On 8 April 1944, the Fourth Ukrainian Front began the assault on Crimea from the direction of Syvash and Perekop. The 46 Guards Night Bomber Regiment, the only one in the Soviet Air Force composed entirely of women, bombed the Germans in Kerch. On 9 April, just two days before the city was liberated, the regiment lost a young pilot, Pana Prokopieva, and her navigator. That night her partner had been the regiment’s chief navigator, Zhenya Rudneva. Zhenya was highly experienced and, while for Pana this was only her tenth flight, for Zhenya it was her 645th. Rudneva, always demanding of herself and others, considered it her duty to take to the skies with all the novice pilots.
More than familiar after two years with losing their friends, the girls of Zhenya’s regiment mourned her probably more sorrowfully than anyone they had lost before. For the night bombers’ guards regiment, this loss was one of the most painful in the entire war. They had been in awe of Zhenya, a dreamer who knew an endless number of folk tales, a punctilious navigator, and a loyal, fearless friend.
Prokopieva’s aircraft failed to return from bombing in the vicinity of the village of Bulganak near Kerch. When Kerch was liberated, they searched in vain for Zhenya and Pana, and after three months the regiment’s commissar, Yevdokia Rachkevich, wrote to Pana’s parents, “Your daughter died for the Motherland. It has not been possible to bury her. She was incinerated together with Zhenya Rudneva and their ashes were carried away by the wind.”209
That was not actually true. The plane crashed in the centre of Kerch, and the girls were found and buried by the townspeople. Her soldiers’ boots had been preserved on Pana’s charred body, which was assumed to be that of a man and buried in a mass grave. Zhenya’s body was thrown clear of the plane, so it was less burned. The local people buried her in the city park, writing on the plaque, “Here lies an unknown airwoman.” The members of her regiment learned this only in 1966, when the graves were found by Commissar Rachkevich.
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570 Infantry Regiment left the Adzhimushkai quarries on 10 March 1944. Zina Galifastova wrote to her mother in Armavir, Krasnodar Region,
Yesterday the army went on the offensive. We girls marched with our regiment. There was intense fighting. The Germans resisted desperately. Sometimes you have to lie on the ground and cannot lift your head. You know your friends are running behind you and alongside. We broke through very strong German fortifications and burst into Kerch. Now, dear Mother, we are driving these fiends back to Sevastopol. I am happy to tell you that in this battle none of my sniper friends were killed or even injured. Our sniper platoon has been given a truck. Now we will not be pursuing the Fritzes on foot but in our own transport.210
227 Infantry Division was part of the second formation of the Maritime Army. The first, in which Lyudmila Pavlichenko served, had been almost entirely captured or killed in Sevastopol in 1942. The division, and with it the sniper platoon, began the attack on Kerch during the night of 10 April: by morning the city was liberated. The Soviet soldiers found themselves in a deserted realm of devastation. A population of 100,000 had been reduced to only thirty souls or so. Many had been killed; others the Germans had expelled. Nothing remained of the large, verdant pre-war city. One of the liberators wrote in a letter, “A few impressions: night, the crossing, and we are standing on the soil of Crimea. Everywhere is broken, mangled equipment, tanks, guns, transport. This is Kerch, the gateway to Crimea. Or rather, this is what used to be Kerch. Heaps of rubble, traces of those bastards with swastikas.”211 The time had come to liberate Crimea, and the Soviets made plenty of resources available for the task. Although the peninsula was no longer of great strategic importance, given the huge advances being made elsewhere, the loss of Crimea would represent a great symbolic blow for the Germans, and one likely to substantially undermine their morale.
On 11 April, the Maritime Army broke through the fortifications of Turetsky Val on the Isthmus of Perekop and approached the Ak-Monay stone quarries, where the Germans had built a further line of fortifications. The next day, Feodosia fell. Galya Koldeyeva, returning from hospital after being wounded in the throat, caught up with the snipers there. She brought Nurse Zhenya Grunskaya a newspaper containing the letter she had written to her School No. 36. “When the war is over,” Zhenya wrote, “I will come and sit down again at my desk and catch up on all the lessons I’ve missed. Girls, I wish you every success in your studies and hope you become skilled professionals.”212
Zina Galifastova wrote home, “Soon you will be hearing that Crimea has been completely liberated!”213 After Feodosia, the Maritime Army liberated the town of Stary Krym and continued to advance towards Sevastopol. There was rain in the mountains and the roads were reduced to mud, which meant that they frequently had to get out and push their truck.
The German 17 Army retreated towards Sevastopol, from where it was to be evacuated by sea. Although Hitler confirmed his order that the Crimea was to be held and rejected all evacuation proposals, a plan to evacuate troops from Sevastopol did exist. The final version, signed off in April 1944, was codenamed “Adler”. It was proposed over 6–7 days to withdraw troops from all sectors of the peninsula to the fortified district of Sevastopol, where transport ships would evacuate them. In Sevastopol itself they built a series of fortifications with anti-tank ditches to delay the pursuing armour. The German command on the peninsula believed they could hold out in Sevastopol for three weeks and save 17 Army.
For the sniper platoon, the truck they had been assigned was undoubtedly a godsend: from 12 to 16 April the Independent Maritime Army just pursued the German and Romanian units that were fleeing in panic to Sevastopol. As the Soviets approached the Sevastopol fortified district, German resistance stiffened, and on 16 April the pursuit ended. The Maritime Army came to a standstill on the near approaches to Sevastopol. An assault on the city was imminent.
On 12 April, Hitler issued a lunatic order to defend Sevastopol to the last man. This was subsequently watered down: the troops were ordered to hold out there for 8–10 weeks. On 24 April the evacuation was completely stopped. The fortified area contained 55,000 German troops who now had no choice but to die there or surrender.
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On 18 April, after heavy fighting, the Maritime Army took Balaklava, a small town on the outskirts of Sevastopol. Now the only obstacle to the city was the Sapun Ridge, which was protected by unbroken minefields of anti-tank and anti-personnel mines, trenches up to two metres deep, and triple, quadruple and quintuple barbed-wire entanglements. Every 25–30 metres along the trenches there were machine-gun emplacements, and every 150–200 metres there were pillboxes and bunkers. When combined with the line of hills the engineering works made the boundary all but impregnable.
“Before I knew it, there it was, the Sapun Ridge,” Ivan Shpak, one of those who took part in the assault recalled. “They certainly had put in all sorts of stuff there, bunkers, pillboxes, trenches, foxholes.”214 For several days before the assault on the ridge, the snipers went about their business, stalking Germans on the fortified line. They picked off gunners and observers, officers and ordinary soldiers. Nina Kovalenko managed to shoot a German sniper who had been causing a lot of trouble.215 At night they would fire randomly at bursts of fire from the machine-gun nests, just to make sure the Germans felt as if they were under continual pressure.216 All around them the ground was cratered and the smoke of gunpowder hung over the hills.
They broke through the German defences on 7 May. A powerful artillery barrage lasted an hour and a half, and tanks fired directly at the German fortifications, “flushing out of their burrows” some at least of the mountain range’s defenders. Maria Ivashchenko took part in the assault on the Sapun Ridge with an artillery regiment where she was serving as a signaller. She recalled, “The assault was terrifying. The Germans had dug in very thoroughly, and the Sapun Ridge was by then completely bare with never a tree or a twig for shelter. The infantry started going in to attack, but the German positions, which you would have thought had been completely flattened by the shelling and bombing, suddenly came to life and brought a hail of bullets and mortars down on the heads of our young lads.”217 The infantrymen whom Ivashchenko’s unit was supporting were mercilessly wiped out by this fire, and she felt tremendously sorry for the soldiers, especially the very young local boys who had just been conscripted and given only a few days’ training.
The poet Eduard Asadov, seriously wounded at Sevastopol and blinded at the age of nineteen, wrote about those days that, in the hell of Sevastopol, ill-fortune struck, his “lucky star” deserted him.
And in that battle, when the earth was burning
And Sevastopol vanished in the haze,
You could not make me out amidst the churning
To hold at bay the tricks misfortune plays.218
Early in the morning of 7 May the girls’ sniper platoon got mixed up with advancing soldiers. “Mortars and shrapnel were whistling through the air,” Nina Kovalenko recalls.219 A former student of Krasnodar Pedagogical Institute, in the war Nina became the commander of a squad of girl snipers. Katya Peredera, reflecting later on the disaster, wondered why all the girls immediately lost sight of each other as they moved forward. She found herself alone with Zhenya Makeyeva and surrounded by infantrymen. When they saw the girls, the soldiers began shouting to them to go back. There was only sparse undergrowth around, which provided no cover from the Germans who were shooting from above.220
“Where the hell are you going!” someone shouted. “Take cover!” They could see themselves that they needed to get down and wait for the firing to tail off. The Soviet soldiers around them were no longer advancing: “They were all rolling downhill,” Katya remembered.
The girls saw a shallow artillery shell crater where they could hide. Katya left her rifle up at the edge of the crater and it was immediately blown to bits.
Zhenya was wounded as she was crawling in. “She faded immediately,” but managed to ask Katya, “Bandage me!” The bullet had hit her heart, but she held out for a couple of minutes. Katya was wounded too before she had time to get properly into the crater. “My legs were sticking out.” Needless to say, a German sniper, using dumdum bullets (which were designed to explode inside the body of the victim – the girls used this ammunition themselves), aimed at them. Katya felt a terrible blow, “as if someone had hit me very hard on the legs with a stick”. Her leg, with half the boot ripped off, was a terrible mess. She took a bandage pack with the intention of bandaging Zhenya. Overcoming a deadening sense of weakness, she opened the package, only to see that it was too late to help her. Zhenya Grunskaya, their platoon’s nurse, should have been somewhere nearby, but Katya realised there was no time to wait for help. She needed to get back down the hill before she lost too much blood or she too would die, unless the German sniper finished her off first.
She started crawling, twice losing consciousness on the way, but managed to get down by herself. She was put on a stretcher and taken to shelter. “Where’s Zhenya?” someone asked, and Katya told them she was dead.
Later, as she was moved from one hospital to another, and after the war, Katya was always thinking about Zhenya. What had become of her body? Had somebody buried her? Would anyone remember where? Would there be a grave for her mother to visit? She learned later that Zhenya had been buried in a mass grave on Sapun Ridge, and another of her comrades-in-arms was also there, Nurse Zhenya Grunskaya, who died in the same battle.
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The dumdum bullet had shattered Katya’s heel and she had to spend a year in hospital. In August 1944, having been in two hospitals already, she was sent to a third. Things were not going particularly well: her leg was not healing properly and she faced further operations. The hospital food was awful, there were no painkillers, but there were other people there suffering far more than she was. Katya decided that, after the war, she would study to become a doctor. She wanted to help people. She was very homesick and missed her mother, and then in August, moving to the next hospital, after many days in a hospital train which sometimes moved along quietly but had now been standing for hours at a station, she suddenly realised she was close to home.
“Goodness, this is Kavkazskaya!” she exclaimed, waking up one morning at a station and looking out the window. The station building was not in good shape, but Katya recognised it immediately. This was where she lived. “Oh, Kavkazskaya! My mother lives here!”221 she cried, and one of the walking wounded called some of the local women to her window. A lot of them met trains with the wounded in the hope of finding their sons or husbands. “Tell me the address and we’ll fetch her,” someone volunteered. Katya gave them the address (her mother lived two or three kilometres from the station), and two women ran off as fast as their legs could carry them. Unfortunately, her mother was not at home, but these total strangers rushed on to find her where a neighbour thought she might be. Katya had asked for her mother to bring sauerkraut, bacon fat and flowers, the things she had most missed at the front and now in the hospitals. She peered out of the window and waited and waited. The train might move at any moment. Would her mother really not get here in time? In the end, she did, completely out of breath. She brought sauerkraut, such boiled potatoes as she had left, a good piece of bacon fat and some flowers: morning glory, zinnias of all shades from red to yellow, the first asters and little blue thumbelinas. Katya loved these simple flowers, and later planted morning glory and asters, “plain country garden flowers”, in her own garden too.
Her mother was able to spend a couple of hours with her before the train moved on, but its destination, and Katya’s new hospital, were not too much further away. Her mother often visited her, bringing Katya meatballs, pancakes and radishes to supplement the plain hospital food. Her sister came to see her too, not Nina, who was demobilised only after the end of the war, but Valya, who had just been released from prison. She had run away from a military unit where although she was employed as a civilian she was subject to the army’s regulations: jail was her punishment for desertion.
Katya’s sniper platoon moved on, pursuing the Germans. In the fighting at Sevastopol they had lost another two snipers, Lisa Vasilenko and Lilia Vilks. The others went on to liberate Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. On 1 February 1945, Galya Koldeyeva was killed in Zvolen in Slovakia. She was just nineteen years old.222 223