by Anne Noggle
About our regiment: we haven't only cherished all these relationships for so many years, we have doubled them! When we don't see each other for a long time, we feel we lack these attachments, we lack these feelings, we miss each other greatly.
junior Lieutenant Tamara Voronova, pilot
I was born in the Volga region in 1922 in the town of Yaroslavl. When I was in the last grade of high school I learned to fly, and then I became a flight instructor. I graduated three groups of pilots, and then the war started. I flew my aircraft to a combat military regiment-it was a male fighter regiment-and I retrained to fly the Ut-4 aircraft. When a plane needed to be repaired, I was assigned to work in the regiment as a dispatcher.
The division commander came to my regiment, and when I told him I was very eager to fly, he transferred me to the liaison unit. I flew in that section one year and was given the rank of junior lieutenant. I carried messages from one unit to another. The commander of my regiment wanted me to retrain to fly the Yak-3 fighter, and I flew the Yak-3 as the only woman pilot in that regiment.
Later I flew the Yak-7 aircraft, and about that time I was transferred to the 586th Fighter Regiment. I arrived at the regiment in June, 1944, not long before the end of the war. I stayed with the 586th until the end of the war, when I was among a group of pilots ferrying aircraft to Vienna, Austria, and from there to Ploesti, Romania.
When I came to the female regiment I had a short training course with the commander of the squadron, and then I was assigned as a combat pilot. I was put on patrol over the Danube River. When I wasn't flying, I was in the cockpit in a state of alert called readiness one, waiting to intercept enemy aircraft when the remainder of our regiment was away on a mission. By the time I joined the regiment the Germans were retreating, and we seldom had encounters with enemy planes-we controlled the skies.
When the war ended, it came so suddenly that even though we expected it, it was a shock. We cheered and cried and shot our pistols off in the air. Our regiment met the victory in Hungary, not far from Budapest. The civilian population there was very friendly to us; we felt no hostility at all. I was discharged from the army in November, 1945.
After the war I returned to my native town, married an 11-2 pilot, and had four daughters. They all graduated from universities. Now I have four grandchildren.
Senior Sergeant Marina Muzhikova, mechanic of the aircraft
I was born in 1923 in the Urals. When I voluntarily joined the regiment I was a second-year student at the Moscow Aviation Technical University. I served in the 586th Fighter Regiment from the first day of its formation until our release in 1945.
After the war, I returned to Moscow and entered a university to study law. Before the war, I was studying to be an aircraft designer. I changed my mind drastically after the war-only a woman who possesses the mind of a designer should connect her life with aviation. Being a mechanic of the aircraft was very difficult, both mentally and physically. It is not a woman's job. All our work at the front was hard labor.
I really wanted to study languages at the Linguistic University, but unfortunately they didn't provide hostels for the students and the university did, so my choice was influenced by that. I have been a lawyer now for thirty-six years and have never regretted my decision. It is my dedication. For the last eighteen years I have been a state arbiter in the Supreme Court of Arbitration. But I couldn't escape aviation-I have been considering cases connected with aviation all these years.
Lieutenant Yelena Karakorskaya, deputy engineer of the squadron in special aircraft equipment
I was born in July, 1917. I was the sixteenth child in the family. My father was a Cossack peasant of pure Russian stock from the area of the Don River. Some of my brothers and sisters and I moved to the town of Novocherkask. I moved there to get an education. One of my sisters, who was nineteen years older than me, was married, and she and her husband adopted me because my parents by that time were very old. My stepfather was the commander of the North Caucasian Military District in Aviation. One of my brothers was a pilot in the Civil War and perished at the front.
In 1935 I entered a pilot training school in the navigation department; then that department was closed. At that point I could enter any aviation institute, and I did apply to enter, but my stepfather was repressed by Stalin, and I was not accepted. I stayed on at the school and entered their instrument department. In 1939 I became an engineer in aviation instruments. I was sent to the Finnish front and worked there as a technician in aircraft instruments during that war. The instruments were very primitive, and my work was manual labor under difficult conditions, because it was very cold there.
After the Finnish War I was transferred to the Moscow Central Aviation Detachment, where we worked on the Li-2 version of the American Douglas transport aircraft and other planes. This was on the eve of the Great Patriotic War. I already had the rank of a junior lieutenant, but I did all the work myself, checking the instruments after flights and repairing them.
When the war started, Marina Raskova selected me for her regiment. I became the engineer, and I supervised a group of five women who were specialists in instruments.
In September, 1942, I lost my close girlfriend, a pilot in our regiment, whom I had known for many years before the war. She took off on a mission and was climbing up to join the other aircraft when something happened to her plane, and it fell and crashed onto our airdrome. It was a great shock and loss for me.
When our regiment was stationed in Voronezh, a famous Russian pilot, A. I. Pokryshkin, three times a Hero of the Soviet Union, landed at our regimental airdrome. The Germans were afraid of him, and they even recognized his voice in the air. Our commander was away, and the deputy commander of our regiment, who was a former Tsarist officer, came to me and ordered our group (of engineers) to refuel Pokryshkin's aircraft. I replied that the manual forbade the engineers from fueling the aircraft; it was the duty of the mechanics. He grabbed me by my collar, and I pulled away; his hand slipped down onto my breast, and I slapped him on his face instinctively. He pulled out his pistol and wanted to shoot me, but the girls hung on his arm and prevented it. He then ordered me to be imprisoned for ten days, even though the officers' manual forbid the imprisonment of officers in the guardhouse.
The guardhouse of our regiment was situated in the basement of a house, and I was ordered to whitewash the walls. Every day he came there and checked my work. The basement had no electricity, and I had to whitewash the walls with the aid of a torch. There were lots of rats in the cellar, and I was without light. Only when I was working on the walls did I have light. I was afraid that one night a rat might bite me. I had to sleep in my uniform, and I wore my gloves, a cap on my head, and a scarf around my face to keep from being bitten.
While I was imprisoned I was the last to be fed in the mess, and the people on duty there sympathized with me and gave me extra food. I was always guarded, even when I went to the bathroom.
When the commander returned from his trip to Moscow, I called to him. He came to the cellar, saw the conditions, immediately released me, and gave me a day off to recover. The deputy commander was cruel to everyone, and for that he was discharged from the regiment.
Senior Sergeant Kareliya Zarinya, mechanic of the aircraft
I was born in Saratov in 1919. My father was an economist. After finishing secondary school, I entered an automobile engineering university. Before the war I had attended a parachute school and made three jumps. When the war broke out, I voluntarily joined the 586th Fighter Regiment as a reinforcement. Until the end of the war I served in that regiment.
I was discharged from the army in August, 1945. I returned to my civilian profession and graduated from the university as an engineer. I am still working in Riga, Latvia. I come to Moscow to attend our regimental reunion.
NoTE: This interview was cut short because she had to catch a train back to Latvia.
Lieutenant Zoya Pozhidayeva, senior pilot
I lived and worked in Moscow after I gradua
ted from a trade school. In the evenings I attended a glider school. Then I was sent to pilot school to become a pilot instructor. When I graduated, I returned to Moscow to instruct. We flew both the Po-2 and the U-2 aircraft. When the war broke out, we all went to the military commissariat and asked to be taken into the army. I was then twenty-two. I applied to the Komsomol Central Committee and the Communist Party Central Committee in Moscow, to no avail. I wrote to Marina Raskova, who received millions of letters from young girls all wishing to join the army and go to the front. She had received so many letters that she went to the government with a proposal to form a female air regiment. But so many girls had applied that it was decided to form three separate female regiments.
When our regiment, the 586th Fighter Regiment, was stationed near Saratov in September, 1942, I knew the grief of the first loss. My friend Olga Golisheva and I were to protect a railway and bridge. We fulfilled our mission and were returning home when we were assigned a training flight over our airdrome. I don't know what happened to her plane, but it nosed down into a dive and crashed. She might have been diving and couldn't pull it out of the dive. She didn't respond when I cried out to her over the radio, "Jump!" She never got out; she perished right in front of my eyes. I felt so terrible-it was not only my first loss but the first loss of the regiment.
I mainly escorted important people to the front, but I never knew who they were. They usually were flying to the Stalingrad front. Six of us were ordered to escort a high-ranking military officer from the Stalingrad front to the town of Kujbishev. We missed him because the weather conditions were very misty with poor visibility. When we were landing, the commander of our squadron, Yevgenia Prokhorova, crashed because we got into a dense fog and couldn't tell the earth from the sky. We were held at that airdrome for a long time while they investigated the cause of the crash, and it was at that time we also learned about Raskova's death.
In 1943 our regiment was transferred to Voronezh, and there I flew with two different wingmen. On one mission I took off with my wingman at 5 A.M., on an alert signal, to an altitude of 8,ooo meters where we intercepted a German reconnaissance aircraft, a U-88. I transmitted that we had in sight an enemy aircraft and were approaching it. The German made a left turn and made it easy for us to attack. To escape, he made a deep dive and we followed, but the speed of our aircraft was so high it was impossible to attack. Very close to the ground, he pulled out of the dive and I followed, but I lost sight of my wingman, thinking she must have run out of fuel. I went on attacking him, and I could see the white trail of steam coming from his aircraft. But he crossed into German-held territory, and I ran out of fuel over the neutral ground between the Soviet and German lines and had to make an emergency landing.
All in all, I flew 237 combat missions. My husband was also a fighter pilot, and after the war I applied to the commander of the air army to be transferred to his regiment. I flew together with my husband until 1946, when I had a child. My husband was forming a fighter division in the Urals area, and we lived there until 1985, when I buried him. He flew the American Airacobra during the war and was a Hero of the Soviet Union.
I returned to Moscow to my daughter, and now I raise her two children.
Sergeant Zoya Malkova, mechanic of the aircraft
We lived in a small textile city near Moscow where I graduated from a secondary school, and then, in 1937, my parents moved to Moscow and I entered the Moscow Aviation Institute. That was in 1939, so I finished a two-year course and wanted to he an engineer. It was a very prestigious institute. When the war broke out, all the young people were so very, very patriotic, and we visited military offices asking them to take us and send us to the front. That September, when I came back to the institute, my friends from the Young Communist League Committee told me to please be in a hurry and go to the Central Committee. That was in October, and I saw a long line of young people standing in line to join the army. I joined the army and I was nineteen.
At that time we looked at Raskova as a rather old woman, but we were very young then. She was an outstanding woman in our country; she was a military officer and navigator. Stalin's son, Vasily, was a pilot, and Stalin's favorite military field was aviation. That's why before the war, aviation was held in such high prestige, and that's why he liked three women fliers, Grizodubova, Osipenko, and Raskova. He liked and admired them greatly. He had made them Heroes of the Soviet Union even before the war. When Raskova wrote a letter to Stalin asking him to authorize a women's detachment and permit her to organize such a unit, he granted her request.
At that time and now, my position is that war is not for women; women shouldn't participate. In a way it's against their nature, because women's first purpose is to preserve peace and not to permit conflicts. Now, looking back from 199o, I think that at that time we didn't need this women's detachment, because 1941 was an awful time for the Soviet army and people. The fascist army was eighteen kilometers from Moscow, and even men pilots wasted their time because there were not enough aircraft for all of them. To some extent it was a kind of propagandist action, but still and all we were mostly happy that we joined the army.
We were elitist because students from aviation and pedagogical institutions and universities joined the army, and that is why the atmosphere in our detachments was intellectually high. We had serious discussions, we took a record player with us and listened to classical music, and then we swore not to be in love with anybody until the end of the war. We thought that our main task was to fight and not to have dates.
In 1943 there was a kind of breakthrough in the war at Kursk. At last our people realized and could see the victory, and that's why we permitted ourselves to be loved! Our detachment often had the same airfield as the men. We had dates and were in love with the boys. But I want to tell you that I speak rather often before young people, and I tell them that only during the war did I feel an atmosphere of man's nobility, a readiness to help. After the war, I never felt that in men's attitudes toward myself or the ladies.
I was a mechanic, and my duty was to prepare the planes for flying. There was severe frost at Stalingrad, our fingers stuck to the metal, and we had to carry very heavy things such as oxygen containers. At the same time this life gave me a lot. From my point of view, all the people should have some hard life to stimulate their energy, to open their abilities, and simply to bring them up adequately. I think that owing to my war experience I am strong, and I learned how to reach a goal and not to postpone or retreat but to be persistent, to be strongheaded. War gave me wide experience; my wartime service taught me how to live in a collective body, to communicate with other people, to subordinate my wishes, and to coordinate with the needs of other people.
After the war I was fed up with aviation, and I decided to choose the most humane profession-teaching. I graduated from a teachers' training institute and worked as a teacher for ten years in secondary schools. Then I defended my dissertation, took the doctor's degree, and finally moved up to the position of director of the Institute of Theory and History of Education. And really I am happy.
It was a noble war for our people; it was a great patriotic, enthusiastic feeling for all young people. For example, my younger brother was seventeen years old, and he added one year to his age to be accepted into the army. He was only at the front one year when he was killed near Kiev. His friend wrote to me how he had been killed, and I went there because it was twenty kilometers from where our regiment was stationed. I rushed there and opened his grave, and with their help I put him into a coffin, and then we reburied him. I could never do that now, when I'm sixty-eight years old, but then I was so young and brave, and he was so young, eighteen years old, and he had never even kissed a girl. Eighteen, and he was a commander of some detachment. We lost so many, and the best people, the best men. Some specialists think that we spoiled our genetic fund because we lost the best. The first to fight and the first to be killed.
The last of my war experience is that I have more than one hundred
sisters. We regularly meet twice a year in front of the Bolshoi Theater on the second of May and the eighth of November. Outsiders look, and they can't understand old ladies that sing and make noise. Of course this war was a just war, and that is why we are proud of our participation.
Introduction
Women not only flew in the three regiments organized by Marina Raskova but in other diverse units of the Red Air Force. Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, deputy commander of the 805th Ground Attack Regiment, was the only woman pilot in that organization. She flew the powerful Illyushin Sturmovik.
Anna Popova flew with the Toth Guard Air Transport Division as a flight radio operator on an Li-2 twin-engine transport aircraft.
Pilot Olga Lisikova, also in the Transport Division, later flew in the Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff in C-47, lend-lease, American transport aircraft.
A number of other women who were later transferred to one of the women's regiments began the war in male units. Marina Raskova attempted to gather all the women serving in the air force into her regiments but was not entirely successful.
Senior Lieutenant Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, pilot, deputy commander and navigator of the regiment
Hero of the Soviet Union Xo5th Ground Attack Regiment
When the war ended I returned to college for a master's degree in history and, later, another master of technical science degree at an aviation technical college. My husband was a pilot and our division commander during the war. He died ten years ago. I have two sons, and one of them is an air force pilot. I never sleep when I know he is flying.
I was horn in 1918 in the town of Torzhok, between Moscow and Leningrad. When my father died, my brother brought me here to Moscow where he was working. I finished secondary school in Moscow, entered a trade school to become a locksmith, and then worked on the metro construction. In those days either you quit the Kom somol or you went to work building the metro. The metro was considered to be the most gorgeous and fabulous creation of the century, and all the young Komsomol members were expected to work on it.
