Somewhere very close to 31 Army, flying from Poland into East Prussia, the pilots and navigators of 46 Night Bomber Regiment bombed the Germans from plywood aircraft. These women pilots, the “Night Witches”, were aerial aristocrats held in high esteem by the army’s top brass. By late 1944, 46 Regiment boasted a number of Heroes of the Soviet Union and its members were seen to be in a different league from ordinary girls in the army. But they got killed like anyone else.
On the night of 13 December 1944, Scout Silkin was on duty with his colleagues in a trench and saw a burning plane flying above the front line. Two figures parachuted out and landed in no-man’s-land. Shortly afterwards they heard an explosion and a woman crying for help. They crawled towards her across the minefield, which they were familiar with, but before they could reach the wounded pilot, there was a second, more powerful, explosion. The collar of the pilot’s flying suit fell on Silkin’s face, along with a piece of her body. The plane was burning, lighting up the area, and the Germans were “firing incessantly”. The scouts did manage to retrieve the pilot, but she was already dead. They crawled over towards the other.
Navigator Rufina Gasheva began flying with Olga Sanfirova in Kuban. Olga had returned to the regiment there after a “long and painful saga”. Back in Engels, while her newly formed regiment was training, as an experienced airwoman she was accompanying a new pilot, Zoya Parfyonova. Their wheels clipped a high-voltage electricity line and they fell to earth. They miraculously survived but the plane was a write-off. Olga, as the person in charge of the flight, was sent before a tribunal and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. Fortunately, the regimental command appealed to a higher authority and the sentence was revoked.
Sanfirova and Gasheva were shot down for the first time on 1 May 1943, falling on the wrong side of the front line. They were saved by the marshes, through which they made their way back to their regiment for two days. A day after their return, they were up in the skies again.
When hit a second time, they had considerably less luck. For Rufina Gasheva this was her 813th sortie. They dropped their bombs and turned for home, but then Gasheva saw the right wing of their plane was alight. “For a few seconds, we flew on in silence,” she recalled. The fire flared up and was moving towards the cabin. Sanfirova tried to hold out until they crossed the front line, but when it was impossible to wait any longer, she ordered Gasheva, “Rufa, quick, get out. Jump!” Gasheva remembered standing with both feet on the wing and then being blown off by the airstream. As she fell, she tugged the ripcord but the parachute did not open. She was “overwhelmed by horror”. With all her strength she jerked the cord again. She felt a sudden jolt and “a white dome” opened above her. On the ground, she freed herself from the parachute, ran away from it and started crawling. There was a terrible racket. It seemed to her as if she was being shot at from all directions.341
But where was Olga? Perhaps she had been injured during the jump and was lying helpless somewhere. Perhaps the Germans had got her. Suddenly Rufina’s hand came upon “something cold and metallic: a mine!” She had landed in a minefield, but needed to move forward. She groped ahead with her hand, and then with a stick she found, as if that might save her. Finally she found herself facing a wall of barbed wire, which she picked her way through very slowly and with great difficulty. When she heard Russian voices, she stood up and called out loudly. The soldiers shouted back, “This way, lassie!” In the trenches the soldiers gave her hot tea. One of them took off his boots and gave her them so she could get to the command point. There she heard what had happened to Olga. “Your friend didn’t make it,” somebody told her “She hit a mine. She landed in a minefield too, only hers were anti-personnel. The ones you came on were anti-tank, which is how you got through.”342
At headquarters Rufina was given a glass of spirits and drank it down like water, not feeling anything. She could not sleep. In the morning the pilot’s body was brought back and Rufina went out of the dugout to see it. “Nothing stirred in me. It just didn’t seem to be Olga,” Gasheva recalled. Her friends came, the girls from the regiment, and hugged and comforted Rufina. As they were arriving back at the house where the girls were staying, she jumped out of the vehicle and ran barefoot to her room, sure that Olga was there, alive and well.
After Olga’s death, Rufina found the strength to take to the air again. She continued flying until victory was declared, as the navigator of Nadya Popova, a remarkable pilot.
*
December 1944 was quiet. Anya Mulatova’s division was still posted near Suwałki and the girls often went out hunting. They saw almost nothing of the local people. Only the officers who were given leave in the town met up with them. Open conflict was rare since the troops were instructed to behave well towards the Poles. “Soviets and other authorities are not to be set up and Soviet ways of doing things are not to be introduced. There is to be no obstruction of religious observances, and Polish and other churches and prayer houses are not to be touched.” They were also ordered to guarantee Polish citizens “protection of their private property and personal property rights”.343
The soldiers were given instructional talks. “Victory over German fascism will come through the liberation of the peoples of Europe.” “A Red Army soldier is a warrior in the world’s most powerful and well-disciplined army,” the political instructors and Party administrators explained. And, indeed, what they saw around them did not incline the soldiers to hostility towards the Poles: “. . . the people are poor. All around is sand and more sand . . . coniferous forests and then more sand and more impoverished villages,” war correspondent Dmitry Dazhin wrote home to his wife.344 It was an attitude based on a kind of cross-national class solidarity, but even the poor Poles were often far from welcoming their Soviet liberators. “. . . Everything was petty bourgeois, based on smallholdings. In Eastern Poland they were wary of us and semi-hostile, trying to rip off the liberators whenever they could. The women, though, were gratifyingly pretty and flirtatious. They captivated us with their manners, their cooing speech where suddenly everything became comprehensible, and sometimes they themselves were captivated by our gruff, virile strength or a soldier’s uniform. Their pale, emaciated suitors just had to grit their teeth and stay in the shade for the time being.”345
Brought up to believe in the emancipating mission of the Red Army, Soviet soldiers and officers felt insulted by the fact that many Poles seemed far from happy about being rescued by them. Galina Yartseva who, like Taya Kiselyova and her comrades, had fought their way through Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland and were currently halted “somewhere on the German border”, wrote to a friend: “. . . they have fun, make love, live their lives and it’s our job to come and liberate them. While they are laughing at the Russians . . . Yes, yes! The bastards . . . I don’t believe for a moment in friendship with these Poles and Lithuanians and all the rest of them!”346 Soviet military censorship registered such sentiments as “the reality of a misunderstanding of the great liberating mission of the Red Army”.347 The Poles, of course, had plenty of reasons to treat the Russians with suspicion, but an ordinary Red Army soldier was not likely to be aware of that.
The political instructors of 31 Army also talked to the soldiers about atrocities committed by the Germans in Suwałki: the executions of Polish civilians (they lumped the Jews in together, not treating them as a separate category: Soviet publications usually remained silent on the subject of the Holocaust) and prisoners of war at the large German concentration camp in Suwałki, where more than 50,000 people were killed.
Vasiliy Slavnov, the commander of 123 Infantry Regiment, saw in the New Year 1945 in Suwałki while being treated there for sinusitis acquired in the swamps of Byelorussia. The lady of the house in which he was billeted laid on a feast that made it seem as if there was no war on. In his memoirs Slavnov says that the local Polish people often came to visit him there “to learn the truth about the Land of the Soviets”, and get a better idea of what it was the Russians were bringing them.348 German propaganda had portrayed the Russians as complete brutes, and people were very keen to be persuaded that this was not the case. With those who were poor he had no trouble in finding a common language.
The Poles very willingly handed over to the Russians Volksdeutsche* who had not managed to flee and were hiding in the town. The only thing that puzzled the local people, the Russian political reports note, was why the Soviet soldiers were so badly clothed.349
*
As 1944 drew to a close the Soviet army was preparing for an offensive that would bring it to Berlin. Boys born in 1926, and even in 1927, were being called up, along with girls born in 1925 and 1926. Yulia Zhukova and her friend Valya Shilova had been born in 1926, and in December 1944 they were on their way to the front with the third cohort of graduates from the Central Women’s Sniper School. The girls had gone together to the army enlistment office in their native Uralsk. They had been called up together, studied together, and had hopes of being a pair at the front together. Their mothers negotiated themselves business trips at work (they would never have been allowed into Moscow if they had just turned up), and came to join their daughters for the November celebrations of the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, travelling the length of the country from Kazakhstan. In the barracks, while Yulia was getting ready – she and Valya were being granted leave – the other girls swarmed around her mother. It was a miracle, a mother! Someone else’s, but, still, a mother. Most of them were only seventeen or eighteen years old. Parted at such an early age from their parents, they were homesick.
Their mothers had brought dresses for Yulia and Valya, and a relative who lived in Moscow lent the girls her own and her neighbour’s coats. They went for a walk round Moscow, to Red Square, and how wonderful it was to be strolling around in civilian clothes and not have to salute every officer you met!350 A month later they were issued their uniforms for the front: tunics and trousers, greatcoats, padded trousers and jackets, warm underwear and downy white American stockings. For the first time they were given wine to drink with their dinner, and before the meal there were speeches and music. After dinner, the girls, as was customary, gave their two snitches a talking to and beat them up but, as everyone was in a good mood, not too badly.
Soon they were on their way to the front, in heated goods wagons. It proved a long journey; the train moved slowly and stopped frequently. They would sit for ages, despite the cold, at the open wagon door, looking out at the fields and woods, singing all the songs they had learned at school, one after the other. They sighed nostalgically as they remembered the excellent food at sniper school. Now they were gnawing black bread rusks, sucking at herrings, and boiling something out of a concentrate that might have been soup or might have been porridge. At all the stations they found Russian women waiting for the troop train, pressing food on the girls even though they hadn’t enough for themselves – they felt they had to give something to the soldiers, and then, maybe, someone would feed their husband or their son and be kind to them.351
In Minsk they were re-formed and the cohort was assigned, some 400 of them, to the various fronts. Yulia and Valya were devastated to learn that they were to be separated, and afterwards Yulia could not imagine why they had not asked to be together. Nevertheless, Yulia had no presentiment in her heart of anything ominous as she said goodbye. She would not learn until after the war that Valya had been killed in March 1945.
In the reserve regiment in Suwałki, a “chubby, rosy-cheeked major” in a solid, good quality white sheepskin jacket “strutted down the line, critically examining” the girls. “Well, what are you here for?” he finally enquired. “To fight . . .” The most foul-mouthed of the girls, Sasha, finished the sentence for him: “or whore?”352 They all found that offensive, but there was plenty more, and much worse than that, to come. They were not detained for long in the reserve regiment, however, but went on to join 611 Meritorious Infantry Regiment, which had been fighting almost from the outbreak of the war.
Their baptism of fire came in a mortar attack during their very first meal in the new regiment. Scared out of their wits, the girls abandoned their rifles and the mess tins of soup that they had been delighted to see after so many days of unspeakable food. They finished it, cursing the Germans, when it was already stone cold.
Soon after, during their introduction to the front line, the young officer escorting them taught them that they did not need to be afraid of every mortar shell. At first, they did not find him very impressive: he seemed just to be a young boy, although a very gloomy-looking one. But the medals they saw on his chest under his casually unbuttoned greatcoat duly inspired respect, as did the fact that when they all fell down in the snow during shelling the officer stood there and imperturbably waited for them to get up again. They could soon tell for themselves from the sound whether a shell or a mine would land close to them or far away.
They were warned of the need to be careful, as the Germans in the area had also recently acquired a sniper. As too often happened, they only began to be truly cautious after one of the girls was killed by that sniper’s bullet. The precision of the wound in her head left no room for doubt about who was responsible.353
They were introduced to their new workplace: a long trench, almost as deep as a person’s height, with individual gun emplacements and observation points. On the other side of no-man’s-land were the Germans, close, and they could see clearly through the sights of their rifles an occasional helmet bobbing along above the parapet. In the evenings they could hear them singing and playing mouth organs.
As she worked on her memoirs, Yulia Zhukova analysed her feelings in those first days at the front. She noted “a degree of excitement and elation, but also uncertainty and expectation of something unusual, and fear”. It was not yet fear of the Germans – that would come later – but that she might not cope, might do something stupid, “make myself a laughing stock”.354
The first kill in nineteen-year-old Yulia’s sniper book was recorded before the old year was out. She opened her tally when she and her pair were tired and cold and it was getting dark. It was not a simple matter to shoot someone. There was only one partially exposed section within their view, and the Germans stooped down and ran across it as quickly as they could whenever they had to traverse it. Yulia suddenly saw, however, a German sauntering slowly along, standing completely upright. “He’s either just arrived or is reckless,” she thought. She took aim and fired. The German “waved his arms about ridiculously and fell sideways”. The girls waited for a time to see whether he would get up, but then left, asking a soldier to “keep an eye on that German.” He did not get up again. It was reported to the commander and, calling the entire section out on parade, he publicly commended Yulia. For her part, Yulia felt slightly sick all night. She was shivering and “didn’t want to think about the dead man”.355
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The New Year of 1945, which was clearly going to be the last year of the war, was celebrated very happily by the girl snipers and the lads from reconnaissance. So, at least, wrote Yulia Zhukova in her memoirs. She makes no mention of an ugly incident which occurred on New Year’s Eve in her regiment, although she does write openly about others. Even if she was not directly involved in the episode, she must have known about it.
A report to Ryaposov, the chief of the Political Department of 31 Army, mentions
an incidence of hooliganism in 611 Infantry Regiment of 88 Infantry Division on the part of staff officers working at the regimental headquarters. After the spirits brought by Voyentorg had sold out (calculated at a rate of 200 grams per officer), three drunken officers “burst into a room where a rehearsal of the amateur dramatics club was in progress”.356 Major Sosnin ordered the accordionist to play a waltz and roughly pushed the leader of the club out into the corridor. After that the drunks started dancing.
Member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Captain Pozdnyakov, entering the quarters of the sniper company, began coarsely importuning Sniper Dogadkina. When she broke free, Pozdnyakov chased her, ordered her to stand to attention and swore at her obscenely. After that Pozdnyakov entered the snipers’ quarters and, standing in the middle of the room, subjected them to a stream of obscenities: “We know why you have been sent here. You are all whores and prostitutes and you have been sent for us to . . .”
A little later SMERSH Representative Shlennikov, who was also very intent on entering the girls’ hostel with two companions, knocked to the floor the snipers’ company commander Kaftannikov and Sergeant Bitkova who tried to stop him. When Instructor for Work with Young Communists Dovzhenko arrived on the scene, the delinquents, swearing defiantly, left the premises.357
* The term Volksdeutsche applied to people of German origin living, for example, in parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia, as long as they were not Jewish.