A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  “We dreamed of our grooms, marriages, children, and a future happy, peaceful life,” said 588th pilot Yevgeniya Zhigulenko. She even claimed that “after a night of combat we never forgot to curl our hair”! Yevgeniya felt that keeping herself pretty was good not just for her own morale; it was also encouraging to anyone she met.

  While they were in training at Engels, Marina Raskova assured them, “After the war you’ll wear white dresses and pretty shoes, and we’ll have a big party. Don’t worry; we’re going to win the war.”

  But some of the young women felt it was unpatriotic to fuss over their appearance during wartime. Galya Dokutovich, the navigator who’d been run over, thought that people who wore makeup and daydreamed about boys were good for nothing but a “bride’s fair.” One of the mechanics in the 588th told aircrew who wore makeup while on missions, “You’ve gone out of your minds!” When an important pair of major generals came to inspect the 588th, one of them gave a speech and told the regiment that they were “the most beautiful girls in the world.” He added, though, according to Zhenya Rudneva, that “beauty lies not in lipstick or a manicure, not in clothes or a hairdo, but in what we actually do.” Zhenya told her parents, “And he is right.”

  Lilya Litvyak’s friend Katya Budanova was Lilya’s polar opposite as far as her appearance was concerned. Katya kept her hair short. She even went so far as to use a male name, Volodka, as her nickname in the 437th Regiment, where most of the other pilots were male. If the regiment held a dance and local girls got invited, Katya would introduce herself as Volodka and get them to dance with her. On one occasion, she walked one of these girls home—but made an escape when, still thinking Katya was a boy, the girl tried to kiss her.

  When boyish Katya went to visit her sister in Moscow, she dressed in a stylish woman’s coat and hat. We can’t assume anything about Katya’s sexuality from her behavior, or anybody’s. Soviet culture at the time essentially demanded everyone to accept heterosexuality as the norm. None of these women talk about any other kind of romance.

  But it’s tempting to read between the lines and wonder if some of their intense friendships were more than just friendships. Zhenya Rudneva makes it clear in her diary entries about her dearest friends that she loved them deeply and passionately. She didn’t keep it secret, either, and it made some of them uncomfortable—for example, when she gave Galya Dokutovich a story she’d written about two girlfriends with a deep love for each other, one of whom she’d named “Galya.”

  No one seems to question the urge of these women to form intense friendships, though, or to explore more deeply what those friendships might mean. To complicate our understanding even more, Zhenya was also passionately in love with a young man in a tank crew named Ivan Slavik, with whom she exchanged letters more than once a week—and whom she kissed and cuddled on the rare occasions that they met.

  From our much more broadminded twenty-first-century North American viewpoint, it’s important to remember that identifying yourself as male or female doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your sexual orientation. These women were all doing what’s considered to be a man’s job and were forced to dress and behave like men. Regardless of their sexuality, most of them liked to remind themselves that, yes, they still identified as women.

  There was one pretty, feminine thing available for free throughout the war—flowers.

  Lilya Litvyak wasn’t the only one who flew combat missions with a small bouquet stuck on her control panel—Yevgeniya Zhigulenko liked to have a bunch of lilies of the valley in her Po-2 when she was dropping bombs.

  Even in winter when nothing was blooming, people made flowers out of gauze or newspaper or hung up pictures of them.

  PILOTS OF THE 586TH FIGHTER AVIATION REGIMENT READING, WRITING, AND EMBROIDERING—IN A ROOM FULL OF FLOWERS

  When flowers were in bloom, the women of Raskova’s regiments—along with the other women soldiers of the USSR—filled their living spaces with fragrant blossoms. Tulips, dandelions, daisies, and poppies were favorites as they came into season; roses were prized. When women shared an airfield with male pilots, they put bunches of flowers on the wings of their own planes to mark them.

  They did it out of pride, too. Those flowers on the wings of an aircraft at rest boasted: I am a woman and I am a combat pilot.

  At about this time in the war, the female fighter pilots of the 586th found another visual way to take pride in their role: they began to mark their dangerous Yak fighter planes with a white stripe, which was easy to spot even when they were aloft. Now when they teamed up with other Soviet pilots in the air, everyone would know there were women flying with them. Lilya Litvyak got her ground crew to paint something even more personal on her Yak: a white lily, of course.

  Creative outlets were another way to express yourself as a woman. The creative urge doesn’t go away just because you’re at war; we need to use our imagination almost as desperately as we need to eat. Making things seems to satisfy some deep inner need for us. One pilot who joined the 587th as a reinforcement, Antonina Bondareva, worked on a piece of knitting in between flights. She kept it in her plane—she’d take it out and knit until she was given a combat assignment and then she’d tuck it behind her parachute.

  Needlework was all the rage among Marina Raskova’s aviators—something that you could scrounge the materials for. The armorers of the 587th made pillows out of their foot cloths and decorated them with planes. “Everybody embroidered the Pe-2 on their pillows,” said Yekaterina Chujkova. In the 588th, people embroidered their foot cloths with flowers—using blue thread pulled out of their regulation men’s underwear again! One day when Irina Rakobolskaya came into a flooded dugout to inspect it, she found someone standing on a table to get closer to the light, calmly embroidering while water streamed down the walls around her.

  Music, song, poetry, and literature also raised everybody’s spirits—and could be used to express determination and to show patriotism. Most of the pilots and technicians of Raskova’s regiments were educated at least to high school level, and many of them had some university education as well. They read, they wrote—and published—poetry, they put on shows, and they produced newsletters. The 588th produced their own literary magazine, and the infinitely creative navigator Zhenya Rudneva sometimes gathered everyone around her at the airfield while she recited fairy tales. All the women liked to keep track of what the other aviation regiments were doing, so they wrote letters to friends they’d made while they were training at Engels.

  Music, especially singing, was deeply important to them all. One Po-2 pilot for the 588th, Klava Serebryakova, always had her mandolin waiting for her back on the ground. The 586th held talent shows. Their mechanics took a record player with them as they moved from base to base; one of them, Sonya Tishurova, organized a group who performed national dances from different states in the USSR. When an airwoman for the 587th gave a concert for her companions, her comrades made her a white silk dress out of parachute fabric to wear while she sang.

  Everybody loved to sing. The armorers for the 587th sang as they fixed bombs to aircraft. Nina Yermakova, an armorer in the 586th, got nicknamed the “USSR Honorable Singer” by her regiment. She said, “Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Gridnev would call out, ‘Yermakova, sing out!’ and I would start the song, and then the rest of the regiment would join me.”

  “You heard them singing all over the place: in the dugouts, on the airfield, in aircraft, and in the evening during amateur talent performances,” said Lina Yeliseyeva, the deputy commander for political affairs for the 587th Regiment. The 587th performed in hospitals. They made up their own songs as well as poems that others set to music. Once, on a day when they didn’t have to fly, they helped local peasants to harvest a field full of rye. At the end of the day they sang together as they marched back to the airfield.

  “When weather caused the cancellation of a mission, everyone stayed at the airfield and danced,” said Irina Rakobolskaya. “It would never come int
o any man’s head to do that, while waiting for permission to fly.”

  WOMEN OF THE 588TH NIGHT BOMBER AVIATION REGIMENT PERFORMING AN IMPROMPTU FOLK DANCE BETWEEN MISSIONS

  And no matter where they were, everyone always found ways to try to make life feel more ordinary. The pilots and navigators of the 587th kept a long-running volleyball competition going whenever they got a free moment, with the two flight squadrons making up their opposing teams. No matter how harsh their living conditions, no matter how hungry they were, the young women of Raskova’s regiments were living life to the fullest.

  In November 1942, the commander of the Southern Front turned up to present thirty-two members of the 588th with commemorative watches as a reward for their service, and medals to ten others. When he told the regiment about the first Soviet victories at Stalingrad, the young women all started cheering and clapping.

  The 588th’s chief navigator, Zhenya Rudneva, wrote in her diary on December 2, 1942, “This is silly, a complete paradox: after all, the war is going on, there is so much horror and spilled blood all around, yet I am convinced that for me this is the best time of my life.”

  And Galya Dokutovich, the navigator who’d been run over while lying on a landing strip in the dark, came back to the 588th late in 1942. She was supposed to be on sick leave—she hadn’t fully recovered. But she didn’t want anyone to know that. She wanted to fly. On December 20 she wrote in her diary, “I am back in my regiment. I doubt whether it would be possible to get a better reception anywhere else. It was like going home to my own family! I hid the leave authorization in one of my pockets. I’ll rest and get better after the war.”

  She was going to have her work cut out for her, because now the Soviets were on the offensive again.

  21

  Winter Comes Early

  By December 1942, as another harsh Russian winter began to settle in, the Soviets managed to get the German army surrounded at Stalingrad. Then they began to starve them. Now the Germans could only get supplies by air, and the Soviets shot down their lumbering transport planes the second they got anywhere near their troops.

  The Russian winter might stop the Germans, but it wasn’t going to stop the women of Raskova’s regiments.

  FROM LEFT, NATASHA MEKLIN, RAISA ARONOVA, AND KATYA RYABOVA OF THE 588TH NIGHT BOMBER AVIATION REGIMENT WEARING WINTER FLIGHT GEAR

  Everyone must have been dreading the onset of another harsh winter—especially now that Marina’s aviators had to work to keep the planes ready for combat every day. But aircrew and ground crew all loved their planes, and never resented the work it took to keep them in the air.

  “When our crews were flying combat missions near our airdrome, we mechanics could recognize the sound of our guns and machine guns as a mother can tell the voice of her child,” said Galina Drobovich, the chief aircraft mechanic for the 586th Regiment, talking about the fast and dangerous Yak fighters. Even though their pilots flew solo, the ground crew thought of the Yaks as their planes too. “We worried until our planes returned.”

  Nina Shebalina, Commander Aleksandr Gridnev’s mechanic, was passionate about “her” plane. “During the war my attitude toward my aircraft was really like it was a living creature, my baby. I cared for it every day and night, and I had to go through lots of tears when I lost my plane. I saw it off and said goodbye to it when they went on a combat mission, and then I was impatiently awaiting their return. If it didn’t come back it was a misery. . . . We all knew our own aircraft: you didn’t have to see it, you just heard it and you knew.”

  An aircraft couldn’t easily be replaced. When a pilot found herself in the sky in a machine that was damaged or out of fuel, rather than parachute to safety she’d do her best to glide back to earth so the plane could be landed in one piece.

  Katya Polunina, the 586th’s senior mechanic, and her team were soon forced to improvise once the harsh conditions of winter set in.

  “There was no water, so we boiled snow; there was no antifreeze for the planes, so we drained [the radiators] in winter after each mission and drained the oil and heated it in barrels with a stove underneath,” Katya said. “The barrels were on skis like a sleigh, to take to the planes.”

  When a plane landed away from the airfield after being shot down or running out of fuel in combat, the mechanics would tow the oil barrels to the downed plane themselves, sometimes hiking many kilometers as they dragged the oil through the snow.

  But as the 586th’s first winter of defensive combat began to bite down in November 1942, the young aircraft mechanics didn’t have any of this rehearsed to a fine art.

  How’s this for a relaxing night: At three a.m. on November 7, 1942, Sofya Osipova and the rest of her group got woken up by their chief mechanic. A severe cold snap was in danger of turning the water in the planes’ radiators to solid ice, which would break the radiators. In the middle of the night, Sofya and the others stumbled out of bed and began to defrost the planes by spraying them with hot water from a tank truck. They had to stand on the planes’ wings to do it.

  “We feel the water taps in the dark. They are covered with a thin coating of ice, so it is difficult to open them,” Sofya said. “As we are moving step by step . . . along an icy crust, the wind keeps knocking us off the wings. . . . The wind grabs the heavy, iced[-]over [radiator] covers out of our hands. You threw one end upward and the other one flew back with the wind, knocking you off your feet. Three times I was knocked down from the wing to the ground.”

  The streaming hot water soaked everyone to the skin, and as soon as the water cooled down, everybody was wet and freezing. Sofya’s hand froze to the propeller blade of the plane she was working on. By dawn, people’s faces were covered with white spots of frostbite and their hands were bleeding.

  But in the morning when the pilots came running out to their aircraft, none of the planes had been damaged by the sharp cold. The radiators had all been refilled and the engines were running smoothly and were ready for the next defensive flight mission.

  The 586th stayed based in Anisovka, protecting Saratov, until February 1943. Not surprisingly, the vacation cabins the pilots had been living in all summer turned out to be drafty and freezing cold in the winter. The wooden walls weren’t insulated. The only heat source was a brick stove that didn’t warm up anything more than three steps away. In some of the thin-walled houses, it was so cold that water could freeze in a bucket before you’d finished washing. Or, if you tried to clean the floor, it would only dry near the fire—the rest of the floor became an icy skating rink. Wet clothes froze solid when you tried to dry them anywhere but right next to the fireplace—but when you dried them there, they sometimes ended up burned.

  In the harsh Russian winter, sometimes the pilots moved into dugouts, because it was warmer underground!

  The cold of the Russian winter was more than an endurance test. Sometimes it could be deadly.

  On December 3, 1942, three pilots from the 586th took off in their solo Yak fighters into a snowstorm on a mission to escort a VIP away from the Stalingrad Front. The plane they were escorting, a transport aircraft with good navigation equipment, landed safely; but the three Yaks ended up crash-landing in the snow.

  Zhenya Prokhorova, the aerobatic pilot who’d discovered the mice in her cockpit, was flying one of these planes. Blinded by dense snow and freezing fog, Zhenya wasn’t able to see where she was landing, and one of her wings hit the ground. Her plane flipped and she was trapped in the dark and the cold.

  The commander at the airfield where this happened, dealing with three crashed planes in a snowstorm, didn’t send anyone out to check Zhenya’s aircraft until the next morning. There, the local ground crew discovered Zhenya’s body trapped in her Yak. She didn’t seem to have any injury at all. But she’d frozen to death overnight.

  Another Russian winter was closing in, and it hadn’t finished taking its toll.

  22

  Marina in the Wind

  For six months, the 586th Regiment had bee
n defending strategic positions in their dangerous solo Yak fighters and the 588th Regiment had been harassing German troops with bombs dropped from their flimsy Po-2s. But because it had taken so long to deliver and master the powerful Pe-2 dive-bomber aircraft with its aircrew of three, the 587th Bomber Aviation Regiment still wasn’t flying combat missions. This was the unit that Marina Raskova would be commanding herself—she, too, had had to learn to fly the complex Pe-2 before she could lead her flight crews into battle.

  In December 1942, the women of the 587th finally completed their grueling training course and were assigned to fight on the Don Front, one of the areas of battle aggressively defending Stalingrad. Their mission was to bomb the German troops by day.

  But winter had set in, and they struggled to get to their new base. First they had to wait for the weather to clear before they could leave Engels. Masha Dolina, who’d been flying in a men’s regiment since the beginning of the war and had recently been recruited by Marina for the 587th because she was such an experienced combat pilot, had to cope with an engine failure and got separated from the others.

  Then everybody got snowed in when they stopped to refuel—they had to dig the planes out and drain their radiators before they set off again. But they only had enough hot water for one squadron to leave. Marina stayed behind with the other squadron, entertaining them by playing the village school piano and reading them poetry.

  By the time the weather cleared about a week later in mid-December, Marina got called away to Moscow—so her aviators had to continue without her. But two of the Pe-2s had engine trouble and stopped for repairs along the way. At the end of December, Marina decided to meet the stragglers and fly with them to the Don Front herself.