A Thousand Sisters

by Elizabeth Wein

  But even with the end in sight, tragedy could still strike at any moment. Masha Batrokova, who’d already been decorated with the Order of the Red Star, was killed on a routine flight mission in the spring of 1945.

  Galina Burdina learned how close she herself had come to being killed when she had a strange encounter with a Romanian pilot who surrendered to the Red Army with other Romanian troops.

  He said that he’d been flying for the Germans over Kiev, a year or so earlier, and had seen Galina in flight, covering the 586th’s commander Aleksandr Gridnev. He’d flown close enough to Galina in that air battle to be able to recognize her as a woman—and he’d chosen not to fire his guns at her because she was a woman.

  Galina realized how lucky she’d been, all because of the other pilot’s strange wartime chivalry.

  “So he gave me back my life,” she said.

  The devoted trio of Katya Fedotova, Klara Dubkova, and Tonya Khokhlova was now considered one of the best aircrews in the 125th Guards, and they got permission to paint a swallow on their Pe-2 dive-bomber—a hopeful sign of both the spring and the victory they were counting on 1945 to bring them.

  The 125th Guards operated in the German region of Prussia, flying aggressive missions along the southwest of the Baltic Sea from January to May 1945. Katya, Klara, and Tonya were shot down again as the front moved west. This time, Tonya herself managed to destroy an enemy plane with the machine guns in her tail gunner’s turret in the back of their Pe-2. Tonya didn’t even realize she’d done it until she heard the story from soldiers on the ground who’d seen the air battle, and the proof was in the automatic photographs that the plane took as its machine guns were firing.

  Katya, the crew’s pilot, once again managed to land her crippled plane in a forest clearing on the safe side of the front line. But a Pe-2 from another Soviet regiment was not so lucky. Under enemy fire, it crashed at the same time as Katya landed, and she and her horrified aircrew watched it burn.

  Then, said Tonya, “Because there was no one else around, we had to pick up their remains: one arm, one leg, all smoked and roasted. I thought I would never look at any meat after that. Well, life is life. So we collected the remains of that crew, all three of them, torn apart. No heads, all apart. We gathered them together. There was a parachute intact, so we ripped the parachute apart, covered the remains, and buried them.”

  The fighting grew no less desperate at the end of the war, which meant that no one was safe—not even from their own regulations.

  For example, someone in a position of authority decided the Pe-2s of the 125th Guards would be able to carry a heavier load of bombs if the planes carried less fuel. But of course this meant that the aircraft couldn’t fly as far. It also meant they used fuel less efficiently because they were carrying more weight. Worst of all, it made a plane that was already difficult to take off even more difficult.

  Waiting for their turn to leave on one of these missions in their overloaded Pe-2, Antonina Bondareva and Galina Brok watched aghast as, on the runway ahead of them, one of the aircrews from a men’s squadron failed to get enough height to climb away safely. The plane crashed into a hangar and exploded.

  “We were next in line to take off,” said Galina. “You have to forbid yourself from thinking that your plane will end up the same way. You concentrate on a successful mission.”

  Even though it was Antonina flying the plane and not Galina, Galina could tell that their aircraft was too heavy to lift off safely. “We felt it dragging us back to earth,” she said.

  But somehow they made it into the air, flew to the assigned target, dropped their bombs, flew home, and landed safely.

  “It was a victory,” Galina said, “not over the German troops but over ourselves.”

  As for the night bombers of the 46th Taman Guards, in addition to harassing the retreating German army all night and every night, they and other Po-2 regiments had to again use their open-cockpit planes to drop supplies of cargo to stranded Soviet troops. In February 1945, when they were in western Prussia, once more the winter weather made the roads utterly impossible to travel on. The 46th Guards made supply flights in daylight as well as at night, in aircraft fitted with skis instead of wheels.

  One night, the visibility was so poor that only a single Po-2 was able to complete the supply run—not because anyone was being prudent about continuing into bad weather anymore, but simply because none of the other pilots could figure out where they were heading, and had no navigators to guide them because the navigators’ cockpits were full of supplies.

  “I made the flight at a very low altitude, following the railroad tracks,” said pilot Zoya Parfyonova, who managed to find the right place. “It was snowing very hard.”

  In the storm, flying so low she was afraid her wing might touch the ground if she turned, Zoya found herself over a German camp instead of the Soviet one she’d been heading for.

  “German infantrymen began firing at me,” Zoya said. “The airplane was hit all over like a sieve, and I was wounded in the leg.”

  In a shaking, damaged aircraft, Zoya made her escape and found the Soviet troops only three minutes away. She landed, unloaded her plane, and took off for home—but fainted from blood loss and crashed just as she was about to touch the ground again.

  She survived the crash. It was her 701st combat mission—but only the first time she’d been wounded.

  By March, the fields were so muddy that the Po-2s could not take off. Their wheels simply sank in the mud. One aircrew, lost in bad weather, landed in a field and couldn’t leave until the next morning when the ground had frozen. They spent the night in a Polish village, too worried to sleep, and shared their “pilots’ rations of vodka, biscuits, and milk” with the boys who guarded their plane during the night.

  As the hard frosts grew less reliable, the planes continued to struggle to take off out of the mud. The fuel trucks couldn’t move, either. So the airwomen of the 46th Guards improvised a way to get their planes into the air. They took down log fences and built a wooden platform 200 meters long and 30 meters wide (about 660 by 100 feet). Everybody helped refuel the planes by carrying cans from the trucks to the aircraft; the armorers had to carry the bombs out to the Po-2s by hand as well.

  Finally, the ground crew would lift each loaded aircraft onto the platform. This gave it a short runway above the mud—almost like taking off from an aircraft carrier. When the plane returned from its mission, it would land in the mud, get pushed back to the platform, and the whole process would begin again.

  “Our regiment made 300 combat missions from that field in those conditions,” said Irina Rakobolskaya.

  While the Po-2s of the 46th Guards were struggling in the mud and the Pe-2s of the 125th M. M. Raskova Borisov Guards were straining to get off the ground with their extra-heavy loads of bombs, the 125th’s missing navigator, Nina Karaseva, was fighting a very different kind of war—and probably looking forward to victory even more than they were.

  When she’d been captured by the Germans in September 1943, she’d been sent to an airmen’s prisoner-of-war camp in Poland, where she spent seven months with other Soviet pilots—as well as a Frenchman from the Normandie-Niemen Regiment. But in May 1944, Nina was transferred to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück in Germany, and from there was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Nina saw firsthand the undiluted evil of the Nazi killing machine. She had to live and endure its horror at Buchenwald for nearly a year.

  On April 12, 1945, when the German guards fled from the Red Army as it approached the concentration camp, Nina and her fellow prisoners cut the lock off the gate and let themselves out.

  Nina survived the war and lived to tell her own story. But she doesn’t talk about what happened to her between unlocking the gates of Buchenwald and her later life as a civilian with a family. Every last Soviet citizen liberated from the German prison camps—even those at Auschwitz—was questioned as a possible spy. That’s exactly what happened to Tamara
Pamyatnykh’s husband when he returned from Buchenwald. But both he and Nina were eventually able to return to civilian life.

  Now that the Soviet Army was on the offensive, the terrifying Orders 270 and 227 didn’t have to be enforced to the letter. But anyone who fell afoul of them was still put through the ordeal of inquisition as a traitor. In many cases, whether you lived free or were sent to prison or were executed depended simply on whether the person who tried you was in the right mood.

  As the Nazi concentration camps began to be liberated, the end of the war grew very near.

  The 46th Guards made their way steadily through Germany until they were stationed north of Berlin, supporting the Red Army as it swept in for a final and brutal victory.

  Even ordinary German homes seemed extravagantly comfortable to the Soviet soldiers. They were staggered by the wealth they saw in Prussia, and the 46th Guards were no exception. Irina Rakobolskaya spoke for her comrades when she voiced her amazement; so did the journalist Vasily Grossman.

  “But why did [the Germans] come to us?” the Soviet soldiers all marveled. “What did they want?”

  How could the people who owned such rich farms, such beautiful furniture and gardens, modern bathrooms, and electricity to run refrigerators have ever needed to come take over the Soviet Union’s peasant huts?

  Of course it made the Red Army soldiers even angrier at the Germans, but it also baffled them.

  The last harassment missions were nerve-racking for the 46th Guards in their open-cockpit Po-2s.

  “Everybody knew that the end of the war was near, and no one wanted to die,” said navigator Polina Gelman, the woman who’d promised to name her daughter Galya.

  But the commanders were eager for a big victory, and the 46th Guards were sent out on a bombing mission twice as far away as their usual targets took them. The engine of Polina’s Po-2 overheated on the longer flight, and she and her pilot were now going to have to make a crash landing, only a week before the end of the war.

  To make matters worse, because of thick fog, they couldn’t see the ground. They hadn’t found their target, and now that they didn’t have any idea where they were, Polina and her pilot hesitated about dropping their bombs. “It could be on our own troops, on civilians, or on anyone,” Polina said.

  Knowing that now they might be flying a suicide mission, they decided to land with their bombs still attached to their plane.

  They sank down to earth through the mist and landed on faith in a forest clearing—stopping a single meter (about three feet) away from the tree trunks. They were so thrilled to be safe and alive that both of them jumped out of the plane and started to dance.

  One week later, Polina was supposed to fly yet another combat mission on May 8, 1945.

  “Everything was ready,” she said, “the bombs loaded and the crews on their way to the aircraft, when suddenly we saw the mechanics run up to our aircraft and do something. What they were doing was deactivating the bombs. The Germans had surrendered; the war was over. I burst out crying.”

  A PO-2 FLYING OVER THE BRANDENBURG GATE IN BERLIN, GERMANY

  The 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment was at Gruzdžiai, in Lithuania, when the war ended. At the end of a long day of aggressive flying, everyone was in bed and no one wanted to get up to answer the insistently ringing telephone. Finally, pilot Masha Kirillova couldn’t stand the noise anymore and hauled herself to the phone.

  When she heard the news she stood frozen, hugging the receiver against her chest.

  Then she managed to tell the others, “The war has ended!”

  Everyone leaped out of bed screaming with excitement.

  “We just couldn’t believe it,” said navigator Galina Brok. “There were tears in our eyes; we greeted, hugged, and kissed each other; we laughed and we cried.”

  But hugging and kissing weren’t enough. The 125th M. M. Raskova Borisov Guards needed to make some noise. They all ran into the street and started firing their pistols into the air in a victory salute.

  The 586th Regiment lined up on their springtime-green airfield near Budapest on May 9, 1945.

  Their Yaks were ready for a combat mission—but no assignment came. The war was over.

  It was victory day at last. The young women of the 586th all sang together, as they’d done so many times before over the past four years.

  To the Homeland, happiness and friends!

  To those who fought bravely and fell . . .

  One anonymous pilot’s future husband proposed to her among the ruins of Berlin just after the war ended.

  “I wanted to cry,” she said. “To shout. To hit him! What do you mean, married? Now? In the midst of all this—married? In the midst of black soot and black bricks. . . . I almost hit him . . . I was about to . . . He had one cheek burned, purple, and I see: he understood everything, tears are running down that cheek. On the still-fresh scars . . . And I myself can’t believe I’m saying to him: ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’”

  There was no way to separate the joy from tears. The war had brought too much grief to too many people.

  Part V

  After the War

  37

  One Thousand Nights in Combat

  “After the war we had a lot of headaches, could not relax, and had very hard problems with our sleeping, because for nearly three years we turned over the day and night,” said 46th Guards pilot Serafima Amosova. “I couldn’t sleep for at least three months. . . . We had been fighting for one thousand nights—one thousand nights in combat.”

  Mariya Smirnova, who flew 935 harassment missions during the war, estimated that every one of the 46th’s pilots made at least eight hundred combat flights.

  In their three years on the front lines, the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment flew more than twenty-four thousand combat missions in total. Most of their pilots and navigators flew around ten harassment missions every night of the entire war in their flimsy open-cockpit Po-2s. In the winter’s long darknesses, during what they called their “maximum nights,” they might make twelve to eighteen bombing runs in a single evening.

  Twenty-four of these women were given the nation’s highest military honor and became Heroes of the Soviet Union—including Polina Gelman, Natasha Meklin, Nadya Popova, Larisa Rozanova, Zhenya Rudneva, Mariya Smirnova, and Yevgeniya Zhigulenko.

  Quality, not quantity, shines in the 1,134 combat missions flown by the three-person crews of the 125th M. M. Raskova Borisov Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment. In their Pe-2 dive-bombers, they dropped nearly a million tons of bombs. Five women in the regiment were awarded the honor of Hero of the Soviet Union—Masha Dolina, Galya Dzhunkovskaya, and Klava Fomicheva are the ones we’d recognize.

  The 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment’s statistics are more quietly triumphant. They made over nine thousand solo flights in their fast and dangerous Yak fighters—about half of those were combat missions, and 125 were air battles. Between them they shot down thirty-eight enemy aircraft, in addition to destroying targets on the ground and escorting dignitaries.

  Considering their role was to defend and protect as they served in the rear guard and not on the front lines, it’s sobering to realize that nearly a third of the women who flew with the 586th did not survive the war.

  A frustrating epilogue to their story is that the 586th Regiment was never awarded the honorary and elite title of Guards. They were recommended for it—after their heroic service at Voronezh, they got special Guards uniforms ordered for them. According to their commander, Aleksandr Gridnev, the pilots of the 586th were photographed and filmed (even in battle!) in preparation for a press announcement that they were being honored with a Guards number. But the paperwork was never correctly submitted.

  It’s not obvious why this never happened. Aleksandr Gridnev actually blamed Tamara Kazarinova for somehow sabotaging plans for the 586th’s Guards ceremony, perhaps in revenge for being dismissed as their commander. Aleksandr also suggested he was personally disliked by an important ai
r force officer who ranked above him and who disapproved of the women fighters.

  It’s possible they weren’t seen to be as important or as worthy as those who were fighting at the front. Despite their heroism, the 586th was never on the front lines, as were the two other regiments associated with Marina Raskova—the 586th’s job was always to protect the Soviet forces at the rear.

  It’s ironic that the women’s regiment consisting solely of fighter pilots—the most dramatic, boldest aviation role of which all the young women had desperately dreamed when they joined the 122nd Air Group—was the least united and least decorated of the three regiments formed under Marina Raskova.

  One woman who’d flown with the 586th did become a Hero of the Soviet Union, though.

  Twenty-five years after Lilya Litvyak disappeared in battle, in 1968, Komsomolskaya Pravda urged that she be given the honor posthumously.

  But the Soviet Air Force Command insisted this couldn’t be done unless there was proof that Lilya had died in battle. A stone monument in her memory, carved with a star for each Luftwaffe aircraft she’d shot down, was erected with a blank space on the memorial slab just in case one day there would be room to add “Hero of the Soviet Union.”

  Lilya vanished in 1943. It was more than forty years before a crashed plane and a body were found that were believed to be hers. Inna Pasportnikova, who’d been Lilya’s mechanic when she flew with the 73rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment, spent three years searching with a metal detector for Lilya’s plane. Her husband and grandchildren helped. So did the students in the school where Inna became a teacher after the war—Inna organized expeditions to hunt for wartime plane crashes. “We found thirty aircraft but not hers,” Inna said.

  In 1979, Inna discovered that an anonymous female pilot had long since been found and buried in a village called Dmitrievka in Ukraine—the body could no longer be identified, but the circumstances of the crash matched up, and there wasn’t anyone else but Lilya who could have been flying in that place at that time.