor.

  Then, after months of training pilots, she was told she had to train parachutists. And first, Valentina would have to take a parachuting course herself, which she did during that bitter wartime winter. After jumping, when the students touched down on the icy airfield, the wind in their billowing parachutes would take them sliding across the ice—“and only the instructors in the bushes could stop us!” said Valentina.

  When she’d finished her course, she was told she had to train sixty men before she’d be allowed to volunteer for combat duty. And she did, and at last she was offered a place as a pilot with the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment.

  Valentina insisted on becoming a fighter pilot, and made her application to a male commander.

  He told her, “No! No women!”

  “I will go nowhere, I will fly fighters,” Valentina said, and refused to get up from the chair where she was sitting.

  “All right, you can sit here!” said the commander. Then he left.

  Valentina spent the entire night sitting in his office. When he came back the next morning she was still sitting there.

  Finally she wore him down, and Valentina was allowed to stay with the all-male fighter pilot training regiment. She was given her own little private plywood cabin in a corner of the dugout where the other pilots slept. But she wasn’t allowed to fly.

  Valentina had over ten times more flying hours than the rest of the students, so there wasn’t any point in putting her through the paces in the training aircraft with the young men.

  Instead, she was given kitchen duty—but the commander promised that when the fighter aircraft arrived, she could be the second person, after the top male student, to try one out!

  Valentina would finally get to join Marina Raskova’s 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment late in 1943.

  * * *

  The young women who’d been assigned as Komsomol administrators had the unlucky job of trying to patch things up. In these early days of learning to live with a thousand strangers under harsh conditions, the pilots and mechanics had a hard time getting along—especially when the shortages were so extreme that there weren’t enough forks and spoons to go around, and even the officers had to try to scoop up watery porridge with their fingers!

  Klavdiya Ilushina, the chief engineer for the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, was at first annoyed at the working-class rough edges of the mechanics, who’d mostly had no higher education. Having to work closely with these women helped Klavdiya overcome this prejudice.

  “After I was in closer contact with the girls,” she said, “we all became like sisters.”

  Anyone who came of age in the Soviet Union during the 1930s was not going to let class awareness affect her commitment to the urgent demands of war.

  13

  The Aircraft Arrive

  Late in December 1941, Marina inspected three beaten-up Sukhoy planes that the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment was supposed to train on. The first thing she noticed about them was the nasty smell.

  These battered Sukhoys were stinky and smoky and inefficient. They burned a lot of fuel, and they used castor oil, which leaked and splattered all over the cockpit after a few flights. Pilots would climb out with their clothes covered with castor oil, and the smell didn’t wash off. If you weren’t careful, the plane’s nose dipped as you landed it, and then the whole plane would flip over onto its back. The young women of the 587th were miserable in these planes.

  So Marina made a special trip to Moscow to check out new planes for the regiment she was going to command.

  Remember Vladimir Petlyakov, one of the aircraft designers who’d been arrested during the Great Terror and spent three years in prison? He’d been released from prison in 1940, and for his fantastic work on the Petlyakov Pe-2, a brand-new dive-bomber and fighter, he was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1941.

  These Pe-2s were the planes Marina ordered for her dive-bomber regiment, and by the end of the war the 587th loved this aircraft so much that they, and other pilots throughout the USSR, gave it an endearing nickname: “Peshka.” It means “pawn” in Russian, but it’s also a cute way to say “Little Pe-2”!

  The design was so new that the planes wouldn’t be ready to roll off the production line for another six months. The 587th Regiment would have to keep on training in the stinky Sukhoys. But at least they wouldn’t be stuck with them forever.

  The aircraft for the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment were much easier to get hold of. They were Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes14, the same aircraft that all the Soviet flying clubs used. Almost every pilot in the 122nd had learned to fly in a plane like this one.

  It was a flimsy thing made of plywood covered with fabric, with two cockpits that were open to the wind and rain and snow. In daylight, the Po-2 was an easy target for enemy fighter planes because it was so slow. But at night, believe it or not, this was actually an advantage. The Po-2s were hard to see in the dark as they bumbled along, and the German fighters couldn’t fly slowly enough to get an easy shot at them.

  Dozens of Soviet Air Force regiments, all men’s except the 588th, flew these planes. They were already being used at the front for communications, as ambulances, and for clobbering German troops. Every night the P
o-2s dropped thousands of pounds of explosives behind the front lines, destroying enemy camps and supplies and not allowing the enemy soldiers a wink of sleep throughout the entire war.

  A PO-2 BIPLANE

  “It sounded like a sewing machine,” said Sergeant Artur Gartner of the German Luftwaffe. “But they were nasty because we couldn’t sleep as long as the Po-2s approached.”

  The Germans absolutely hated them.

  The Soviet women hated the Germans right back. Polina Gelman, who became a chief squadron navigator for the 588th Night Bombers, said, “We hated the German fascists so much that we didn’t care which aircraft we were to fly; we would have even flown a broom to be able to fire at them!”

  As for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, Marina ordered them brand-new single-seat Yak-1s. The Yak was a sleek and speedy Soviet plane, easy to fly and easy to fix, and it could stand up to the deadly Luftwaffe fighters.

  Marina pulled some strings to get twenty-four new Yaks. She had help from I. S. Levin, a friend who was the director of the Saratov Aviation Factory where the Yaks were made, just across the Volga from Engels.

  The male technicians at the factory were angry. Why should they build the hottest design in Soviet fighters for a few women, when men already in battle at the front desperately needed new planes?

  Marina decided to introduce the factory technicians to the pilots who’d be flying their planes.

  YAK-1 ASSEMBLY LINE

  She sent a group of women from the 586th to visit the Saratov factory, which wasn’t far away. Lilya Litvyak, overflowing with enthusiasm and oozing personality, was one of them. “Our aerodrome kids were transformed,” said I.S. Levin, the factory’s director. “Exhausted, fatigued from sleepless nights, from stressful work in the freezing cold, they somehow at once pulled themselves up.” After they’d met the women pilots of the 586th in person, the young men put extra effort into Marina’s order!