“The female snipers who arrived have killed eight Germans,” a report about 1138 Infantry Regiment records on 7 April 1944.224 Roza Shanina and her comrades had only recently arrived at the front. The army to which the snipers were sent was occupying defensive positions in Byelorussia. Although a decision had already been taken to advance at this sector, the offensive was not due to start until June, by which time everyone at the front was familiar with the work of the girl snipers, especially Roza Shanina.
Senior Reserve Sergeant Zhudin later described the girls turning up in the regiment, and how he took them to the front line to show them where there were most Germans.225 He best remembered Roza, the most dynamic of them. In less than a month, on 1 May, the front-line newspapers Red Army Pravda and Destroy the Enemy were writing about Roza. She featured also in the leaflets of front-line units, under such headlines as, “Follow the example of Roza Shanina!” or “One cartridge, one fascist!” At the end of May, Sergeant Zhudin and Roza were both awarded the Order of Glory. By this time she had over twenty kills to her name.
Shanina told the press about her first German: “Finally, in the evening a German showed in the trench. I estimated the distance to the target was not over 400 metres. A suitable distance. When the Fritz, keeping his head down, went towards the woods, I fired, but from the way he fell, I knew I had not killed him. For about an hour the fascist lay in the mud, not daring to move. Then he started crawling. I fired again, and this time did not miss.”226
Alexander Stanovov, a photographer for Destroy the Enemy, got to know this sniper platoon as soon as they reached the front, and heard about their first successes during the deadlock between Vitebsk and Orsha. At first, he too laughed with the soldiers at these “cheerful chatterboxes”. What sort of soldiers would they ever make? Soon, however, he was photographing them for his newspaper: Roza, Kalya Petrova, Sima Anashkina, Lida Vdovina, Dusya Krasnoborova and Sasha Yekimova. This group was even included in an Informbyuro press announcement on 19 May, and Roza was mentioned separately as having “exterminated fifteen fascists”.227 When Stanovov appeared where the platoon was quartered, Roza, “a tall, slender girl with smiling eyes”, refused to be photographed. She finally agreed, providing all her friends were in the photo too.228
While talking to her he learned that Roza was from the north, and had worked before the war as a teacher at the Beryozka kindergarten in Arkhangelsk. After the start of the offensive Stanovov lost track of her and her friends, and only heard about them from others who had met up with the girls at the front line and from what he read in the newspapers. Forty years later he was in Arkhangelsk and went looking for the Beryozka kindergarten. It had a large portrait of Roza, which Stanovov recognised as a picture he had snapped so many years ago.
Sniper Vdovina, a very pretty, petite girl with a doll-like face, was nicknamed “the old woman” in her platoon, no doubt because her fair hair could be taken for white. People living near the White Sea, where she was from, often have this kind of look. Lida lived in Arkhangelsk and arrived at the front at the same time as Roza. She fell short of Shanina’s tally, but was also quite a sharpshooter and was written about in the newspapers, as was Sasha Yekimova. “In the fighting for Vitebsk, Lida Vdovina exterminated eight fascists.”
Like Kalya Petrova, Lida’s war began with a tragedy. A signaller crawled to her trench to report, “I’ve come to collect your friend, Nina. She has been killed.”229 Lida followed him until they reached the spot where her partner, Nina Posazhnikova from Dzhambul in Kazakhstan, had been. Lida saw “only her boots and the barrel of her rifle, the rest of her was covered with earth.” Lida “took her rifle and I went back to my position. Pain and sorrow overwhelmed me, and were not healed by time.” In the battles for Vitebsk, Lida would avenge Nina, but her first German was payback for her brother, Viktor, killed in 1941.230
By summer 1944, the front-line newspapers, and even the national press, were writing about many other girls from that second cohort. They published letters from commanders thanking the Central Women’s Sniper Training School for their specialists. Commander Spivak of the sniper section of 125 Krasnoselskaya Infantry Division wrote to the school, “I have been sent ten girl snipers. I was entrusted with them as I am myself an experienced sniper in this war, and am passing on to them my experience of combat. They work very successfully and their tally of vengeance grows by the day. Bogomolova has put paid to 14 Hitlerites, Adoratskikh – 11, Shvetsova – 14, Morozova –12, Bulatova has 10, Tupekova – 5, Nevolina – 5, Karenysheva231 – 6, Kiselyova – 4, and Veryovkina – 9. These snipers have forced the enemy to crawl. The girls behave with exceptional modesty and discipline.”232
That is more than could be said of some of their commanders.
Shortly after Taya Kiselyova’s platoon reached the front, their battalion commander started taking a great interest in Zina Karenysheva. Zina declined his offer of intimacy and did not respond to threats. In the end, seizing an opportunity, the battalion commander locked himself in with her on the first floor of a building and raped her. That was not the end of it: the rapist would not let Zina out and kept her imprisoned there for two days. Finally she called to her friends, and they helped her climb down on sheets knotted together. Should they seek justice against a senior officer? It was just too dangerous and few dared. The rapist could shoot you on the front line and that would be the last anyone heard of you. In any case, they thought it better to keep the disgrace to themselves.
Taya Kiselyova herself rejected the advances of a captain who was the chief of staff. He promised to festoon her tunic with medals, but otherwise . . . He even threatened to whip her. When Taya flatly refused to sleep with him, the captain tore up an application for an award in front of her. It was very hurtful, but she decided that, having taken his revenge on her in that manner, the chief of staff would leave her alone. He was incapable of anything more serious.
*
The 31 Army political reports mention the arrival of 129 girl snipers conscripted by the Young Communist League Central Committee. They were split into five groups and assigned to various divisions. The snipers were given “appropriate guidance by workers of the Young Communist League branch of the Army’s Political Department”, and approval was also given to “a special list of themes for talks and reports in working with the girls”. For example, in addition to the standard programme, they heard presentations on the topic of “Girl Heroes of the Soviet Union”. Meetings were organised for them with leading snipers, they were “inducted into military life”, and regular reports were forwarded on their achievements. Care was also taken over their living conditions. The report mentions that the girls’ platoons were each accommodated in their own dugout, with two-tier bunks, with a desk in each dugout “suitable for writing, reading newspapers and books, playing dominoes and draughts”. There was to be a drying room near the dugout.
Noting the “exceptionally good condition of the rifles”, the report’s author moves on to “shortcomings in working with the girl snipers”. The main, and often the only, problem he noted was sexual harassment by officers. “In 331 Infantry Division there have been instances of a number of senior commanders at headquarters attempting to summon girls to their dugout at night. The divisional command placed Captains Moiseyenko and Borovsky under house arrest for five days, with deductions from their pay for such behaviour.”
The political reports contain no information about complaints against a regimental commander of 31 Army who blighted the life of probably more than one girl. Was it hushed up? Did no one dare to complain? Anya Mulatova would never have dreamt, as a corporal, of complaining about the misconduct of a lieutenant colonel.
One evening the adjutant of the regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Golubev, came into the snipers’ dugout (which, in the interests of discipline, had a sentry posted at its entrance to keep men out). “Which of you is Sniper Mulatova? You are required.” The top brass lived in a different world, with which people like Corporal Mulatova had no contact. Until now they had taken no interest in Anya, and her first reaction was alarm: “What have I done?” It soon transpired, however, that the regimental commander was in a very amicable mood.233
“Ah, reporting for duty,” he commented. “With a smirk,” Anya noted when she came into the dugout. “Well, come in, since that’s the case.” The bald, middle-aged lieutenant colonel invited her to sit down, and in came the adjutant with a teapot and some biscuits, “a great temptation” and delicacy at the front. Golubev had no sweets to go with the tea, but did have sugar lumps, which are delicious if you sip your tea through them. So there they were, drinking tea, the commander asking about this and that, how well they had studied the German line of defence, the soldier’s newsletter Anya was editing with Lida Anderman, their sniper record books . . .
Then everything suddenly took an unwelcome turn. Perching himself on a broad bunk next to the log Anya was sitting on, her regimental commander abruptly, without so much as a by-your-leave, grabbed her and pushed her back on the bench. He lost no time in starting to unfasten her trousers (which were buttoned down both sides on women’s uniforms). Reluctant to scream – she was worried the ageing sentry at the top of the stairs would find out what was going on – Anya fought the lieutenant colonel off for a while. She was strong and healthy, and as fast as Golubev was unbuttoning her trousers on one side, she pushed him back and refastened the buttons on the other. She finally managed to get free and gave the rapist a hefty kick. Regimental Commander Golubev fell off his bunk on to the floor and Anya rushed to the door, still doing up her trousers. There were three or four steps to go up before she could escape the dugout. She stumbled and fell, but managed to shoulder the door open.
“On your way, my dear, on your way,” the sentry said. Anya thought Golubev would hardly come chasing after her, so did not run but walked away, sobbing, back to her quarters. She had never even kissed a boy, and suddenly this!
In the dugout she said nothing to the girls about what had happened. What a disgrace! She took her greatcoat off the nail, lay down on her bed of fir branches, put her head on her knapsack, and pulled the greatcoat over her head, sobbing to herself.
She was surprised that none of the other girls came over to her, and that they were whispering, “Anya’s been over there!” It turned out she was not the first of them to have experienced the commander’s advances, but nobody talked about it. She supposed that if she told them what had actually happened it would only make matters worse, because nobody would believe her.
The next day Anya was very worried, expecting trouble from the authorities, but nothing happened. Soon after that the offensive began and their platoon joined up with a different unit, the 123 Infantry Regiment led by Vasiliy Slavnov, an excellent officer and a gentleman.
*
The new Soviet weapon which, perhaps in honour of the heroine of a popular song, was given a girl’s gentle diminutive name, terrified the Germans.
From behind us we heard a sudden grinding, a rumble, and over our heads and up on to the hill in front of us there passed a flight of flaming arrows. Up on the heights everything was covered with fire, smoke and dust. Amid the chaos, candles of fire flared up from individual explosions. We heard a terrible roar. When everything had settled and we heard the command, “Forward!”, we took the height almost without resistance. The “Katyushas” had blown everything away. Up on the heights, when we reached them, we saw the ground all churned up. There was almost no trace left of the trenches where the Germans had been. There were a lot of corpses of enemy soldiers, and any surviving Germans looked terrified. They had no idea what had hit them, and never recovered from that Katyusha salvo.234
In June 1944, it was Klava Panteleyeva’s turn to hear the Katyusha for the first time. What power! “It made the tunic on your back flutter,” she recalled.235 Multiple rocket launchers were cutting-edge technology for the time. They delivered explosives to a target area more quickly than conventional artillery but with reduced accuracy, and they required a longer time to reload. That day the sniper platoon had been taken to the front early in the morning. The artillery barrage designed to soften up the German defences began. Finally, the division went on the attack. It felt to Klava as if they had been static, defending Orsha for almost the whole summer. Around them “the army was advancing on all fronts,” but all they were doing was demonstrating “amazingly effective defence”.
Further advance and the liberation of Byelorussia would be possible only if the “Byelorussian balcony”, a German eastward salient, could be cut off. If not, the fronts advancing to the north and south of it would be vulnerable on their flanks. The balcony consisted of two towns the Germans had designated as fortress cities: Vitebsk and Orsha. An offensive in May failed, as did the one in the winter of 1943–44, and the operation to liberate Byelorussia, given the name “Operation Bagration”, began only at the end of June.
The attack opened with a reconnaissance in force early in the morning of 22 June 1944. As noted in the Soviet reports, in the course of this probing, the Soviet side managed in many places to drive a wedge into the German defences and capture their forward trenches. But on the first day Klava Panteleyeva’s division did not manage to move forward at all.
The soldiers advanced, and Klava and her comrades found themselves doing a job they would be called upon to perform numerous times in the future. Even though they had not been trained as nurses, because they were female, it was considered that this was their job. They were sent in to bandage and evacuate the wounded, and though they did not always particularly like it, they generally put up with it.
On that day Klava found herself tending an officer who had been carrying a very heavy case. The girls had been on their feet since four in the morning, had had nothing to eat, and were disinclined to observe niceties. Dragging some bloke back by herself was unreasonable enough, but now he was also demanding that she should haul along this case of his! Although only a corporal, Klava told the officer in no uncertain terms to abandon it. What had he got in it anyway? Gunfire, explosions all around. “Dump that case will you? It’s too heavy for me.” The officer was having none of it. “Certainly not! If you don’t want to carry it, dump me!”236
Twenty years after the war, Klava found out what was in it. The officer recognised her at a veterans’ reunion, rushed over to thank her for dragging him to safety under fire, and told her the case had contained his violin, from which he had never been parted throughout the war.
*
On the stretch of the front where Klava’s division was fighting, the German resistance was so strong that by the evening there was almost no one left on the Russian side, while the Germans were still in their trenches. The commanders gathered together everyone capable of holding a rifle: the drivers, the cooks and the penpushers. They posted everyone in the trenches to repel a possible German counter-attack during the night.
When the girl snipers were ordered to stand in the trench that night, Klava was puzzled. It was dark. What were they supposed to be doing? A middle-aged cart driver posted next to her explained that they had very few people left and it was up to them to defend the line until morning. There were wounded out in no-man’s-land that they had been unable to evacuate during the battle. Standing in pitch darkness, she heard their cries. It was said that the Germans were bayoneting them.
The girls “were all ears”. Until that night they had known they were protected from the Germans not only by their fellow soldiers, but also by minefields and barbed wire on which tin cans were hung, to rattle if anything was afoot. Now there was none of that and if the Germans were stealing up silently no one would know. The snipers’ platoon commander was an Armenian lieutenant and was with them in the trench throughout the night. He went constantly from one girl to the next. There were so few of them and they were far apart. They had plenty of cartridges, and the snipers kept firing tracer bullets into the darkness at random. There was little practical benefit to this, but the tracer bullets lit the ground for a split second, as well as demonstrating to the enemy that the Russian soldiers were alert and had no shortage of ammunition.
At last the terrifying night was over. In the morning they were sent Byelorussians, recruited right there in the recently liberated villages around them. In truth they were fairly useless, but they were at least reinforcements of a sort. Again there was a preliminary artillery bombardment, but when they attacked they found the German trenches deserted. The Germans had taken a beating too, and quietly withdrawn during the night. Now they would be pursued all the way to the River Dnieper. Operation Bagration was gaining momentum.
The operation involved making two converging strikes, from Vitebsk and from Bobruysk, towards Minsk. The plan was then, over the next 40–50 days, to occupy the whole of Byelorussia and Lithuania, as well as to reach the coast of the Baltic Sea, and the borders with East Prussia and Poland. Four fronts were involved in the operation on the Soviet side: the First, Second and Third Byelorussian Fronts and the First Baltic Front: in all, over 2 million, about one third of all the troops on the Eastern Front. The Soviet forces had significant superiority over the Germans in terms both of numbers and of armaments. Although the German Army Group “Centre” knew of the impending Soviet offensive, their general staff agreed with Hitler that the main thrust of the attacks should be expected in Western Ukraine and refused to send any significant reserves.
On 25 June Vitebsk was surrounded and the German 53 Corps, when it tried to break out of the encirclement the next day, was annihilated. On 28 June, troops of the Second Byelorussian Front advanced 50–80 kilometres, crossing the Dnieper and occupying the city of Mogilev.
Klava Panteleyeva’s infantry regiment caught up with the Germans only at the River Dnieper. This mighty river has its source in Novgorod Province and is not particularly wide in the region of Orsha: less than 150 metres. As they were climbing in short bursts up a hill planted with rye, Klava noticed a shed on the other side. At the foot of the hill the rye was high and dense and afforded good cover for the advancing soldiers, but at the top it was quite sparse. When they took up their positions at the top of the hill, someone shouted that there was a sharp-shooter firing a machine gun on the other side of the river. At that very moment, Klava saw Alexey Kitaev, the regiment’s young chief of staff, fall next to her.237 Somebody crawled over to him and Klava was also going to go up but then saw the chief of staff’s face was already blue and that he was beyond help. “That bright band on his cap!” flashed through her mind. The German sniper on the other side was targeting officers first.
The commander of the regiment Klava’s platoon was advancing with – Yerdyukov, a thirty-year-old moustachioed Odessan – ordered the girl snipers to take out the German machine-gunner.238 They looked and finally spotted him, and when several of the twelve girls fired simultaneously, the other side of the river fell quiet and the troops were able to cross.
Snipers were ferried across after the soldiers in an overloaded inflatable boat that capsized close to the other shore. This was lucky for Klava, who could not swim. “Girls, let us save your rifles!” the soldiers shouted, but the girls had already raised the precious weapons above their heads to ensure they stayed dry. They themselves were, of course, soaked.
Soldiers helped the girls to the shore and then the snipers were ordered to evacuate the wounded, which was easier said than done. Klava crawled over to one man who had a stomach wound and saw “his intestines spilled out of his body like rising dough.” She had no idea what to do. “I’ll get you a doctor,” she told him. It was very hot and he was turning black in front of her. She crawled over to another wounded man. Many years later, she heard Zina Gavrilova say at a reunion, “I crawled to one wounded man. His intestines had spilled everywhere. He grabbed my arm and went rigid. I didn’t think I would be able to pull my hand free.”239 The other injured soldier Klava tried to help died too.
On the shore they saw their regimental commander punching a soldier in a German uniform. He was begging for mercy – in Russian. The girls realised he must be in the anti-Soviet Vlasov army. Its soldiers, civilians recruited from occupied Soviet territories and from amongst Soviet P.O.W.s, were regarded as traitors and were much hated by the Red Army. They were almost always shot on the spot rather than taken prisoner. Klava’s commander killed the Vlasov soldier.240
After the fighting their regiment was terribly thinned. Klava’s unit also suffered losses: Tanya Fyodorova and Irina Grachyova were wounded. Klava’s partner, Marusya Gulyakina, was wounded for a second time. Klava was concussed and could hardly hear. Her tunic was peppered with holes and she had numerous cuts but did not go to the medics. “What can they do for me? They’re surrounded by wounded people who have lost arms and legs. They don’t need me making a fuss.”241 She marched on with her regiment and recovered as time went by.
*
After Operation Bagration, 125 Guards Bomber Regiment was awarded the further honorary title of “Borisov” for its part in the liberation of Borisov. 3 Air Army provided support for the Third Byelorussian Front. The Vilnius operation started. Once Lithuania was cleared of German troops, the front was to advance on the enemy’s territory, East Prussia.
On 4 July 1944, nine twin-engined Pe-2 bombers took off from Bolbasovo airfield near Orsha to bomb the railway station. Eight of them returned. While the regiment was wondering what had become of Lena Malyutina and her crew, the seriously wounded pilot had already been taken to a field hospital far from Bolbasovo.
“Hurry! Pilot with a stomach wound!” someone shouted as they ran into the operating room. It was an ordinary village hut, where surgeon Ivan Fyodorov operated on a table put together from planks. The girl had been flown in that afternoon on a little Po-2. She was unconscious and in a very bad way. She was carried through a courtyard strewn with straw, where dozens of wounded, sitting or lying, were waiting their turn in the open air. The surgeon looked at the wound and told them to prepare for an operation.242
Lena Malyutina had notched up thousands of flying hours as a civil aviator before the war. A Leningrader, born in 1917, she decided as a teenager that she was going to fly. Lena graduated from the Bataysk flying school, and for several years ferried the mail, medicines and patients around Tatarstan in regions where roads were almost non-existent. Later she was transferred to work as a flying instructor in Magnitogorsk because the U.S.S.R. needed pilots, and professionals were needed to train them. She was still working in Magnitogorsk when the war broke out. In 1943 she was sent to a flying school at Yoshkar-Ola, a city in the Republic of Mari-El in the Urals. Here Lena Malyutina was retrained to fly the Pe-2 bomber. At flying school she met many girls she knew, professional pilots like herself from civil aviation, or flying club instructors whose experience was now needed at the front. They all had thousands of flying hours, and they were still young, none of them over thirty.
In the evenings, tired out by the day’s work, they would sit on their bunks in the barracks in just their white men’s underwear, singing, joking and chatting. Lena thought that in those white shirts they looked like the saints. It was summer underwear. The moment the girls were issued with the warm, flannel men’s winter underwear of a vest and underpants, they bartered it for honey. A kilo of honey cost 400 rubles, the same as a set of underwear. It was not as if they were starving, but the girls always craved sweet things. Later, at the front, they would raid their emergency rations for condensed milk.
They were to fight in the women’s heavy bomber regiment formed by the legendary Marina Raskova, which by this time was known as the 125 Guards Regiment. Raskova was dead now, but for these young pilots she remained their idol and role model. When the newcomers arrived in the regiment in March 1944, Lena again saw many familiar faces, mostly of her schoolmates from Bataysk.
That summer, just before Operation Bagration began, they relocated to Bolbasovo, an excellent airfield built by the Germans near Orsha. They were used to flying from grass airfields, and were amazed by the concrete runways and solidly built hangars. All around, however, was terrible devastation. Here in Byelorussia, in Soviet territory recaptured from the Germans, Lena saw the dreadful damage caused by the war. Many villages had been burned to the ground. In the spring of 1944, teams of women harnessed themselves to ploughs to till the soil. In other places they ploughed with cows, but there were none left here.
At Bolbasovo Lena met Sasha, a pilot she had worked with in the instructor team at Magnitogorsk. Sasha flew a Po-2, and the next day Lena heard he had been killed. She did not even have time to ask where he was buried. She had other things on her mind, because her regiment was going into combat. The mission was always the same: to bomb the enemy’s troops and hardware. With bombs weighing 100, 250 or 500 kilograms, the Pe-2 dive bomber was a no less formidable and advanced weapon than the Katyusha missile system. Navigator Lyudmila Popova recalled how in the early stages of Operation Bagration she saw a photograph taken with a camera mounted on her plane of the bombing of Orsha. “It was terrifying. Railway wagons were up in the air . . . When we were deployed near Orsha we went to take a look at our work. Everything was completely wrecked.”243 The crews of these mighty aircraft also had to fear for their lives. Nine of the huge Pe-2s on the way to a destination were a magnet for enemy fighters and anti-aircraft guns. “From the front line all the way to our target we were under constant anti-aircraft fire,” Popova recalled.
On 4 July it was raining in the morning and the cloud cover was low. It seemed unlikely they would be flying. The crews were sitting under the planes. In the afternoon they suddenly saw the white flare for them to take off: the weather had marginally improved.
They flew in a formation of two nines, with Lena Malyutina in the second under the command of Major Nadezhda Fedutenko, a highly experienced pilot who had returned to her unit after recovering from a head wound inflicted at Stalingrad. They approached the railway station at an altitude of 800 metres owing to the low cloud. (Normally they would have bombed from a height of one and a half to two kilometres.) The target was hidden by clouds just as Lena’s flight reached it and they had to circle round for a second approach. This was dangerous because the anti-aircraft guns now had a bead on them. They again approached the target and found “a whole fireworks display” coming up towards them from below.244 The navigator dropped the bombs and, with its load released, the plane bounced upwards. Lena always felt that freed of its bombs the aircraft exulted like a human being. The pilots exulted too – their mission had been accomplished and the main thing now was to return safely to base. As soon as they flew away from the target, however, Lena felt something burning her stomach. “I think I’ve been wounded,” she told her navigator, Lena Yushina. An anti-aircraft gun had hit them.
The formation was flying away but their bomber was lagging behind, slowed by the damage. The navigator urged her to hold on because they were flying over a forest with nowhere to land, but in three minutes’ time there should be a fighter airfield they could land at. They certainly would not make it back to their own. The navigator gave Lena smelling salts to sniff to keep her from losing consciousness. After four turns, they made their final approach to the field. When they were down to fifty metres they saw that the runway was not free: a fighter was taking off. With a huge aircraft like the Pe-2 it would have been no easy matter for even a healthy pilot to head up again and go for a second approach, but Lena managed. She remembered landing the bomber gently, bringing it to a halt, turning off the engines, releasing her snap hooks, but then nothing else. She was dragged from the aircraft unconscious.
She came to at a field hospital two kilometres from the front line, on the operating table. Her small intestine was damaged in eleven places and her colon in four. The anaesthetic was a litre of alcohol poured into the abdominal cavity. She recovered from the operation in a corner curtained off in the same hut. For the umpteenth time in her life, having chosen a man’s profession, she was the only woman among men, and from beyond the curtain came an endless barrage of swearing and groaning from wounded soldiers.
Lena spent a week in the field hospital, then two more in a hospital in Poland, then a month in an aviation hospital in Moscow. When they tried to send her from there to a sanatorium to recover fully (“Your blood is crap!” the doctor scolded her), Lena decided enough was enough and that she would return to her regiment. Without asking anyone’s permission, she went to the Central Airport and found a civilian flight to Lithuania. By September she was back flying with Lena Yushina. Their radio operator and gunner was now a lad. The girl who had been with them on that terrifying sortie wanted never to fly again, got pregnant and was sent to the rear. Before the end of the war, Lena Malyutina completed a further seventy-nine sorties.