A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II

by Anne Noggle

  Well, we were shot down in the Kuban region, and there were more German planes there than we had fighter aircraft to escort us on missions. It was very hard for Soviet pilots at that time. I don't remember if we had any escort when we saw German Messerschmitts approaching us. Of course we started firing; we were frightened, and these were our first missions. We were saved, more thanks to the weather. We got into a big, stormy cloud, and the Messerschmitt lost us. But before he lost sight of us he fired a round, and we saw that one of our engines was burning and the fuel was gushing out. My pilot was very skilled, and she managed to land the plane in a small meadow about two kilometers behind our lines. We had an agreement between us that if there were a forced landing, the one who feels better, who is conscious, not wounded, helps the others. It was especially necessary to help the pilot and the navigator to get out of that very small cabin.

  After we landed my pilot, Yekaterina Musatova-Fedotova, called, "Tosha, Tosha!" I had with me an instrument, like a small axe or crowbar, to pry open their canopy, but I had breathed in so much dispersed fuel that I was like a drunken person. There was a pounding noise, and four-letter words, and shouting to get out quick and help us! That sobered me a little. Even now I can't breathe in exhaust gases, and I can't stand the sight of petrol. Well, I got them out, and luckily the plane didn't blow up and begin to burn.

  The most interesting thing that I remember since then is that I communicated by radio with somebody in the ground forces and told them of our despair and our situation. So on the ground we were waiting for help, and then we saw some soldiers, infantry soldiers, crawling up to us. But we saw that they were our soldiers, and what do you think they came with? Big green leaves, and these leaves were 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!

  We survived the war because of our regimental commander. All through the flights he was addressing his navigator, asking, "How are the girls?" He chose the routes so that we evaded the ground attacks of the anti-aircraft guns and also the German fighters; he knew the situation very well. He told us always to stick together. Of course the anti-aircraft fire couldn't be helped, and the first salvo generally got someone. We began to maneuver all together, the nine of us or the eighteen of us. Well, they couldn't adjust to our maneuvering and missed us, but the fighters looked for an opportunity, for a plane to part from the group so that they could easily shoot it down. When the group stuck together there were nine planes: nine gunners with machine guns, nine navigators with their machine guns, plus the guns of the pilots.

  The second time we were shot down was on the western front, but I shot down one plane, too! I didn't know I shot it down, but the ground forces saw everything, and then we had the photographing that begins when you fire. They saw it was shot down; the bullets were tracer bullets, so our soldiers could see where they came from. One of the planes of a male regiment was burning; our plane was hit, but we weren't burning. The fuel tubes all shattered, and the fuel again was streaming out. Then Katyusha, our pilot, saw a little clearing surrounded by the forest on all sides, and she managed to land the plane safely.

  The other plane that was on fire was flown by the men's crew. Probably they were conceited young boys not very well trainedthey couldn't make it the last one hundred meters to that open space where we landed. They crashed in the forest and burned before our eyes. 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 third time we were not shot down, but one of the engines cut off as we were taking off. The height was only one hundred meters, and we were loaded with bombs. Luckily for us there was a field in front of us, so I quickly switched on the radio and said, "Forced landing, forced landing!" so that the ground personnel knew where we were. We made a belly landing, and very soon the crew of technicians and engineers arrived. When they looked under the wings and saw the bombs they nearly fainted-the engineer was a woman, too. One of the explosive devices that attached to the bomb was pushed out and got split up, so it was live. It was by a micron or the hundredth part of a millimeter that the yoke did not detach from the capsule with the explosive. Well, that's probably luck. But when they arrived they thought that I was crazy from sheer fright, because they found me sitting on the fuselage, powdering my face. We had landed on a freshly plowed field and the earth was dry, and there was so much dust you couldn't see anything. So I sat astride the fuselage, my legs down in my cabin, and I thought, I must do something with this dust, so I began brushing it off. They thought, Tosha is gone!

  Either you have no time to be frightened or you have to act very quickly, but somehow it's not a helpless fright. You have to act, you have to do something, you have to save your life-not only your life but the lives of your friends. Fright is natural and fear is natural for everybody, but it wasn't freezing-a fright that makes you helpless.

  I am frightened now (i99o). I don't know what will become of my fair country. I don't know what is going to happen to our country, with the lack of even the barest necessities.

  It's not just the lack of things, it's just the sheer stupidity and sabotage! The harvest, they plowed it down; probably they have always been doing it. Throughout the years, when the chief of the Regional Party Department comes to inspect the fields and finds that by a certain date the crops haven't been harvested, he punishes everybody. So what the kolkhozinks (farmers) do is to plow it under and say everything is harvested.

  Everybody has thought about this, but there is no one to think what to do. No one can do anything here. We are all helpless for some reason. These people are no fools, and even I am no fool. I can tell them what should be, but how to achieve this? It doesn't work because of the resistance, because of the party leaders, and Gorbachev himself-I think he doesn't know what to do. To take the power away from the party you have to begin shooting them. I don't know whether Gorbachev is right or not. I think so far he may be right, because if he starts shooting them, there will start an overall shooting, a civil war. A civil war is something-it will be just a massacre of everybody, by everybody. As I read in a book, everyone is in an excellent state of preparedness to bite or to kill everybody else. And the people are nice, the people are nice. I don't know the psychology of it.

  I was a student here in Moscow at the language institute before the war, so I got through two years, four terms; then the war broke out, and I made a break in studies. After the war, in May, 1945, I came back and had two more years at the military institute.

  I hated Stalin throughout my life, beginning with the murder of Kirov. I was fifteen then, in sixth grade, and I said, "That's Stalin's deed!" Then there came Kujbishev and Gorky and all the nice men, from my point of view, and I hated Stalin when the war started. Molotov declared, "For our country, for the motherland, for Stalin." I was a coxswain at the rudder of the men's crew, a sculling crew, when we heard the declaration of war. So we came back, landed, put the boat away, and all went to the Military Commissariat to enrolleight boys and myself. I told the boys when I heard this broadcast that said "for our country, for the motherland, for Stalin" that the motherland is all right, but why should I fight for Stalin? He's a man-let him fight for himself! There was no traitor among the eight boys, no traitor. I might have been shot.

  A second time I also might have been shot but was only punished very severely: they didn't let me fly for several months. One of our mechanics liked to paint. He was rather an old man, about forty-we were so young, and we thought he was so old. Our plane was beautiful-it was streamlined; especially when it flew low, you couldn't turn away your eyes from it-like English
is beautiful. I like English, and I liked my plane. I like the way English sounds when Mrs. Thatcher begins to speak, or Bush, or Reagan, anyone-I just begin to melt down! Well, on one side of the plane he painted a swallow in flight, and on the other side he wrote, For the Country, for Stalin. So I took the paint and the brush and I smeared it. Then he painted some thing else very quickly, but there were no traitors, no traitors. I said, "No, I don't want to fight for Stalin!" I was not brave, I was lucky; like all fools I was lucky. If someone had turned me in, of course I would have been shot, shot on the spot.

  I graduated in languages from the military institute, and I taught there; I was a senior lieutenant then. I ought to have been something more, but I was so undisciplined. I got out of the service in 1954. After the war I married, and we have one son.

  It wasn't the phenomenon itself, the girls being called up and volunteering into the army: it was the spirit, the spirit not of fighting for some person but of fighting for the freedom of the country from those German fascists.

  NOTE: After the war Antonina married the brother of her crew navigator, Klara Dubkova. This was the only interview conducted completely in English.

  Captain Mariya Dolina, pilot, deputy commander of the squadron

  Hero of the Soviet Union

  One of my sons is a pilot; the other is the captain of a ship. I was a flight instructor before the war. In comparison to my comrades-inarms, the women who dreamed of becoming pilots, I never hoped to be one because I grew up in a very poor family that experienced great hardships. I am a Ukrainian by origin, but I was born in Siberia in the Omsk region. My father, a peasant who had experienced great suffering in the Ukraine, went to Siberia to work on the land, and I was horn there on December 18, 1920. There were ten children in our family, and I was the oldest. My father lost both legs and couldn't do much, so I had to labor for the whole family. In 1934 we returned to the Ukraine.

  My mother had asked me to quit school because my father couldn't support the family, so I left school and went to work in a plant. At the same time I began attending a glider school. I really came into aviation by chance. Mother didn't want me to attend the glider school because I had to labor. She said that she had asked me to quit secondary school to help the family, and now that I was attending glider school, who was going to work? The head of the glider school came to my mother and asked that I be allowed to continue, because there were fourteen of us, and I was the only girl. Our group of cadets was to be sent to a military flying school to continue flight training. No matter how much my parents objected, I knew from the moment I first got into the plane that I was born there in the air, and it became my main purpose in life-to fly. And it was also the matter of my ambition, too, because I wanted to achieve something in life. I was eager to get an education. Because I had to quit secondary school, I thought of acquiring a good profession in aviation.

  Mariya Doling, 125th regiment

  I graduated from the Kherson military aviation school as a lieutenant in the reserve air force. I became a professional pilot, an instructor, and I was teaching at Dnepropetrovsk Flying School when the Great Patriotic War started. On the eve of the war, we had received some new sports aircraft, U-2s, and yet we sat there waiting, but there was no call to activate us. The male pilots from our school were taken to the front. The fascists were advancing rapidly, and at any moment our area could be occupied by the enemy. I couldn't even think of surrendering to the enemy, but I had never dreamed of fighting, either. According to Tolstoy, war and women are things that don't go together-they exist apart. But when I witnessed all the atrocities of 1941, the death of my friends and relatives, peaceful civilians, I wanted to help liberate my people from the enemy. I want you to underline in red that it was the cherished dream of the girls to liberate the land, but none of us wanted to fight-to kill.

  My flying club was stationed with the 66th Fighter Division of the air army, and we women wanted to voluntarily join it. Finally the commander agreed to take us-we would all retreat together. There were one other pilot, a girl navigator, and myself. We were ordered to ferry our aircraft at night across the Dnieper River. Before we left we were assigned to set on fire all the petrol and to explode the hangars where the planes were kept. I was to ferry three aircraft to the field where the division was moving. We set the hangars on fire and also the house we had built with our own hands, where we had lived so happily. When I flew over that night the river was burning with oil, and everything on the ground was burning. It felt as though even the air was on fire. The next morning I was enlisted into the air division, and I became a military pilot in one of its regiments.

  I flew 200 missions with that regiment. I was assigned to special missions, such as ferrying important people and the wounded. My plane was very small, and although it was hit it was not shot down. The German fighters tried from time to time to shoot it down, and I would maneuver. The U-2 was a slow biplane, and the fighters' velocity was so much greater that I could fly very low to the ground and make turns so that they didn't hit me. It was difficult for the enemy fighter, for he quickly overshot me-God saved me!

  The morning Raskova came to the staff of the southern front to select women for her regiment, I was the only woman there. Raskova said I must join the women's regiment. I said, "No, I don't want to go, this is now my family, my regiment; how could I?" I cried bitterly at losing my friends. She showed me Stalin's order saying that all the women should be in her regiment. Raskova was a strong-willed and strong-hearted personality. I was transferred to the training base at Engels, where I was assigned to fly the Pe-2 dive bomber.

  A most difficult flight took place in 1942 at the northern Caucasian front. It happened in the village of Krimskaya, where the military situation was very complicated. This village was first liberated by the Soviet army, and then was recaptured by the Germans, and again liberated by the Soviets, and again captured; this went on twice or thrice a day. The combat going on in this area was quite severe.

  On June 2, our forces managed to free the village. The weather conditions were very bad, with low clouds at about nine hundred meters. Nine aircraft were assigned to fly that mission, to try to destroy the enemy fortifications in that village by bombing. Yevgeniya Timofeyeva, deputy commander of our regiment, led our nine bombers. On this mission my left engine was hit by enemy fire and quit, and I began lagging behind in the flight. We were alone at the target, because the other aircraft had already bombed. We had to fly there and bomb without a fighter escort, because our fighters had started a dogfight with enemy fighters. The German planes attacked us, and we had to fight alone; of our nine bombers, five were shot down. My aircraft was set on fire while fighting with the Messerschmitts. Our squadron shot down four of the enemy fighters by ourselves. So we simultaneously bombed and shot down the four aircraft. Two were shot down by other formations and two by the formation that I led. Afterward my tail gunner was given a gift, a bonus of I,ooo rubles for shooting down a German aircraft.

  When the fight was over I was trailing behind, and my formation stayed back with my plane because they didn't want to leave us alone. Although the plane was shot up, it was not on fire until the German planes, seeing that my formation was alone, returned and fired on us again, and my engine caught fire. It was only because of my friend Tonya Skoblikova that we remained alive. One aircraft from my formation went ahead to our airfield, and our two planes were left alone. So Tonya held off all the German fighters with machine-gun fire to protect and save us. Then Tonya's plane was hit, and she had to leave and land on one of the fighter airfields.

  I proceeded alone, and our plane was attacked again by a German fighter. The right engine was hit and caught fire also. By that time my navigator and tail gunner had run out of bullets, so they started shooting flares instead. Then the German fighter came around and flew right up next to me, and I could see his face. He showed his teeth, and he looked so ugly. His face was freckled, and I remember his face until now. He was ferociously smiling at me, his
face distorted with hostility, and he showed me his fingers, gesturing one, two. I didn't know what it meant, and later on, when I was in the military hospital, I asked a fighter pilot what he was signaling. I was told he was asking, "How would you like me to shoot you down, in one attack or two?" Then he left, apparently thinking that because both engines were now on fire, our aircraft was done for. As we descended Galina Dzhunkovskaya, my navigator, pulled my goggles down over my eyes. She realized that I needed to see to land, and smoke was beginning to enter the cockpit. The goggles saved my face and eyes when the fire entered the cabin. I sustained burns only on my chest. We made a belly landing, and our gunner pulled us out of the cockpit, because Galina and I were already being burned. We were beginning to burn in the cabin.

  Our gunner was a man, and he saved our lives. He was wounded in the leg and sustained other injuries from the rough landing. The canopy was jammed, and he succeeded in prying it open and saving us. We beat the canopy with our hands and heads, trying to force it open. I was in shock. We landed just two kilometers from the front line. When he pulled us from the cabin, we fell on the ground, and the grass around us was burning-it was about one meter high in the summer-and we had to roll about to put the fire out around us and on us.

  The artillery men saw us land, picked us up, and took us to a military hospital. There I fainted. I had a spinal compression injury from the shock of landing and was hospitalized for a month before returning to duty. Now (1991) I must have surgery on my spine because of that injury. No one could believe we were still alive because they saw an explosion in the air, our two engines were on fire, and they saw no parachutes. So, at our regiment, they thought we had perished. We were too low to jump when we were set on fire, and the wind was blowing in the direction of the fascist troops. If we could have jumped, we would have drifted across the front line.