by John Man
Their bodies were picked up by a U-2 and flown to Saratov, where the director received orders to bury three of the dead locally, and to prepare Raskova’s body for an overnight journey to Moscow. Her shattered head was stitched together, but not well enough to be seen in public. The news spread nationwide. Hundreds filed past her closed coffin before it was put in a special carriage for the train journey to Moscow. All her women pilots, navigators, gunners and technicians in their scattered units gathered in tearful shock. One of the Night Witches took a little comfort from the thought that, though the other two regiments were no longer exclusively female, hers, the 588th, had remained true to Raskova’s ideals.
The whole nation mourned. Pravda’s front page described this, the first state funeral of the war: the funeral hall, the strips of black crêpe cascading from the ceiling either side of the funeral urn with Raskova’s ashes, the gathering of the top politicians, the guard of honour, the slow march with the urn to the walls of the Kremlin, the threefold volley of shots, and the fly-past, all proclaiming ‘that Marina Raskova, hero of the Soviet Union, great Russian aviatrix, has concluded her glorious career.’
A new commander, Raskova’s No. 2, Zhenya Timofeyeva, led the Women’s Heavy Bombers into combat against Germany’s besieged Sixth Army, trapped in the charred, snow-covered ruins of Stalingrad. Several raids were shared with planes flown by men, until 30 January, when the women were allowed to go in on their own, preparing the ground for assaults by tanks and infantry. The next day, Hitler, who had ordered General Friedrich Paulus never to surrender, made him a field marshal, on the grounds that no field marshal in German history had ever surrendered. But Paulus had no choice. On 1 February, a German soldier crawled out of the basement of the Sixth Army’s HQ, the Central Department Store, waving a white flag. Two days later, the news reached the final, isolated pocket of Germans, and it was all over. Russian deaths in the siege were over 100,000, while the Germans lost 160,000 dead, with a further 90,000 shuffling off into captivity and to almost certain death. On the Eastern Front, the tide of war had turned. Russian forces began to advance westwards, the Women’s Heavy Bombers with them.
In the Caucasus, the Night Witches started to move northwards and westwards, into devastated lands. It was the first time they had seen war close up, as if the women lived in a world of their own, sowing damage and death, never seeing the results first hand, until now. Moving forward yet again, in Rasshevatka, 400 kilometres north of their old front-line base on the Terek River, navigator Natasha Meklin and her pilot Irina Sebrova saw dead Germans for the first time. The place had just been liberated. The village was on fire, bodies of men and horses lay scattered about. The first German she saw was young, Meklin recorded, ‘pale and waxen, the head thrown back … straight fair hair frozen to the snow.’ She felt a flow of emotions: depression, revulsion, pity, and a sudden insight into the effects of what she was doing. Not that she was deterred. ‘Tomorrow, I shall be bombing again, and the day after that, and the day after that, until the war is over, or I am killed myself.’
Spring came, turning the steppe to mud, bogging down planes and fuel trucks, curbing operations. The pilots of 296th Regiment, which had absorbed Raskova’s women fighters, had to share the fifteen surviving planes, which was OK by fighter pilot Lilya Litvyak, because the man she was sharing with was about as small as she was, so there was no need to adjust the pedals. Life for her was fine, because she was in love with another pilot, Alexei Salomatin. They had official permission to marry. He was a bit reckless and she notoriously sharp-tongued, but they were a popular couple, so the others did their best to give them time together as the regiment moved forward, even if it was only in one abandoned peasant hut after another.
Litvyak, still just twenty, was a star, thanks to the Soviet propaganda machine. In February she had claimed a Stuka (a Junkers Ju-87 dive-bomber), in March another Stuka and a Ju-88 fighter-bomber, an encounter that left her with a bullet in the thigh and in a damaged plane, which she managed to land safely. ‘The Girl Avenger’, as she was called in a magazine article, was the perfect heroine, ‘20 years old, a lovely springtime in the life of a maiden! A fragile figure with golden hair as delicate as her very name – Lilya,’ a fragility that contrasted with her fighting spirit: ‘When I see a plane with those crosses and the swastika on its fin tail, I experience just one feeling – hatred. That emotion seems to make my grip firmer on the firing buttons.’ She left hospital after a few days, still limping, but happy, and eager for some R & R with family in Moscow. Her brother recorded that she had with her a dress made of German parachute silk, trimmed with little green bits made from viscose that had once held gunpowder in German anti-aircraft shells. She fought well, and sewed well too.
In May, Litvyak was back on duty in Pavlovka, almost on the Ukrainian border, sitting in her cockpit waiting for action. Her lover, Alexei Salomatin, was in the early-summer skies above, flying his Yak, training a new pilot. Two women mechanics were sitting on Litvyak’s wings, chatting to her. Suddenly they heard the noise of a plane engine, rising to a roar. It cut off with a boom at the far end of the runway. Someone else had seen a Yak come out of the clouds doing rolls, far too close to the ground. The three women ran to the crash site. It was Salomatin, killed by his youthful recklessness, or as the official report put it, because of ‘undue self-confidence, self-regard and lack of discipline’.
Lilya Litvyak faced death many times in the next two months. Two immense Russian counterattacks were under way: to the north, the greatest ever tank battle around Kursk, and to the south, along the Mius River, where Soviet forces were trying to break the line formed by reinvigorated German armies. She had a string of successes and narrow escapes: in June, she and her wing-mate, Sasha Yevdokimov, set on fire two German observation balloons; on 16 June, she was leading a new arrival into the air when she veered off course, causing the pilot following her to crash to his death; that same afternoon, she and Yevdokimov were chased by four Messerschmitts, returning to base with several bullet holes in their machines; five days later, her Yak was hit by a Messerschmitt, but she crash-landed safely.
On 1 August, having moved further west to Krasnyi Luch in Ukraine’s coal-rich Donbass, Litvyak flew three sorties in support of Ilyushins attacking German ground troops. When she was climbing into her Yak for her fourth sortie – leather boots, khaki tunic, dark-blue flying breeches, blue beret tucked into her map case – her mechanic, Nikolai Menkov, tried to talk her out of it. He recalled the scene vividly later; it was etched into his memory by what happened next.
‘It’s very punishing for one person to fly so many missions in this heat,’ he said. ‘Do you really need to do so much flying? There are other pilots.’
She replied, ‘The Germans have started using weaklings! They’re wet behind the ears and I feel like blasting one more of them!’
She said goodbye, bright and cheerful as usual, closed the canopy and took off. She and five other Yaks were escorting eight Ilyushins. Approaching the front line, they shot down two Messerschmitts then, as they turned for home, another Messerschmitt emerged from clouds, fired at Litvyak’s Yak, and vanished again. Two of the other pilots saw her plane falling out of control, and guessed that she had been shot and was either dead or seriously injured. She did not bail out, and no one saw an explosion on the ground. Back at the base, everyone waited and hoped, until hope died. A day later, as the Soviet troops advanced, Yevdokimov and the mechanic Menkov searched the villages and gulleys where they thought she had crashed, but found nothing. Then two weeks later, Yevdokimov was killed, and no one went looking for Lilya any more. ‘Lost without trace,’ said the official letter to her mother.
But the loss of a heroine often inspires legends, especially if she’s a slender, feisty, good-looking blonde of twenty-one. A returning prisoner said he had seen Lilya in captivity. Rumours spread that a plane had landed in a village in German territory, that a girl had been driven off by Germans. Or perhaps the Germans had buried her with
full military honours. Political officers asked questions. Could she have gone over to the other side? Another returning prisoner claimed she had. But these were strange times, with prisoners being re-imprisoned by their own people, and forced ‘confessions’ made and retracted, and cancerous jealousies in the regiment of Lilya’s looks and skills and popularity. There was never any evidence, only hints to the contrary: in the 1970s, village boys pulling out a grass-snake from its hole found fragments of a helmet and underwear made of parachute silk. But the discoveries were buried and, despite continuing research and much controversy, Lilya remained lost without trace, and remains so today.
Her memorial is the record of what she achieved in her two years of service: the first woman pilot to shoot down an enemy plane, 66 sorties, 11 or 12 solo victories and 4 shared (though these figures too are disputed, like so much in her life and death), giving her the greatest number of kills by a woman pilot.
The day before Lilya Litvyak vanished, some 400 kilometres to the south, the Night Witches, now honoured as the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, suffered their worst night. The Russians had driven the Germans back along the Taman Peninsula, which divides the Black Sea from the Sea of Azov. The Germans needed it as a base for regaining all the ground they had just lost. Fifteen Russian U-2s took off that night, as searchlights sliced through the darkness ahead. Strangely, the anti-aircraft guns fell silent. The pilots soon learned why. The Germans had for the first time deployed a night-fighter,fn6 who had perfect targets in the spotlit, slow-moving U-2s, each as ‘clear as a silvery moth caught in a spider’s web’, as one of the returning Night Witches put it.
Serafima Amosova, one of the surviving pilots, recorded what happened:
The searchlights came on, the anti-aircraft guns were firing, and then a green rocket was fired from the ground. The anti-aircraft guns stopped, and a German fighter plane came and shot down four of our aircraft as each one came over the target. Our planes were burning like candles. We all witnessed this scene. When we landed and reported that we were being attacked by German fighters, they would not let us fly again that night. We lived in a school building with folding wooden beds. You can imagine our feelings when we returned to our quarters and saw eight beds folded, and we knew they were the beds of our friends who perished a few hours ago.
Success in the Taman campaign brought more fame and more honour to the Night Witches, redesignated as the 46th ‘Taman’ Guards. They fought on to the end of the war, moving westwards with the land army – to Belorussia, Crimea, East Prussia, Poland, and in May 1945 to Berlin and victory. They were disbanded in October 1945, because women were being reintegrated into society. Motherhood and factory work took over from fighting as Soviet ideals.
Postscript: A few statisticsfn7
The 588th/46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment served for three years, June 1942–May 1945. How many achieved what? Many figures are quoted, few of them well sourced. Twenty-four thousand-plus sorties? That’s easily possible – forty planes (maximum) with two- or three-person crews flying several sorties per night for three years. The tonnage of bombs dropped? Perhaps 3,000 (23,000 is one figure given online, which must be nonsense, because U-2s/Po-2s could carry only 300 kilograms, maximum). Twenty-four pilots made Heroes of the Soviet Union, out of thirty-three awarded to women in the whole war. Twenty-six dead in combat, out of a total of 124 Night Witches (pilots and navigators), backed up by ninety-nine mechanics, armourers and engineers.
12
WONDER WOMAN: THE SECRET ORIGINS OF AN AMAZON PRINCESS
‘BEFORE SHE WAS Wonder Woman, she was Diana, princess of the Amazons.’ So begins the storyline of the 2017 blockbuster movie. As always with superheroes, the plot involves saving the world, which suggests that the film is nothing but fun, at best, and utterly lacking in significance. Not at all. Wonder Woman is a lot more important than you might think. How an Amazon from several centuries BC became today’s superhero (or superheroine; usage varies) is not the point of the movie, but it’s a story in its own right, leading back almost 100 years into an America of dominant men, a few rebellious women, and one man who was, amazingly, a feminist in one respect – he dreamed up Wonder Woman as an icon of female power and independence. ‘Feminism made Wonder Woman,’ as the Harvard history professor Jill Lepore puts it in her superb account,fn1 ‘and then Wonder Woman remade feminism.’
The starting point is the mix of radical themes, events and people forming the campaign for women’s rights before, during and after the First World War, many of which – the ones I focus on here – played into the themes, events and people forming the context for the creation of the original Wonder Woman and her Amazonian origins. In what follows, watch out for themes now familiar to us, including: Greeks; a women’s homeland of infinite happiness; sexual equality; a rejection of marriage; obsessions about secrecy, lies and truth; patriotism; bondage; and an obscure item of jewellery. The story is an intriguing mixture of very public exposure and a veil of secrets.
Take first the extraordinary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a feminist sociologist who wrote Women and Economics (1898) and several other very serious books arguing for women’s rights. Luckily for her cause and her readers, she also had a sense of humour. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she lived out her ideals, leaving her husband, Charles Stetson, and taking their daughter Katherine to California. After the divorce, she and her ex agreed that Katherine should live with Charles. He married one of Charlotte’s best friends. Everyone got on well. She remarried (George Gilman, a first cousin) and moved back to New York, where she continued lecturing and writing: half a dozen non-fiction books and three novels by 1915, winning wide respect for both her feminism and her socialism. She worked ferociously hard, writing every word of her own magazine, the Forerunner (1909–16), in which she serialized her three utopian novels, expressing her anti-traditionalist views: that women were as courageous, creative, generous and virtuous as men; that male dominance was not a given; that culture can trump biology; that revolution should happen; and that it should come as the result of non-violent action by women.
Herland, written in 1915 and one of those novels serialized in the Forerunner, is the story of three male adventurers who stumble on ‘an undiscovered country of a strictly Amazonian nature’ (the only mention of ‘Amazon’ in the book). It is the homeland of a society of women who live without men, in which virgin birth produces only girl children and in which community is all. The women are anti-Amazons, driven to cooperate, not to fight and conquer. There are no family homes, which Gilman thought created inequality and inhumanity. All the women look after all the children. Explaining their ways to the three aghast intruders, they were used by Gilman to spotlight the oddities of American society. Why, one of the women wonders innocently, do those Americans with the fewest children have the most servants? Terry, the most macho of the three men, complains that even young and beautiful women are unsexy because they lack deference and fragility. In fact, the women have had sexual desire bred out of them, and they are the better for it. If the men want to marry them, they can only do so on the basis of equality.
In later life, after her husband’s death, Gilman moved back to California, where she was joined by her first husband’s wife, herself a widow. In 1932, she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Three years later, having finished her autobiography, she used chloroform to kill herself.
Gilman was writing at a time when women’s rights were a major issue. Women were now going to college in ever-increasing numbers,fn2 and among them were ‘suffragists’ demanding the vote – ‘New Women’ who were often referred to as Amazons. In 1908, Mary Woolley, president of the first women’s college, Mount Holyoke, helped found the National College Equal Suffrage League. She was also a feminist, aiming to establish gender equality in all things, leading an American equivalent of Emmeline Pankhurst’s campaign in Britain. Included in this was birth control, spearheaded by Margaret Sanger in the magazine Woman Rebel, with its challenging
subhead: ‘No Gods, No Masters’. She campaigned to break the bonds of prejudice and prudery wherever she saw them. In the US, as in England, there were arrests for distributing information about contraception, with frequent trials, imprisonments and hunger strikes. Margaret Sanger’s sister, Ethel Byrne, was the first woman prisoner in the US to be force-fed. Sanger got her released by guaranteeing that she would not break the law again, something for which Byrne never forgave her. Sanger pursued her agenda in the teeth of official opposition. Just after the 19th Amendment gave women the vote in August 1920, she published Woman and the New Race, arguing for even greater equality and for birth control – ‘the revolt of women against sex servitude’, as she called it – a cause for which she travelled internationally, including to England, where she, being an advocate of free love and needing money for her work and family, married the oil millionaire J. Noah Slee, then started a long-lasting friendship and occasional love-affair with H. G. Wells.
One of the New Women at Mount Holyoke was Elizabeth (then known as Sadie) Holloway, whose boyfriend William Moulton Marston was at Harvard. Marston was doing research in experimental psychology and also dabbling in ‘photoplays’, as screenplays for silent movies were known. He was clever, handsome, restless, ambitious, and not at all the bulky figure he would become. He had had an idea: that telling a lie raised blood pressure, and that if this could be measured during an interrogation it would be possible to see if someone was telling the truth or lying. He and Holloway did an experiment. Using crime stories written by Holloway, Marston asked questions about the fictional crimes, identifying liars by their rising blood pressure and then comparing his results with judgments made by mock-juries. There were 107 tests. He was right 103 times – 96 per cent. The jury was right about 50 per cent. That’s how the lie detector was invented. His paper, based on these and later experiments, remained fundamental to future research into lie detectionfn3 (it would ultimately prove rather less reliable, and was never accepted in court). Marston and Holloway married in 1915, and both went to law school, he in Cambridge (Harvard), she in Boston (Radcliffe).
