A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  Remember how a strong headwind can slow you down or help you take off, depending on how you use it?

  Very occasionally, bad weather can come to your rescue. On one of Tonya’s missions, she and her aircrew were saved “more thanks to the weather” than anything else.

  They’d been hit by gunfire from a German fighter and, with an engine on fire, managed to escape the enemy plane by hiding in a storm cloud. Tonya put in a radio call to soldiers on the ground and told them that their Pe-2 was in trouble. Finally, after the enemy aircraft had flown away, Katya landed the damaged Pe-2 in a small field just inside Soviet territory over the front line.

  Exactly as had happened to Masha and Galya on June 2, Katya and her navigator, Klara, couldn’t get their cockpit open to get out of the crashed plane, and needed their tail gunner’s help.

  But Tonya, back in the tail gunner’s compartment, was overcome by leaking fuel fumes.

  “I was like a drunken person,” she said. “There was a pounding noise, and four-letter words, and shouting to get out quick and help us!”

  Tonya finally realized what was going on, and when she got herself out of her own cabin, her headed cleared enough that she managed to release her friends from the crashed plane.

  In the meantime, the soldiers Tonya had been in touch with on the ground came hurrying to meet the stunned crew.

  “What do you think they came with?” Tonya said. “Big, green leaves . . . full of strawberries! Probably they heard us talking and knew we were women, the gift sent to them from the sky. That was the first nice thing during the war—red strawberries, beautiful strawberries in green leaves!”

  Fresh fruit was a wonderful and rare treat in wartime.

  But more than that, the kindness of the surprise gift was the real treasure—a glimpse of ordinary humanity in the long, terrifying, and hellish slog of battle.

  27

  The 46th Guards in Taman, 1943

  The 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, meanwhile, was also fighting fiercely in the spring of 1943.

  In March, they moved their fleet of open-cockpit Po-2s to continue their harassment missions in the coastal area of the Taman Peninsula, which separates the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov east of the Kerch Strait. Here, there was a strongly fortified line of German troops, airfields, tanks, searchlights, headquarters, and machine gun and antiaircraft batteries. These embattlements squatted for 110 kilometers (about 70 miles) along riverbanks and inlets, marshes and mountains. The long fortification was known as the Blue Line and was part of Hitler’s offensive as he tried to push through Crimea to take over the oil fields of the Caspian Sea.

  The 46th Guards dropped bombs over the Blue Line for six months, right up to the point when the Red Army forced the Germans out of the Taman Peninsula in September 1943.

  But they’d hardly been in Taman for a month before they suffered another horrifying loss.

  Yevdokia “Dusya” Nosal was a calm, confident pilot who’d already flown more than 350 combat missions by this time. She had a good reason to want to fight the Nazis: in 1941, her baby was killed when a German bomb hit the maternity hospital where she’d just given birth.

  On the night of April 23, 1943, Dusya was training a new navigator, Irina Kashirina. Dusya and Irina flew one successful harassment mission in their flimsy Po-2 by the helpful light of a moon three nights past full, returned to their base to refuel and reload their bombs, and then set out again. They dropped a second wingload of bombs over their target without any trouble.

  But when they turned for home, Irina saw a flash in the sky ahead of them and realized that it was a German night fighter aircraft.

  Irina didn’t even have time to shout a warning to her pilot before suddenly the Po-2 turned and began to lose speed.

  “Dusya! Dusya!” Irina yelled.

  When Dusya didn’t answer, Irina took over the dual controls.

  “But the pedals were jammed,” she said. “Then and there I understood that Dusya had been either seriously wounded or . . . No, I didn’t want to think the unthinkable. I put the aircraft into a turn to fly back. Dusya kept sliding down into the cockpit, leaning against the control stick. I kept pulling her up by her collar.”

  Irina made it back to the airfield and managed to land the plane safely.

  Only after she landed did she realize that indeed, the unthinkable had happened.

  Dusya had been shot in the head by the Luftwaffe fighter plane. She probably died instantly.

  The 46th Guards had to organize another funeral. They buried Dusya in the village of Pashkovskaya, now part of Krasnodar, giving her full military honors and covering her grave with flowers. Both her comrades and the local people laid wreaths for her.

  DUSYA NOSAL’S FUNERAL

  Soon afterward, Dusya was posthumously given the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union, the first of the 46th Guards to be awarded this medal.

  Anger is a powerful motivator.

  Though grieving, the women of the 46th Guards didn’t react to Dusya’s death with fear or discouragement. They were angry. In the coming weeks, they flew their harassment bombing missions in Dusya Nosal’s name and memory, even painting one of their Po-2 bombers with the inscription “To avenge Dusya.”

  On June 10, 1943, exactly a year after they’d flown their first combat mission, there was a special ceremony to celebrate the honor of being named the 46th Guards earlier that year.

  Now the 46th received their special Guards’ banner, and all took the Guards’ oath: “I swear! While our eyes see, while our hearts beat and our hands move, to mercilessly annihilate the fascist invaders.”

  A PO-2 INSCRIBED “TO AVENGE DUSYA”

  Then they sang together a new “Hymn of the Regiment” they’d written themselves, with words by their own infinitely creative chief navigator, Zhenya Rudneva, and music by Natasha Meklin, who’d just started flying her first combat missions as a pilot.

  Fight, girls, fighting friends,

  For the glory of the women’s guard regiment.

  Fly forth

  With fire in your breast . . . !

  28

  The Heat of Battle

  Lilya Litvyak, Katya Budanova, Mariya Kuznetsova, and Raisa Belyaeva—the four pilots who’d transferred with their solo Yak fighters from the 586th to the men’s 437th Fighter Aviation Regiment—didn’t stay in the 437th very long. It was hard to provide maintenance for the Yaks there, since the rest of the regiment flew a different type of plane. So all four women transferred again, this time to the 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, a special unit for elite pilots, who were of course all men.

  Not long afterward, they got an order telling them to return to the 586th.

  Raisa and Mariya both did. But Lilya and Katya persuaded their commander in the 9th Guards to let them stay. They liked the excitement of flying on the front lines, and they probably felt that it would be hard to fit in comfortably with the women of the 586th again.

  Because of yet another issue over aircraft types, Lilya and Katya soon transferred again so they could continue flying their familiar Yaks. Their new regiment, the 296th, was based on the same airfield as the 9th Guards, so they didn’t have to move far. Lilya and Katya hadn’t been with them long before the regiment was honored with the elite title of 73rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment in March 1943.

  So many different regiment numbers! But the 73rd Guards is where they stayed. Their new commander, Nikolai Baranov, made them feel at home, even though they were the only two women in the regiment—he could see they were both fantastic combat pilots. Katya became Nikolai’s wingman. Lilya became the wingman for another man, Alexei Solomatin.

  Lilya’s and Katya’s female mechanics transferred with them. Their daily routine never got any easier. Inna Pasportnikova, Lilya’s mechanic, said that the pilots slept in local homes in a nearby village, and “we mechanics slept at the airdrome near the aircraft in open trenches. When it became cold in the winter, we took the engine cover and
put it over ourselves, and in the morning we would wake up with ice on our hair and faces.”

  Lilya soared from height to height as a combat pilot. She and Katya were both granted the special status of okhotnik, or “free hunter”—a fighter pilot who could use her initiative to go searching for enemy aircraft or ground forces to attack. Instead of being assigned missions, free hunters were allowed to go looking for trouble. Free hunting was a tactic the Soviet Air Force exploited in 1943 and assigned to experienced fighter pilots of exceptional talent.

  This suited Lilya just fine: she liked to do as she pleased. She performed forbidden aerial stunts over the airfield when she returned from a mission and got away with it. She colored strips of parachute silk to use as scarves, and she carried a picture of roses on her Yak’s instrument panel. When men were assigned to fly her plane, they’d sometimes find a bouquet Lilya had left in the cockpit. They’d utter a few bad words and toss it out before taking off!

  On March 22, 1943, Lilya was involved in an air battle in which she and five other Yak fighters were outnumbered by the enemy two to one. She’d shot down one of the German planes when she suddenly felt a sharp pain in her leg. Before she could figure out what was going on, she found herself under attack by no less than six Luftwaffe fighter planes.

  PILOT LILYA LITVYAK AND HER YAK FIGHTER

  Ignoring the pain, Lilya flew straight into the middle of the German fighters. She knocked one of them out of the sky with her guns, and the rest scattered. Then, with her Yak full of bullet holes, Lilya flew back to her own airfield and managed to land.

  She’d been shot in the leg—that was the pain she’d felt as the fight began. Safe on the ground, Lilya fainted before she’d even parked her plane.

  Lilya’s heroic fight and her battle wound turned her into a celebrity.

  Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist Party’s youth newspaper, published a feature about her. The Soviet Air Force magazine Stalin’s Falcons ran a story titled “The Girl Avenger,” calling Lilya “one of the Front’s outstanding pilots.” The youth magazine Ogonyok published an article about Lilya and Katya and their achievements, with a full list of the aircraft they’d shot down. A photograph of the two young women in flight helmets, grinning with pleasure, was splashed on the cover.

  In the hospital, friends and even total strangers visited Lilya and brought her candy and other little presents. When she came back to her regiment she was limping, loaded with gifts, and extremely pleased with herself.

  Lilya had to stay on the ground for six weeks recovering from her wound. Nikolai Baranov, her commander, sent her home on leave to her mother and younger brother in Moscow so she could recuperate. But being grounded made Lilya very restless. She missed her regiment and she missed the action of the front. Still limping, she made her own way back to the 73rd Guards early in May 1943.

  Almost immediately after her return she shot down two more Luftwaffe fighter planes.

  Not just for Lilya, but for all the pilots of Marina Raskova’s regiments, the summer of 1943 was filled with flame and fury.

  Back in Voronezh, Aleksandr Gridnev now flew with Valentina Lisitsina as his second-in-command in their fast Yak fighters, and he continued to prove himself as the right commander for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment.

  On June 26, 1943, on one of their defensive missions to the city of Belgorod, not far from Kharkov—both cities were still under German control—Aleksandr and Valentina attacked a group of Luftwaffe bombers flying with a fighter escort. Valentina shot down one of the bombers and Aleksandr shot down one of the fighters. When two more Luftwaffe aircraft began to chase them, Aleksandr escaped into clouds while the two enemy fighter planes collided in flames. The air battle and the 586th’s triumph of that day were reported in the national newspaper Pravda.

  By the time they left Voronezh in August 1943, the 586th had helped to liberate Kharkov and had shot down ten German aircraft—and they weren’t even fighting at the front.

  They might not be at the front, but the 586th was still in easy reach of German attackers. The Luftwaffe pilots figured out what time the 586th had dinner, and purposefully raided their airfield when they were eating. They flew low over the base’s makeshift buildings and strafed the canteen with gunfire. The cook tried to run and hide in one of the defensive trenches but was killed in the attack.

  If you think about the amount of harassment the Germans endured from the night bombers in their Po-2s, it’s hardly surprising they resorted to shooting at the Soviet fighter pilots while they were trying to eat dinner.

  The 586th Regiment didn’t let this stop them from getting regular meals. Instead of serving dinner in the canteen, the ground staff brought food out onto the airfield. Now the pilots could sit and eat on the wings of their aircraft, ready to take off at any moment when the enemy turned up to interrupt their meal.

  The fighting was so intense during the months at Voronezh that sometimes there wasn’t even time to punish people when they disobeyed the rules.

  Now that she was back in the 586th, the high-spirited stunt pilot Raisa Belyaeva was constantly getting in trouble for performing aerobatic loops or rolls in her plane, or flying upside down at low altitude after a combat mission. One day a visiting official saw one of her performances and ordered Aleksandr Gridnev, “She will be arrested for forty-five days for a violation of flight regulations.” But before anyone had a chance to place her under arrest, Raisa took off for another mission.

  As punishment for that, she was grounded, but she didn’t let it stop her. The airfield was coming under fierce bombardment every night, and one night, when Aleksandr was sent to attack a German bomber, Raisa took off after him. Aleksandr didn’t even realize who it was until he heard her voice over the radio—his wingman was supposed to be a male pilot from a different regiment.

  Raisa managed to shoot down the bomber herself.

  This time, instead of being arrested for disobedience, she was told she could be on active flight duty once again.

  On July 19, 1943, Raisa failed to pull her Yak out of a dive over her own airfield. She was killed in the crash.

  The whole regiment wept over their talented and personable friend. Aleksandr Gridnev cried too, in public, while giving the speech at Raisa’s funeral.

  Two of the men Lilya Litvyak flew with in the 73rd Guards were killed in the month after she started flying again. One was Nikolai Baranov, her sympathetic commander who flew with Katya Budanova as his wingman. The other was Alexei Solomatin, who flew with Lilya herself. Lilya was devastated. In a letter to her mother after his death, she called Alexei her “best friend.”

  Lilya took these losses hard, and her flying and fighting hardened along with her personality.

  In May, she made a triumphant flight on purpose into enemy territory and back. There was an observation balloon tethered in a village occupied by the Germans so they could spot Soviet positions and tell their gunners where to fire. Whenever anyone flew at the balloon to try to shoot it down, the gunfire would get so hot that they’d have to give up.

  Lilya had an idea for how to take care of it.

  She flew over the front a long way from the balloon and traveled so far into German territory that she was able to circle around and sneak up on the balloon from behind—where the German gunners weren’t at all expecting an attack. And she shot it down and came speeding home.

  In June, she was promoted and became a flight commander.

  In July, Lilya was injured again in a furious battle in which she and five other Yak pilots fought against thirty-six enemy planes—but she stayed in the air to shoot down a German bomber and a fighter anyway. As she was flying back in her damaged plane, which was trailing smoke, Luftwaffe fighters attacked her and Lilya received yet another wound. When she got back to her airfield with damage to both her shoulder and her leg, she let herself be given first aid but refused to go to the hospital.

  Three days later, Katya Budanova was killed.

  Katya died like a
true Soviet fighter pilot, first filling an enemy fighter with bullets before using expert flight techniques to put out the flames that were engulfing her own plane. She crash-landed her Yak in one piece but was already dead when local farmers found her and buried her.

  Lilya’s way of grieving seems to have been to throw herself into battle. She, too, shot down a German fighter plane on the day of Katya’s death, and she was back in the air the next day as well. This time, the fighting Lilya engaged in was so fierce, and her plane was shot up so badly, that she had to parachute to safety.

  On July 28, 1943, Lilya sat in the cockpit of her Yak and dictated a letter to her mother while she waited to be given a combat mission. One of the ground staff wrote the letter for her, perching on the wing of Lilya’s plane.

  “I am completely absorbed in combat life. I can’t seem to think of anything but the fighting,” Lilya told her mother.

  “I long . . . for a happy and peaceful life, after I’ve returned to you and told you about everything I had lived through and felt during the time when we were apart. Well, good-bye for now. Your Lily.”

  It was her last letter home.

  On August 1, 1943, Lilya Litvyak flew mission after mission, each time coming back to base so she could refuel and rearm her Yak.

  On her fourth flight of the day, Lilya and another pilot were returning from an escort mission when two German aircraft appeared from behind the clouds. The fighter planes started firing their guns, and more and more aircraft joined the fray, until there were nine Soviet fighter pilots battling forty Luftwaffe aircraft.

  Lilya’s Yak was hit by enemy fire, and another Soviet pilot, Ivan Borisenko, saw her dive into the clouds to try to escape.