by Gwen C. Katz
When she came alongside Galya’s stretcher, Galya grabbed her sleeve and, struggling with each word, said, “Promise me that when I come back you’ll let me fly.”
I was amazed. Lying there grievously wounded and she was thinking about what she’d do when she returned. Of course Bershanskaya promised.
We slept very little the next day as we awaited news. The call that came from the hospital, to our surprise, was good. Galya had injured her spine, but it wasn’t broken, as they had feared. The doctors were impressed by her resilience. If all went well, they said, she’d be fit to return to duty in a month. She had a message for Bershanskaya: “Remember your promise!”
It was such a relief to know that we wouldn’t lose our precious Galya. The accident was a reminder of what could happen to any of us at any time. I resolved to take special care of Iskra the next time we flew, and I slept extra close to her afterward beneath the aircraft’s wing.
Sometimes we relocate so hastily that there is no time to construct dugouts and we sleep on the airfield under the wings of our planes. The ground crews thoughtfully park the planes on high spots to keep us from getting soaked if it rains. But it’s hard to sleep in broad daylight with only a cockpit cover hung over the edge of the wing, especially when a mechanic starts banging around on the engine right above you. One benefit of canvas: it hurts less than aluminum when you sit up too fast.
One of those days I woke and Iskra was gone.
I found her on a hill near the airfield, stretched out on the grass with her eyes closed. Sunlight bathed her delicate face. I lay down next to her and whispered, “Trying to get a tan?”
She laughed without opening her eyes. “No. I’m just enjoying it. I spent weeks in a cell, two meters by three. Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever see this again.” She gestured broadly at the sun and the sky and the rolling grass of the steppe.
She acts so normal, I almost forget that anything had happened to her. But Iskra doesn’t have the luxury of forgetting. I asked, “Do you want to tell me what happened? I hate that you have to carry that alone.”
“No, baby cousin,” she replied. “I just want to feel the sun.”
Amid everything, it’s amazing that we get any flying done at all. But we do. And that brings me to the second incident.
I really don’t want to tell you about this one. I’d rather let you keep telling everyone how proud you are of me, your hotshot pilot friend. But however much I hate to disappoint you, lying to you is even more unthinkable.
It goes back to the partisans. There are thousands of them in fascist territory, from bands of a few dozen furtively cutting telephone lines in occupied cities to brigades with hundreds of fighting men and women. Surrounded by fascist forces, they have only air supply as their lifeline. Our agile biplanes can dart in and out of their forest hideaways, dropping ammunition and medical supplies or airlifting out wounded men.
The partisans light signal fires to guide us, but the crafty fascists light their own fires to draw us off. We get around this by prearranging a signal pattern. One night the partisans will place the fires in a triangle. Another night it will be a cross. Tonight it was three fires in a row along the patch of clear ground that served as a runway.
Something else was different today: Zhigli flew as a pilot. Bershanskaya has promoted her. She was a cautious navigator, but in the front cockpit, she’s fearless. The only thing she worries about is what might happen to her former pilot if she’s not around to take care of her.
The weather was foul. There was rain and a difficult headwind that kicked up into gusts strong enough to wrench the controls from my hands. Zhigli was flying ahead of us, but we couldn’t see a thing through the lashing rain.
We caught a glimpse of her as we neared the drop zone. She should have already dropped her cargo and gone, but instead she was circling the clearing. I waited for the white shapes of parachutes to pop open underneath her plane. None appeared. After a couple of circles, her U-2 peeled away. But it didn’t head back to the airfield. It passed us and Zhigli waggled its still fully loaded wings, then turned north—the opposite direction she should have gone.
“She wants us to follow her,” said Iskra, as if I didn’t know what a wing waggle meant.
“I know,” I said a little defensively. “But what is she doing?”
Iskra sounded doubtful. “Something must have gone wrong with the drop.”
We were over the clearing. I spotted a line of three lights, flaring up and dying down erratically in the wind. Everything looked fine, and I told my cousin so.
She said, “It’s the right signal, but . . .”
I didn’t have time for Iskra’s waffling. I brought Number 41 down to the right altitude for a drop.
Iskra didn’t pull the release. She said, “Maybe we should follow Zhigli.”
“I have no idea what she’s up to and I won’t follow her to find out. Come on, Iskra, you know Zhigli gets ideas. She doesn’t want to fly if she hears a dog howling because she thinks it’s a bad omen. Stick to the flight plan.”
“She must have had a reason.”
I’d had enough. I wanted to mark off that fiftieth sortie. So I said, “Junior Lieutenant, I’m the commanding officer of this vessel and I’m ordering you to make the drop.”
We’re real soldiers now, not play soldiers. She obeyed my order.
When we were back at the airfield, trying not to slip on the wet canvas as we climbed out of our cockpits, Iskra said, “I can’t believe you pulled rank on me!”
“Sorry,” I replied. “The middle of a sortie is not a good time for a sudden change of plan. Please don’t be angry.”
“But Zhigli . . .”
Her plane came in just then, still laden with supplies. “She’s all right. And see? She failed to make the drop.”
Water streamed down the stairs of the plank-roofed command dugout as we headed to our debrief. We waded in, trying not to splash.
We found Zhigli there, doing what she does best: getting other people in trouble.
“. . . north to south. But the partisans’ runway runs east to west!”
Bershanskaya riffled through the papers on her desk and found an aerial photo of the partisan camp. The makeshift buildings and paths that made up the partisan camp reminded me of the pattern of wires and tacks on your homemade radio. “Look at that—you’re right! What were the exact instructions?”
Our head of communications said, “‘Three fires in a line along the runway.’ Not ‘three fires in a line east to west.’”
“Right, so any Germans who intercepted the message wouldn’t know which way to line them up,” said Zhigli.
Bershanskaya asked, “Did you find the real drop site?”
A small mercy for me, Zhigli hadn’t.
“We’ll try again when the weather clears up. No harm done.”
“No harm done by me,” said Zhigli. She pointed at me. “I tried to warn her, but she ignored me! You made the drop, didn’t you, Valka?”
I said sharply, “I completed the mission. It wasn’t my job to follow you on your flight to nowhere.”
“And it never occurred to you that I might have had a reason? You thought I was going for a joyride in a rainstorm carrying a hundred kilos of ammunition?” Zhigli’s dark-lashed eyes narrowed. “Or did you think I was leading you into a trap?”
“You can’t expect me to trust you,” I said.
“You should have,” said Bershanskaya. Her face was stern, with no hint of the good humor that usually danced beneath the surface. “It was a copycat signal.”
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach as I realized what that meant.
Zhigli crossed her arms. “You dropped your cargo in the middle of a German camp. The fascists just got an early New Year’s present.”
“‘I’m the commanding officer of this vessel and I’m ordering you to make the drop,’” muttered Iskra, mimicking my voice.
“You’re not in trouble for making the drop, Koroleva,” s
aid Bershanskaya. “You had no way of knowing. It was an accident. Two heavy machine guns and ten SMGs’ worth of accident, but still. The real issue is why you ignored Zhigulenko’s attempt to alert you.”
Zhigli began, “Because she’s convinced I’m—”
Bershanskaya held up a hand to silence her. “I know there’s bad blood between the two of you. It doesn’t matter why. But you need to work it out. Short of pistols at dawn, I don’t care how, just deal with it. I can’t have two pilots in my regiment who won’t work together, and I won’t separate you like squabbling schoolchildren. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, gritting my teeth. I couldn’t explain that this was more than a playground fight.
The major dismissed Zhigli, but told me, “One moment, Koroleva. There’s one more thing you need to do.”
She made me tell the division commander.
Heading to that meeting felt like being sent to the principal’s office after picking a fight with the boys at school; and like my defiant preteen self, I made up a long list of excuses, blaming Zhigli or the partisans or the weather. Except then I realized who would most easily take the blame for me. Iskra. There was an entirely different way to look at the fiasco: a questionably loyal navigator with known ties to wreckers deliberately drops weapons into enemy territory, despite clear indications that it is the wrong location.
No. No one could be given cause to look into Iskra and her past. She might have escaped unscathed last time, but the arrest was a permanent black mark on her record. She would never be truly out of danger. And that meant I had to take the fall, completely and unequivocally. I had messed up due to pure stupidity and that was the whole story.
You can imagine how that went. The division commander has been waiting for a mistake like this since we arrived. I got a long lecture in which the words “girls” and “useless” frequently coincided. Bershanskaya managed to cool him off a bit, but in the worst possible way: by pointing out that Zhigli hadn’t made my mistake and that it was therefore a single pilot’s isolated error, not representative of the whole regiment.
He didn’t disband us on the spot, though he wanted to, but he did ground me for two days. It would be longer, but we’re at war and we can’t spare pilots, even censured ones. Worse, he’s contacting his superiors. Says he’s willing to go all the way to the top if that’s what it takes to get rid of us. However that goes, it’s safe to say that I’ve set our regiment’s efforts to prove our competence back to zero.
I guess the list of people who believe in me is back down to just you.
Yours,
Valka
TWENTY-TWO
2 August 1942
Dear Pasha,
Galya can barely sit up, but already she can’t wait to be back with the regiment. Every day she asks when she’ll be well enough to return. She’s bored out of her mind at the hospital. She and Zhenechka write each other poems and stories and Zhenechka reads them to the rest of us. It keeps Galya occupied—and us too, because we’re rained out.
Last week’s rain kicked up into a beautiful summer thunderstorm. Lightning flashed and the downpour was so torrential that we couldn’t see a meter ahead. Lucky me: I was grounded on days when there was no possibility of flying anyway.
There was also no chance to rest or relax. Thunder constantly boomed overhead. Our dugouts were half flooded. Vera, in the bed by the doorway, would put out her hand to test the depth of the water during the night. If it was only a few centimeters deep, she’d say, “It’s fine, go back to sleep.” But when it got shin deep, she’d throw on a coat and wade out to the pump truck to get them to pump it out.
Colonel Popov made good on his threat: he complained about us to the marshal in command of the front. Turns out the marshal and Major Raskova go way back. Keen to see how her regiments were faring, he arranged an inspection the day the weather cleared up. And, he told us, he was bringing a friend.
I was nervous about the inspection, in part because of our damp and bedraggled state, but mainly because I was convinced Germans would show up somewhere armed with Russian SG-43s at that exact moment. It didn’t help that his friend turned out to be Tamara Kazarinova.
Kazarinova, wearing her customary frown, immediately stalked, or rather limped, over to Bershanskaya.
Bershanskaya said truthfully, “Major. This is a surprise.”
“I’ve been hearing so much about your regiment that I wanted to see it for myself,” said Kazarinova. “I would have thought that a brand-new commander might take it slow and spend more time learning how things are done, but you’ve jumped in as though you’ve commanded your whole life.” Her tone left no question as to how she felt about this upstart civilian.
“During wartime, we must all step up to greater responsibility,” said Bershanskaya.
“What’s this I hear about your girls gliding? Your mechanics didn’t have trouble installing their engines, did they?”
Bershanskaya replied that our gliding technique was strategic and had, so far, been highly effective.
“Frankly, I’m impressed by what you’ve accomplished here,” said Kazarinova. “Given your level of experience, it’s amazing that you’ve even gotten those trainers off the ground.”
That was enough for Bershanskaya. She said in a tone of carefully controlled politeness, “How’s the aircraft factory? Still unthreatened, I hope? It must be nice having such a relaxing assignment that you can afford to take a few days off to visit an old friend. But I suppose your regiment can spare you easily enough, since you can’t fly anyway.”
Kazarinova glowered, but she only said, “Knowing Marina Raskova doesn’t make you untouchable. Remember that.”
She retreated to rejoin the marshal. Bershanskaya bit her lip while the rest of us sneaked nervous glances at each other, trying to gauge how much trouble she had just gotten us into. She’s made us a very dangerous enemy.
But I can’t say that any of us blamed her.
To my astonishment, the marshal actually seemed pleased with us. He’s the same man who inspected us in Engels all those months ago. He praised us for how far we’d come, saying that Raskova’s girls were all grown up. Then he turned to Popov and said, “But it’s probably hard for the girls in the ground crews to do everything themselves. Why don’t we send them ten or twenty men to do the heavy work?”
Our infuriated armorers yelled, “We don’t need any help! We’re fine on our own!”
The marshal smiled indulgently and said that of course we were.
Popov broke in to say, “They may look like soldiers, but they’ve been a disaster. They mistook their own escorts for enemy aircraft and they accidentally delivered an airdrop to the fascists—at least I hope it was an accident. They’re a danger to themselves and a liability to the rest of the division.”
“This is what happens when you put a civilian in command of rookies,” said Kazarinova.
The marshal brushed them off. “Cut them some slack—you have to remember that you’re dealing with young girls, not battle-hardened men. All things considered, I think they’re doing very well.”
So our regiment will not be punished for my mistake. Yet the inspection left a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t want to be treated like a girl if it means what that marshal meant by it, being handled gently and forgiven when I mess up because I can’t be expected to do better.
Major Bershanskaya agreed. When the marshal was gone, she addressed us. “There you have it, eaglets—he says you’re doing well . . . for girls. Do you know how often I hear that? ‘Your pilots fly so well for women.’ ‘Your girls are doing such a great job, almost as good as the men.’ I’m not satisfied with that. Are you?”
Of course no one was.
She turned to me. “Junior Lieutenant, how many sorties did you fly on the seventeenth?”
I checked my logbook. “Two, ma’am.”
She said, “Your big brothers in the 650th all flew at least three.”
I ventured that their pl
anes were faster.
Ilyushina put her hands on her hips. “And if they become elite Guards and we don’t, I’m sure you’ll find it adequate consolation that you were outflown by the mighty Polikarpov R-5.”
Bershanskaya asked her how quickly a ground crew could turn a U-2 around. Ilyushina said it could take as little as five minutes.
“Explain to me how we’re only fitting in two sorties a night,” said Bershanskaya.
Ilyushina shrugged. “Maybe they can’t cut it in the field.”
Protests broke out up and down the line from the mechanics and armorers. Bershanskaya asked a click-snap, “I won’t accept that what takes you five minutes in theory takes an hour when you’re under stress. What’s the real problem?”
She had singled out Masha, the girl who’d had the accident with the detonator. Masha still has a white scar on her forehead. She stammered and said, “It doesn’t take that long—I mean, it shouldn’t. But everyone is trying to get to the fuel truck or the truck carrying the bombs and we get in each other’s way.” In an even smaller voice, she added, “Also, ma’am, I’m not complaining or anything—we all want to do everything we can for the war effort—but we load and fuel the planes all night, and we service the weapons during the day. We never have a real chance to sleep.”
That day, we discovered the genius hiding beneath Bershanskaya’s reserved exterior. She conferred with Ilyushina and this is what they came up with: No more ground crews for each plane. Instead she divided the mechanics and armorers into groups and assigned each group a specific duty. One group would meet the planes and bring them to their hardstands, another would refuel them, and so on.
The next morning at breakfast I sat down next to a pilot from the 650th and asked him how many sorties he’d flown that night. He proudly told me that he had flown four. I got a long explanation of his heroic bombing missions and a generous offer to take me up in his R-5 and give me a few pointers before he got around to asking me how many I’d flown. I offhandly told him, “Seven. But I was last in the flight order.”
