A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  They proved themselves up to the challenge, though. The pilot who checked out Mariya Smirnova wrote in her logbook that her performance was “excellent”!

  Before Marina flew back to the training center at Engels, she gave the young women of the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment a pep talk. They crowded together in a room stuffy with the heat of early summer. She told them that their job wouldn’t be easy, but she knew they’d be able to overcome the difficulties—including male pilots who didn’t take them seriously. She wished success for the young aviators and told them she hoped they’d earn the honorable name of “Guards” for their regiment—a special title awarded to elite military units.

  In the middle of Marina’s speech, the noise of bombs at the front could be heard clearly through the open windows. Natalya “Natasha” Meklin, one of the 588th’s flight commanders, wondered what the future held.

  “Standing shoulder to shoulder, we all thought and felt the same,” she said. “A new chapter was opening up in our lives.”

  On June 10, 1942, three Po-2s of the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment finally braved their very first combat mission at the front.

  The 588th’s commander, Yevdokia Bershanskaya, flew the lead aircraft herself, with Irina Rakobolskaya as her navigator. The two other planes were flown and navigated by the regiment’s squadron commanders. As they approached the target area under cover of darkness, there was nothing to light their way but the smoldering glow of burning coal mines.

  They were surprised that no one seemed to be shooting at them.

  Pilot Serafima Amosova and her navigator didn’t have any trouble finding their way in the dark. When they got to the target, they circled it twice in their small plane, heavy with the weight of the bombs hanging beneath its fabric wings. Still no one fired at them, so for the first time, Serafima’s navigator released the catch that held the bombs in place.

  Suddenly the night was full of explosions. It wasn’t just the bombs Serafima and her navigator had dropped—now the German antiaircraft guns began firing up at the small Po-2. Long, eerily pale beams of light swept back and forth across the dark sky as the Germans on the ground tried to find the aircraft that were attacking them.

  The surrounding landscape grew covered with smoke, and it was even harder to find the way home than it had been to get to the target in the first place. Back at the 588th’s airfield—about fifteen minutes’ flight away—there were only three small lights to guide the returning Po-2 down to the ground.

  But Serafima and her navigator made it. The rest of the regiment were all sitting on the airfield in the dark, waiting anxiously for their commanders to return. “When we landed, our fellow pilots began hugging and kissing us,” Serafima said.

  But for Lyuba Olkhovskaya’s squadron, the excitement and triumph of that night slowly turned to apprehension, and eventually to grief. They waited and waited, but the plane flown by Lyuba and navigated by Vera Tarasova didn’t come back.

  In the days that followed, the regiment pieced together what had happened to Lyuba and Vera.

  After they’d dropped their bombs, those guns that were firing from the ground had torn through their fragile aircraft. Wounded and bleeding, Lyuba managed to land her plane in the dark. But she and Vera didn’t have the strength to climb out, and neither one of them ever set foot on the ground again. After they landed, they both bled to death in the Po-2’s cockpits.

  The Germans found and searched their bodies, then left the dead aviators for local villagers to bury.

  Once again, the 588th had to cope with a shocking loss.

  But this time they weren’t going to let it delay them one day more. This time they were on their own and they were at war at the front. They must have remembered and repeated to themselves all the things that Marina had said to encourage them, and above all they must have looked forward to being able to take action—to being able to do something at last.

  Serafima said, “We painted on . . . our planes: Revenge to the Enemy for the Death of our Friends.”

  Lyuba’s squadron had to fly their own first combat mission the next night, even though they’d lost their commander. Mariya Smirnova, the pilot who’d had the “excellent” comment written in her logbook after her flight test, became their new commander.

  For most of the summer, the young women of the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment stayed at their first base in the village among the orchards. They slept in the homes of local residents and they had a mess area with tables under a grove of trees. And all summer long, the German army fought and burned its way relentlessly toward the city of Stalingrad.

  Yevdokia Bershanskaya turned out to be a good commander for the 588th. She was decisive without being bossy and didn’t easily get angry. She didn’t talk down to people. She didn’t praise you, but she didn’t criticize you, either. She encouraged the young women under her command to think about the effects of their own actions.

  Yevdokia didn’t have Marina’s natural warmth, but she was understanding. She tried to balance military discipline with human kindness to help the young women of the 588th manage enormous physical and emotional stress. When they were on duty, they had to call each other by their ranks and surnames; off duty, they could use their first names—or even sweet or funny nicknames. Tonya Rudakova, who was tiny for a mechanic, was called Ponchik—“Doughnut”!—by her friends.

  Yevdokia was always there on the dark airfield to give instructions to the women who were flying that night, and to hear their reports when they returned. She’d have a few cool, calm words to speak to each pilot before she took off.

  “Be careful.”

  That was enough to reassure the young women that their commander was thinking about them as they flew out into the dark and the antiaircraft fire.

  The 588th settled into a routine. They used two airfields at the same time: one, the home field, was the place where they ate and slept and took care of their aircraft. The other was about fifteen kilometers (nine miles) closer to the front, where they were able to land and refuel and reload their bombs between missions at night. Fuel and explosives were brought there in trucks. There wasn’t any need for shelter at this temporary airfield, because everyone here was awake and working all night. In the morning, all the ground and aircrews would drive or fly home to their base to repair damaged planes and get some sleep.

  The advantage of this second field was that it wasn’t obvious from the air. There weren’t any buildings nearby, and no aircraft were parked there during the day. If a German scout plane flew over it in daylight, all the pilot would see was an empty green field. The night bombers didn’t need paved surfaces or even runways; the pilots just pointed their planes into the wind and took off from the dirt or the grass.

  Zhenya Rudneva, the astronomy student and storyteller, became the 588th’s chief navigator. She makes the navigator’s job of releasing bombs sound perfectly simple:

  “You point your plane at the target and press the bomb release catch. The bomb is released and lands on the heads of the damnable Germans. God, how I hate them!”

  The release catch wasn’t entirely reliable, though. If it got stuck, the navigator had to climb out of her cockpit onto the plane’s lower wing in the dark sky full of gunfire and jiggle the bomb free with her own two hands.

  When Zhenya wrote a letter home five days after her squadron’s first flight, her tone was full of enthusiasm. She told her parents, “I am not in the least afraid when I am flying. . . . Well, the only difference between training and combat duty is that antiaircraft guns are sometimes firing at us. Above all, don’t worry about me. . . . After all, it is so wonderful to fly!”

  Of course Zhenya’s breezy tone was partly meant to reassure her anxious parents.

  Flying in the dark was a constant danger. Once, a returning aircraft accidentally landed on top of one that was already on the ground, killing three of the four crew members involved.

  Another sobering accident happened in the dark when Gal
ina “Galya” Dokutovich, one of the navigators, returned from a nighttime flight mission that summer. The plane she’d been flying in had been damaged, so while she was waiting for another plane to be readied for her next mission, she lay down to rest right there in the tall grass on the edge of the airfield. A truck was hurrying on its way to refuel the planes. The driver didn’t see Galya and ran over her in the dark.

  She survived, but with a serious back injury that kept her hospitalized for six months. As Galya lay on her stretcher about to be carried away, she made Irina Rakobolskaya promise that when she came back to the regiment, she’d be allowed to fly again.

  The darkened nighttime airfields were dangerous to people in the air as well as on the ground, but there wasn’t anything the night bomber regiments could do about it. They couldn’t use bright lights to guide them in to land, because any kind of permanent airfield lighting might have been spotted by enemy aircraft. Sometimes they got a vehicle parked on the ground to quickly switch its headlights on and off. Otherwise, their regular landing lights were kerosene lanterns you could only see from one direction—they called them “flying mice”!

  The pilots joked, “Soon we’ll be expected to land by the light of our commander’s cigarette.”

  They were getting used to working in the dark.

  16

  Dive-Bombers for the 587th

  Back at Engels, late in the summer of 1942, the new Pe-2 dive-bombers that Marina had ordered for the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment finally arrived.

  The challenging, powerful Pe-2 dive-bomber, with its aircrew of three, was one of the most sophisticated aircraft the USSR built during World War II. So before the pilots of the 587th could go anywhere else, they had to learn how to fly it, and the maintenance teams had to learn how to take care of it.

  PE-2 DIVE-BOMBERS IN FLIGHT

  It wasn’t an easy plane to fly. The Pe-2 had twin tails and twin engines, one engine on each wing. Hardly any of Marina’s pilots had flown using two engines before, and now they had to learn how to balance these engines, and how to land out of balance on one engine in case the other failed. The plane was hard to take off, and once it was in the air at last, it was also tricky to land.

  Some pilots in other regiments called the Pe-2 a “flying coffin.” It would be a while before the 587th liked it enough to call it their little “Peshka”!

  Katya Fedotova, one of the four friends who’d begged Marina to let them fly together, said that “the control stick was heavy to move, and our arms and legs were so short we had three folded pillows behind our backs. The navigators helped us by pushing on our backs as we pushed on the stick to get the tail up for takeoff.”

  Marina Raskova was less experienced as a pilot than as a navigator, and as the commander of the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment, she too had to learn to fly this difficult plane. Katya was there to see Marina Raskova’s first solo flight in a Pe-2. Things seemed to be going fine until, high in the sky, Marina tried to turn. Suddenly a white plume of steam trailed from the starboard engine and it stalled.

  Katya and the other pilots on the ground watched breathlessly, willing Marina to keep her speed up and turn the controls toward the working engine, as they’d been taught.

  Marina did exactly what she was supposed to and then made a faultless landing. As the young women came running across the airfield in relief to welcome her back to earth, a smiling Marina climbed out of the plane.

  She told them calmly, “Never mind, girls, this machine mustn’t be trifled with, but certainly is airworthy.”

  The challenging Pe-2 dive-bomber’s aircrew of three included a pilot, a navigator, and a tail gunner. The pilot sat in the main cockpit with the navigator standing behind her. According to pilot Yelena Malyutina, there wasn’t any seat for the navigator. The navigator also acted as bombardier, releasing the bombs over the target. In the back of the aircraft there was a separate compartment for the tail gunner, whose other job was to operate the radio.

  Now Marina ran into an unexpected problem. She didn’t have enough recruits to crew and care for these complicated planes, and she didn’t have the time to train reinforcements. So Marina recruited men from the air force reserves to fill out her staff shortages. When the 587th Regiment finally went to war, most of its tail gunners were men, because the machine guns in the Pe-2s required so much strength to recharge. But all the 587th’s pilots and navigators were women.

  We don’t know much about how these men felt when they were first told they were going to work in a women’s regiment. But we do know that the mixed aircrews quickly became reliant on each other and worked together loyally.

  Tonya Khokhlova was one of a very few women who was a tail gunner in a Pe-2. Because of the strength it took to load the machine guns, she’d started as their only female tail gunner; she’d been a gymnast, a rider, and a rower before the war and had great upper body strength. Crouched in her little canopied compartment in the back of the aircraft, Tonya could see in all directions, and there she was responsible for two machine guns that would protect her crewmates from enemy aircraft.

  Tonya said that it was so hard to recharge the machine gun that she couldn’t do it on the ground—“but in the air it was one, two, and it was recharged!”

  It was difficult for the armorers who had to load these guns, too, and the women who ended up doing this work weren’t at first particularly interested in bombs or guns or even in engineering. Often, they ended up being recruited for jobs that had nothing to do with what they were good at, just because there was a gap to be filled.

  The Pe-2 dive-bomber contained five machine guns. As a bomber, of course, it also contained bombing gear and bombsights, and all of this needed maintenance and loading. One young woman was responsible for all the weapons on a single aircraft. When the regiment was flying combat missions, the armorers had to service the aircraft two or three times every day.

  Galina Volova, the regimental armament engineer, called their duties “unspectacular but difficult and important.” They worked covered with sweat in stifling enclosed cockpits in the summer. They worked without gloves in well below freezing temperatures in the winter. Natalya Alfyorova, another armorer in the 587th, said that during combat “the guns became very dirty inside, choked with smoke and burned particles. We had to lift them; they weighed sixteen kilograms [about thirty-five pounds] and were two meters long [about two yards]. We were all so small and thin—what was Raskova thinking about when she chose small girls for such jobs?”

  It was a rhetorical question, of course. They did the work without complaining.

  17

  “Not One Step Back”

  Spirits were very low in the USSR in the summer of 1942. Although Marina’s aviators were excited to be finally engaged in combat, most people weren’t rushing to defend their Motherland with the same energy and passion they’d felt the year before.

  In the areas that hadn’t already been taken over by the Germans, cities were on fire. People were starving. Those who were fighting were dying in what seemed like hopeless battle. They were tired and hungry, and their resources were scarce. Refugees fled frantically ahead of the German troops, and when they got stuck at river crossings, the German Air Force swooped down overhead and fired their machine guns into the waiting crowds. The Soviet Air Force didn’t have enough fighter planes to fight back.

  Back in August 1941, right after war broke out in the USSR, Stalin’s Order 270 had ruled that if you surrendered or were captured by the enemy—or even just ended up behind enemy lines—you were a traitor. This iron-handed law was supposed to encourage people to fight to the death. Sonya Ozerkova, the chief engineer of the 588th Night Bombers, accidentally ran into real trouble because of this policy when she got stuck in German-occupied territory while she was working on a damaged plane. The Germans moved in so swiftly that she had to run away, leaving the plane behind, beginning a three-week adventure on foot that included shooting a German soldier herself.

  But when sh
e finally made it back to Soviet territory, she didn’t get anything like a hero’s welcome. Sonya was immediately arrested by her own people, interrogated for treason, and sentenced to be shot. In shock, she had to let her captors shave her head while she awaited execution.

  She was rescued at the last possible minute. An officer whose battalion included the 588th found out what was going on by a chance comment from his driver. He told the commander of the Southern Front, who ordered Sonya to be released. Sonya, stunned and traumatized by the events of the past weeks, was able to return to her regiment.

  You’d think that this kind of terrifying treatment would be enough to keep everyone in line, but with the terrible losses of 1942, people weren’t fighting with the enthusiasm and commitment they’d shown in the beginning of the war. So on July 28, 1942, the Soviet government issued a new order, with an even more fearsome message than Order 270. Stalin’s Order 227, “Not One Step Back” (Ni shagu nazad), made it a crime even to retreat. Now it became illegal for soldiers to stop fighting.

  Imagine you are someone with a dangerous job—let’s say a firefighter. Now imagine that the law says no matter how fierce the fire, if you don’t successfully put it out, you’ll be executed. If you back out of a burning building, even if the fire is too far out of control for you to do anything, you’ll be shot the next day for turning back. But if you stay in the burning building and die and nobody ever identifies your ashes, the official verdict will be that you probably tried to get out. So even though you died fighting that fire like a hero, no one can prove it. Your family won’t get any survivors’ benefits, and you won’t even be given a memorial.

  That’s exactly what the Red Army soldiers faced under Order 227.