A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II

by Anne Noggle

  Sometimes we had a day off, and we gathered in the barracks or wherever, combed our hair, and trimmed ourselves. We wanted to make ourselves look pretty and attractive and womanlike, in spite of the uniform clothing. Our regiment was a female regiment, but there were a lot of male pilots and mechanics, and we wanted to make an impression. Lots of us fell in love, and after the war we married, having been through the war together. Yes, we had time to fall in love-life is life!

  Once before a combat mission my aircraft got out of order. I had to fix it quickly, but it was a complicated task, and I couldn't finish it in the short time before the mission. Two male and two female mechanics helped me-that was the way we were-we all helped each other.

  The regiment consisted of very intelligent girls, graduates of universities and institutes. We even had a poet. She studied at Moscow University in the philology department, and she composed verses and we recited them; moreover, we sang those verses using the melodies of well-known songs. We danced a lot, made fun, teased each other, and laughed.

  All of us at the front were obsessed by the idea that our land must be liberated.

  Senior Lieutenant Galina Burdina, pilot, commander of the formation

  I was born into a very large and poor family. We had to exist without a father, and I had never dreamed of becoming a pilot. At the age of fourteen I had to work as a laborer, and simultaneously I was attending secondary school in the evening part time. When I was seventeen I was admitted to glider school. Then I was sent to continue my studies at the civil aviation pilot school in Ulyanovsk. I graduated and was sent back to Sverdlovsk to work as a pilot instructor. In September, 1941, our school was turned into a military pilot school; I trained military pilots there.

  When war broke out, all the girls volunteered into the army and wanted to help the country. At that time we were flying the Ut-2, a sport aircraft. It was a transitional plane between a training and a military aircraft. It had a covered cockpit-a canopy. Later we three girls who were instructors received orders to be in Moscow within twenty-four hours, and when we arrived we were told that we were to be admitted to the women's regiment. When we arrived at Engels, the training base for the regiment, Marina Raskova looked at us and said that we three were going to be fighter pilots!

  At the front, Tamara Pamyatnykh and I first flew as a pair in the Yak fighters. While I was in Tamara's squadron I was trained to fly at night. Then I became a night fighter. Our main task was to fly over the major industrial areas of the cities located close to the front line and safeguard important positions. We also escorted our dive bombers over the front line and guarded transports carrying important persons.

  We were stationed in the Ukraine, and on April 5, 1943, which is in the middle of spring, it began snowing. It is a rarity for that time of year, and all the airfields were shut down and incapable of receiving any aircraft. It snowed very heavily during the night again, and the snowstorm blew huge drifts. That night we were to fly combat missions. In spite of the fact that the runways had been cleared, heaps of snow were here and there. We were lined up and told the flight could be very risky, and were there any volunteers? Tamara and I were the first to volunteer, to risk it in any weather. It kept on snowing heavily, and we wondered how we would take off. It would be very difficult. Then we received a radio signal that the enemy was approaching; a large group of German bombers was flying in the direction of the railroad. We didn't believe we would be given permission to fly, for that flight might very well be our last in those conditions. But then a rocket was shot into the air signaling me to take off. It was snowing, and the white reflected light and that helped.

  Left to right: Galina Burdina, unidentified, and Alexandra Makunina, 586th regiment

  I was ordered to fly to the area of the railroad where the German planes were approaching. When I saw the German planes I ascended a bit, to be higher than the enemy. I heard on the radio that Tamara was also ordered to take off to help with the mission. When Tamara joined me, we saw a large number of German bombers dropping flares by parachute to light the area they were to bomb. They thought that with the bad weather there would be no Soviet fighters in the air. We were the only two that made it. We were above the bombers, and we could see that there was a great black mass of them, and I dove into the mass and fired all my weapons. Then we both turned and made another run through them, and then again, so that the Germans would think there were many of us. The bombers began dropping their bombs a distance from the railway; they didn't reach their target and turned back.

  When the bombers turned back we too were ordered back. Then we were told that it would be impossible for us to make a safe landing, and we were ordered to jump from our planes. I just couldn't jump; I loved my aircraft and I begged them to think of some other way. I couldn't give up my aircraft. Beneath us was an airfield of a male bomber regiment. They didn't want us to die, and their commander had an idea. He had his men gather all the flares from their planes, and they shot them into the air a few at a time and lit the runway for me to make a landing. I made a safe landing, but because of the heavy snow the aircraft nosed down into the snow but wasn't damaged.

  I was very anxious about Tamara and calculated that her plane was running out of fuel. Moreover, I lost radio contact with her. Tamara knew that it was impossible to make a safe landing at our own airfield, and she had decided to change her course to Kiev. She told me later that she had flown to Kiev, but she couldn't land there either because of the heavy snow. She turned back and decided to jump by parachute over her own regimental airfield. Then she saw the flares being shot into the air, and she too made a safe landing. The very moment she landed the engine quit; she was completely out of fuel.

  Another time Tamara and I were to carry a very urgent message to the Stalingrad front. We landed at a male fighter airdrome, and a fighter pilot met us and questioned us, asking who we were and where we had flown from, and we told him we were from the female fighter regiment. He didn't believe such young girls could be fighter pilots. Then he accompanied us to headquarters, and we delivered the message. We were told not to take off because by then it was nighttime; moreover, in the air over the Stalingrad front there were heavy battles every day. The Germans were constantly loitering over the airfield, and every time an aircraft took off, they tried to shoot it down. The commander told us to wait until early morning and take off with the male fighter regiment stationed there, so they could protect us.

  But the next morning we overslept. When we came to the airdrome they had already taken off. The commander ordered us to wait until the next formation went out on a mission. We decided we didn't need protection and made up our minds to fly alone. We got into our aircraft and told the commander we only wanted to warm up our engines. We took off, and the weather was cloudy. We could see the German aircraft behind us, but they didn't like to fly in cloudy weather, so we dove in and out of the clouds and made it back to our airdrome safely.

  In the Kiev region the Germans were retreating. Large groups of German troops and armament were encircled by the Soviet troops, and the Germans tried to break out. I flew my plane along with the commander of our regiment to loiter over the area. We were assigned the mission of shooting down the aircraft sent in by the Germans to fly out their high-ranking officers from the encirclement. We shot down two Messerschmitts and a cargo aircraft.

  It was in the territory of Romania, where the Romanian troops had already gone over to our side, that I met a Romanian pilot. Our regiment was stationed on the same airfield as a Romanian regiment. One of their pilots came up to me and told me that he knew me. He said he had seen me in the battle over Kiev. In that battle I had been covering my commander, and all my attention had been concentrated on that duty. This pilot had flown quite close to me in that battle, and when he recognized that I was a woman, he decided not to fire at me, not to shoot me down. So he gave me back my life.

  I participated in many combat missions, and the one time that my plane was shot down, I made a belly
landing. I was wounded in my head, face, and mouth. Part of my lower lip was torn, and it was hanging down. I was never shot down or wounded again. All in all I shot down four enemy aircraft.

  After the war I returned to a pilot school and taught flying to cadets, and then I flew for fifteen years in civil aviation for Aeroflot.

  Sergeant Irina Lunyova-Favorskaya, mechanic of armament

  When we meet every five years in October, we tell each other time after time that the reason we never tire of each other over all these years is because we all came together at the same time and volunteered to join the regiment. I was a student in the Institute of Geology in Moscow, a second-year student. I was born in 1921, and in 1940 I finished secondary school, then entered the institute. I wanted to join the army to help the country beat the fascist Germans, to liberate the motherland. My comrades in arms, I discovered, all joined for the same reason.

  When we heard it was Raskova that was forming regiments, and she was so attractive, so intelligent, we all wanted to serve under her very much. It happened that on October io all of us had submitted our papers to the Central Committee asking to be allowed to go to the front. On the sixteenth the Hitlerite fascists were located only twenty-four kilometers from Moscow. I am a native Muscovite as were my parents and grandparents. All were born here, and it is the loveliest and dearest place in the world, and I didn't want it to be captured by the Germans-it was an emotion of my heart!

  The war broke out on June 22, and on July 3 many of the students from my institute along with other colleges and universities were called to the front line to dig the trenches around Moscow, not far from the town of Smolensk. Two units had been formed at the geology institute to dig the trenches. One unit consisted of the first- and second-year students, and I was a part of that unit.

  When we were called we were asked to take meals for three days. Concerning clothes and other things, we were not warned about anything, so we were in our summer dresses-light summer dresses. It was a very hot summer, and all we had with us was the clothes we had on. We were loaded into trucks and driven on the Minsk highway to near Smolensk, where we dug antitank trenches. It was a really hard job for us girls because our hands were not used to this work, and after the first day of digging, our hands turned to a mass of skin and blood. We covered them with bandages, and it took much time for them to recover. We couldn't hear the guns at all. The soldiers helped us by exploding the soil with gunpowder to make it easier to dig. Sometimes it was very useless. At one place we had been digging for three days, and on the third day a commander came to us and said, "Girls, you have to go because the enemy is advancing, and we have to retreat." So we put the spades on our shoulders and walked back to a new location and dug there. When we moved from one place to another, it was almost always at night. We were working along the forest, and at that time the German aircraft would fly over and begin dropping bombs on Moscow. When they flew raids over our city we couldn't fall asleep for two or three hours. We became very tired, and we would cry when we heard the sound of the engines overhead.

  In order not to fall asleep while we were working, the girls would ask me to sing out loud. I had a beautiful voice when I was young. I was singing and crying at the same time; we were so tired. I started singing what the girls called concerts when we were marching; then I drifted to romantic songs, then folk songs to keep our spirits up, to help them keep walking, walking-not to fall asleep. Later on I began to sing to myself. Finally, when everybody was exhausted at night and I couldn't sing anymore and they couldn't walk anymore, we all fell into the dust. Because the village roads are not paved, they are dusty; we fell into this dust and went to sleep.

  As I said, when we went to the front to dig we were told to take food for three days and nothing extra, so we went in our dresses. The summer was extremely hot, and it was impossible to dig trenches in those clothes. We spared our dresses because we were haunted with the fear that one day we would finish and return to Moscow and what would we wear! So in the daytime when we dug trenches we took off our dresses and dug in our underwear. The native population, the village population in our country, is very superstitious, old-fashioned, and traditional. When they saw us almost naked they said, "It is crazy people, how they appear in the daytime before all the men and women in their underwear!"

  At that time, when our dresses became so very shabby, the Central Committee of the Komsomol remembered about us, and they sent Alexandra Makunina to the front line with clothes for all of the girls, and that is when I met Alexandra for the first time. Since that time we have been friends, and it turned out that we were later assigned to the same air regiment.

  We were out there digging for more than a month. The choice of food was very primitive. They brought loaves of bread, sugar, and some grains from the military in Smolensk, and we had to cook it ourselves after digging all day. In the morning before we went to dig we had white bread, a cube of sugar, and water for breakfast; sometimes boiling hot water, but without tea.

  When we had done our job there we asked the commander of the nearest regiment if we could stay, but in vain. When we returned to Moscow we again tried to volunteer for the army, but we were refused. Always we were sent to local committees. But suddenly I read in the Komsomol newspaper that the army might take us, and so we went to be interviewed. They talked with us before determining where we would go and inquired if we were afraid of fighting-to go to the front. No one got frightened at that time; we were young and brave. Later I heard about Raskova founding three regiments and that I was going to be in one of them.

  At Engels, where we trained, I was assigned to armaments. In the winter of 1941, the cold was the most severe of the whole war. The temperature dropped to thirty-five degrees below zero centigrade; it was unbearable. We had to fix instruments on the aircraft with our bare hands, our skin stuck to the metal, and our hands bled. I wrote to my mother saying that it was unbearable to work with bare hands, and she sent a parcel to the front with a pair of pink silk ladies' gloves! I wore them, and all the girls laughed and made fun of me.

  When I started as a mechanic of armament it was hard for me. There was supposed to be a technician assigned also, but there was none, so I performed all the work myself. The Yak fighters were new and intricate, and our education was limited. In March, 1942, the regimental commander brought in a male technician who was to help with our armament duties.

  Later on, this man became the chief armament mechanic of the squadron. He assigned some work to me, and I didn't succeed in performing it successfully. I told him that I performed it as best I could, but he reprimanded me for that. Being not very reserved I blurted out some not very good words, and he heard them. His order, and his punishment, was to transfer me from mechanic of armament to motorist. That job was as an assistant to a mechanic of an aircraft. I washed the plane and did all the minor work. I was very cross and angry with this man, but I revenged myself on him; later on he became my husband!

  In 1944 we were married, and last year he passed away. We not only fought at the front together; we also made merry, we fell in love, and he courted me for two years. I constantly refused to marry him. I told him, "The idea for my joining the army was to fight for our liberty, to serve, not to marry you!" Later on, I accepted. We have three children; we were married forty-five years. We have grandchildren and even one great-grandchild. My oldest daughter was born in 1945-victory year. I always say that my daughter was born together with the victory.

  When we were stationed on the Volga River, again we experienced shortages of everything: food, bread, soap; we suffered great hardships. We had to patrol the airdrome, we had to work in the open air, and the conditions were difficult. My husband, Fyodor, had courted me for two years, and there was a rule that we must submit papers to the commander of the regiment asking for permission to marry. My husband submitted the papers, and the commander responded as follows: "I permit Senior Lieutenant Fyodor Favorskaya to marry Sergeant Irina Lunyova." But there was not a single m
ention of my acceptance to marry him! At that point I felt hurt. It is also customary to register a couple's marriage in a special establishment called the Palace of Matrimonial Procedures. There are two palaces in Moscow, and one branch of each in all Moscow districts. There at the front there was no palace, no establishment, no branch. There was nowhere to register our marriage. My husband was in a hurry to register because I was not an obedient girl; I was strong-willed and could decline his proposal, and God knows what could come into my mind. Moreover, he was seven years older than me, and in the regiment he was called Uncle Fedya because all the staff of the regiment were very young. My girlfriends tried to persuade me not to marry him-they said he was too old.

  My younger son, having lived with his wife for five years, decided to get a divorce, and he did. He explained to me that they quarreled a lot, and they didn't want to be married any longer. I asked my son, "Do you think that we have lived for forty-five years together and never quarreled?" We did, and at one point my husband came to me and said, "Irina, I want to tell you we haven't quarreled for a long time," and I said, "Yes, I have noticed it." He asked, "Why?" and then answered for himself, "Because why should we quarrel when we know that in a few moments we'll have to reconcile!" If he hadn't been a really kind and wise man, always helpful to me with the children and household duties, I would never have given birth to our three children.

  When I retired I joined the War Veterans Council here in Moscow, and I was responsible for the work in the Propaganda Committee, which gave many lectures at schools and institutes.