A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  Shockingly, the first death in the squadron was a suicide. One young pilot, Lina Smirnova, shot herself in the head after a rough landing in July. She’d been flying Raisa Belyaeva’s plane before Raisa left the regiment, and Lina seems to have dissolved into a panic attack over how Raisa was going to react to finding that her Yak had a bent propeller. Lina’s death must have had a terrible effect on the mental state of the other young women in the regiment—and was probably one of the reasons Raisa was transferred.

  The 586th’s first flight loss came about a month later. In September 1942, Zoya Pozhidayeva and Olga Golisheva took off from the airfield at Anisovka and lined up to fly side by side to protect a railway and bridge from an enemy attack. When they got back to their base, on the same day, they were assigned a training flight over the airfield.

  And then Olga lost control of her plane. There might have been a mechanical failure in the aircraft—or it could have been an error Olga made herself, perhaps failing to pull out of a dive. But for some reason, Olga’s aircraft suddenly went plummeting earthward.

  Zoya, in the air with a full view of what was about to happen to Olga, called to her friend over the radio: “Jump!”

  But Olga didn’t respond, and she didn’t use her parachute, and she never pulled out of the dive.

  Her aircraft plowed into the ground—Olga was killed by the impact.

  Zoya was heartbroken, and not just for her friend. She said, “I felt so terrible—it was not only my first loss but the first loss of the regiment.”

  At the same time that the 586th’s fighter pilots were dealing with frustration and grief, they were also getting their first taste of battle, and some of them were having to do it in the dark.

  On the night of September 24, 1942, a call came in to tell the 586th that a group of German bombers was heading toward Saratov. Yevgeniya “Zhenya” Prokhorova and Valeria “Lera” Khomyakova ran for their Yak-1s, scrambled in, and took off into the dark to chase away the enemy planes.

  Nina Slovokhotova, the 586th’s chief of chemical services, watched and waited tensely that night with the rest of the regiment. Sirens wailed and the antiaircraft guns rumbled like thunder. Nina saw the pale searchlights sweeping across the sky, hunting for the German aircraft. Finally one of the grasping fingers of light snatched at the tiny, distant silhouette of a plane. Within seconds, the other searchlights caught it in a web of light.

  The women watching from the ground saw the gleaming red bursts of tracer bullets17 across the dark sky. Then they heard a distant explosion.

  A breathless messenger came running from headquarters, where Commander Tamara Kazarinova was giving radio directions to her pilots from the ground. The messenger told the excited regiment, “According to the Air-Warning Service posts, the enemy [bomber fell] to the south of the railroad bridge and blew itself up on its own bombs!”

  When Zhenya landed, she was in tears and furious—her weapons had jammed and she hadn’t been able to use them. That meant that it was definitely Lera who’d shot down the German bomber. Her mechanic, Yekaterina “Katya” Polunina, came running up to Lera and kissed her. Katya exclaimed, “You darling, you’ve just shot down a Heinkel!”

  The next morning, Nina went by truck while Lera and Tamara flew overhead to check out the crash site. What they found there was sobering.

  “Near the bridge, in the willow thicket on the river bank, lay the broken-up machine with a black spider of a swastika on its tail unit,” said Nina. “Beside the dead German aircrew were their unopened parachutes.” Not realizing how low they were in the dark, the Luftwaffe crew had jumped out of the plane seconds before it hit the ground, and were killed by the impact.

  As well as being Lera’s very first nighttime combat, this was the first air victory for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment.

  They were jubilant. Lera was given a pay bonus and a special victory breakfast of vodka and watermelon. The regiment even got a splashy full-page story in the youth magazine Ogonyok (Spark). Lera Khomyakova had become the first female pilot in history to shoot down an enemy aircraft at night.

  But Lera was one of the pilots Tamara Kazarinova didn’t get along with. Now she’d become a celebrity, the first woman ever to shoot down a bomber at night. Lera received a medal for her history-making victory, and she had to travel to Moscow to go to the awards ceremony. When she returned from the long trip, before she had a chance to rest, Tamara assigned her to night duty. Lera was supposed to fly a routine patrol, searching for enemy planes.

  Lera managed to snatch a short nap on the ground while her mechanic, Katya, started the engine of her Yak-1 for her. When a messenger came to wake Lera and told her it was time to take off, she leaped into action. She raced for her plane, jumped into the cockpit, and took the controls.

  But she didn’t give herself enough time to adjust her eyes to the dark.

  Lera’s plane sped down the runway, which was purposely unlit so that German aircraft couldn’t find it. She misjudged her takeoff. She turned too steeply as she was climbing, and instead of lifting off into the sky, her plane crashed a little way beyond the airfield, killing Lera. She wasn’t found until the next morning.

  As commander, Tamara Kazarinova was blamed for the chain of events that led to Lera’s death.

  Soon afterward, she was dismissed from her command.

  Tamara had only been in charge of the 586th for six months when she was fired. It’s not entirely clear why she left, though it may have been related to Lera’s crash. Or it might have simply been that Tamara’s leg injury was keeping her from flying with her squadron. There were also probably personal or political issues going on that we don’t know about. It’s even possible that some of the other pilots—including Lilya Litvyak, Katya Budanova, and Raisa Belyaeva—may have gone behind Tamara’s back to ask for a new commander.

  For a few days, she was replaced with a temporary commander. Then, either because someone felt the 586th needed a firmer hand or simply because there weren’t any qualified women available for the job, the command of the women’s 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment was assigned to a man, Major Aleksandr Gridnev.

  Aleksandr Gridnev had troubles of his own. He’d been arrested earlier that year while in charge of another air force regiment, for endangering the life of a top government official by failing to fly with him through a dust storm. Aleksandr Gridnev was never brought to trial, but throughout the war and for years afterward he had to worry that he might be. He may have thought that being put in charge of a women’s flight regiment was his punishment.

  When Aleksandr Gridnev showed up as the new commander of the 586th on October 14, 1942, the rookie fighter pilots were still frustrated at being “stuck at Anisovka.” Aleksandr suggested that he run a training program for them along with their flight duties that fall. Once he was satisfied that they were ready for it, they would be sent to the front.

  The young pilots were thrilled by this response and asked Aleksandr how long he’d be staying with their regiment.

  “Forever,” he told them.

  COMMANDER ALEKSANDR GRIDNEV WITH (FROM LEFT) 586TH FIGHTER AVIATION REGIMENT PILOTS KLAVDIYA PANKRATOVA, ZINAIDA SALOMATINA, MARIYA KUZNETSOVA, OLGA YAMSHCHIKOVA, ANYA DEMCHENKO, AND ZOYA POZHIDAYEVA

  Aleksandr Gridnev took his role as commander of the 586th very seriously. As time passed, the women of the regiment grew to like him so much they began affectionately to call him Batya—“Dad.” It was a contrast with how they’d felt about their previous commander.

  In the fall of 1942, the two squadrons of the 586th were joined by a third squadron of male pilots, along with their ground crew. These men flew and fought beside the women of the 586th as their equals, but there isn’t much on record about them. According to Katya Polunina, the senior mechanic who became the regiment’s historian, the women often flew in pairs with a male pilot because the men had more experience.

  Aleksandr Gridnev got to work right away on the training program he’d promised. In the fall of 1942
the 586th practiced formation flying, navigation, target practice, and night flying using radar. Even while they were training, they were on alert in case of nighttime attacks by the enemy.

  A couple months after Aleksandr Gridnev took over, half of the pilots who’d transferred under Tamara Kazarinova’s command came back.

  The 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment was back on its feet.

  20

  “Life Is Life”

  Even at war, people need food. They need a place to sleep. They need water and soap to wash with every now and then, or else they have to struggle with parasites and diseases. They need clothes, especially in winter. Women need extra underwear when they get their period. All these things need to be produced: crops have to be grown and distributed, soap must get boiled, cloth has to be woven. In wartime, this has to happen at the same time as factories produce aircraft and tanks and trucks, while other factories refine the fuel to keep those vehicles moving on the ground and in the air.

  The necessities of daily living were often hard to come by in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s iron grip in the 1930s, and they were even harder to come by after the Soviet Union went to war with Germany. Leningrad, Russia’s old capital, was under attack and had been blockaded by the German army since September 8, 1941. It would stay that way until January 27, 1944, nearly two and a half years later. It was almost impossible to get supplies into the city. In the fall of 1942, people in Leningrad had nothing left to eat but wallpaper paste and broth made of boiled leather. Nearly a million of the city’s inhabitants would starve to death before the war was over.

  The suffering in Leningrad was extreme, but no one in the USSR was living in luxury. Food was scarce; in a nation at war, much of it occupied by enemy troops, it was difficult to grow and gather crops. When the harvest was in, goods were hard to transport. Everyone’s food was rationed. Those serving in the military were given rations according to a strict order of rank and importance.

  Pilots were at the top of that ranking system. Zinaida Butkaryova, the parachute packer, did her best to be polite when she summed up the difference between the ground and aircrew of the 586th Regiment: “Our ration was a soldier’s, and the pilots had their own rations.” Pilots got butter and cheese with their bread—mechanics did not, and had to survive on a steady diet of porridge (they called it “blondie”). If they were stationed near a village, they could exchange soldier’s luxuries such as tobacco, cigarettes, and sugar for milk and eggs. But they couldn’t count on it. Once, when the German forces cut off their supplies for several days, the ground crew of the 586th ate nothing but herring.

  The pilots were supposed to get better rations than the ground crew, but they didn’t always eat well, either. Even Aleksandr Gridnev, the 586th’s commander, looked forward to an unexpected treat from the supply chain every now and then: “When they sent us the American food, it was a feast—canned meat, dried eggs, canned milk.” Even that must have been delicious when they’d eaten nothing but herring for three days!

  Throughout the war, ground personnel lived in underground dugouts they built themselves, no more than trenches covered with logs and soil—or even just with canvas. It could get so cold in these dugouts that sometimes your hair would freeze to the wooden planks of your bunk while you were sleeping. The only heat came from a pechka, a small woodstove, or a burzhuika, a fireplace made from an oil drum. The word burzhuika comes from the same word as bourgeoisie—the middle class who liked luxury. A good fireplace that actually gave off heat was a luxury!

  Water trickled into the dugouts when it rained. Sometimes everybody’s pillows, sheets, and mattresses would be soaked; the person who slept nearest the entrance was in charge of checking how deep the water was getting while the other women rested. “When . . . there was so much water in the trench that everything was floating, we would jump up and go out in our underwear to ask the men on the truck with a pumping machine to come and pump out the water so we could go back to sleep,” said Valentina Kovalyova, a mechanic for the 586th.

  There was never enough soap, and sometimes not even enough water. In the 588th, the women might have to wash with water from puddles or melted snow. About once a week a truck would turn up for the 587th with a box of cold water on it for them to bathe in. And in the 586th, every couple of weeks the regiment could get a truck ride to the nearest town so they could bathe in a public bathhouse, common throughout the Soviet Union. But the women had to share the bathhouse with the men of their regiment, so they hung a sheet between them for a little privacy!

  Yelena Kulkova-Malutina, who became a Pe-2 pilot for the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment, ran into a different kind of problem. She spent the first part of the war training male pilots—out of eighteen instructors, she was the only woman. “It was in an open airfield, and there was no place for a ladies’ room,” she said. “Everything was open, to find a place I had to go behind a bush, where I could be seen by everyone, and there were only men. I was so shy and embarrassed that I didn’t even have a gulp of water in order not to go to the ladies’ room behind a bush. And the cadets insisted on asking our commander why I didn’t ever have breakfast!”

  Lack of soap and water and toilet facilities weren’t the only problems that the Soviet soldiers faced in terms of hygiene. The steppes, the flat grassland of southeastern Europe, crawled with rats and mice. When the rodents migrated, they could stop trains—the wheels would get jammed with their crushed bodies. In November 1942, one fighter pilot of the 586th found mice in the cockpit of her Yak-1 while she was flying. Zhenya Prokhorova had taken off one night for a training flight when Commander Aleksandr Gridnev noticed that she was flying erratically. Aleksandr assumed there was something wrong with Zhenya’s aircraft and called out the emergency vehicles. When she landed, leaped out of the cockpit, and ran, people thought her plane was about to explode.

  In fact some mice had been nesting in the plane and had fallen onto Zhenya’s head while she was flying. She’d been a member of the state aerobatic team before the war, but she’d never had to deal with rodents landing on her head in flight before!

  In our modern civilizations, we don’t really think of bathing with soap and water as being gendered. We have similar expectations for what counts as cleanliness in men and women alike. But being afraid of mice is a gendered expectation in many people’s minds. It would probably surprise us more, and be an even funnier story, if the mice in the cockpit had upset Aleksandr Gridnev rather than Zhenya Prokhorova.

  And this highlights a theme that runs through almost every Soviet female soldier’s story of the Great Patriotic War: War is gendered, and it is not feminine. No matter how valiantly a woman proves herself in battle, her experience of war will always differ from a man’s experience, because she is a woman. Dressing in men’s clothes and using the same equipment as men does not turn a woman into a man.

  The young women of the Soviet Union who fought in World War II clung to their feminine identity with consistent determination, and if one single item could represent this individual battle, it’s underwear.

  Soviet stores had never sold much in the way of pretty underwear, and most Soviet women at the time made their own. In wartime, being forced to wear men’s underwear drove them crazy. It didn’t fit, it was ugly and uncomfortable, and they all hated it. Soviet women soldiers waged a private battle against men’s underwear the whole time they were fighting their invading enemy, the German army.

  Maybe your mother could send you some panties. If you were lucky enough to get hold of a piece of German parachute silk, you could transform it into panties yourself. Then you could trade your sturdy military men’s underwear with local people in exchange for potatoes or milk. If you got caught, you’d end up having to spend a few days in the guardhouse. But since your “guards” were friends from your own regiment, you could usually get someone to sneak a book into your cell.

  Two armorers from the 588th Regiment were sentenced to ten years in prison because they’d taken little parach
utes off unused flares and made silk panties out of them. Their sentences were put off so they could continue to fight, and eventually they were both retrained as navigators. One of the women was killed in action—but the other had a row of medals by the end of the war. She didn’t have to go to jail over silk panties after all.

  It might seem silly and insignificant to us now, but the silk panties mattered. Hanging on to femininity was a concrete way to express your womanhood. It was especially important when other physical markers disappeared—your long hair, dresses and shoes that fit properly, limited access to makeup and soap. Under so much physical stress, many women stopped having their periods throughout the war, which meant that even their bodies didn’t seem to be functioning like women’s bodies anymore. This wasn’t just confusing and upsetting—it could be frightening, too. These young people didn’t have a women’s health clinic they could consult. They didn’t know what might be causing this change. But suddenly they had to live with the possibility that they might not ever be able to have children.

  Making strong statements about their womanhood helped them to cope with these issues.

  “We wanted to make ourselves look pretty and attractive and womanlike, in spite of the uniform,” said Nina Shebalina, a mechanic in the 586th Regiment.

  “We were sick and tired of the men’s boots, and once I decided to put on these slippers I knitted for myself,” said Mariya Kaloshina, an armorer for the 587th. “From other people’s point of view, it was ridiculous when I appeared in my slippers in uniform!” Another young woman in the 587th, who’d been a hairdresser before the war, used a metal rod for cleaning guns as a curling iron. One pilot in the 586th got in trouble for keeping perfume in the cockpit of her fighter plane.

  Don’t forget: the pressure to conform was a matter of life and death in Stalin’s time. Nobody openly challenged gender boundaries—in spite of the wartime crew cuts and men’s underwear. The young women of Marina Raskova’s regiments treasured the thought of finishing the war and living ordinary lives, drawing heavily on Marina’s model of perfection as a soldier, a woman, and a mother.