A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II

by Anne Noggle

  vsx: During the war the Germans knew about our regiment, but there were no newsmen or cameramen at our regiment. At the night bomber regiment there were a lot of them from the press. Nobody wrote about our regiment during the war. For the Soviet people it was like a secret regiment, carrying out secret assignments. Only at the victory parade in Moscow did the country learn about our existence. I didn't know anything about American women pilots during the war.

  I knew that there were American women pilots who flew planes to Alaska.

  vM and vsx: Now the situation has changed, and we know a little more about you, and you know a little more about us.

  vsx: I was appointed at Engels to be the squadron navigator. The Pe-2 bomber is not very convenient for the navigator. The design of the navigator's space, we cannot call it cabin, was poor. In front of the navigator there was the armor-protected seat of the pilot, behind the navigator the machine-gun ring, and in the floor there was a small window. There was one machine gun. The pilot had a cannon and a machine gun to fire. The pilot and navigator sat in one cabin, and the gunner was behind us in a separate compartment. We used maps printed before the war. Everything was perfect on them, but many cities were destroyed, so it looked different. The flooring of the fuselage in our compartment was made of clear plastic. When I could not see the landmarks I took off my parachute and peered around the pilot, to the right and left side, looking. I dropped the bombs, which were released by buttons. We used an optical sight, into which we put the altitude and speed of the aircraft.

  There were no radio transmitters on the Pe-2 until later in the war. In the fall of 1943 our unit was honored by being named a "Guards" regiment, and our regimental name and number was changed from the 587th Bomber Regiment to the 125th Guards Bomber Regiment. The regiment was also named after Marina Raskova, at our request.

  When we were flying, my duty was to navigate the aircraft to the target and to find our route. He, as commander and pilot, could not see other aircraft flying behind us. He would ask me, "Where is this pilot, and where is that one?" and I would say, "Everything is all right, they're following us." He was thinking more about the crews than about the target! After we had been flying with him for some time we called him not "bayonet" but "Daddy." I was twenty-five at that time and he was thirty-three, and now we still call him Daddy.

  vM: Now we live in a little-improved world. You (in the United States) know more about us, and let God help us add to our mutual knowledge, to become more easy and less tense.

  Senior Lieutenant Antonina Bondareva-Spitsina, pilot

  I come from the Ural region, from a working family; my father worked at a metallurgical plant in the Urals. Our family consisted of six children. When I was little everyone started talking about aviation, an outburst of aviation, and it became more and more popular. We lived in a small village, and a plane, at that time even a glider, was a small miracle.

  I was in sixth grade when a biplane landed. Everybody rushed to see what it was like, what it looked like, what it really was in real life. When I saw that plane my heart began beating fast, and I fell in love with the aircraft at first sight. Later on the pilot who brought the aircraft to the village founded a glider club nearby, and when I was sixteen, I enrolled in the club. In our region they admitted eighteen students, and only two were girls. I was the only daughter in my family, with five brothers, and my mother didn't even let me go to the club until I completed all household tasks and duties. My father was very much against my flying, but I did it anyway. Each time I left to go to the glider school my father would say, "Don't come back, you may not come back, I won't let you in!" Strange as it seems, my mother was not against it-she let me go. I was healthy, robust, and active, and my mother said I was meant to be a boy but turned out to be a girl.

  I graduated from the glider school at sixteen. We had to make five parachute jumps before we were allowed to go to flying school. This was not a physical test but one to show whether you were brave enough to fly a plane. I quickly went on to powered aircraft, flying the U-2. When I became an instructor, I was nearly eighteen. Then I taught cadets. I was just under eighteen, and they were seventeen. And I didn't even have a passport of the country yet! You had to be at least eighteen to have a passport. I even had to add a year to my age in order to be assigned the rank of instructor-pilot.

  When the war broke out I wanted to volunteer to be in Raskova's regiment, but I wasn't allowed to leave the school. The male instructors had left for the front, and I had to instruct the cadets. Only in 1943, when the women's regiments suffered losses, did I go to the front as a reinforcement.

  I joined the 587th, later to be the 125th Guards Bomber Regiment. 1, by this time, had 2,000 flying hours. Then I was trained to fly the Pe-2 dive bomber. My middle brother was also a pilot in the war, and my elder brother perished during the war. He was a paratrooper, a member of a sea landing force, and was killed. We received only a notice that he was killed in battle; we do not know the place of his grave. During the war we were each provided with a cylinder that we spun open, and we inserted into it a piece of paper with our identification on it. The official name for our air arm, which was a part of the Soviet army, was the USSR Army Air Force.

  On one mission, just as we dropped the bombs, I felt something go wrong with our aircraft. The dive brakes had fallen, and I did not know that. The aircraft began chattering, and it started going down. The sea was below us and we remained alone, because the accom panying fighters went on with the squadron. I was searching for a place to land, and then I was caught by two fascist fighters who began shooting at us from different angles. I tried to maneuver, but I couldn't; the plane wouldn't respond. It was like a cat-and-mouse game; they didn't hit any of us, but the shells came very close. Suddenly they disappeared, and I learned later that two of our fighters came to rescue us and shot down the Germans. I finally landed on the airfield, but it took all my muscles, strength, and might-everything that I had-to make it, because it was pulling the nose down toward the earth. God saved us, and no one was hurt. The aircraft was so shot up that it took a month to repair.

  125th regiment in front of their re-a aircraft. Standing, sixth from left: Antonina Bondareva-Spitsina; seventh from left: Yevgcniya Gurulyeva-Smirnova; far right: Galina Brok-Beltsova

  One of the most horrible episodes came on a mission when I sensed that there was petrol in the cabin. I bent my head down to see what was happening and saw a hole in the fuel tank, and just then a great shell flew through the cabin over my head. Only because my head was bent down did I survive. My navigator (Brok-Beltsova) was nearly hit also, and she was so frightened that even after the mission her mouth was screwed up in a funny way. It was her nerves; she had seen the shell go over, and her face remained distorted for some time. War is war, and life is life.

  While we were waiting for our combat mission to be assigned we would sit on our parachutes, and between the parachutes and our back we had a tiny cloth that we were knitting between flights. When we were assigned a mission, we put it back between our body and the parachute and went off to combat.

  At the end of the war, when the women were released, I continued serving in the air force. There were only three women pilots in my unit who wished to remain in the active air force; we were retrained to fly the Tu-2 aircraft and were assigned to a male regiment. I flew until 1950, when I quit flying. I often have dreams about aircraft-of flying. It is my favorite dream.

  War friendship is stronger than that between relatives, and we still know about everybody. We take care of each other and help in any way we can, and on great holidays I have received at least seventy letters from my friends!

  Lieutenant Yevgeniya Gurulyeva-Smirnova, navigator

  I was born on December 24, 1922. Aviation is my fate. I came to it because it was predestined. I loved the sky since early childhood.

  I came from Siberia, very far away behind the Urals, to apply to the army headquarters to be drafted into the army. We were all united by the sentim
ent of defending our beloved motherland from the enemy. I know how the Americans love their land, and we Russians love our land, too. You can understand our patriotic feelings. I know that in America you are heterogeneous just as we are, but you are friendly with each other, you support each other, you are one whole nation. I like your president; I like your people.

  I started flying in a glider school and made my first flight when I was sixteen years old. I continued on to pilot-instructor school; then I flew in an auxiliary medical regiment until I came to the 125th regiment as a reinforcement. My assignment was to he a navigator. I did not have a lot of flying hours, but I was a very good pilot.

  I was wounded-very few from our regiment were wounded. We were bombing tanks in Lithuania, and there was heavy antiaircraft fire. A shell exploded directly under our aircraft when we were over the target. I had a burning pain in my body, as if a fire were burning inside. I hit against the metal navigator's seat and fell to the floor. I was semiconscious, and my blood covered the floor of the cockpit with a shell splinter of about twenty-five centimeters stuck into my thigh. The pilot's seat was protected with armor plate, but the navigator's seat was not.

  Yevgeniya Gurulyeva-Smirnova, 125th regiment

  I knew I had to drop the bombs, so I reached up and found the liquid ammonia, put it to my face, and became fully conscious. Then I dropped the bombs and photographed the target as was required to indicate we had fulfilled the mission. We returned to our airfield and landed safely. By then I was motionless, and they had to throw me out of the cockpit as though I were a sack of coal. I was carried to a military hospital where I was operated on, and I was in the hospital for three months. I came back to the regiment and made a few training flights before returning to active service in the summer of 1944.

  We moved from one airfield to another. When it was warm enough, we covered the wing of our plane with a tarpaulin and slept under it, especially in the spring and fall when it was too wet to sleep in a dugout. It was very cold and wet in the Smolensk region where we slept in dugouts. When we returned from our missions we couldn't rest or even dry our things because the floor was covered with water and mud. Our linens, pillows, mattresses, blankets-everything was wet through. Sometimes we left our boots in front of the open fire to dry overnight, and when we awakened, instead of dry we found them burned. Those mornings we had nothing to put on our feet when we heard the alert signal.

  By the time I arrived at the regiment the whole squadron to which I was assigned had been killed, and we were all replacements. Only in 1944 did we make our first combat missions. There were eight of us from our squadron who became very good friends and swore that our friendship would endure to the last day of our lives. We are still friends and call each other and see each other, but unfortunately many of us have already died.

  No other country in the world let women fly combat, but Stalin proclaimed that our women could do everything, could withstand anything! It was a kind of propaganda to show that Soviet women were equal to men and could fulfill any task, to show how mighty and strong we were. Women could not only bring babies into being but could build hydroelectric plants, fly aircraft, and destroy the enemy. Even if Stalin hadn't let the girls fly we would have volunteered by the thousands for the army.

  Our regiment had two squadrons of nine aircraft each. We had very good air cover; not only Russian but also French fighters provided us with protection when on bombing missions. When the German fighter planes came up to try to stop the bombers, our fighter aircraft would engage them.

  I only saw one of our aircraft shot down. It started to fall, and only the tail-gunner managed to parachute out. We were instructed on how to jump from our plane if necessary: by jumping vertically to our flight path, with our feet pointed to the ground and our back against the wind. We were to jump through the lower hatch, feet first. The tail-gunner left her position, dropping through the lower hatch also.

  The Pe-2 had one bad feature: its landing speed was quite fast, and that contributed to a number of crashes. We had fewer casualties in our regiment than the men did flying the same type of aircraft; I think we were more exact in our flying.

  What I feared most on flying missions was being captured by the fascists. We also were afraid of being punished for not fulfilling a combat mission. We couldn't turn around and go hack without completing the mission. If we didn't complete our assignment, we could be imprisoned. We didn't think we would be imprisoned but only punished within the regiment. Nowadays people don't pay much attention to trifles, but in our time, in Stalinist days, we were punished.

  Today we speak about repression and about labor camps in our country. We say it was a great injustice for the people to be imprisoned by their own government if they spoke out against the system, but at that time we didn't think so. My grandfather was imprisoned after the revolution and sent to a labor camp in Siberia for protesting against Soviet rule. He cursed all the Soviets in his village. Before the revolution he was a rich peasant in spite of the fact that he had a large family. He worked hard, but the Soviets dispossessed him of everything. They tried to force him to join the collective farm and he wouldn't. So he was punished. At that time, when I was young and in school, I thought it was just punishment because he didn't support the system.

  I married after the war, and I have only one child. He hasn't any children, and I am not a happy grandmother. My husband died seven years ago.

  Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya Zapolnova-Ageyeva, mechanic of armament

  My native city is Moscow; I was born there. When the war started I was studying at the Moscow Aviation Institute. We were all patriots and wanted to volunteer. I heard of the three female regiments being formed by Raskova, and I immediately applied and was admitted to the regiment. My knowledge of aviation was theoretical because I had no practical knowledge or flying experience before the war. I became a mechanic.

  Our planes usually flew three raids a day, and the interval between raids was one hour. Within that time we had to fix the bombs, load the guns, and prepare for flight. The flight could not be delayed even for one minute, because it was all coordinated with fighter regiments that escorted the bombers. It was very intense. In Stalingrad, in very cold weather with temperatures down to forty-two degrees below zero centigrade, the skin on our hands froze and stuck to the metal, and our hands were black from frostbite. In the Kuban region, in the south of our country, there was unbearable heat, and there we burned our hands on the metal.

  When Raskova, who had become commander of our regiment after our training at Engels, perished ferrying a plane to the front, we had a ceremony at the regiment, a deep mourning. In Russia we have a good tradition to pay tribute to the dead after the body is buried. We all assemble in a hall somewhere to say the kindest and most honorable words about the dead person. Then we have a funeral. We were all filled with grief, and it was the greatest loss for us. Russian people are superstitious, and we believe in some signs. We have a sign here in Russia: if a dog is howling for a long time, weeping and sobbing, a misfortune is sure to happen-something terrible. Before Raskova perished a dog was howling for several days, and we asked ourselves, "What is going to happen? What wrong is going to happen?" and she died. Well, again, signs are signs, and life is life.

  On the eve of the New Year we have a tradition foretelling our fortune for the coming year. At the regiment we wrote some small notes, saying for everybody what kind of a year it was going to be, and we put them under the pillows. Everyone thrust her hand under the pillow, took out the message, and read it out loud. Raskova read that she was going to have a happy year, but it turned out to be quite the contrary. That year she perished; she was thirty-one years old. She was born in 1912 and was killed in 1943. She left an orphan daughter, Tanya, who had to live with her grandmother.

  I returned to the institute after the war, but I had missed four years and had forgotten a lot. My father had perished at the front, and I was not physically well, so I quit and later married.

 
; Sergeant Antonina Khokhlova Dubkova, tail-gunner

  Members of the z25th regiment

  Some Soviet pilots flew over our regimental airfield at zero altitude. Then we saw that something was dropped from the plane. Our commander was very strict and said, "That is forbidden, and the pilot must be punished." Well, of course it might have created an accident. Then he sent a technician to find what was dropped. What he brought back was a big teddy bear. I don't know where they procured it, but there was a notice pinned to the bear that said: "Dear young girls, we just learned we are escorting you. Don't you get frightened; we'll do everything to defend you, fight for you with the last drop of our blood. Thank you!" That was a gift from the sky. These were the fighters who escorted our bombers. Every bomber flight going out on missions is supposed to have fighter escorts.

  I was a sergeant and an aircrew machine gunner. At first I was the only woman machine gunner in the whole regiment. All the other gunners were men, because physically it was very difficult. I used to do gymnastics, ride horses, and row a scull, too, so I had a lot of strength. I asked Marina Raskova to let me fly. At first they wanted to make me a weapons mechanic. Then I asked her, and she liked me and I liked her, and she said, "Well, I will take you in my plane once and see what you look like." She couldn't tell very well without doing that. We flew, and it was enough for her that I didn't throw up on my first flight. Then she said I should take up the studies for two or three months, and that should be enough for me.

  The real effort was to recharge the machine gun, to pull the lever when it took sixty kilograms, and I had to do it with my left arm. I could never do it on the ground because it was very hard, but in the air it was one, two, and it was recharged! I squatted with the parachute behind my back, one machine gun behind me, another fixed machine gun that faced down and back. The latter gun was heavier, and it required the recharging. The lighter machine gun could be lifted out from one side and remounted on the other side, depending where the attack was coming from. I was in a separate compartment farther back than the pilot and navigator. It had a small canopy, so that you could see in all directions. I had communication with the pilot on an intercom. We were shot down two or three times. There was a narrow escape, and, you know, we might not have had the pleasure of seeing each other now.